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16th March 2009 Archive

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  • Cloudera floats commercial Hadoop distro

    Open source for the Google wannabe

    Face it: You want to launch your own Google and get your hands on some of that (easy?) internet money. Well, now's your chance to take a stab at it. Today, a startup called Cloudera is launching a commercial distribution of the Google-inspired open source Hadoop software underpinning Yahoo, Facebook, and a number of other hot- …

    Servers 16 Mar 2009, 03:11

  • HP in NonStop rack server chase

    Blading (not quite) everything

    Hewlett-Packard today is rolling out an entry configuration of its NonStop fault tolerant machines based on rack-mounted servers instead of the more expandable and more expensive blade-style NonStop iron the company has been peddling recently. The new rack NonStop machine, the NS2000, is a bit of a return to the past for HP, …

    Servers 16 Mar 2009, 05:02

  • Discovery en route to ISS

    NASA hails 'spectacular' launch

    Space shuttle Discovery blasted off last night from Kennedy Space Centre at 19:43 EDT (23:43 GMT) on its STS-119 mission to the International Space Station. The launch was twice delayed due to technical issues - the first a suspect hydrogen flow control valve and then a leak in a gaseous hydrogen vent line. NASA Associate …

    Science 16 Mar 2009, 08:04

  • Pandemonium at NYC 'Top Model' audition

    WSA Chaos, coppers and cuffings

    Fears that the exciting world of international modelling had lost its edge following Naomi Campbell's apparent retirement from bitchslapping pugilism were evidently groundless - a fact confirmed by a New York audition for America's Next Top Model which ended in panic and chaos with six people injured and three cuffed. …

    Bootnotes 16 Mar 2009, 09:49

  • Freecom pitches tough hard drive at sporty types

    Protected against 2m drops, hackers

    Freecom has rolled out a 2.5in external hard drive designed to "endure even the toughest conditions", the company claimed. We're not sure how many folk who go "cycling up mountains" want to take up to 500GB of data with them while they're at it, but that's the kind of user Freecom said it has in mind. Freecom's ToughDrive …

    Hardware 16 Mar 2009, 10:02

  • Lead roof thief eyeballed targets on Google Earth

    Swiped £100k of Pb in six months

    A builder who used Google Earth to pinpoint lead roofs across south London and subsequently made off with £100k's worth of the valuable metal has been handed an eight-month suspended jail term, the Telegraph reports. Tom Berge, 27, targeted Croydon Parish Church, Honeywood Museum in Carshalton and Sutton High School for Girls …

    Bootnotes 16 Mar 2009, 10:10

  • Scottish Parliament pr0n law faces angry opposition

    Dead horse flogging farce limps on

    Last week, the long-awaited Scottish extreme porn bill (pdf) was published — s34 of the Criminal Justice and Licensing (Scotland) Bill — and it hasn’t gone down well at all. The proposal was much as expected; similar to the English version, but slightly more extreme. However, unlike the English version, which avoided the trap …

    Law 16 Mar 2009, 10:45

  • NASA pimps Google Mars

    Historical maps, 'live' image feeds added

    Users of the Martian part of Google Earth will be delighted to hear that it has received enhancements. The new virtual-Mars features include historical maps of the red planet, and up-to-date imagery from spacecraft in orbit above it. The latest updates were put together in cooperation with NASA's Ames research centre. The …

    Science 16 Mar 2009, 11:06

  • National Express to 'ban' trainspotting

    'They should go back to running buses'

    An almighty war of words has broken out between National Express and The Transport Salaried Staffs Association (TSSA) over alleged plans to see trainspotters ejected from platforms along the East Coast line. According to the Evening Standard, the TSSA says it was "told at a meeting" that rail aficionados would no longer be …

    Bootnotes 16 Mar 2009, 11:35

  • Mystery chip found inside talking iPod Shuffle's earphones

    Controller chip - or covert IP protection part?

    Discovery of an as-yet-unidentified chip inside a dissected pair of new iPod Shuffle earphones has sparked rumours that the control-less player can only be driven by Apple-approved cans. The mystery chip's located underneath the controller's three buttons The chip – which carries the marking “8A83E3” on its surface – is, …

    Hardware 16 Mar 2009, 12:07

  • Sega Mega Drive to be revived next month

    Get lost, PlayStation

    Thumbs at the ready, because the Sega Mega Drive’s set to make a comeback within weeks. Blaze's Sega Mega Drive: retro action Although slightly slimmer than the original model, the redesigned retro console has been developed by Blaze International and will be released by online retailer Play.com – to name but one – towards …

    Games 16 Mar 2009, 12:10

  • Coroners & Justice Bill chewed a new one by opposition

    Mostly duff: Too few plums

    If you seek a textbook example of how not to draft law in 21st century Britain, then look no further than the Coroners and Justice Bill which emerged from committee stage last week in the House of Commons. That’s the pretty unanimous view of both Conservative and Lib Dem MPs, whose job it was to wrestle with the intricacies of …

