23rd November 2006 Archive

Browse by publication date, or search the site.

UK gets first IPTV-ready HD DVR

Freeview upscaled

UK retailer Evesham today introduced iPlayer, an 80GB DVR that can not only pump out HD resolution pictures but can be connected to the internet ready for IPTV-based video-on-demand services. The £300 set-top box incorporates an HDMI port for hi-def flat-panel screens. It's got a Freeview digital TV tuner on board, and …

Reg Hardware 23 Nov 2006, 08:02
UK ISP mislays domains beginning with 'C'

Legend Communications cock-up

UK ISP Legend Communications has been suffering an alphabetical technical problem over the past couple of days apparently affecting its Designer Servers customers: Mercifully, Legend is now part of THUS plc which boasts a "state-of-the-art next-generation network". This would explain why the latest network status report …

Music and Media 23 Nov 2006, 09:35
'Bored geek' resells self on eBay

Still looking for Ms Right

Jonathan Reed, the "bored geek" who last year offered one lucky girl the chance of accompanying him on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Antigua, is back on eBay reselling himself to the UK's geekette demographic. Sadly, the Antigua gig didn't work out - not, we hasten to add, as a result of a lack of females willing to "top and …

Music and Media 23 Nov 2006, 09:38
Indian student develops paper-based storage system

'Rainbow Versatile Disc'

A Kerala student claims to have invented an eco-friendly, paper-based storage system capable of compacting 90 to 450GB on a single disk, Arab News reports. Sainul Abideen, 24, of the Muslim Educational Society Engineering College, says the secret behind his "Rainbow Versatile Disc" (RVD) is that "instead of using zeroes and …

Storage 23 Nov 2006, 09:47
3's mobile phone TV service could land users in trouble

Plug it in and break licensing laws

Users of 3's just-announced mobile television service will break TV licensing laws if they view the service on a mobile while it is plugged in at unlicensed premises. While the phone runs on its own batteries it does not need its own licence. Users of the service also run the risk of violating the terms and conditions of …

Mobile 23 Nov 2006, 10:03
EU blocks low-duty online booze and fags

Booze cruising set to continue

The European Court of Justice has ruled that boozers and smokers looking to get cut-price deals from countries with lower rates of duty will will not be able to buy the stuff online, the BBC reports. Rather, snout and alcohol-hungry punters will have to continue the time-honoured "booze cruise" tradition and "accompany the …

Financial News 23 Nov 2006, 10:16
Irish government waves in digital fingerprinting

For immigration purposes, apparently

Irish law enforcement agencies closed an €18m deal on Wednesday to procure digital fingerprinting technology from the private sector. The Director General of the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service (INIS) and the Commissioner of An Garda Siochana signed a contract with an international consortium to design and …

Public Sector 23 Nov 2006, 10:23
Siemens investigation nets six

€200m in dodgy dealing

German police investigating Siemens' telecoms unit have made two further arrests and reckon suspicious transactions could total as much as €200m. Six people have now been arrested after police raided 30 homes and offices. Police are now searching through 36,000 documents they have seized from Siemens. Police suspect an …

Financial News 23 Nov 2006, 10:30
Auzentech X-Meridian 7.1 sound card

Review At last, a real rival for Creative's X-Fi?

The vast majority of modern motherboards have integrated HD audio, and if you do fancy an sonic upgrade, most likely for gaming, the obvious candidate is a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi. So where the heck does Auzentech hope its X-Meridian 7.1 sound card will fit in? Integrated HD audio is fairly impressive and while the exact …

Reg Hardware 23 Nov 2006, 11:01
Cooler Master touts Nvidia Edition SLI-friendly case

Black and green, fan-filled machine

What do you buy for the Nvidia fanboy who has everything? Cooler Master's Nvidia Edition Stacker 830 Evolution case may be the answer. Kitted out with the appropriate logos and colours, it'll take a range of mobo form-factors and provides space for nine 5.25in drives and four 3.5in peripherals. There are a pair of front- and …

Reg Hardware 23 Nov 2006, 11:22
NetServices reconnects V21 punters for free

Ofcom in wait and see mode (again)

Broadband wholesaler NetServices has agreed to provide a connection free of charge to former customers of V21, the retail ISP it cut-off as part of a financial dispute. NetServices will bear the cost of connections until Friday, when a "bulk cease" will be requested to unplug V21 users from its network. Once BT applies the …

Networks 23 Nov 2006, 11:30
Warning: do not search Yahoo! for 'franchise'

NSFW Image result shocker

We're obliged to the anonymous reader who's just tipped us off that anyone tempted to do a Yahoo! image search for "franchise" will get a bit more than nice pictures of Starbucks: For the sake of common decency, we've pixellated the offending images, which are topped by a fine study of a young lady entertaining a horse, …

