6th March 2008 Archive

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Why you should care that Jimmy Wales ignores reality

Comment 'A great Wikipedian'

Even if the colonel were disobeying a Twenty-seventh Air Force order by making you fly more missions, you'd still have to fly them, or you'd be guilty of disobeying an order of his. And then the Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters would really jump on you. - Catch-22 Late last year, in the wake of our story on Wikipedia, …

Music and Media 6 Mar 03:04
Hackers find clever new way to hose Google users

Updated IFRAME piggybacking

Hackers have found a new way to get Google to point to malicious websites with the help of unwitting websites such as TorrentReactor, ZDNet Asia and several other CNET-owned properties. As a result, more than 101,000 Google search results that appeared to lead to pages of legitimate sites actually directed end users to sites …

Anti-Virus 6 Mar 03:06
You don't know disk about storage failures

Research shows platters a victim of spin

Knowing just what breaks a storage box is of obvious interest to data center admins. It's quite reasonable to conclude the blame should be heaped on the 80-some platters spinning all day at 7200 RPMs. But a recent study presented at the USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies argues that disk failure isn't nearly …

Storage 6 Mar 06:06
File-swapping Icelanders slapped on wrists

Download: The Movies

Nine Icelanders were convicted this week for sharing movies on the popular DC++ file sharing network. Eight of the defendants were sentenced to two years' probation while the principal defendant, Bjarki Magnússon, was given a 30-day suspended sentence at a hearing before Reykjavík District Court. The nine face legal bills …

Music and Media 6 Mar 07:02
Microsoft plays IE 8 interoperability pick and mix

Mix 08 Bet big or go home

Microsoft has defended an Internet Explorer 8 roadmap that gambles on the successful completion of unbaked standards and qualified support of W3C initiatives. Yesterday Chris Wilson, IE platform architect, said Microsoft had picked elements of HTML 5 and CSS 2.1 from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that it believes are …

Applications 6 Mar 07:02
Intel Atom said to gain second core in Q2

Cool fusion?

Intel's Atom processor family looks set to go dual-core in the third quarter of this year, the latest leaks coming out of Taiwan imply. The desktop version of Atom was previously known by its codename, 'Diamondville'. The first Diamondvilles will be single-core parts clocked, it's claimed, at 1.87GHz. They will contain 512KB …

Reg Hardware 6 Mar 10:26
Two centuries of Hansard to move online

Web no longer 'somewhere data goes to die'

Parliament hopes to place all Hansard reports - from 1804 to 2004 - online by the end of this year. Its information management department is using optical character recognition (OCR) technology to turn three million printed pages of the record of Parliamentary proceedings into digitised text. Some is already online, although …

Government 6 Mar 10:26
BlackBerry inventor escapes UK patent fees

Visto patent declared invalid

Research In Motion (RIM), the company behind BlackBerry mobile devices, will not have to pay patent licence fees to a rival email software company after the High Court ruled that the rival's UK patent was invalid. RIM took the court case to revoke a patent owned by Visto, which makes email software. It also asked the courts to …

Mobile 6 Mar 10:34
Palm OS-based Centro arrives in UK

Still no 3G or Wi-Fi...

Palm has rolled out the Palm OS-based Centro smartphone in the UK, pitching the £199 handset as a yoof-oriented alternative to its more 'serious' Treo phones. Centro uses the same layout and look as the recently released, Windows Mobile-based Treo 500, but it's rather narrower in profile and with a crisper, higher resolution …

Reg Hardware 6 Mar 10:41
Fujitsu Siemens turning off life support for old folks PC plan

CeBIT What did you do in the OS wars Grandpa?

Fujitsu Siemens has pulled the plug on its efforts to push a locked down Linux box at older customers. But the German-based PC vendor said it will continue to explore other options to ensure older customers are not buried at the bottom of the digital divide. Fujitsu Siemens launched the Simplico in Germany 2006 to serve a …

Channel Register 6 Mar 10:45
Government set to 'destroy' UK radio astronomy

STFC proposes chop for e-Merlin programme

The Government’s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is proposing to axe the annual £2.5m public funding for "e-Merlin" - an upgrade to the Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network between the UK's seven radio telescopes, the Times reports. The proposal is part of a controversial plan to plug an £80m …

Space 6 Mar 10:58
AMD lets Puma release date out of the bag

Laptop platform to challenge Centrino on power consumption

AMD's would-be Centrino-beater, its 'Puma' platform for laptops, will debut in June in notebooks you can actually buy, the chip maker promised this week. AMD first began talking about Puma almost a year ago. The platform comprises 'Griffin', a dual-core processor designed specifically for mobile applications but built using …

Reg Hardware 6 Mar 11:03
Acer trumped Dell in Q4 07 world laptop sales

While Asus saw explosive growth

Acer nudged Dell into third place in the world notebook sales chart for the last quarter of 2007, but the market leader, HP, and up-and-coming Asus experienced the most growth. So state stats released this week by market watcher DisplaySearch. HP shipped 20.1 per cent of all the laptops that left manufacturer warehouses in Q4 …

Reg Hardware 6 Mar 11:22
EU preps Google-DoubleClick rubberstamp

Le anti-trust? La vie privée? Bof!

