16th June 2009 Archive

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Oz boffins to milk 'other half' of WiFi

Aussie lawyers eyeball Apple, RIM

Having put the squeeze on tech heavyweights like Intel, Dell, and Microsoft in defense of its ubiquitous WiFi patent, Australia's national science agency is preparing to wring out the rest of the electronics industry for royalties. The Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) says it's …

Wireless 16 Jun 00:20
Microsoft's Windows 7 price gamble opens door to Linux

OEMs assume barrel-folding posture

Ubuntu creator Mark Shuttleworth is itching for a clean fight with Microsoft on netbooks. Shuttleworth once told The Reg he can't wait for Windows 7 on this sub-laptop class of machines because it'll finally give Ubuntu the opportunity to compete fairly against Microsoft's operating system in this emerging market. OEMs have …

Channel Register 16 Jun 00:37
US lawmakers call for AppleT&T probe

Wireless exclusivity spotlighted

A quartet of US senators has asked the acting chairman of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to review whether mobile phone manufacturers should be allowed to enter into exclusive contracts with wireless service providers. In a letter signed by four lawmakers - including Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate's …

Mobile 16 Jun 01:17
'Lord of the Universe' loses Wikiland grip

Guru disciple re-retired

"The Lord of the Universe" has undoubtedly lost his grip on Wikipeda. Back in February 2008, we told you the epic Wikitale of Jossi Fresco, who had worked his way into the site's inner circle to guard the Wikimage of his guru and apparent employer, Prem Rawat. Formerly known as Guru Maharaj Ji, Rawat once fostered a worldwide …

Music and Media 16 Jun 05:47
Google to delete Street View source images

Privacy watchdog growls - Google grudgingly complies

European privacy watchdogs have demanded that Google delete the original images behind its Street View service. The company has said it will comply with the demand in the "long term". Street View has raised privacy concerns wherever it has launched but the UK's privacy regulator the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has …

Law 16 Jun 07:02
Yamaha TSX-130 iPod dock

Review Quality player?

Back in 2006, Yamaha established a special R&D department to look at desktop products. The thinking behind this was to utilise some of the company’s high-end AV know-how and apply it to a new range of products further down the food chain. Yamaha's TSX-130 iPod dock includes CD player, DAB radio and alarm clock From this …

Reg Hardware 16 Jun 08:02
Herschel space 'scope flips its lid

Pops lens cap, first observations follow

The European Space Agency has successfully commanded the Herschel space telescope to open the protective cover protecting its instruments, meaning scientists can get down to the task of observing the universe in far infrared and sub-millimetre wavelengths. In a department of the bleedin' obvious moment, the team behind …

Space 16 Jun 09:03
Amazon's Bezos hits out at Google over books deal

Saucer of milk for table ten

Jeff Bezos, chief executive of Amazon.com, has called for Google's book digitisation project to be sent back to regulators. Amazon, and its Kindle digital book device, are right in the centre of Google's crosshairs as it starts to turn its digital book archive into a business. Bezos was asked what he thought of Google's …

Music and Media 16 Jun 09:07
Escrow vital for banks choosing cloud computing, says provider

Although soft drinks firms might be too orangey for it

Financial services firms are using cloud computing with increasing frequency, but often forget to protect the software they invest in, a software security firm has said. It said its escrow services were as vital for remote as for traditional computing. Software as a Service (SaaS), a form of cloud computing, is increasingly …

IT Director 16 Jun 09:23
Malta pair charged over illicit Playmobil trade

Decapitated knights filched from factory

A pair of Maltesers have appeared in court charged with fencing stolen Playmobil figures, some of which had been modified to show "knights holding decapitated bleeding heads and arrows lodged in the heads". Francis Difesa, 51, of St Paul's Bay and Nadine Cutajar, 26, of Ghaxaq, were held following a police investigation into …

Bootnotes 16 Jun 09:24
Paris Airshow kicks off

Paris Airshow Ils montent diddly vers le haut et encore vers le haut

Yesterday saw the opening of the biannual Paris Airshow (or more correctly the Salon du Bourget Air et Espace). Like its British counterpart at Farnborough, held in alternate years, Paris is a technology show as much as it is an aviation one - not to mention the fact that the aerospace world is joined at the hip to the world of …

Science 16 Jun 09:41
AMD to intro 6Gb/s Sata III chipset in early 2010

USB 3.0 too?

