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17th January 2007 Archive

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  • Worms own Symantec users

    Punishes sys admins too lazy to apply patch

    Corporate users of some Symantec antivirus product are facing persistent attacks that target a vulnerability that the security provider patched more than seven months ago. The attacks are yet more proof that IT professionals, not just mom and pops running their first PC, are dangerously lax about installing crucial security …

    Malware 17 Jan 2007, 00:12

  • Nepal, the new gambling mecca? Maybe not

    House of Cards Gambolling among the online gamblers

    Putsches, legal spats and acquisitions - they're all here in this week's round-up of the online gambling scene. Read on: A New Dehli accountant cum Nepalese casino baron, Rakesh Wadhwa, has worn out his welcome in the Himalayan kingdom, according to an Indo-Asian News Service report out of Katmandhu. Wadwha rose to prominence …

    Music and Media 17 Jan 2007, 01:55

  • Gambling enabler Neteller craps out

    Hippie Canuck founders busted as DOJ rampage continues

    "Internet gambling is a multibillion-dollar industry. A significant portion of that is the illegal handling of Americans' bets with offshore gaming companies, which amounts to a colossal criminal enterprise masquerading as legitimate business. There is ample indication these defendants knew the American market for their services …

    Law 17 Jan 2007, 06:39

  • Survey shows data sharing intent

    Public sector ponders possibilities

    A majority of public sector organisations are taking the potential for data sharing seriously, according to a Kable survey. The results of the survey, sponsored by data integrity company QAS, show that 43 per cent of respondents said their organisations are working on sharing data with other public sector bodies, and another 21 …

    Public Sector 17 Jan 2007, 10:06

  • Cisco's iPhone trademark also under threat in US

    Defective Declaration of Use?

    Cisco may lose the rights to the term iPhone in the US, it has emerged. The news follows last week's revelation by OUT-LAW that the company is in danger of losing the European trademark. Last week, OUT-LAW exposed the legal loophole that could be used to put the trademark rights in Apple's hands. A US lawyer has found a similar …

    Law 17 Jan 2007, 10:18

  • New ITU head has no ambitions to run internet

    Megalomania denied

    The new head of the United Nations' telecoms agency said he has no plans to increase his body's role in the governance of the internet. He would prefer the current coalition of groups running the internet to co-operate more effectively, he said. Hamadoun Toure is the new head of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU …

    Networks 17 Jan 2007, 10:30

  • Prosecutions unlikely in water drinking contest death

    Radio station fires 10

    Sacramento County sheriffs said Tuesday it was unlikely that the death of a participant in a radio station stunt would lead to a criminal investigation. Jennifer Strange, 28, died after drinking more than six and a half litres of bottled water at KDND 107.9 last Friday in a bid to win a Nintendo Wii for her three children. …

    Law 17 Jan 2007, 10:33

  • Intel completes 45nm 'Wolfdale', 'Yorkfield' architecture

    'Penryn' platform boots Vista, OS X, Linux

    Intel has completed its first 45nm processor, 'Penryn', ensuring the part will successfully run Windows Vista, Mac OS X and Linux, the chip giant said yesterday. The news comes just over a month after Intel began offering engineering samples of the chip. Penryn will go into production during the second half of this year, with …

    Reg Hardware 17 Jan 2007, 10:38

  • Tul preps Vista-friendly entry-level PowerColor cards

    Silent, PCIe, AGP X1550s

    Tul today introduces a trio of AMD ATI Radeon X1550-based graphics cards, respectively targeting owners of PCI Express, AGP and no-noise machines. All three PowerColor-branded boards feature GPUs factory-overclocked from 550MHz to 600MHz, the company said. The CrossFire-ready boards ship with 256MB of DDR 2 graphics memory …

    Reg Hardware 17 Jan 2007, 10:57

  • Of spooks, security and Vista

    Comment Where's my tinfoil hat?