Music and Media 23 Nov 2006, 11:33
Night of long knives at Ecademy

Mass banning hits networking site

Seventeen members of Ecademy - a business networking website - have had their accounts suspended following a row on the company's messageboard. One member was banned for using the word "shit" while others were banned for posting messages in a thread which questioned the original decision. One member was even banned for making …

Financial News 23 Nov 2006, 11:38
Handheld MP3 player to turn PCs into Linux boxes

iPod-like gadget offers full open source software suite

It's an MP3 player. It's an FM radio. It's video and photo display device. It's an e-book reader. It's a sound recorder. It's a Linux-based personal computer ready for web, email and office usage. Yes, it's Wizpy, the Swiss Army Knife of handheld gadgets announced by Japan's Turbolinux this week. Sporting a 256,000-colour …

Reg Hardware 23 Nov 2006, 11:49
Microsoft gives the EC interop info

Revised docs handed in

Microsoft has handed in revised interoperability information to the European Commission (EC). Under the 2004 anti-trust ruling Microsoft was required to hand in documents detailing the technical information required to create products which interoperate with Microsoft work group servers. Microsoft appealed the decision but lost …

Software 23 Nov 2006, 12:53
EU earmarks €9bn for ICT research

Europe gives handout to boost competitiveness

The European Union this week announced plans to pump €9bn into research on information and communications technologies. The funding makes up by far the biggest single slice of EU's seven-year 7th Framework Programme for research and development, accounting for 18 per cent of the total Community budget and emphasising the …

Public Sector 23 Nov 2006, 12:59
AMD faces 3DNow! patent violation claim

Second time in less than a month

AMD has been accused of patent infringement for the second time in less than a month. Having found itself on the receiving end of a lawsuit from intellectual property holder Opti earlier this month, AMD was this week threatened by MicroUnity Systems Engineering. MicroUnity claims a whole heap of AMD CPUs, new and old, which …

Reg Hardware 23 Nov 2006, 13:05
The book is open for a Macworld launch of the iPhone

For those prepared to put their money where their mouth is

Bodog, the online betting site, has opened a book on whether Apple will indeed announce their much-anticipated iPhone device at Macworld Expo in January next year. The iPhone has been heavily predicted by just about everyone for years, and the anticipation is now reaching fever pitch. Strapping an iPod to a mobile phone might …

Mobile 23 Nov 2006, 13:09
Mellow yellow phone no longer Chocolate

LG blamed in-pocket storage for colour change

Bored with the traditional white, black and pink versions of the LG Chocolate phone, one Reg reader decided to take the radical step of storing the phone in his pocket - which apparently resulted in the handset changing from white to a fetching shade of yellow. He first attempted to get the unit repaired at Carphone …

Reg Hardware 23 Nov 2006, 13:15
Excel books at an Excel-lent price

Site offer 40% off with free P&P

Excel – everybody knows it, everybody uses it. But does everybody get the best out of it? Offering so much more than most people realise, Excel is rarely used to its full potential as people just do not know what it can do. Because of this, Register Books is offering a selection of Excel titles with a 40 per cent discount, and …

Site News 23 Nov 2006, 13:20
IT bods bemoan slavery

Letters Everyone else gets a decent wage - why shouldn't we?

There's a reason why the Australians call us whinging poms, and this bunch of letters illustrates it well. But let's not get down on ourselves, because there's also a reason why we whinge, which is illustrated by this bag of letters - and that is that England's shit, if you are measuring quality of life by the consumerist …

Letters 23 Nov 2006, 14:00
IE and Firefox blighted by fake login flaw

MyPhish.com

The latest versions of both Firefox and Internet Explorer are vulnerable to an unpatched flaw that allows hackers to snaffle users' login credentials via automated phishing attacks. The information disclosure bug affects the password manager in Firefox 2.0 and its equivalent in IE7. Firefox's Password Manager, for example, …

ID 23 Nov 2006, 14:02
O J Simpson hypothetico-shlockfest hits eBay

If I Did It: The Final Insult

Inevitably, copies of O J Simpson's spousal stabbing fantasy If I Did It which slipped out prior to it being recalled and pulped have popped up on eBay. The bizzaro yarn of how the executive producer of Goldie and the Boxer Go to Hollywood would have murdered his wife and her friend in 1994 (wot he never even done) was pulled …

Music and Media 23 Nov 2006, 14:20
Cameron paints ID policy by numbers

He's artful, but lacking in detail

David Cameron, the straight-talking public relations executive who runs the Conservative party, gave the reasons why he opposes ID Cards yesterday. In a speech at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the self-confessed "liberal Conservative" said the government was wasting its time with ID Cards because they would …

Music and Media 23 Nov 2006, 15:04
Monster sacks general counsel

Lawyer takes long walk

Online recruitment company monster.com will be scouring its own database of CVs looking for a replacement for the company's chief lawyer. Monster suspended Myron Olesnyckyj, its general counsel and secretary back in September. He has now been sacked. The company has been investigating the allocation of share options. The …

Financial News 23 Nov 2006, 15:10
RTX ships 'first' cordless Skype phone

Exaggerated claim?