AMD will roll out its next generation of desktop chipsets in January 2010, Taiwanese motherboard-maker moles have claimed. Two chipsets are in the pipeline: 'RD890' and 'RS880D', the latter an integrated offering equipped with a 700MHz 'RV620' graphics core and AMD's UVD 2.0 video decoder unit. Both chipsets support …

Reg Hardware 16 Jun 10:09
Olympus unwraps first Micro Four-Thirds camera

"Mirrors no longer necessary"

Olympus has launched its first camera based on the Micro Four-Thirds format. The firm claimed the result is a DSLR much slimmer than others. Olympus' E-P1: uses Micro Four-Thirds technology The E-P1 measures 119.3 x 68.5 x 33mm, yet sports a 12.3Mp sensor and support for interchangeable lenses. A range of Micro Four-Thirds …

Reg Hardware 16 Jun 10:19
Extreme porn law used on beastly Chinese DVD pirates

Cops make grab for mysterious black bags

Five months on from the passage of new laws on extreme porn, police forces up and down the UK appear to be using them sparingly – and not quite in the way that parliament intended. According to sources within law enforcement, there have been two or three prosecutions on their patch under the new legislation. In each case, the …

Policing 16 Jun 10:42
French offer gunshot-locator flying robots

Paris Airshow Next: Droids which can pry open cold dead hands

There are lots of small, hand-launched roboplanes around these days, usually intended to let foot soldiers get an idea what lies over the hill or around the corner. There are also lots of acoustic gunshot spotter rigs nowadays, some of them very fancy indeed. Shooting at the robots. Bad idea. Neither of these on their own …

Science 16 Jun 10:43
Adventurer demands -70°C phone for next expedition

Sonim pledges suitably chill-resistant handset

Aging adventurer Sir Ranulph Fiennes, 65, has hinted that rugged-phone firm Sonim is working on an ultra-hard handset ideal for use on his next jaunt. Sonim's S1 Land Rover phone: will work at down to -70°C? During Sonim’s launch of its new S1 Land Rover phone in Birmingham yesterday, Sir Ranulph said that the firm’s …

Reg Hardware 16 Jun 10:44
Cracks in China censorware patched

Claims personal pornwall is voluntary

The Chinese government has ordered patches to fix security holes in censorship software which will be shipped with every new computer sold in the country from 1 July. Researchers from the University of Michigan found major flaws in Green Dam's software which they claimed would allow a hacker to take over a machine. They also …

Government 16 Jun 10:57
Pirate Bay launches encrypted private network

Delayed service fires broadside at Hollywood

The Pirate Bay has opened beta testing on its encrypted virtual private network which it reckons will stop copyright hassles for anyone wishing to share files. The only issue for the freetards is the price - €5 a month. The VPN is being used by 3,000 testers right now and there are another 180,000 in the queue. Pirate Bay …

Data Networking 16 Jun 11:04
Opera to take web back to the old days

A server in every client

Opera raised the browser feature ante today by announcing Opera Unite - placing a web server in every client and encouraging end users to share content from their own desktop with the world. Rather than compete with the cloud-based services that are currently so popular, Opera is proposing, and enabling, a return to how the …

Applications 16 Jun 11:07
Gov tries to work out if anyone is visiting its websites

But first it will try and work out how many it's got

The government is trying to get a grip on its sprawling estate of websites by taking the revolutionary step of actually verifying how much traffic they generate. The Central Office of Information says it is "driving forward a programme of work to assess the value for money of government websites to the taxpayer". It has taken …

Government 16 Jun 11:34
Dell live Q&A on The Reg today

Webcast Cloud claims grilled by Reg readers

Dell will be facing questions from readers of The Register on its move into services with cloud-optimized SaaS offerings from 11am PST, 2pm EST, 7pm BST today. Listen to Dell talk about its new Modular Services and check out the slide deck for the company's take on: distributed device management service; software inventory and …

Business 16 Jun 11:38
Carterware - it's the new vapourware

Comment Virgin, Universal in rush to babble incoherently

We all know what vapourware is. It's a class of product that's announced with great fanfare, typically in response to a competitor, or as simply The Next Big Thing. But betwixt the announcement and the launch, many months and years may pass, and sometimes the vapour never condenses into a product at all. Now meet its cousin - …

Music and Media 16 Jun 11:38
First plug-in Prius paraded by car rental firm

Leccy Tech Streetcar adds socket to Toyota's motor

Car rental club Streetcar has added what is believed to be the UK’s first plug-in hybrid electric Toyota Prius to its rental fleet. Streetcar's plug-in Prius: destined for London-based rentals The Prius was modified for Streetcar by Grantham-based firm Amberjac, which removed the car’s standard nickel-metal hydride battery …

