12th March 2009 Archive

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Aussie firms makes Surface-readable business cards

MS tech serves up employee pics, Tweets, blog posts

Ensuring people actually look at your business card, instead of throwing it into a drawer, is tough. But one firm hopes its innovative use of Microsoft’s Surface will make its business cards too tempting to bin. Can't see the video? Download Flash Player from Adobe.com Amnesia Razorfish, an Australian design firm, has …

Hardware 12 Mar 2009, 00:02
Wikileaked donor list shames US lawmaker

IT pro bares 4,700 names and numbers

Financial data belonging to more than 4,700 donors of Republican Senate candidate Norm Coleman have been leaked to the internet following a breach of his campaign website that also made public the contact details of another 51,000 supporters. Two Microsoft Excel files containing the supporter information were recently posted …

Security 12 Mar 2009, 00:21
Wall Street: Google, Apple good - Palm, AMD bad

The Meltdown shuffle

The ongoing Meltdown is not only causing turmoil in global finance and manufacturing, it's also transforming how money-men rank and rate market fitness. Cases in point: There are rumblings on Wall Street about revamping the membership of the 113-year-old Dow Jones industrial average (DJIA), the closely watched barometer of …

Financial News 12 Mar 2009, 00:28
Texas Memory Systems punts Texas-sized SSD

450GB PCI-Express server flash

It being Texas and all, you would expect for the flash-based solid state disks to be bigger and faster than you might find in other parcels of the globe. And so it is that Texas Memory Systems has this week launched a whopper of an SSD. The RamSan-20 SSD weighs in at 450 GB, and it's based on single-level cell (SLC) NAND type …

Storage 12 Mar 2009, 04:02
Vodafone Music drops the protection

Like Amazon, only more expensive

Vodafone has announced that from this summer the company's music store will start switching to DRM-free MP3 files, with every Vodafone network going DRM-free over the next few years. Germany, Italy, Spain, New Zealand, and the UK will be first to drop the Digital Rights Management that currently encumbers music bought from …

Mobile 12 Mar 2009, 05:02
Poor pound ups Wii's trade price

Gamers facing ten per cent price hike

UK gamers could soon be forced to fork out a little extra for a new Wii, if Nintendo’s recently upped trade price for the console is passed on to consumers by retailers. The gaming giant told website MCV that the current economic environment has forced it to up the price it sell the Wii to UK retailers for. It’s rumoured the …

Games 12 Mar 2009, 05:02
IBM rejiggers x64 servers, blades

Fat Opteron plus new chassis, disks, SSDs

IBM this week has tweaked System x and BladeCenter server lines to give customers more options in terms of processors, disk drives, and solid state disks. The new gadgets are aimed more at getting the machinery current than in radically altering or re-engineering the System x and BladeCenter products in the wake of six months of …

Servers 12 Mar 2009, 06:02
Failed probation system 'masterclass in sloppy management'

Even the NAO is impressed

The failure of the project to provide a single offender management system for UK prisons and the probation service was the fault of senior civil servants who had failed to learn even the first lessons of project management. The drastically downsized project is currently three years late and twice over budget. This failure was …

Government 12 Mar 2009, 08:32
Apple 24in iMac (March 2009)

Review Not enough of an upgrade?

Having given its entire laptop range a thorough overhaul in recent months, Apple has now turned its attention to its desktop machines, starting with the iMac and with the Mac Mini and high-end Mac Pro to follow. Apple's 24in iMac: what's new is largely under the bonnet However, the new iMac is a more modest affair than many …

Hardware 12 Mar 2009, 09:02
Grand Theft Auto IV update spied in publisher's accounts

Fiscal filing promises game update before the financial year's out

PlayStation 3 owners look away now, because Grand Theft Auto IV publisher, Take Two Interactive, has confirmed that a second download will be launched for the Xbox 360 this year. Take Two's financials: good news, for Xbox 360 gamers at least Stashed away inside Take Two's recently released Q1 financial results for FY2009 is …

Games 12 Mar 2009, 10:24
ContactPoint will cost more than thought

Gov project in budget creep shock

The government has revealed that the ContactPoint children's directory will cost just under £44m a year to run, £3m more than previously stated. Children's minister Beverly Hughes provided the figures in a parliamentary written answer on 9 March 2009. "Most will go directly to local authorities to fund staff to ensure the …