European competition watchdogs will give Google's $3.1bn acquisition of online display ad network DoubleClick an unconditional go-ahead next week, according to reports. The deal was approved by US regulators in December. The EU process has taken longer and been a forum for concerns over the privacy impact of lumping together …

Government 6 Mar 12:07
Pure Highway in-car DAB radio

Review DAB in your motor, without breaking the bank

If rumours are to be believed, Ford will soon be fitting DAB as standard on some vehicles. But the retro-fit market still has massive potential and to fill that gap digital radio specialist Pure has come up with a really neat little gadget: the Highway. It's like all those iPod-oriented FM devices. Highway picks up digital …

Reg Hardware 6 Mar 12:08
Taking the piste: Wii to bring skiing to the living room

And here's a Japanese lass to show you how...

If you’re bummed about the coming end of the skiing season, then video games are the answer - in particular a skiing game that uses the Wii’s new Balance Board add-on to send you sliding down the mountainside, virtually speaking. Developer Namco Bandai said We Ski lets up to four gamers ski across virtual mountains while …

Reg Hardware 6 Mar 12:23
Bill Gates loses richest man crown

Buffett supplants him as billionaire King

Bill Gates is no longer the richest man on the planet. Investment guru Warren Buffett has knocked him off the number one spot for the first time in over a decade. Gates has been at the top of the annual Forbes rich list for the past 13 years. Buffett now has a personal fortune of about $62bn - ahead of Gates' cash pile of $ …

Channel Register 6 Mar 12:24
Stamen punts new approach to data aggregation

Etech: Let the data choose the questions

"Give me everything," says Tom Carden, a programmer and designer at Stamen Design. Stamen takes huge amounts of data and turns them into images you can interact with. Let the data choose the questions, he said, rather than the other way around. Carden's work is part of a trend at this year's Etech emerging technology …

Applications 6 Mar 12:38
Adware package tops malware charts for first time

I'd like to thank the academy and all my Trojan helpers

An adware program - not a virus - topped malware charts for the first time last month. The Virtumonde-gen adware package appeared more often than any other strain of malware in online scans using tools from Kaspersky Labs during February. The proliferation of the package was assisted by various strains of Trojan downloader, a …

Security 6 Mar 12:48
Nokia gets the upper hand in global IPR wrestle with Qualcomm

Comment Battle not over, but...

While we are not saying that the long-running battle between Nokia and Qualcomm is actually over - anything but - there are signs that Nokia’s position is a lot stronger than many observers first thought. Last week, the International Trade Commission said it would not review its earlier decision that Nokia did not infringe …

Mobile 6 Mar 12:53
Asus to offer Linux-less Eee PCs globally

XP to be pre-installed

Asus has formally announced it will begin offering outside of Japan its tiny Eee PC laptop with Windows XP pre-installed in place of the Linux distro it's offered to date. That's not to say the Eee will not ship with Linux. While Asus was a little vague on the matter, it's likely it will offer the Eee in multiple forms, some …

Reg Hardware 6 Mar 13:03
Has your shifty foreign neighbour got 16 mobes?

Call this number, sharpish

The Metropolitan Police have launched an intensive media onslaught aimed at advising Londoners just what to do if their shifty-looking Arab next door neighbour is packing mulitiple mobes, trading SIMs with the men in black turbans, taking delivery of binary liquid explosives, photographing CCTV cameras, or generally acting in a …

Policing 6 Mar 13:19
Will the US 700 MHz auction be remembered for dismembering wireless?