Reg Hardware 16 Jun 11:46
Symantec rides dedupe roadmap to backup software

Will reach NetBackup and Backup Exec by next March

Symantec is embedding deduplication capabilities in NetBackup and Backup Exec as part of its ongoing of its backup software. Instead of seeing these software products backup data to deduplicating appliances, such as those from EMC, Data Domain or Dell's DL2000 CommVault Simpana box, Symantec will have its own backup products …

Storage 16 Jun 11:50
Boffins design ferroelectric Flash cell for 'super' SSDs

Tech to boost Flash longevity, slash write times

Japanese researchers have developed a NAND Flash cell design they claim will make solid-state drives not only faster but also more reliable, with a longer lifespan. Led by University of Tokyo Engineering Department Associate Professor Ken Takeuchi and Shigeki Sakai of the Frontier Device Group within Japan's Advanced …

Reg Hardware 16 Jun 11:57
What's the best non-iPod music player?

Not video, music

I want an 8GB MP3 player - just not an iPod. I don't want a touchscreen, either - too easily broken. Video I don’t care about - I'm not going to use it, so the player doesn't need to have it. What I do want is a great battery life, an even better sound quality and the ability to shuffle tracks within a given genre. Any ideas …

Reg Hardware 16 Jun 12:02
BlockMaster SafeStick hardware-encrypted USB drive

Review Tough enough?

It may make its money shelling shedloads of its security centric USB Flash drives to organisations like the NHS, but Sweden's BlockMaster believes the rest of us likewise need memory sticks with a high level of data protection built in. Leaving aside for a moment the question of whether you really want to keep confidential …

Reg Hardware 16 Jun 12:02
Pictures reveal upcoming skinny Dell Latitude laptop

Dell keeping mum

Images have appeared online of what would seem to be Dell’s upcoming Latitude Z laptop. A 15in Dell Latitude Z with Intel Centrino? Images courtesy of Notebook Review Although Dell is yet to cough up anything on the existence of a Latitude Z series, one of the leaked pictures clearly shows ‘Latitude Z’ printed onto the …

Reg Hardware 16 Jun 12:10
Britain losing radio habit?

BBC benefits from commercial carwreck

Commercial radio has suffered its worst quarter since 1999, according to new research by Britain's leading radio analyst Grant Goddard. Although radio is still part of as many people's lives as ever, it's a more fleeting one. Radio reaches over 90 per cent of people - but hourly listening is in a steady decline. And so is …

Music and Media 16 Jun 12:16
Israel to test ducted-fan robot air jeep 'within two months'

Paris Airshow Auto-stabilised for windowsill boarding

Israeli developers working on a ducted-fan flying hovercar say that a full-size, turbine driven unmanned prototype will fly "within two months". Flight tests with a smaller electrically-driven model, they say, have validated their basic technology. Sorry sir, your flying car isn't quite ready yet. The Reg flying-car desk …

Science 16 Jun 12:18
Western Digital intros own-brand SSDs

Takes SiliconDrive III to new, expanded markets

If you have been wondering how Western Digital would develop its solid-state drive (SSD) business after it bought SiliconSystems in March, now we know: more of the same, only better and aimed at a wider market. WD has announced its SiliconDrive III product range based on SiliconSystems' technology and targeted pretty much at …

Storage 16 Jun 12:19
Costa Rican snacks on boyf's todger

Takes 'eat me up' a little too literally

A Costa Rican woman whose boyfriend exhorted her to "eat me up" during an evidently torrid romp interpreted his request literally and bit off a piece of his penis, AFP reports. Emergency services attended the scene of the San José todger chew after a wounded Marvin Rodríguez summonsed urgent assistance. Police official …

Bootnotes 16 Jun 12:30
Iran's revolution will not be televised, but could be tweeted

Comment For better or worse, a medium is just a medium

Iran is teetering on the brink of a revolution today, thanks to the web in general and Twitter in particular. At least that's the narrative shooting around the Web 2.0-sphere right now. During the recent election campaign, the wisdom goes, opponents of the hardline Ahmadinejad regime used Twitter, Facebook and blogs to push …

Music and Media 16 Jun 12:39
Google cloud told to encrypt itself

Updated R in RSA wants s in https

A small army of security and privacy researchers has called on Google to automatically encrypt all data transmitted via its Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar services. Google already uses Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (https) encryption to mask login information on this trio of cloud-based web-based applications. …

Security 16 Jun 13:02
Reg reader turns 'homo devil machine' on eBayer

Bandwidth-leeching photo link gets the Turing treatment

An Italian eBayer has not yet clocked that he's been rumbled for linking to a photo from someone else's personal website in an attempt to offload a handheld CB radio. A Reg reader spotted the outrage - hosted on his servers - and decided to replace the image with something more provocative. The sale is here, and you'll need to …