    Government 16 Mar 2009, 12:17

  • BBC Click paid cybercrooks to buy botnet

    Your licence fees at work

    BBC Click has admitted paying cybercrooks thousands of dollars to buy access to a botnet as part of a controversial cybercrime investigation, broadcast over the weekend. In a website story accompanying the heavily-promoted report, BBC Click reporter Spencer Kelly explains how licence fee payers' money was used to buy access to …

    Security 16 Mar 2009, 12:32

  • TfL cans mobiles on the tube plan

    Thank f*ck for that

    Transport for London has given up on plans to get mobile phones working underground. TfL said the technology was available but it was unable to get anyone interested enough to pay to get the kit installed underground. We're betting the real reason is that it is so damned noisy on most parts of the Underground that you wouldn' …

    Mobile 16 Mar 2009, 12:34

  • Guns N' Roses blogger faces music prison

    Feds, RIAA disagree on numbers

    A Los Angeles man who pleaded guilty in December to illegally uploading nine Guns N’ Roses songs onto his music site could be thrown in the slammer for six months if federal prosecutors in the case get their way. Kevin Cogill was arrested last summer after posting tracks on 18 June from GNR’s album Chinese Democracy to his …

    Media 16 Mar 2009, 12:44

  • Doc-in-chief targets 'passive drinking' with price hike

    50p per unit floor to keep boozers upright

    Government chief medical officer Sir Liam Donaldson has gone ahead and demanded the government jack up the price of alcohol to 50 pence a unit. Donaldson made the call this morning despite a weekend of ministerial insistences that the government had no intention of doing any such thing to a population already punch drunk from …

    Science 16 Mar 2009, 13:04

  • Supercar maker pitches 'leccy sportster with stunning spec

    'Leccy Tech Can't put a Quant in a pint pot?

    Swedish supercar maker Koenigsegg is probably best know in the UK for the time one of its CCXs tried to do for The Stig by spearing backwards off the Top Gear test track in Dunsfold. Now, however, it has come over all environmentally friendly and the result is the Quant – which will hereafter by known by Reg Hardware as the …

    Science 16 Mar 2009, 13:05

  • Dell Inspiron Mini 12 notebook-not-netbook

    Review The netbook goes big-screen

    With the evolution of the netbook now progressing at such a rate that it would probably make Darwin mutter darkly about wishing the Bible was right, hardly a month, week, day passes without a new sub-species crawling from the primordial ooze. Dell's Inspiron Mini 12: big screen for a netbook One of the latest is the Dell …

    Laptops 16 Mar 2009, 13:07

  • DARPA to build nothingness detector for tunnel sniffing

    Bottom falls out of subterranean-lair market

    Renowned US military tech bureau DARPA has issued a request for an ultrasensitive gravity-measuring instrument which could be mounted in a low flying aircraft and detect underground tunnels. The project, known as Gravity Anomaly for Tunnel Exposure (GATE), was formally announced on Friday. In essence, it will detect an absence …

    Science 16 Mar 2009, 13:07

  • Right-wing Oz politico in nude snaps rumpus

    That's not me, protests Pauline Hanson

    A right-wing Australian politician has protested that nude snaps published (NSFW) in Oz's Sunday Telegraph are not her in a state of advanced undress as captured by a former boyfriend back in the mid-1970s. Pauline Hanson, a former fish-and-chip shop owner who in the 1990s enjoyed a degree of celebrity as founder of the anti- …

    Bootnotes 16 Mar 2009, 13:24

  • Industry ponders fate of Wacky Jacqui's überdatabase

    Has anyone seen my IMP?

    Home Office officials will today meet industry respresentatives to discuss delays to a consultation on plans to massively expand government surveillance of the internet, sources say. Jacqui Smith announced in October she would seek views on the controversial Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP). The consultation paper …

    Government 16 Mar 2009, 13:49

  • Samsung parades 'sleek' handset

    The new Tocco?