High spectrum price could lead to catastrophe

Faultline has not covered much of the 700 MHz auction, not wanting to read into it too much, and seeing that it is not yet clear how much of it is directly about networks which carry video or other forms of entertainment, which is our chosen territory. But now, as it approaches its end, we find that a review of all the content …

Wireless 6 Mar 13:39
'Boil a frog' ID card rollout to continue until 2012

Smith offers series of compelling propositions

The latest stage in the long slow death of the UK ID scheme became official this morning, as Home Secretary Jacqui Smith unveiled a two-pronged revised delivery plan, aimed first at selected groups of workers and teenagers. This effectively confirms the strategy proposed by the leaked ID scheme Options Analysis earlier this year …

Government 6 Mar 14:15
Adidas coaches Samsung on phone design

Feel and hear the burn

People have been walking and talking with mobile phones ever since the devices' mass adoption in the late 1990s, but Samsung and Adidas now want users to jump up to running and talking. They've launched an "exercise phone". Samsung's and Adidas' miCoach: makes calls, keeps you fit The miCoach slider handset creates …

Reg Hardware 6 Mar 14:53
Garmin touts new Nuvi range

CeBIT Pimp your satnav

Garmin has given GPS enthusiasts a sneak peek at its upcoming satnav-cum-portable TV. It also unveiled its latest range of entry-level models this week. Garmin's 900T: picks up DVB-H broadcasts and GPS signals The TV-equipped model, dubbed the Nuvi 900T, is thought to be the first portable GPS device with an extendable …

Reg Hardware 6 Mar 15:07
Intel plans power cuts for Harpertown

CeBIT And explains the importance of the Atom

Intel said it would begin shipping its Harpertown low voltage processor in the next few weeks as it wrings out everything it can from its 45nm architecture before it begins the shift to 32nm next year. Intel enterprise marketing director Shannon Poulin, in an update of the vendor’s server roadmap, said its 32 nanometer …

Hardware 6 Mar 15:17
Cisco hops onto patching treadmill

Network giant wheels out bi-annual IOS update cycle

Cisco has taken a leaf out of Microsoft's book by adopting a regular patch release cycle. However, the change will apply only to security bugs involving its core IOS software and not all its products. Starting on 26 March, Cisco will release bundles of IOS security advisories on the fourth Wednesday of March and September in …

Data Networking 6 Mar 15:25
New York's Freedom Tower to depend on RFID

Is it done yet?

The concrete base of the 541 metre Freedom Tower, being built on the site of New York's former World Trade Centre, will be embedded with RFID tags to make sure it's setting properly and can sustain the pressure of 14,000 psi the tower will exert. Monitoring the temperature of setting concrete is nothing new, but doing so …

Physics 6 Mar 15:34
DAB: A very British failure

Taxpayers to subsidise the digital radio flop?

Emergency talks to save digital radio are taking place in Manchester today, the FT reports. Unloved, unviable, and often unlistenable, DAB is a technology the public clearly doesn't want; so it comes as no surprise to learn that coercion will be used to persuading the public to get on board. With DAB, we're expected to pay for …

Music and Media 6 Mar 15:49
Tories call for big changes to cybercrime offences

G-men for the internet, new offence for civil servants

Civil servants who lose public data could be prosecuted under proposals announced by the Conservative Party. It's one of a number of measures touted, as the Tories call for major changes in how the UK deals with cybercrime and data protection. The Tories' report - Tackling Cybercrime - calls for new offences for civil servants …

Policing 6 Mar 15:55
Caution - FBI fit-ups of Muslim patsies in progress

Loose-tongued loser tagged with international terrorizing

The trial of ex-Navy signalman Hassan Abu-jihaad took merely a week, ending with the bang of a one-day deliberation in which Connecticut jurors found the man guilty, sending him over for providing material support to terrorists. The prosecution employed a strategy in which the jury was shown videotapes Abu-jihaad was said to …

Law 6 Mar 16:01
Small businesses aren't worried about technology

Competition and taxation still top of their list

Small businesses in the UK have an optimistic view of the future, according to the Annual Small Business Survey, with 65 per cent looking to grow their business over the next 12 months, and less than 30 per cent expecting to shut up shop, or sell out, over the same period. Competition is still the biggest barrier to growth, …

Small Biz 6 Mar 16:23
IT industry needs more women

EU calls for action as US improves

The European Commission (EC) is calling for more women to consider careers in the IT industry because the growth in the number of female graduates in relevant subjects continues to fall. But the US is seeing the first signs of a turnaround in declining numbers of people studying for careers in IT. At a conference in Brussels …

Public Sector 6 Mar 16:26
Silverlight 2.0 data and web services explained

Mix 08 Mashups and large downloads challenge

Microsoft Silverlight team member Eugene Osovetsky has explained to a packed Mix 08 session how Silverlight 2.0, released as beta on Wednesday, interacts with external data and web services. No surprise: the first thing we saw was based on the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Microsoft's universal .NET web services API …

Applications 6 Mar 17:39
Paranoid partners to get GPS snooper

Behind you...