Government 12 Mar 2009, 10:25
Hydrogen leak grounds Discovery

Launch no sooner than Sunday

NASA yesterday aborted the scheduled launch of space shuttle Discovery after a leak in a gaseous hydrogen vent line. Launch Director Mike Leinbach explained yesterday that "the leak developed on the piping that runs from the fixed service structure, or launch tower, to a valve at the intertank section of the shuttle’s external …

Science 12 Mar 2009, 10:26
Court rules 'ceaseless liability' for net libel fine for free speech

European Court of Human Rights backs old English law

Publishers' indefinite liability for defamatory material in their online archives is not a restriction on their rights to free speech, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled. The decision backs a 160-year-old rule of English law. The Times newspaper had argued that the burden of indefinite liability was so onerous …

Law 12 Mar 2009, 10:48
Designers mock up bonkers 'leccy car concepts

'Leccy Tech The future of motoring?

"When I was a child I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, I reasoned as a child. But when I became a man I put away childish things." So saith the Good Book. Doesn't say anything about putting away the sort of cars you though were cool when you were 12 years old, though, and with that in mind lets have a shoofty at what …

Science 12 Mar 2009, 11:00
Three short papers about virtualization and data centres

I am a recovering tape addict

Data centres, virtualization, disaster recovery - it's a Titanic selection this week from the Reg Library. Virtualization and its impact on disaster recovery planning Few organisations are doing enough to protect mission-critical data, applications and systems from unexpected disruption and potential loss. Says who? Says …

Virtualization 12 Mar 2009, 11:02
Bletchley Park attracts £300k extra funding

Round of applause for Milton Keynes Council

Bletchley Park has attracted a further £300,000 funding after Milton Keynes Council agreed to match English Heritage's pledge to stump extra cash for the "essential backlog of maintenance and urgent repairs needed at the WW2 Codebreaking Centre" - if another organisation could match the figure. Dr Simon Thurley, chief exec of …

Science 12 Mar 2009, 11:16
BT freezes wages for 100,000

Bosses can expect 'substantially reduced' bonuses

British Telecom is freezing wages for all its 100,000 UK staff in a "head on" response to the economic downturn. A BT spokesman said: “BT can confirm that, after careful consideration, there will be no pay rises as a result of this year’s review of salaries. This will apply to all UK employees, including BT’s most senior …

Broadband 12 Mar 2009, 11:16
'Bland' iPod Shuffle gets third-party arty visual update

Designer displays his etchings

The new talking iPod Shuffle only officially touched down yesterday, but one artist’s already decided it looks too bland and has sketched some more eye-catching bodywork. Shuffle The Possibilities: a work of art? Peter Cui’s artwork suggests brightening up the MP3 player’s bland façade with laser engraved designs and boy …

Hardware 12 Mar 2009, 11:18
O2 wins UK Palm Pré exclusive?

Market sources claim carrier will offer iPhone, iPhone clone

Not content with snapping up the iPhone, O2 may have also secured exclusive rights to sell Palm’s upcoming Pré smartphone in the UK. Palm's Pré: could arrive on O2 in the UK Quoting sources familiar with distribution contracts between Telefónica – O2’s parent company – and Palm, Spanish website Expansión has reported that …

Phones 12 Mar 2009, 11:34
Google Voice goes call-forward crazy in US

All your talk are belong to us

Google is preparing to launch its latest wheeze, Google Voice - a single number that forwards calls and texts to your phone. It's 21 months since it shelled out more than $50m for phone number aggregator Grand Central. The service will be in private beta for a week or two and then restricted to a US audience, but anyone with a …

Broadband 12 Mar 2009, 11:41
Gates retakes rich list top spot as Zuckerberg slides off chart

Life's a... bitch

Bill Gates struck a blow for the world's techies yesterday, when he regained his spot at the top of the world's billionaire list despite mislaying around $18bn over the last year. But, illustrating how recessions hit the youth hardest, Facebook boy wonder Mark Zuckerberg has been booted off the Forbes Magazine billionaire list …

Bootnotes 12 Mar 2009, 11:46
FAST fingers another Cardiff biz over software compliance

