2nd September 2008 Archive

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UK punters scowl at webmail ad targeting

Hands off our inboxes

Two in five Brits are worried that free webmail comes at the expense of privacy because firms are scanning their messages in order to serve up targeted ads. A similar 40 per cent of 1,800 Brits polled in a survey by alternative freemail firm GMX were unaware of the practice. One third of Brits quizzed during GMX's Attitudes to …

Spam 2 Sep 07:02
Google releases open source browser

Not an April Fool this time

Google is releasing an open source browser called Google Chrome which it promises will be small, fast and stable. Available for download shortly, the tabbed browser is explained in a 38 page comic by Scott McCloud. The comic explains that browsers are now very different from when first introduced - they are used for running …

Software 2 Sep 08:27
The Google-isation of all the net's access points

Chrome Sweet Chrome

Google is creating its own open source Chrome browser and so spreading its influence over access points to its core search, mail, docs, photo-sharing and other services. An early - maybe too early - release of a (no really) comic book-style description of Chrome can be found here. The giant, brimming with optimism, megadollars …

Software 2 Sep 08:37
Mimosa adds files to archive cocktail

Archive's dusty old barn is shaken to foundations

Mimosa, an email archiving software company, is adding file archiving to its NearPoint product, this way striking out on a unified archiving strategy. Once upon a time data protection meant backup to tape. Those simple times seem a long time ago now, with tape backup's front-end restore role and back-end archive role both …

Storage 2 Sep 08:39
Road warriors offered office in a suitcase

Crazy case contains printer, laptop stand, power

Travelling salespeople have a hard time, often working from their car, without enough space for laptop, let alone use of a printer. But now all their problems have been solved - with one suitcase. The case fits onto a car seat (left) and opens (right) to reveal a laptop holder arm Forget living out of a suitcase, because …

Reg Hardware 2 Sep 09:36
Last days of Symbian - business ticking over

Finland shores up freebie shortfall

Symbian has published its unaudited results for the first half of 2008, the last time the company will be doing so before it becomes part of the Nokia empire later this year. They show things are slightly slower than this time last year, but overall doing fine. A company whose primary product is about to be turned into a …

Mobile 2 Sep 09:50
Fujitsu wants NHS exit payment

Wants NHS to pony up millions for unfinished job

Fujitsu Services has submitted a claim for payment to the NHS, following its sacking in May from the National Programme for IT. A spokesperson for the firm refused to confirm or deny a claim in the Independent that the vendor is asking for £700m of the £896m it was due to have been paid if the ten year contract had been …

Government 2 Sep 09:55
Arrest made over data-stuffed eBay ~~laptop~~ hard drive

Plods attempt to plug data leak

Police have made an arrest in connection with last week's eBay sale of a computer hard drive containing personal data. The latest information security lapse has happened in Charnwood in Leicestershire, where taxpayers' personal details were found on a computer which was sold for £6.99. The details are said to include bank …

Storage 2 Sep 09:58
Owner alleges iPhone 3G became red hot

iToast?

A German Swiss man has alleged his recently purchased iPhone 3G mysteriously overheated, almost to the point of catching fire, he said. After an unsuccessful attempt to sync the three-week-old handset with his PC, the fellow discovered the device to have become very hot, he told Swiss German-language site 20 Minutes. So hot, …

Reg Hardware 2 Sep 10:19
Ex-BT boss off to Alcatel-Lucent

Turnaround kid

Ben Verwaayen, who spent six years as CEO of BT, is joining Alcatel-Lucent as chief executive. Verwaayen will work with Philippe Camus, who starts as Chairman on 1 October. He was credited with helping BT's apparent turnaround, moving from a voice to broadband provider and cutting jobs in the process. Alcatel-Lucent's …

Market News 2 Sep 10:21
Aussie Customs in presentational-aid crackdown

Prang peril pointers fingered

Australian customs officials have made their first seizure of possibly-deadly "high intensity" laser pointers under newly introduced federal regulations. Some 1,200 of the fearful photon weapons were intercepted in the crackdown. "Unfortunately for a lot of people, the message is still failing to get through," said Oz Home …

Policing 2 Sep 10:27
3PAR thins storage arrays

Revs its ASIC to slim down fat volumes

Today 3PAR is doing its bit to solve the storage obesity problem with new T-class InServ storage servers featuring a third-generation ASIC and hardware-assisted fat-to-thin volume transformation. Currently 3PAR offers two S-class storage servers, the S400 scaling to 300TB with Fibre Channel SATA drives and S800 scaling to …

