The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Feeds

23rd December 2008 Archive

Browse by publication date, or search the site.

  • Supermicro does micro server for SOHOs

    Because you can't have too many servers

    Motherboard and server maker Supermicro is not a tier-one corporate-server supplier itself, but it does sell a lot of motherboards to tier-two players. Now wants to get a piece of the small-office/home-office (SOHO) market with a new single-socket mini-tower server. Super Micro Computer, which also calls itself Supermicro just …

    Hardware 23 Dec 00:03

  • Free eco-friendly font saves ink and toner

    Holey Vera Sans, Batman!

    Ecological consciousness is taking a leap forward with the release of Ecofont, a TrueType font designed to save ink and toner, by the Utrect-based Spranq creative communications agency Spranq achieved Ecofont's resource-saving magic by shooting the open-source Vera Sans font full of holes. As the company's website claimed: " …

    Odds and Sods 23 Dec 00:16

  • Investment firm slips $100m into Palm's stocking

    Or glove... or something...

    Palm is getting the greatest gift of all this holiday season. No, not family, friendship, and goodwill towards men – $100m. Private equity firm Elevation Partners has agreed to make a $100m investment in the struggling smartphone maker to help keep things running during the economic dumps and push its 2009 product line – most …

    Mobile 23 Dec 00:24

  • Lenovo preps dual-display Frankenlaptop

    3,353,088 pixels, at your service

    Word has leaked out that Lenovo plans to release the world's first dual-display laptop at next month's Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Not since Ray Milland had his head grafted onto Rosey Greer's body in 1972's The Thing with Two Heads has a more unlikely two-headed beast been seen in the wild. And "beast" is not an …

    PCs & Chips 23 Dec 01:14

  • Prolific penis-pill pusher gets slap on the wrist

    Billions served

    A New Zealand man said to be at the helm of one of the world's most prolific spam enterprises has agreed to pay fines totalling $92,715 (about US $63,400) after admitting his role in an operation that spewed billions of junk messages in recent years. Lance Atkinson, 26, paid the paltry amount "because of his co-operation and …

    Spam 23 Dec 01:22

  • LG Cookie budget touchscreen phone

    Review Crumbs! It's a low-cost iPhone alternative

    Just because it’s a touchscreen phone, it doesn’t have to be wallet-stingingly expensive. Following on from its high-end eight-megapixel touch-controlled Renoir, LG is now bringing the joys of finger tapping and thumb stroking to the masses with the Cookie KP500. Initially available in the UK on various pay-as-you-go packages …

    Reg Hardware 23 Dec 09:02

  • Windfarm lobby bows to ASA and cuts CO2 saving figures

    Spinners' numbers overblown

    The British Wind Energy Association, which promotes the UK windfarm industry, has been forced to halve its figures on carbon-emission reductions by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). The BWEA had formerly made its calculations on the basis that every kilowatt-hour (or "unit") of electricity generated by a wind turbine …

    Environment 23 Dec 09:59

  • Cellular repeaters: Can you hear me now?

    Pass go, do not go to jail

    Operating or installing an unlicensed radio transmitter can get you a year in chokey, or six months if you're lucky enough to be in Scotland, and El Reg would never condone such activity - so please enjoy the following work of speculative fiction. A cellular repeater is a base station, but one whose only connection to the rest …

    Mobile 23 Dec 10:48

  • Check Point buys Nokia security appliance business

    Threat management huddles under one umbrella

    Check Point Software is buying Nokia's security appliance business. Terms of the deal, announced Monday, remain undisclosed. The agreement is subject to regulatory approval but expected to close in the first quarter of 2009. Nokia has made use of Check Point firewall and VPN software technology to market purpose-built …

    Channel Register 23 Dec 10:50

  • Home Office death list 'stops ID fraud'

    I impersonate dead people

    The Home Office today said its new weekly register of deaths mailout is "hastening the demise of a cruel type of identity fraud" by catching pension cheats who impersonate dead people. So far four "carefully vetted" organisations have been approved by the General Register Office (GRO) - part of the Identity and Passport …

    ID 23 Dec 10:52

  • Samsung turns to VIA Nano for 12in noteboook-not-netbook

    Bonkers Intel size rules to blame?