Outcome of probe remains a mystery

Trading Standards officers and the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) used new copyright powers earlier this week to probe a business in Cardiff to check its software licensing. The team investigated the unnamed firm on Tuesday, according to FAST. The organisation wrote to 200 businesses in Cardiff in July 2008 warning …

The Channel 12 Mar 2009, 12:05
Level 3 burglary gang plead guilty

Trio face up to 10 years each

The three men caught raiding a major datacentre in central London earlier this week have all pleaded guilty to burglary charges. The trio were remanded at Thames Magistrates Court for sentencing on March 31 at Snaresbrook Crown Court. Police caught John Harrison, 31, of no fixed address, Darren May, 23, of Mansell Court in …

Security 12 Mar 2009, 12:09
Nintendo shifts 100m DS consoles worldwide

Double the PSP's tally

Nintendo DS sales have topped a whopping 100m units worldwide, the videogames giant has claimed. The figure’s a combination of sales for all the DS variants: the original DS, released back in November 2004, the DS Lite, which appeared in 2006, and the DSi - which was only launched into Japan in November last year and won’t …

Games 12 Mar 2009, 12:17
Samsung quietly uncovers stylish music player

Q2 unveiled

Without saying a word, Samsung has added a new MP3 player to its website. Samsung's Q2 MP3 Measuring a diminutive 49 x 101 x 10mm, the 209g Q2 has a 2.4in, 320 x 240 display and 16GB of Flash storage. That may constrain some music fans, especially since the Q2 doesn’t have a memory card slot. In addition to MP3, the Q2 …

Hardware 12 Mar 2009, 12:26
Superfast-charging batteries? Whoa there, MIT

New 'lectrode tech causes premature inkgasm

New battery technology developed at MIT has made a big media splash today, supposedly offering Li-ion energy storage which could charge up fully "in seconds". However, no such capability has been demonstrated: in fact the kit doesn't seem very important. The ink storm results from the usual advance notices attendant on a …

Hardware 12 Mar 2009, 12:38
Rogue international ‘M&A advisors’ target Brit ISP customers

Exclusive FSA warns on ‘Recovery Room’ cons

Britain’s financial watchdog has warned former customers of dotcom ISP Totalise to guard against “Recovery Room” share fraudsters, following a Register investigation. Before going bust in 2002, Totalise PLC offered people who subscribed to its dial-up internet access the extra incentive of free shares in the company. Although …

Financial News 12 Mar 2009, 12:47
Sofia ~~Dark Knight~~ Englundh protests footie chant slur

My surname's non-English, non-drunken

Our piece yesterday on Stockholm lass Sofia Englundh, prevented by the authorities from adopting the middle name "Dark Knight", prompted an email from the 19-year-old Heath Ledger fan protesting her treatment at the hands of the El Reg Bootnotes department. To recap, Ms Englundh's pitch to the Swedish National Tax Agency, aka …

Bootnotes 12 Mar 2009, 12:54
UK.gov thinks internet should be run like BSkyB

Makes case with Wikipedia cut'n'paste

Which is worse: the fact that the UK government appears to favour replacing free access to the internet with a model that looks suspiciously like that of a cable TV network, or that whoever helped draft this measure cut-and-pasted text from Wikipedia in support of it? The threat to internet access arose during discussion of …

Broadband 12 Mar 2009, 13:08
BBC botnet investigation turns hacks into hackers

Changing PCs without permission always wrong

An investigation by the BBC into cybercrime may itself have broken UK computer crime law. BBC Click got its hands on a botnet of 22,000 compromised PCs from an underground forum. It used these machines to send spam to two accounts it had established with Gmail and Hotmail. The programme also used these zombie machines to show …

Security 12 Mar 2009, 13:10
Robbie Williams, Billy Bragg et al say downloads aren't illegal

Hits out at music industry bigwigs

A lobby group consisting of well-known UK musicians has argued that individuals should not be prosecuted for downloading illegal music from the interwebs. The Featured Artists Coalition (FAC) was stitched together last autumn and is made up of 140 or so of Blighty’s rock and pop stars including Blur drummer Dave Rowntree, …