Storage 2 Sep 10:34
Nokia pitches 'free music with old phone' offer

Comes With Music comes with old 5310

Nokia has said its Comes With Music free song download service is coming to the UK. The only snag: you’ll have to buy a phone that’s more than 12 months old. Nokia's 'new' 5310 gives free music downloads You'll also have to buy it through Carphone Warehouse, which has exclusive sales rights. Comes With Music, as previously …

Reg Hardware 2 Sep 10:45
Add-on to turn iPhone into games console

Kind of

A picture has emerged of what's claimed to be a Belkin clip-on gaming case for the iPhone that, if legit, gives the handset more of a PlayStation Portable look'n'feel. Is the Joypod Belkin's attempt at cracking into iPhone gaming? Pic courtesy Touch Arcade Actually, it looks rather like the ill-fated Gizmondo gaming …

Reg Hardware 2 Sep 11:10
Microsoft eyes mobile app store

Skymarket to challenge iTunes?

Microsoft is looking like it may launch an application repository in response to the success of Apple's iTunes application store and Google's announcement that Android will be similarly endowed. Or is it? Recent job adverts, grabbed by i started something, are for a Product Manager and Senior Product Manager and describe …

Mobile 2 Sep 11:18
Scotland's oldest newspaper exposes readers' smalls in public

Updated URL manipulation snafu gives access to other users

Scottish newspaper The Aberdeen Press and Journal inadvertently made it easy to harvest sensitive information about registered users from its site as a result of a basic information security mistake. Registered users are presented with stories an a URL along the lines of http://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/Article.aspx/815191? …

Security 2 Sep 11:32
GNU turns 25

Happy birthday, software libre

No longer will the Free Software Foundation be the target of advertisements for novelty condoms, Ibiza package holidays and extreme sports gear. It's leaving the 16-24 yoof demographic behind. Today the GNU project celebrates its quarter-century. It was on 27 September 1983 that MIT slacker Richard M Stallman made his …

Software 2 Sep 11:37
Commodore launches little laptop

Am-eee-ga

The famous Commodore brand is to be attached to the lid of a Small, Cheap Computer. Commodore's netbook: peek and poke Images courtesy NRK Beta The UMMD 8010/F will be based on VIA's C7-M processor rather than an Intel Atom, but its other specs are classic SCC. The unit will have a 10in screen, 1GB of memory and an 80GB …

Reg Hardware 2 Sep 11:52
Zombie network explosion

Long shadow cast by SQL injection surge?

The number of compromised zombie PCs in botnet networks has quadrupled over the last three months, according to figures from the Shadowserver Foundation. Shadowserver tracks botnet activity and the number of command and control servers. It uses a variety of metrics to slice and dice its figures based in part on the entropy of …

Security 2 Sep 11:53
Judge slaps Fasthosts for rubbish kit and support

Damages and costs for all-round uselessness

A county court judge has awarded a disgruntled Fasthosts customer almost £1,500 in damages and costs, after the Gloucester firm failed to meet its uptime and customer service guarantees. Hampshire consultancy UK Mobile Media was prompted to take Fasthosts to Southampton small claims court yesterday by a four month period that …

Hardware 2 Sep 11:58
Why the US faces broadband price hikes

Comment Thanks, FCC

Peer-to-peer file sharing just got a lot more expensive in the US. The FCC has ordered Comcast to refrain from capping P2P traffic, endorsing a volume-based pricing scheme that would “charge the most aggressive users overage fees” instead. BitTorrent, Inc. reacted to the ruling by laying-off 15 per cent of its workforce, while …

Telecoms 2 Sep 12:44
Furniture firm offers seat formed from old PS2s

Gaming goes green

Swanky suburban store Selfridges is to sell a chair made from recycled PlayStation 2 games consoles. Have you seen my PS2 anywhere? The Reee chair’s back and seat are made from the plastic casings of nine PS2s, which maker Pli Design stated saves 2.4kg of “post-consumer” plastic from ending up in landfill. Whether the firm …

Reg Hardware 2 Sep 13:08
Women turn on to a throbbing Maserati

'Primeval physiological response' to luxury motors

It's official: If you want to turn a woman on, ditch the Volkswagen Polo and get yourself a Maserati, which is 100 per cent guaranteed to get those vital testosterone secretions flowing. That's according to research by psychologist David Moxon, who subjected 40 guinea pigs to recordings of the aforementioned cars' throbbing …