    Despite packing in much of the latest in mobile phone technology, Samsung’s most recent handset is far from bulky – in fact it’s quite sleek. Samsung's Lucido: sleek The Lucido – which apparently takes its name from the Italian translation of the word 'sleek' – is a 114 x 46 x 12mm candybar handset that looks deceptively …

    Phones 16 Mar 2009, 14:18

  • Upper-atmos ion drive dart sat launch delayed

    Updated Plesetsk countdown stopped at T minus 7 seconds

    A new European satellite which will fly aerodynamically through the extreme upper reaches of the atmosphere, using ion rocket propulsion to maintain orbital speed, has been held up on the launch pad with just seconds left on the countdown. The ion ship, buffeted by upper-atmosphere winds. The dart-shaped GOCE spacecraft ( …

    Science 16 Mar 2009, 14:37

  • Intel hits AMD with patent breach claim

    Never trust an IP agreement

    AMD piled more worries on its shareholders and partners today when it revealed that Intel is threatening to pull a 2001 cross-licensing agreement between the two firms. In an SEC filing, AMD said it had received "correspondence" from Intel relating to the firm's 2001 Patent Cross License Agreement, which "(i) alleges that the …

    Hardware 16 Mar 2009, 14:39

  • How to backup and restore your netbook

    Duplicate your OS, updates, apps, documents, the lot

    Having a small-capacity solid-state drive in your netbook may be limitation but it has one advantage: it's easy to back up. We don't mean copying a few files over to a safe place, but duplicating the entire drive, operating system and all, ready to drop it all back on if the worst comes to the worst. PCs often come with …

    Hardware 16 Mar 2009, 15:05

  • Scientology spokesman confirms Xenu story

    It's all true after all

    A Scientology spokesman has confirmed that Scientologists believe that mankind's problems stem from brainwashed alien soul remnants created millions of years ago by genocidal alien overlord Xenu. The admission follows years of attempts to dismiss the story, first leaked by defectors, as anti-church propaganda. In an interview …

    Bootnotes 16 Mar 2009, 15:07

  • Tosh touts latest Camileo camcorders

    Slim, light and sexy shooters

    Toshiba has extended its Camileo pocket camcorder range with two HD models, each so compact and light that you’ll think it’s started flogging non-functioning demo models. Toshiba's S10 Camileo camcorder: slim The S10 and P10 each capture video at 1080p and have a 5Mp image sensor for still snaps, with the main differences …

    Hardware 16 Mar 2009, 15:32

  • Symbian shows release plan

    Launch schedule launched

    The Symbian Foundation has laid out a version release schedule, and a development timetable that calls for five iterations to be in production at a time. The version of Symbian currently shipping requires a separate graphical layer, S60, but with "Symbian^2" those layers are combined in the first open-source version of the OS …

    Developer 16 Mar 2009, 15:33

  • HTC 'Maple' to unfold next month?

    Taking a 'leaf' from the BlackBerry book

    HTC may unveil a 3G BlackBerry-style handset at a mobile phone industry shindig in the US next month, it’s been rumoured. HTC's Maple: to be launched next month? Chinese-language newssite Economic Daily News has reportedly said HTC will launch the phone - cheekily codenamed 'Maple' - at the Cellular Telephone Industries …

    Phones 16 Mar 2009, 15:42

  • Storage software bucks hardware sales trend

    Keep the champagne on ice, though

    While disk array sales might have been slammed in the fourth quarter of 2008, IDC reckons that the very profitable business of selling software add-ons for storage devices managed to show some growth despite the economic slowdown. Every quarter, IDC makes estimates of internal disk arrays bundled inside of servers as well as …

    The Channel 16 Mar 2009, 16:08

  • Satyam loses Oz contract

    As bidders line up

    Australian telco Telstra is pulling the plug on a A$32m contract with Satyam and handing the work to EDS. The telco's annual applications support contract will not be renewed, despite a visit from Satyam's chief executive A S Murty last week. Telstra refused to confirm the move, revealed by the Australian, because it does not …

    The Channel 16 Mar 2009, 16:14

  • iPhone developers gifted lovely free extension

    While Apple mulls exclusively expensive app store

    Developers who stumped up $99 to become part of the iPhone application ecosystem are to have their subscription extended for a couple of months, while rumours bubble that Apple is planning to offer a more exclusive iTunes experience. CNet reports that developers who signed up early to create apps for the iPhone have had their …

    Developer 16 Mar 2009, 16:25

  • Geo-located malware appears over the horizon

    Dirty bomb ruse used to punt worm

    Malware authors have incorporated technology designed to find the geographic location of prospective marks as a tactic to enable more convincing social engineering scams. A new variant of the Waledac worm uses an email message claiming a "dirty bomb" explosion in order to tempt the gullible into visiting a maliciously- …

    Security 16 Mar 2009, 16:28

  • HP skims another 10% off some EDS workers' pay packets

    No joke as US, Puerto Rico staff have April pay cut

    Hewlett-Packard has confirmed its EDS employees in the US and Puerto Rico will have their base salaries cut an additional ten per cent for April 2009 only. The company told its staff late on Friday that some workers would temporarily suffer a second drop in pay to help HP execs steer the services outfit through tough economic …