Bootnotes 16 Jun 13:09
The Times kills off blogger anonymity

And outs prize-winning blogger, well done lads

The Times has overturned a court order which sought to protect the anonymity of a police blogger known as NightJack. The blog, which has now been deleted, detailed the life and views of a serving police detective. Earlier this year it won an Orwell prize for political writing. The blogger is Richard Horton a 45-year old …

Law 16 Jun 13:23
Antivirus giants fined over automatic renewals

Payments so secure that users could not stop them

Two major antivirus companies have been fined by New York's attorney general for charging customers without their authorisation or consent. The companies have promised to change the way they renew customer subscriptions. Symantec and McAfee have said that they will provide customers with more information about product renewals …

Channel Register 16 Jun 13:29
Endeavour 'in good shape' for Wednesday lift-off

NASA tempts fate as techies tackle hydrogen leak

NASA is tempting fate by describing space shuttle Endeavour as "in good shape" for lift-off tomorrow on its STS-127 mission to the International Space Station, having used pretty well the same words before a gaseous hydrogen leak caused the original launch to be scrubbed on Saturday. NASA explains that technicians have been …

Space 16 Jun 13:41
Reg live-Twitters the Carter report

Digital Britain wonkery as it happens

[Today El Reg is live Twittering the publication of Carter's Digital Britain report. Follow us from the Royal Society of Arts, using the tags #reg_media_node and #anythingforpageviews and join in the Conversation!] 2:28: Lights are about to go down here at RSA, unfortunately all electronic devices must be turned off because 3 …

Music and Media 16 Jun 13:44
Minority Report ~~command~~ sales system pushes Euro UAV

Paris Airshow Touchscreens: Combat maybe, marketing for sure

Continental aerospace colossus European Aeronautics Defence and Space (EADS) says that touchscreen interfaces aren't just for iPhones and people in movies. They're for everyday, mainstream present-day applications, such as controlling enormous killer robots in the sky. Aerospace/Defence Industry: Reinventing wheels every day …

Physics 16 Jun 14:35
Law lord lashes out at ID cards

"The idea should be abandoned"

Lord Steyn, a former Law lord, is calling for the government to abandon its national ID card scheme because it is an unacceptable invasion of privacy and will not help to solve the various problems they keep claiming it will solve. He outlines the different claims made by the government in favour of ID cards. First we were …

Government 16 Jun 14:49
Barclays IT systems have a strop

Updated No cash for you, mate

Barclays Bank is suffering an IT outage that has seen cash points refusing to pay out and online banking going offline, with some readers reporting that even fleshy-staffed branches are having problems. The problems started over lunch time, and it seems that anyone trying to get money from a Barclays account should try and …

Small Biz 16 Jun 14:57
Iran's nuke boffins prefer Opteron baby supers

A few flops to make a rocket for ~~nukes~~ experiments

So what technology does Iran's Aerospace Research Institute use to help it develop rockets that will presumably be used to give it the capability to launch nuclear weapons? Why, the same exact technology that boffins the world over have chosen to do their sometimes nefarious research, of course. Last December, according to a …

HPC 16 Jun 15:09
Broadband tax of £6 per year to fund rural fibre rollout

Digital Britain Town and country

The government plans to impose a 50 pence monthly levy on every phone and broadband line to fund the rollout of fibre to rural areas, it was announced today. The measure, which will mean city dwellers subsidise faster broadband in sparsely populated areas where the economic case for commercial investment is weak, will come in …

Telecoms 16 Jun 15:36
RIM announces BlackBerry Tour

A smartphone, not a roadtrip

Research in Motion (RIM) has launched the latest update to its BlackBerry collection, unveiling a smartphone called, simply, Tour. RIM's BlackBerry Tour: Curveball? Despite looking like an exact replica of the existing BlackBerry Curve – and sporting almost identical measurements – Tour’s main draw is its 3G connectivity, …

Reg Hardware 16 Jun 15:37
Homer Simpson speaks out on satnavs

Dan Castellaneta voices navigational hilarity

Evergreen Terrace’s most famous resident – no, not Ned Flanders – has finally officially found his way onto a satnav. Homer: now available as a TomTom voice TomTom has taken the Murdoch shilling to bring Homer Simpson – as voiced by Dan Castellaneta and broadcast by News Corp's 20th Century Fox subsidiary - onto its satnav …

Reg Hardware 16 Jun 16:02
That Digital Britain report in full

Digital Britain Mandatory DAB, seedcorn for mega-telcos, etc

What's in the Digital Britain review? If you're plugged into our Live Twitter Feed, you'll already know, telepathically. But here are the highlights from the 240 page document Internet piracy Government will only get involved in menacing freetards as a last resort, and disconnection is off-the-agenda. Menacing will be handed …