Bootnotes 2 Sep 13:24
Boffins produce aerobatic copycat-copter pilotware

Computer see, computer do

Researchers at Stanford University have developed technology which lets computers handling remote-control helicopters achieve complex manoeuvres by copying a human pilot. Having "seen" a move carried out successfully once, the pilot-ware can then repeat it more consistently than the human. Stanford grad students led by …

Software 2 Sep 13:33
Sony Ericsson Walkman W980 music phone

Review Too few non-music features

The extensive Walkman phone line-up now has a new flagship: the W980, a glossily stylish clamshell that features 8GB of built-in storage among its spread of music-centric features. Unlike Sony Ericsson’s previous 8GB-packing Walkman W960i effort, the W980 doesn’t bring touchscreen smartphone functionality into play. Instead, …

Reg Hardware 2 Sep 13:44
Google cedes Belgium to Germany

Chrome redraws the map of Europe

We've got some rather shocking news this afternoon for those of you who've spent years believing you're Austrian, Belgian, Danish or Dutch - you're not. In fact, you're German, as this map from Google's comic book guide to Chrome proves: Yes indeed, see page 13 for evidence of your "reallocation" to a Greater Germany. As an …

Bootnotes 2 Sep 14:25
Sony pairs PS3 with Bluetooth headset

Online gaming chats are go

PlayStation 3 gaming looks set to become yet more immersive, because Sony has launched a Bluetooth headset for the console. Sony's PS3 headset, with docking station The CEJH-15002 looks like most mobile phone Bluetooth headsets, with a hook for fixing the wireless communicator around your ear. However, the PS3-branded …

Reg Hardware 2 Sep 14:36
Is the copper in my patch leads worth anything?

Q&A

I'm due to replace a load of patch leads in my server room. With copper prices the way they are, and people stealing signal cable from the railways etc., is there any value in these that can be recovered? What is the least troublesome - and legal - way to go about it if there is?

Reg Hardware 2 Sep 14:44
Discover OS X's hidden artistic side

Mac secrets Jobs' past revisited

One of the most frequently used Cocoa classes is NSImage which, as the name suggests, is all about displaying and manipulating image data. The imageNamed: method of this class retrieves an image reference for you - provided that you know the name of the image you're after. Many of the images that can be retrieved via the …

Developer 2 Sep 15:02
Intel adds cheap dual-core, quad-core chips

New life for the Celeron D

Intel has quietly updated its processor price list over the weekend, making a 45nm addition to its economy quad-cores, a new entry-level dual-core chip, and an upgrade to the Celeron D family. The tried-and-true Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor now has a similarly cheap alternative from Intel that's based on a 45nm fab. The new …

Hardware 2 Sep 18:32
VMware R&D chief goes home again

Back to Oracle after 9 months

After only nine months on the job, VMware's head of research and development is packing his bags and returning to Oracle. Richard Sarwal resigned his post effective immediately in order to resume his life at Oracle, where he spent almost two decades. Sarwal was plucked from the database outfit by VMWare's former-CEO, Diane …

Software 2 Sep 19:38
Skype ignores PayPal siphoning hijack scheme

The phone company without a phone

One day last month, when Klaus Zimmerman tried to log into his Skype account, he got an error message indicating his username and password didn't match. Concerned something was awry, Zimmerman, a computer repairman living in Wexford County, Ireland, phoned his brother and asked him to check his online status. "I saw you on …

Crime 2 Sep 21:41
Google's comic capers: what they really meant to say

The truth behind the speech bubbles

Google publicised its new browser Chrome with a 38-page comic book. It's a gift to satirists, and already, our inboxes are buzzing with slightly less saintly interpretations. Here's a selection. Naturally, the altruistic nature of the operation gets a bit of a bashing: As does the, er, "end to end" nature of the …

Odds and Sods 2 Sep 22:32
Google remodels top secret money machine

'Perfect ad' be damned

Nowadays, even Google is questioning Google's rose-colored portrait of its ever-expanding search advertising monopoly. The way senior vp Jonathan Rosenberg tells it, Google will gradually tweak its AdWords ad platform until it displays almost no ads. Ad "coverage" on the world's largest search engine has certainly shrunk over …

Financial News 2 Sep 22:59
IBM pitches 'network security' blade server

Slimline P2P throttler

IBM is rolling out a blade server made to support deep packet inspection tools, so that service providers and other operations can better shield themselves against viruses, denial of service attacks, and, yes, throttle peer-to-peer bandwidth. The BladeCenter PN41 was co-developed by IBM and the service management and security …

Servers 2 Sep 23:43