Media 12 Mar 2009, 13:20
Georgia withdraws from ~~South Ossetia~~ Eurovision

Declines to substitute 'anti-Putin' ditty

Georgia has withdrawn from this year's Eurovision Song Contest after the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) earlier this week ruled its entry We Don't Wanna Put In in contravention of the rule which states: "No lyrics, speeches, gestures of a political or similar nature shall be permitted during the Eurovision Song Contest." …

Bootnotes 12 Mar 2009, 13:23
Dell cooks up all-in-one PC treat

Suggests putting it in the kitchen

The trend for eye catching all-in-one PCs appears to be growing, with Dell now kicking its latest such offering into touch – the Studio One 19. Described as beautiful enough to put in either your living room or... er... your kitchen, the all-in-one PC’s based around an 18.5in, 16:9 aspect ratio monitor. Touch operation can be …

Hardware 12 Mar 2009, 13:25
Google jacks up fees for Checkout service

Rip-off Britain is back

Google has pissed off online merchants who use its Checkout service by upping the fees it charges for the online payment service. Rival service PayPal has been heavily criticised for upping fees and for aggressively "encouraging" its use on eBay - Australian eBay sellers could only take payment via PayPal until the company …

The Channel 12 Mar 2009, 13:54
UK's privacy watchdog not very bitey

Trailing Europe on fining powers

The UK's privacy watchdog lags most of Europe in the strength of its powers, according to research produced by a data protection journal. While 16 of the EU's 27 data protection watchdogs have the power to impose fines, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) is still waiting to be granted that power, Privacy & Data …

Law 12 Mar 2009, 14:19
'Sunshade' global-cooling plan would ruin solar power

And then we'd never beat global warming! Hold on...

Attempts to deal with global warming by putting a particulate "sunshade" into the atmosphere would have adverse effects on solar power generation, according to a US federal boffin. Dan Murphy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) investigates a major inspiration for "sunshade" schemes, the volcanic …

Science 12 Mar 2009, 14:27
Romanian cops cuff 20 phishing suspects

Big phish

Romania police arrested 20 suspected phishing fraud suspects on Wednesday. Stefan Negrila, chief of the organised crime police in the western Romanian city of Timisoara, said the alleged hackers set up counterfeit banking websites that they used to trick surfers in Italy and Spain into handing over sensitive login credentials …

Security 12 Mar 2009, 14:54
Kodak ESP 7 all-in-one inkjet printer

Review Photo printing doesn't get much cheaper

Not the best known name in all-in-one printers, Kodak now has a range of four machine. They all use the same print engine, but are differentiated by different levels of bell and whistlery. Among the claims Kodak makes for all of them is photo prints for just 7p each - cheaper than any other inkjet. Kodak's ESP 7: promises …

Hardware 12 Mar 2009, 15:02
Govt advisor calls violent-videogame tax

Fears over alleged 'negative impact' of games on teens

An advisor to Gordon Brown on knife crime and youth violence is to tell the Prime Minister that violent videogames should be taxed to put them out of the reach of kids. Richard Taylor, who’s son Damilola was stabbed to death in south London nine years ago, this week told MPs that computer and console games are “too cheap”, …

Games 12 Mar 2009, 15:18
EC calls for tech help on carbon targets

Making micro-generation work

The European Commission is calling on the technology and communications industry to not only sort out its own energy use and carbon emissions but also help the rest of industry make cuts too. Greater use of technology will help the European Union achieve its targets for cutting carbon emissions by 20 per cent by 2020 and …

Science 12 Mar 2009, 15:42
Amazon's cloud adds reserved seating

Pay now, play later

Amazon will let you reserve space on its cloud for up to three years under a pre-paid agreement. The company Thursday announced the introduction of Reserved Instances for its EC2 service starting at $325 for one-year and $500 for a three-year period on Linux and Unix systems. Payments made for unused or partially Reserved …

Servers 12 Mar 2009, 15:51
Ice in fuel feed caused Heathrow 777 crash

Further AAIB tests confirm early findings

The Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) has presented further evidence to confirm its findings last September that "ice within the fuel feed system" caused the 17 January 2008 crash-landing of a Boeing 777 at Heathrow. BA038 (G-YMMM), following an uneventful flight from Beijing, suffered reduced thrust in both engines …

