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31st July 2009 Archive

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  • 3Com bitten by rebate scam

    $90,000 down - and counting?

    A California couple has been indicted for wire fraud, mail fraud, and money laundering for their gaming of 3Com's Trade-Up rebate program. One has been arrested. The other is on the lam. Sheng Qiang (aka Becky Qiang, aka Becky Sheng Qiang) was arrested at her home in Palo Alto, California, last Friday. Hubby Yezhou Zhao (aka …

    Business 31 Jul 00:25

  • Hijacking iPhones and other smart devices using SMS

    Black Hat No user interaction necessary

    Update: Apple says it has patched the vulnerability described below. The full story is here Researchers have uncovered a bevy of vulnerabilities in smart phones made by multiple vendors, including one in Apple's iPhone that could allow an attacker to execute malicious code without requiring the victim to take any action at all …

    Security 31 Jul 01:25

  • Philips Cinema 21:9 56in LCD TV

    Review The film buffs' widescreen TV

    Think of a widescreen TV. The widest one you’ve seen, you know, one with big, garish speakers stuck on the side. Well, whatever it is, it’ll be nowhere near as wide as this new, premium-priced LCD TV from Philips. Philips' Cinema 21:9 56PFL9954H Current widescreens have an aspect ratio of 16:9, so when viewing a movie on …

    Reg Hardware 31 Jul 08:02

  • Revenue U-turns on carousel carbon trading

    Enviro-scammers left feeling green around the gills

    Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs said that from midnight last night all trades in carbon credits will be VAT-free, because of fears that carousel fraudsters, who usually fraudulently exploit computer chips and mobile phones, will target the trade. Carousel fraud or Missing Trader Intra-Community fraud occurs when goods are …

    Government 31 Jul 08:27

  • Southampton Uni getting Nehalem supercomputer

    8000-core IBM iDataplex jobby

    Southampton Uni is getting an IBM Nehalem-based supercomputer. It's a iDataplex-based system, the first one in the UK public sector, built by UK firm OCF. The university says its 8,000 cores will enable it to run at around 74 trillion calculations (74 teraflops) a second, placing the system amongst the top 100 supercomputers …

    HPC 31 Jul 08:29

  • Phoenix warns of 5% rev fall in Q1

    Ashen-faced, but fired up for the coming year

    Services firm Phoenix IT Group has warned that first quarter revenue fell five per cent compared to same period a year earlier. The Northampton-based company, in an interim management statement, blamed a sharp decline in product sales and associated professional services in the mid-market division. For the three months ended …

    Channel Register 31 Jul 08:59

  • CIOs get £170k but helpdesk staffers settle for £6/hr

    IT salaries - because you're worth it

    A survey of fifteen of the most popular technology job titles reveals salaries for both permanent and contractor positions around the UK. Bottom of the list is the helpdesk with starting salaries of £18,000 or contractor jobs from £7 an hour, or just £6 in Scotland. But high salaries go up to £36,000 in London or £32,000 in …

    IT Director 31 Jul 09:24

  • Gaming exec calls for videogame price hike

    £70 per blockbuster title?

    Sony’s former European President thinks the average cost of a blockbuster videogame should rise to £70 ($115/€82). Only a price jump would ensure a continued supply of groundbreaking games, according to Chris Deering, who noted the huge increase in development costs in recent years. “In order to price these games at a level …

    Reg Hardware 31 Jul 09:33

  • McKinnon loses judicial review

    Breaking news High profile campaign suffers potentially fatal blow

    Gary McKinnon has lost a judicial review against his extradition to the United States on hacking charges. Lawyers for the Briton hoped his recent diagnosis with Asperger's Syndrome would be enough to persuade judges to overturn previous rulings and allow McKinnon to be tried in the UK. But Lord Justice Stanley Burnton and Mr …

    Law 31 Jul 09:38

  • Company wins US patent for podcasting

    VoloMedia wants loads of money 'collaborative relationships'

    A US company has been granted a patent that it claims gives it rights over podcasting technology. VoloMedia says that its patent, for "a method for providing episodic media", covers all episodic media downloads, or podcasts. The company said that it would expect podcasters to have "a collaborative relationship" with it. "The …