    News that emerged early January that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been at Microsoft looking at the security of Vista should hardly come as a surprise. With a new operating system that will find its way onto millions of desktops worldwide, the thoughts that some of the smartest brains in the security game have been …

    Operating Systems 17 Jan 2007, 10:58

  • Burger King rampage teen posts footage on YouTube

    Amateur sleuths finger wee ned tube

    Police investigating an incident last December in which 15 to 20 youths trashed a Edinburgh Burger King were given an unexpected helping hand when readers of a local paper tracked down footage of the outrage on YouTube. According to the Evening News, one of the gang used his mobile phone to film his pals "hurling chairs and …

    Entertainment 17 Jan 2007, 11:05

  • Seagate ships 'world's fastest' hard drive

    15,000rpm

    Seagate has introduced what it claims is the world's fastest hard drive: a 15,000rpm, 2.5in 3Gbps Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) job designed for servers and enterprise-oriented storage systems. The company also pitched the part's low power consumption and high reliability. The Savvio 15K has a mean time between failures (MTBF) …

    Reg Hardware 17 Jan 2007, 11:11

  • Carphone Warehouse reviews Big Brother sponsorship deal

    'Clearly we are against racism'

    The Celebrity Big Brother racism rumpus, which has seen complaints to TV watchdog Ofcom regarding the treatment of Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty rise to a record 13,000, continues to rumble on. According to the BBC, Carphone Warehouse is now "reviewing" its sponsorship of the televised human zoo. The company has been sponsoring …

    Mobile 17 Jan 2007, 11:16

  • Nvidia reportedly readying 320MB GeForce 8800 GTS

    Less memory for cheaper DirectX 10 cards

    Nvidia will next month launch a 320MB version of its 640MB GeForce 8800 GTS graphics chip, it has been claimed. According to a DailyTech report, the new model matches the existing part's specifications in all but one respect: the amount of frame-buffer memory it's intended to be connected too. Both products will contain …

    Reg Hardware 17 Jan 2007, 11:28

  • Brussels weighs up Intel action

    Neelie decides whether to put the boot in

    EU investigators have recommended the European Commission haul up Intel for anti-competitive behaviour, The Wall Street Journal has claimed. Competition commissioner Neelie Kroes has now asked for further information before deciding whether to charge the chip giant or draw a line under an investigation that has taken six years …

    Financial News 17 Jan 2007, 11:48

  • Survey shows hole in asset management market

    Centennial sees dollar signs

    Here's a little challenge for someone – the development of a little client PC auditing system that fires off details of configuration and applications to help desk operators. It would seem there is a big market for such a tool if a recent survey conducted by Centennial Software is any guide. This has shown that an estimated …

    Developer 17 Jan 2007, 11:52

  • Apple's alleged 802.11n enabler fee: blame Enron etc.

    Sarbanes-Oxley Law imposes weird accountancy rules on Mac maker

    It's all Enron's fault that Apple will apparently charge $5 to make a recent Mac's AirPort Express Wi-Fi adaptor connect to other 802.11n-enabled devices. The fee arises from accounting rules imposed by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act put in place after collapse of the energy company in 2001. According to Apple insiders cited by iPod …

    Reg Hardware 17 Jan 2007, 11:53

  • LaCie Ethernet Disk RAID 2TB entry-level NAS box

    Review Nice price, shame about the performance?

    Two terabytes of network-attached storage SATA-based RAID storage and an iSCSI desktop disaster recovery platform all within one small compact unit for under £900? Seems unlikely, yet LaCie, with a little help from its friends, appears to have pulled it off. Or has it..? The imaginatively titled Ethernet Disk RAID is the …

    Reg Hardware 17 Jan 2007, 12:02

  • MySpace passes age verification buck to parents

    Teen tabbing spyware

    News Corp's social network MySpace is developing software which will put responsibility for protecting teenagers in the hands of parents. The project, codenamed "Zephyr", aims to pacify critics who point to repeated examples of child abusers using MySpace to groom victims. MySpace's browsing rules are notably free and easy …

    Law 17 Jan 2007, 12:15

  • A picture paints a thousand words

    Moving multimedia into the mainstream

    In Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams' main character's claim to fame is that he coded a facility into his employer's business software to convert the contents of a spreadsheet into a music score and then play it back via MIDI. This addition to the application turned it into a bestseller as large …

    Developer 17 Jan 2007, 12:48

  • Shoecam man accused of filming up women's skirts

    It's a wrap...