    VIA may claim its Nano processor isn't for netbooks, but that won't stop Samsung next month unveiling a 12in notebook-not-netbook based on the chip. According to Asian moles, the Samsung Nano-based machine - dubbed the NC20 - will be unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January 2009. Specifications include 1GB …

    Reg Hardware 23 Dec 11:05

  • Lunar surveyor satellite ready for launch

    NASA plans hairy moon rimshot

    NASA has announced completion of thermal vacuum testing on its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which will map landing sites on the Moon for America's planned new wave of manned space exploration. Launching next year, the LRO will orbit the Moon just 30 miles up, allowing it to scan the surface with great precision. The …

    Space 23 Dec 11:06

  • Reg readers say ‘don’t panic’ about the economy

    Reg Tech Panel Another choice cut from the Reg barometer survey

    Few would now dispute the reality of the global ‘credit crunch’ and the economic downturn this has triggered, which has already hit in most major economies, and according to many pundits is set to continue through 2009 and beyond. But what do Reg Readers make of it all? This is a question we investigated during our recent ‘ …

    Tech Panel 23 Dec 11:19

  • Gov aims to extend dead artists' royalty denial

    Painted into a corner

    The Government has asked the European Commission for permission to continue to deny dead artists' estates a royalty on art sales. It has sided with the art sale industry over artists in seeking to extend the denial of the royalty until 2012. The Government said that it feared that introducing the royalty for dead artists' work …

    Law 23 Dec 11:32

  • Mac fans see MS porn everywhere

    Accuse Redmond of spewing out river of filth

    Microsoft's Seadragon graphics viewing application has come under fire for allegedly distributing pornography to unsuspecting iPhone users, presumably those unfamiliar with the way the internet works these days. Seadragon is a powerful graphics viewer for the iPhone, distributed free by Microsoft Live Labs, and includes an …

    Applications 23 Dec 11:55

  • Datacash tracks down the 3rd Man

    If I offered you twenty thousand pounds £3.25m...

    Payment service provider Datacash has offered £3.25m to buy UK-based credit card fraud experts the 3rd Man. The offer, announced Monday, represents 30p per share, a 18 per cent premium of 3rd Man's trading price on 22 November. The 3rd Man said the deal will allow it to expand internationally. Andrew Goodwill, a director at …

    Enterprise Security 23 Dec 12:04

  • Last Xmas for CDs, please, researcher tells music biz

    Gartner demands freedom from compilation albums?

    Market watcher Gartner is playing Scrooge for the music industry - or at least that part of it that is still in love with the CD as revenue generator. The research company this week called in the music biz to leave this old optical technology behind - the CD has been on sale for more than 26 years - and fully embrace …

    Reg Hardware 23 Dec 12:06

  • Photography: Yes, you have rights

    Comment Unless the police say you haven't

    Government claims to uphold the right of good upstanding Englishmen with cameras to snap whenever and wherever they please took a knock last week, with the publication of a letter from the Home Office setting out when these rights might be curtailed. Vernon Coaker, the Minister for Security, Counter-terrorism, Crime and …

    Law 23 Dec 12:31

  • Apple ejects iBoobs

    Jubblies not lovely, actually

    An application that allows iPhone users to wobble a pair of breasts has been rejected by Apple's application store, denying iPhone geeks the nearest thing to sex they'll get this holiday season. The application was rejected on the grounds of "objectionable content", though with the caveat: "If you believe that you can make the …

    Mobile 23 Dec 12:33

  • iPlayer chief pushes tiered charging for ISPs

    Analysis Extra £10 per month for better streams

    The executive in charge of the BBC iPlayer has suggested that internet users could be charged £10 per month extra on their broadband bill for higher quality streaming. The comments by the BBC's head of digital media technology Anthony Rose reopen a contentious debate about how to pay for the bandwidth consumed by iPlayer, …

    Telecoms 23 Dec 12:55

  • Blighty's jumpjets under threat in MoD budget wrangle?

    Interservice row could see new carriers killed off

    The UK Ministry of Defence has declined to confirm that the nation's fleet of Harrier jumpjets will stay in service until their replacements arrive, fuelling speculation that the Harrier force will be the latest victim of ongoing defence budget problems. The Sunday Times reported again at the weekend that the head of the RAF, …

    Government 23 Dec 13:00

  • MSI mobo ditches Bios for EFI

    Inside the future of PC set-up technology

    Although the MSI P45D3 Platinum looks like a regular Core 2 motherboard, it breaks new ground. Out goes long-standing PC technology the Bios and in comes UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) in its place. UEFI is the successor to the Bios and seeks to take us away from the antiquated method of changing core computer …

    Reg Hardware 23 Dec 13:02

  • MS (finally) confirms unpatched SQL Server flaw

    Exploit code for 0day fails to ping on Redmond's radar

    Microsoft came clean and admitted its SQL Server database software is vulnerable to code injection attacks. It's not a new flaw but the same bug in the database software that emerged around the time of Microsoft's monthly Patch Tuesday update earlier this month. In an advisory, Redmond's security gnomes confirmed that code has …

    Enterprise Security 23 Dec 15:00

  • US.gov questions DNS liberalisation plans

    ICANN gets the call on .whatever

    The US government has criticised an ICANN plan to allow many more top level domain extensions, raising questions once again over the organization's independence from political interests in Washington. The Los Angeles-based quango that runs the domain name system (DNS), is consulting on liberalistaion proposals that would allow …