Music and Media 16 Jun 16:28
Ofcom gets power to punish pirates

Digital Britain Regulator will throttle, cap, block filesharing

Ofcom will get legal powers to impose an array of technical restrictions on ISPs who are unable to reduce illegal filesharing on their networks under plans unveiled by the government. Lord Carter's final report on Digital Britain, published this afternoon, stops short of mandating a mechanism for persistent copyright …

Telecoms 16 Jun 16:44
Apple releases Java patches (finally)

Better six months late than never

Apple has released security updates for Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server 10.4.11 and 10.5.7 - more than six months after Sun Microsystems warned the world of flaws in its Java virtual machine that make it easy for attackers to execute malware on users' Macs, PCs, and Linux boxes. Better late than never. Last month, The Reg took …

Security 16 Jun 17:41
Ryanair requires web check-in, shuts down website

The 10 hour budget airline farce

On May 21, Ryanair insisted that all new bookings would require online check-ins. If you don't print your boarding pass from the company's website, you're charged an extra £40. And now the Irish budget airline has announced that for ten hours next week, its website will be completely unreachable. The Ryanair site will be …

Business 16 Jun 17:43
SCO inks last-second life-saving Unix pact

The firm that wouldn't die!

After a nuclear holocaust, the only thing left alive will be roaches... and the SCO Group. The company that thinks it owns some lines of Linux – and that everyone else thought was fated for Chapter 7 bankruptcy death this week – has instead revealed to the world that it is the immortal Highlander. Just before a crucial …

Channel Register 16 Jun 18:45
Broadband surges despite Meltdown

China tops US as most-wired nation

The ongoing Meltdown may be causing most sectors of the tech economy to wither, wilt, and shrivel, but one industry is going gangbusters: broadband. According to a report (PDF) released Tuesday by the packet-networking spec curators and marketing boosters at the Broadband Forum, broadband's global reach increased by 16.6 …

Telecoms 16 Jun 18:49
Wind River punts homegrown hypervisor

Extra goodies for Intel

One thing that Intel will inherit when it closes its $884m deal to acquire embedded and real-time operating system maker Wind River this summer is a new cross-chip virtualization hypervisor that the software maker has created all by its lonesome. Every watt, every clock cycle and megabyte, and every dollar count in the …

Virtualization 16 Jun 18:55
MySpace cuts 30% of staff

Back-to-basics the hard way

MySpace is cutting nearly 30 per cent of its staff in a back-to-basics effort that puts its numbers more in line with social networking leader Facebook. The News Corp.-owned social site said layoffs will affect its entire US operations, lowering the total number of staffers to about 1,000 in the country. MySpace claims the …

Business 16 Jun 20:56
Gartner: Windows 7 upgrade catch for XP converts

The rising price of advice

Enterprise computing is never straightforward - and neither is the advice around it. Rare is the large organization whose PC or server operating systems come from a single vendor, and rarer still is the organization whose systems are all running exactly the same version of Microsoft's Windows. And if the software is difficult …

Channel Register 16 Jun 21:03
Microsoft sues family over alleged click fraud

Canadian crackdown a first

Microsoft has filed its first-ever lawsuit over click fraud, seeking $750,000 in damages from a Canada-based trio who allegedly orchestrated a massive online scam via its pay-per-click search ads. "Microsoft’s Internet Safety Enforcement team has a long history in enforcement efforts on issues such as malicious code …

Music and Media 16 Jun 22:32
IBM launching American-only software support

Big red, white, and Blue

IBM is rolling out a new software support package manned entirely by United States citizens. Big Blue says its Software Secure Support via USA Citizens option provides tech support as well as data analysis and call data contained in an isolated US network untouched by foreign intents. The offer will be available October 1 to …

Software 16 Jun 23:25
Citrix ships XenServer 5.5

Let the virtual fight begin

Citrix Systems today announced that its XenServer 5.5 hypervisor for servers and its related tools for managing virtual machines are now shipping. Let the battle for whatever budget dollars are available for x64 server virtualization projects begin. Microsoft, VMware, and XenServer are going to be engaged in a price war that …

Virtualization 16 Jun 23:54
Red Hat's standalone hypervisor goes beta

RHEVing up

Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat threw its, er, red hat into the virtualization ring back in February when it announced it was creating a standalone Enterprise Virtualization hypervisor based on KVM to compete with the likes of VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix Systems. Today, that standalone hypervisor and the tools to manage …

Virtualization 16 Jun 23:59