    A Melbourne man was today accused of using a tiny video camera embedded in the toe of his shoe to look up womens' skirts on the city's buses, trains and trams - and admitted doing so for the last four years, local police claimed. The 20-year-old man was caught on a tram yesterday after police received complaints from a female …

    Reg Hardware 17 Jan 2007, 13:03

  • Lost: 30,000 Bulldogs

    Pipex trading update shows punters unleashed

    Pipex used a trading update this week to reveal the disappearance of 30,000 customers from Bulldog, the ISP it bought from C&W last year. Bulldog has slipped from a claimed user base of 110,000 at acquisition down to 80,000 though as Pipex paid a per-subscriber price the total bill is down below £10m quid, from the original £12 …

    Financial News 17 Jan 2007, 13:17

  • Vodafone starts McLaren Mercedes handset line

    Vodafone has wheeled its first co-branded McLaren Mercedes handsets out of the shed and onto the starting grid. Lining up to take on all challengers is a trio of handsets: Samsung's Z720M slider and two clamshells from Sharp, the GX29 and 770SH. The 720M's key features are a three megapixel camera with autofocus; 3G …

    Reg Hardware 17 Jan 2007, 13:23

  • Vacuum firm wants to clean up with DIY robots

    Rolling your own gets easier

    One of the funnier sights at this year's CES was a video of a hamster ball. It wasn't any old rodent workout – this one was steering a robot. The hamster seemed to be having fun, and the developer was having a ball too... Behind it all was iRobot's Create, which takes the familiar Roomba and Scooba cleaners, and turns their …

    Developer 17 Jan 2007, 13:28

  • Dell debuts semi-rugged laptop for survivalists

    Commando line interface

    Dell yesterday parachuted in its first rugged notebook - well, semi-rugged - claiming the machine meets military standards for resistance to vibration, humidity, altitude and torture* - so presumably it's ready to yield its rank, model name and model number, but nothing else... The Latitude ATG D620 is covered in "high …

    Reg Hardware 17 Jan 2007, 13:51

  • Info Commissioner: Too late to stop school fingerprinting

    Not that we really tried in the first place

    So many schools are taking the fingerprints of their pupils that it's too late to do anything about it, according to the Information Commissioner. Yet the privacy guardian hasn't a clue just how many schools are taking children's fingerprints when they take registration, issue books from the library, or dish food out in the …

    Public Sector 17 Jan 2007, 14:01

  • Google erases British bases in Iraq

    Terrorists planned attacks using Google Earth, Army says

    It appears Google has replaced recent satellite imagery of British military bases in Basra with pre-war snaps following Army claims that terrorists were using Google Earth to plan attacks on its facilities. According to a recent report in the Telegraph, "documents seized during raids on the homes of insurgents last week …

    Law 17 Jan 2007, 14:05

  • Rackable gets racked by investors

    Q4 earnings miss mark

    The ever volatile shares of Rackable Systems have imploded following a fourth quarter financial warning. Rackable on Tuesday informed investors that fourth quarter gross margins and earnings per share figures would likely come in well below analyst expectations. The server and storage maker blamed higher memory costs, pricing …

    Servers 17 Jan 2007, 14:32

  • Wal-Mart ads pop up on Pirate Bay

    Oops

    Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, is unintentionally funding the world's largest illegal file-sharing network, Sweden-based Pirate Bay. According to Variety magazine, several Wal-Mart banners have appeared on the site, including an ad for the eighth season of The Simpsons on DVD, The Sopranos, Smallville, Desperate …

    Law 17 Jan 2007, 14:46

  • Oracle blocks 51 security holes

    Patch bandwagon heralds busy week for DBAs

    Oracle released a quarterly patch update on Tuesday containing 51 fixes, one less than originally expected. The January 2007 update contains security bug fixes that address vulnerabilities in a wide range of Oracle enterprise software products including flaws in Oracle Database, Application Server, Enterprise Manager, Identity …

    Enterprise Security 17 Jan 2007, 14:53

  • Sony offers eBook reader leather-bound edition

    Valentine's Day special

    Sony has announced a Valentine's Day incarnation of its Reader electronic book gizmo, a month ahead of time. The festive connection's tenuous - the special edition simply comes in a snazzy textured leather covered, though it's packaging is red and you won't be able to buy it after 9 February, except perhaps on eBay. It all …

    Reg Hardware 17 Jan 2007, 15:35

  • Judge sentences 'hacker' PIs, clients

    BT tipped off by mis-billed customers

    A total of 38 months jail time was handed down on Wednesday to employees and clients of a London private detective agency which illegally hacked into telephone lines. Eight people connected with the agency, which cannot be named for legal reasons, variously admitted charges of conspiring to intercept communications unlawfully, …

    Law 17 Jan 2007, 15:46

  • EC preps Intel antitrust charges - report

    Six-year probe drawing to a conclusion?