    Telecoms 23 Dec 15:06

  • Livedrive's livewire, high-living CEO

    Pop storage idol

    Livedrive's Andrew Michael is not your average storage CEO. Storage CEOs are generally dependable, earnest and businesslike. They don't fly Grammy Award-winning popstars over the Atlantic to sing at their girlfriend's birthday party and they don't generally have a stopped cheque dispute with a gambling club. Neither do they …

    Storage 23 Dec 15:21

  • Oil software exec pleads guilty to hacking charges

    Unauthorised drilling in a protected area

    A top manager at a US software developer has avoided jail after pleading guilty to lifting password-protected files from the website of a business rival. Jay E. Leonard, 61, was sentenced to 12 months on probation and a fine of $2,500 after he confessed to misdemeanor hacking charges as part of a plea-bargaining agreement, …

    Crime 23 Dec 15:39

  • Bees on cocaine: The facts

    Mr Snowman wants some honey, baby

    News has emerged of the latest threat to nature: drug-addled bees, hopped up on crack by crazed scientists. Some bee experts believe that cocaine could have "as devastating an effect on honey bee society as it does on human society". The scientists in question are Andrew Barron of Macquarie University in Australia and Gene …

    Biology 23 Dec 15:41

  • VMware piles up next virtual stack for servers

    Lots of new code coming in 2009

    While VMware still has the lion's share of the money and installed base in the server virtualization software racket on x64 platforms, 2009 is shaping up to be a year when various contenders ratchet up the pressure on the company and try to steal away some business. But VMware has plenty of its own smart techies, and a marketing …

    Servers 23 Dec 15:59

  • Market watcher heralds 'Age of the Notebook'

    More laptops than desktops shipped in Q3, apparently

    More laptops shipped in Q3 than desktops, the first time this has ever happen during a given quarter, apparently. So said market watcher iSuppli today, though a close look at its numbers show there's not a lot in it: 38.6m notebooks to 38.5m desktops. What's a 100,000 units among friends? Laptop shipments were up 40 per cent …

    Reg Hardware 23 Dec 16:07

  • The Mac OS 10.5.6 update saga continues

    Apple suggests fix for Mail suicides

    Apple is hoping that its latest support bulletin will calm down some of the uproar over problems caused by its latest Mac OS X upgrade - in this case, the propensity of Apple's email client to unexpectedly quit. As we reported first one week ago and then again last Friday, the Mac OS 10.5.6 update has gone less than swimmingly …

    PCs & Chips 23 Dec 16:59

  • Offline Silverlight and Live Mesh under the microscope

    Web bling tone Microsoft Live Mess?

    The BBC recently released a new cross-platform version of its desktop iPlayer, for downloading programmes and watching them offline. It may the most prominent example yet of an Adobe Systems' AIR application - a runtime that includes the Flash player and the WebKit HTML rendering engine. By contrast Microsoft's Silverlight …

    Developer 23 Dec 17:02

  • Indulge your fecal fantasies with a doll that craps

    "Uh-oh - I made a stinky!"

    Technology has brought many transcendent benefits to our culture, but possibly none have been as consummate in its exquisite magnificence as this holiday season's nonpareil of elegance, Baby Alive Learns to Potty, a child's doll that craps. Surely this darling $60 dumper is the apotheosis of a dream first dreamed by Charles …

    Odds and Sods 23 Dec 18:54

  • Scareware mongers hitch free ride on Microsoft.com and others

    Attack of the open redirects

    Miscreants are exploiting weaknesses in more than one million webpages operated by the federal government, media companies, and even Microsoft to trick unwitting visitors into installing harmful software that takes over their computers. A Google search conducted by the folks at the CyberCrime & Doing Time blog showed that the …

    Security 23 Dec 21:01

  • Sun boosts OpenSolaris on Atom

    Long way to go to beat Linux

    Intel has announced that the OpenSolaris variant of Unix is now better supported on its Atom processors. The Atom support is being positioned to bring the joys of x64 computing to netbooks and other low-power computing devices, and it offers some of the best performance/watt in processing these days. Sun Microsystems, which …

    Operating Systems 23 Dec 21:26

  • Last major VHS supplier ejects from tape biz

    It's been reel

    Although closing credits for VHS finished rolling years ago, the once-standard home movie format is just now reaching the very end of its tape. The last major American VHS supplier is ditching the tape biz completely at the end of this year - just over a week away. For most mainstream retailers, the gig was up shortly after A …

    Music and Media 23 Dec 21:48

  • New Unisys CEO tightens the belt

    Layoffs and other cost-cutting moves

    Ed Coleman, who took the helm at struggling server and services vendor Unisys in October, has made his first big moves in getting the company aligned to the tougher realities the IT market is facing thanks to the turbulent economy. Unisys is eliminating 1,300 employees from its 29,000-strong workforce, a little more than 4 per …

    Servers 23 Dec 23:20