Danish handset maker RTX Telecom today launched what it claims is the first cordless Skype phone that doesn't require a PC. That's what the blogs are saying, at any rate. What RTX is really claiming is to have shipped the first RTX PC-less Skype handset, which is a bit like Honda making a big deal about how it's the first …

Reg Hardware 23 Nov 2006, 15:35
Cops hunt Xbox hijack gang

£500k Smackdown

Staffordshire police are after a hijacking gang who turned over a £500,000 lorryload of Xbox 360 consoles and games in the early hours of Monday morning. At least three men in two cars - believed to be a Range Rover and a Rover saloon - flagged down the truck near Lichfield, shortly after it left a distribution centre. The …

Reg Hardware 23 Nov 2006, 15:52
Amazon subsidiary suffering downtime

Alexa.com can't keep itself up

Alexa.com, the page ranking service owned by Amazon, has suffered a week of intermittent downtime. Results from monitoring service Pingdom.com reveal the site has been down for over an hour for each of the last seven days. It was down for over two hours yesterday, two and half hours the day before, and was unavailable for six …

Music and Media 23 Nov 2006, 16:06
MS reels in a few stray phish

129 lawsuits

Microsoft has initiated 129 lawsuits against phishing fraudsters in EMEA as part of a wider campaign against online fraud. Nancy Anderson, deputy general counsel at the software giant told an EU conference on ID theft in Brussels, said that the mixture of civil and criminal proceedings initiated by Microsoft had already borne …

Security 23 Nov 2006, 16:26
Congress unlocks US cellphones

But censorware research is illegal, again

The US copyright office will permit mobile phone subscribers to unlock their phones, allowing them to be used by rival network providers. It's a right that's taken for granted in most of the GSM world, where there's little operators can do to stop it. But US carriers, being the enlightened souls that they are (lowest form of …

Mobile 23 Nov 2006, 16:38
Hands off our bank data, Europe tells US

Exclusive Secret subpoenas threaten stability - EC

The European Commission is set to call for an immediate halt on the illegal transfer of financial information to the United States Treasury. A draft final opinion obtained by The Register concludes that central banks and local financial institutions that used the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial …

Music and Media 23 Nov 2006, 17:54
Ofcom flicks switch on iPod FM

Micro power FM transmitters legal from Dec.

Ofcom today announced that "micro power" FM transmitters such a the Griffin Technologies iTrip or Belkin TuneCast can legally be used from 8 December. Ofcom changed the regulations in line with the European Commission Decision (2006/771/EC) establishing a framework for the harmonisation of radio spectrum for use by short-range …

Mobile 23 Nov 2006, 19:47
Symantec claws $100k from Calif. eBay pirates

Defendants rue their actions

Two eBay traders agreed this week to pay $100,000 in damages after they were caught selling illegal copies of Norton security software. The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), working on behalf of its member companies, settled the case against Kevin Liu and GT Tian who also agreed to stop selling illegal …

Small Biz 23 Nov 2006, 20:25
RSA crypto attack poses threat to DRM

Side-channel code break

Security researchers have developed a new approach to breaking the RSA algorithm that creates new problems for the development of effective rights management software. Cryptoanalysts already known the time taken to make different calculations using the same encryption key might, in theory at least, give attackers code-breaking …

Enterprise Security 23 Nov 2006, 20:25
EFF sues US over passenger data

Tell us more

The US Government faces a lawsuit demanding information about the controversial programme which forces airlines to disclose information about European travellers to the US. The suit follows the Government's apparent refusal to give up information following a freedom of information request. The Electronic Frontier Foundation ( …

Music and Media 23 Nov 2006, 20:30
Lobby group sues US govt over passenger data

EFF wants to know how data is used

The US Government faces a lawsuit demanding information about the controversial programme which forces airlines to disclose information about European travellers to the US. The suit follows the government's apparent refusal to give up information following a freedom of information request. The Electronic Frontier Foundation ( …

Music and Media 23 Nov 2006, 21:02
IBM coughs up $65m over techie overtime suit

Not admitting liability

IBM is paying up to $65m in backdated overtime pay to 32,000 US-based techies,to settle a federal class action suit. In January three current and former employees of IBM filed suit in US District Court in San Franciso, alleging that "IBM illegally treats its employees who install, maintain or support computer software or …

IT Director 23 Nov 2006, 21:11