Science 12 Mar 2009, 16:43
Texting peer released from prison

Sentence suspended for 12 months

The Court of Appeal has released a Labour peer who was jailed for 12 weeks for sending and receiving text messages while driving minutes before he was involved in a fatal motorway crash. Lord Ahmed, 51, was charged with dangerous driving after using his mobile phone shortly before hitting a stationary car in the fast lane of …

Mobile 12 Mar 2009, 16:51
Science-boosting thickie questionnaire backfires

Updated California Academy of Sciences flunks own poll

A new survey has apparently proved that American scientific organisations, when it comes to scientific knowledge, are operating at roughly the intellectual level of cheese rind. The latest watch-out-thickies-or-economic-doom-will-befall-us-all effort comes from the California Academy of Sciences. In a telephone poll of US …

Science 12 Mar 2009, 16:52
Nature security breach prompts password reset

Hacked in tooth and claw

The website of science journal Nature has suffered a security breach that resulted in the potential exposure of users' login credentials. The login credentials were stored in an encrypted form, making them hard to extract. But Nature.com has still opted to reset the passwords of affected users, as a precaution. Nature.com …

Security 12 Mar 2009, 17:01
Microsoft claims Firefox- and Chrome-whopping IE8 speeds

Lies, damned lies and questionable lab tests

Microsoft is touting its own research that claims Internet Explorer 8 - expected next week - is faster than Firefox 3.05 and Google's Chrome 1.0. The company has produced a 14-page report (pdf) and supporting video that claim IE8 is three times as fast as Firefox when it comes to loading web pages and one third quicker than …

Applications 12 Mar 2009, 17:07
The eroding enterprise boundary

Lock Down and Open Up

Businesses today function effectively only when the organisation supports effective collaboration between its staff and external parties, wherever they may be situated. Such is the nature of routine operations that they depend on complex interactions between people and their supporting IT systems that spread far beyond the IT …

State of Security 12 Mar 2009, 17:53
Multi-site bug exposes cloud computing's dark lining

One vuln fits all

More dark linings have been exposed in the cloud computing craze, this time by web security expert Russ McRee, who demonstrates how a flaw in a single provider can spell trouble for numerous customers it serves. In this case, the provider is software-as-a-service, or SaaS, provider Baynote, which offers search and other online …

Security 12 Mar 2009, 18:04
Google behavioral ads scare US lawmakers

House mulls privacy law

US lawmakers have been itching for a good excuse to slap mandatory security guidelines on online behavioral ad targeting schemes, and apparently, they've found it. Google's new plan introduced Wednesday to track individual users' browser history to target ads was just the ticket for Democrat Rep. Rich Boucher, the newly-minted …

Media 12 Mar 2009, 18:43
Apple lands democracy on fanboi party-goers

iTunes' egalitarian DJ

Apple released an update to its iTunes music-management application on Thursday. The updated version, iTunes 8.1, adds support for the third-generation iPod shuffle released on Wednesday, improves performance, and patches two security vulnerabilities. Plus, it lets fanboi party-goers request and vote on music. The iTunes DJ …

Applications 12 Mar 2009, 18:59
Former employee of Obama CIO pick busted for bribery

Appointee not linked to wrongdoing

An employee who worked for President Obama's pick for federal CIO has been arrested by the FBI and charged in a federal bribery sting, according to news reports. Yusuf Acar, 40, was taken custody Thursday under suspicion of soliciting and accepting bribes in exchange for awarding contracts, according to The Washington Post and …

Government 12 Mar 2009, 20:11
Supercomputer niche chucks rocks at Nehalem

SiCortex and the Intel 'problem'

As niche supercomputer-maker SiCortex works on the next generation of its line and watches the IT marketing machine gearing up for Intel's impending Nehalem-based Xeon EP, the company says that Chipzilla isn't moving in the right direction for high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. "The major improvement is in the …

Servers 12 Mar 2009, 21:11
ISS crew flees flying space junk

Astros huddle in Russian-built 'lifeboat'

International Space Station crew members were forced to flee to the outpost's escape capsule briefly on Thursday when a rogue piece of space junk came too close for comfort. The debris, a discarded mechanism used in boosting a satellite into higher orbit, missed the ISS without incident. The three astronauts took shelter for …

Science 12 Mar 2009, 21:32