    European Commission investigators have called on the organisation to bring Intel to book over alleged anti-competitive business practices. There's no official word on the outcome of the EU's long-running probe into claims that Intel abused its market lead to hinder its competitors, but according to the Wall Street Journal …

    Law 17 Jan 2007, 16:17

  • Lottery fraudsters exploit 070 personal numbers

    You have to be in it to win it

    Crooks running email lottery scams are exploiting 070 personal numbers in a bid to trick users into thinking they are dealing with people in the UK. Lottery scams, a low-rent variant of advanced fee frauds made notorious by Nigerian email fraudsters, typically promise a recipient is in line to receive a large cash prize, in a …

    ID 17 Jan 2007, 16:20

  • What makes a 5GL?

    Comment Impossible, but ...

    From time to time vendors in the application development space have claimed 5GL (5th generation language) capabilities. If you think about this for a moment you will realise that this can't be true. The idea of GLs is that each is an abstraction of the former, so we had machine code (on which I cut my teeth as a developer); …

    Developer 17 Jan 2007, 17:25

  • AOL phishing fraudster found guilty

    Conman faces up to 101 years in jail

    A Californian conman who posed as a rep from AOL's billing department in order to dupe users into handing over financial details has been convicted of ID theft offences. Jeffrey Brett Goodin, 45, of Azusa, California, was found guilty last week of sending thousands of bogus emails to AOL customers in the first conviction by a …

    ID 17 Jan 2007, 17:26

  • Can Apple manage without Steve Jobs?

    Column Yes but, no but

    CEOs have been fired for doing what Steve Jobs is supposed to have been caught doing at Apple: backdating their share options to a time when they were worth less. Suppose it's true; and suppose he has to carry the can - will Apple manage without him? Already some commentators are ready to wield the axe. Froma Harrop in the …

    Financial News 17 Jan 2007, 17:33

  • Apple to license FairPlay DRM?

    Hi-Fi vendors queueing up

    Apple may be on the verge of announcing it will licence its FairPlay DRM technology, it has been claimed, with the recently announced Netgear EVA8000 Digital Entertainer HD one of the first non-iPod devices to take advantage of the move. So claims website Tech.co.uk, without saying how it's come to this conclusion. Unveiled …

    Reg Hardware 17 Jan 2007, 18:13

  • Sun squares up to Oracle with Red Hat challenge

    Take Solaris, please

    Sun Microsystems has joined the Red Hat hunting party, announcing features and subscriptions for Solaris designed to out-gun and undercut its Linux rival. Sun is packing yet-more high-end capabilities into Solaris around trusted extensions, clusters and common criteria evaluation. It hopes to improve availability and security …

    Servers 17 Jan 2007, 19:15

  • Piratebay's sovereign ambitions blasted

    One Nation under a groove

    The claims of Sealand, a former military platform off the coast of Sussex, to nationhood are complete nonsense, a leading international and maritime law expert says. Piratebay, the Swedish file-sharing links site, says it is in negotiations to buy the platform. The Spanish estate agent acting for the self-proclaimed nation has …

    Law 17 Jan 2007, 19:19

  • Joost - the new, new TV thing

    The Venice Project unveiled - we take a look

    One of the most talked-about startups came out of the shadows this week, as The Venice Project revealed itself to the world as Joost. The company invited The Reg to its West End offices for a demonstration and a chat with CEO Fredrik de Wahl. Joost is an interactive, IP-based TV software system from the people who brought you …

    Music and Media 17 Jan 2007, 22:31

  • Apple channels iPods for record Q1 run

    Pod-au-Plenty

    Holiday shoppers did their part for Apple during the first quarter, carrying the company to record revenue. Apple sold $7.1bn worth of goods in the first quarter compared to $5.7bn in the same period last year. Its profit came in at $1.0bn – well ahead of last year's $565m profit. As expected, strong iPod sales drove the gains …

    Financial News 17 Jan 2007, 22:33

  • SCO punts on Novell bankruptcy claim

    Swerves the verge

    SCO, which Novell claims is on the verge of bankruptcy, had less than $13m at the close of its Q4, less than half the amount its legal adversary Novell says it is owed from the maker of Unix products and services. SCO, which today released financial results for its Q4, said it burned about $10m in cash in fiscal 2006, which …

    Operating Systems 17 Jan 2007, 22:41