    Financial News 16 Mar 2009, 16:45

  • Microsoft's Azure cloud suffers first crash

    Evangelize first, report later

    Microsoft wanted to offer people the full cloud experience. Well, now it has. The company's pre-beta Azure Services Platform has joined the likes of Amazon Web Services and Flexiscale with a massive outage - Azure's first. Azure went dark for a period of 22 hours on Friday and Saturday, leaving a "large number of deployments …

    Developer 16 Mar 2009, 17:05

  • Better metrics needed for security, says expert

    Awash in bad data

    BOSTON — The security industry has done a poor job of finding ways for companies to measure their security, but that does not mean that collecting data is not valuable, the former head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's cyber group told attendees at the SOURCE Boston conference on Thursday. Amit Yoran, CEO of …

    Security 16 Mar 2009, 17:17

  • Lenovo 'Vaio P clone' not a Vaio P clone, claims Lenovo

    Pocket Yoga designed two years ago, firm insists

    When a picture of a pocket-sized widescreen Lenovo netbook emerged recently, we suspected the firm had simply decided to follow in Sony’s footsteps. But Lenovo has claimed it designed its machine long before the Vaio P was introduced. Lenovo's Pocket Yoga: designed two years ago, apparently Johnson Li, Director of Lenovo’s …

    Hardware 16 Mar 2009, 17:29

  • iPod Touch torches tyke's trousers

    Mum sues Apple, Apple Store automatons

    A US district court judge is being asked to award a 15-year-old boy $225,000 (£160,000) because his iPod exploded in his pants. Being an Apple lawyer is no fun. You have to deal with pesky clone-makers, self-destructing hard drives, flaming iPhones, and now an exploding iPod touch. Or, as the lawsuit calls it, an "iTouch." …

    Hardware 16 Mar 2009, 18:08

  • Cisco throws California virt-server gauntlet

    Much talk, action pending

    The gauntlet has been thrown. Cisco Systems launched its "California" Unified Computing System today in a 14-city IPTV extravaganza, with the key partners it has tapped to provide components to the system showing up to talk - and talk a lot - about what this all means. Pity that all this talk was a little light on the details …

    Servers 16 Mar 2009, 18:36

  • Web scam hoodwinks web founding father

    Berners-Lee burned

    Even the inventor of the world wide web isn't immune from online crime. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who developed the idea for today's interwebs two decades ago, has told The Telegraph he was recently hoodwinked by a fraudulent website when he went online to buy a Christmas present. "The moment I called the 0800 number listed on the …

    Security 16 Mar 2009, 19:03

  • Hollywood retrofits MacGyver into feature flick

    Applied science hero's pop culture resurgence

    American TV action hero and world's greatest improvisational engineer MacGyver is set to hit the big screen — just as soon as Hollywood jerry-rigs a script. New Line Entertainment plans to develop the cult 1980s television series into a feature film that will retrofit MacGyver into a new "global franchise," according to The …

    Bootnotes 16 Mar 2009, 19:17

  • Google inspires behavioral ad-zapping Firefox add-on

    Cookie-filled TACO

    Last week, when Google rolled out its new interest-based advertising behavioral ad targeting operation, it enveloped the world's web surfers in the sort of cookie conundrum we've come to expect from these privacy-hedging ad schemes. Across YouTube and countless third party sites in its AdSense advertising network, Google is …

    Media 16 Mar 2009, 20:47

  • Google open sources poor man's Web2.0rhea

    $12m Jaiku put out to pasture

    Google has open sourced Jaiku under the Apache 2.0 license, just sixteen months after paying $12 million for the would-be Twitter rival. The Mountain View Chocolate Factory announced its Web2.0rhea purchase in October 2007. But this January, as part of its new-found attention to belt-tightening, Google said it would soon cease …

    Developer 16 Mar 2009, 21:31

  • New DNS trojan taints entire LAN from single box

    One 'sploit pwns all

    Internet security experts are warning of a new rash of malware attacks that can hijack the security settings of a wide variety of devices on a local area network, even when they are hardened or don't run on Windows operating systems. Once activated, the trojan sets up a rogue DHCP, or dynamic host configuration protocol, …

    Security 16 Mar 2009, 22:43

  • Google clones search ad machine on photo sharer

    Picasa joins money grab

    Google is now showing text ads when users search for public pics on its Picasa photo-sharing site. Google calls this an experiment, saying the ads are visible only to a small number of US-based users. "As part of our ongoing commitment to innovation and to help users find new and better ways of getting the information they're …

    Media 16 Mar 2009, 22:45

  • Red Hat patent app sparks open source lockdown fears

    'Defensive' patent or IP minefield?

    A recently uncovered Red Hat patent application for dynamic message routing on XML has some open-source advocates theorizing the company has quietly forsaken its promise to claim Linux IP only for defensive purposes. Conspiracies are bubbling out of Slashdot and other sites over a 2007 Red Hat patent application for a "method …

    Developer 16 Mar 2009, 23:20