If you’re suspicious about the missus’ daily movements or wonder exactly which 'old friend' your hubby is meeting for dinner, then you’ll be glad that a GPS gadget’s been made available to help you track their movements. Blip's Snitch: track people online and via SMS The GPS Snitch, from manufacturer Blip, is designed for …

Reg Hardware 6 Mar 18:22
Google mistakes search for teleportation

Update Searching the search box gives you a search box

Google is now including search boxes in its search results. If you search the world's most popular search engine and your search turns up a site that Google believes eminently searchable - including Amazon.com, The New York Times, and Wikipedia - you get a second search box that does nothing but search that site. So, if you …

Applications 6 Mar 19:03
Intel rejects investor call to give up its hopes and dreams

'We don't plan for failure'

"Have you ever thought about being like Philip Morris?" Now that's just rude. Some Wall Street type wanted to prove that his Zinger 101 mail order kit was worth the $1,995 asking price. So, he nailed Intel CEO Paul Otellini with that very question during a meeting held yesterday in Santa Clara. Intel brought its largest …

Hardware 6 Mar 19:09
Pentagon attackers stole 'amazing amount' of sensitive data

The truth finally comes out

A network intrusion at the Pentagon nine months ago resulted in the theft of an "amazing amount of data" that continues to pose a threat to national security, the CIO of the Defense Department said earlier this week. "This was a very bad day," Dennis Clem, who is also CIO of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, said during …

Government 6 Mar 19:42
Japanese bank sues IBM over 'difficult' system overhaul

11.1bn yen ought to make things easier

A Japanese bank is suing IBM for $107m over a systems contract it abandoned because Big Blue's proposal was too difficult to carry out. Suruga Bank, based in the Shizuoka Prefecture, filed the lawsuit in Tokyo District Court, seeking 11.1bn yen. Suruga first announced it would replace most of its systems with IBM's "Next …

Servers 6 Mar 19:47
Microsoft indemnifies Novell Moonlight users

Mix 08 Patent media protection

The Novell-sponsored project porting the Silverlight cross-browser plug to Linux is getting patent protection from Microsoft, indemnifying users from aggressive patent holders and litigators such as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Microsoft will provide codecs worth $1m to every user downloading Moonlight …

Applications 6 Mar 20:45
Alabama admits developing country status

One Laptop Per Poor Southern Child

Birmingham, Alabama may soon join the third world. As reported by the The Associated Press, Birmingham's city council has rubber-stamped a $3.5m deal with the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, ogling 15,000 laptops designed for less-than-affluent children in developing countries, including Rwanda, Libya, and Mongolia. This is …

PCs & Chips 6 Mar 22:11
Ghosts of the 128KB Mac haunt the iPhone, Touch

Comment Putting the MultiTouch UI to work

Are mobile gadgets tools, or just toys? There's one way to find out of course, the hard way. Throw something at the market in a recession, and see if it finds a use. Apple has created a wonderful new user interface for its iPhone, iPod Touch and Mac notebooks that should be the basis for a generation of consumer products. But …

Mobile 6 Mar 22:27
Intel shoves Larrabee and visualization goldmine to 2010

God bless oil and gas

Intel wants to visualize like it's 1999. Physically, we were sitting yesterday in an auditorium at Intel's Santa Clara headquarters. But our mind kept transporting to SGI's old 3D wonder lab where it would show off the latest in graphics technology and high-end visualization systems. That's because Intel kept dishing out …

Servers 6 Mar 22:29
3Com delays buyout vote again

In brief Struggles to satisfy US security concerns

3Com says it needs 14 more days to smooth out US security concerns before the company can take its pending $2.2bn sellout to a vote. For a second time, the networking firm has postponed a shareholder meeting to decide if it will sell the company to Bain Capital and its Chinese partner, Huawei Technologies. The three companies …

Data Networking 6 Mar 22:30
Man cuffed for lamppost sex outrage

Is no inanimate object safe?

The suspicion that sexual assaults against inanimate objects, including bicycles and hoovers, are on the rise is confirmed by the disturbing news that a man was last month cuffed for "allegedly simulating a sex act with a lamppost", as the Wiltshire Times puts it. The incident apparently took place at about 4.45pm on 16 …

Bootnotes 6 Mar 22:32
Ballmer pledges PHP love in Microhoo future

Mix 08 Web developers! Web developers! Web developers!

Microsoft has committed to becoming a mixed ASP.NET and PHP shop for the "foreseeable" future should its proposed Yahoo! acquisition succeed, rather than convert popular services like Yahoo! mail to Microsoft's .NET architecture. Chief executive Steve Ballmer confirmed, though, that overlapping online properties would be axed …

Applications 6 Mar 23:33
US electronic surveillance bill trapped in political limbo

The fight turns to Google

A controversial bill to expand the government's electronic surveillance authority has once again been delayed from coming to the floor of the House of Representatives as politicians wrangle over the granting immunity to AT&T and other telecommunications companies. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said he hoped to finish work …

Government 6 Mar 23:50