    Law 31 Jul 10:21

  • Villagers cut off as dripping thong sparks brown out

    Leccy firm says only engineers should remove knickers

    A village in Lincolnshire was cut off after a low flying thong wedged itself on power lines. The skimpy black smalls had been attached to a helium balloon which had become entangled in a power line supplying the village of Leadenham. Locals suggested they may have escaped from the local Polo clubs summer ball. Whilst the …

    Bootnotes 31 Jul 10:23

  • LG hails futuristic phone designers

    Immaculate conceptions

    LG is dishing out $80,000 in prizes to the the winners of its second Design the Future competition. The HiFi: a morphing touchscreen phone was designed for LG The company challenged entrants to “create a concept to define the future of personal mobile communication”. Over 800 phone designs were submitted, and the $20,000 (£ …

    Reg Hardware 31 Jul 10:26

  • McAfee gobbles up MX Logic for cloud security push

    Splashes out again with SAAS-y purchase

    McAfee has agreed to buy email and filtering services firm MX Logic for $140m in cash, followed by a further $30m, providing performance targets are met. The deal - announced Thursday - is designed to bolster McAfee's existing 'security as a service' portfolio. MX Logic's filtering, email archiving and continuity services will …

    Enterprise Security 31 Jul 10:40

  • Microsoft's about turn: Windows 7 tech testers will get free copy of OS

    Reversal of fortune

    Microsoft has taken a sharp about-turn and decided to let Windows 7 technical beta testers have a free copy of the Ultimate edition of the OS after all. The move follows plenty of grumbles from some guinea pigs that had been reviewing the technical beta for MS ahead of the operating system's planned general release on 22 …

    Operating Systems 31 Jul 10:49

  • Intel weans netbook makers off Atom Z

    Clearing the way for Pine Trail?

    Intel is to halt the supply of low energy Atom Z processors to netbook manufacturers before Christmas, according to the Taiwan rumour mill. Industry sources say Intel has informed OEM customers that it will soon stop accepting any further orders for Atom Z series chips – unveiled in March 2008 - according to a report by …

    Reg Hardware 31 Jul 11:14

  • Taiwan hits Dell with $30k fine in pricing saga

    Authorities threaten more to come

    The hole Dell has dug for itself in Taiwan is getting deeper; the company has been fined a million Taiwan dollars (US $30,500) for its pricing cock-up and subsequent refusal to adequately compensate consumers. Dell mistakenly priced monitors and notebooks at sub-bargain-basement prices on its online store in Taiwan on June 25 …

    Reg Hardware 31 Jul 11:25

  • eBay could ditch uncrackable Skype tech

    Spooks likely watching with interest

    Skype's proprietary scrambling technology is purportedly the bane of electronic spies at the NSA and GCHQ, and now in a move sure to spark conspiracy theories, eBay has quietly revealed it could rip out and replace the code at its core. In a regulatory filing this week, the online auction house said it might substitute Skype's …

    Telecoms 31 Jul 11:32

  • The Internet's most evil company?

    The Great Satan of the Blogosphere examined

    Information wants to be free? Au contraire, information wants to tell you all about itself, where, how and if you can use it, and it reserves the right to sue the crap out of you if you don't pay attention. Or at least, that seems to be the way a growing number of traditional publishing organisations view it - the internet has …

    Music and Media 31 Jul 11:59

  • McKinnon lawyers vow to take fight to US Supremes

    NASA hacker loses judicial review

    Lawyers for Gary McKinnon have launched an impassioned attack on the UK justice system, following a decision to allow extradition proceedings against the Pentagon hacker to continue despite his recent diagnosis with Asperger's Syndrome. Lord Justice Stanley Burnton and Mr Justice Wilkie dismissed McKinnon's claims for judicial …

    Law 31 Jul 12:10

  • Vote now to name El Reg space plane

    Reader poll The final say is yours

    Our announcement yesterday, that El Reg would be giving the UK's moribund space programme a touch of the defibrillator with its audacious space paper plane project, certainly seems to have caught readers' imagination. We're obliged to all those who submitted initial technical comments/suggestions. We'll look at those over the …

    Science 31 Jul 12:14

  • Gmail shoves 'on behalf of' feature to one side

    Finally snuggles up with third party SMTP servers

    Gmail users can now send their emails from third party SMTP servers. Google announced yesterday that it's finally got with the program and opened its web mail service up for users who want to send emails from other addresses. "Instead of using Gmail's servers to send the message, we'll use the servers where your other email …

    Applications 31 Jul 12:43

  • 12 of the best... travel gadgets

    Round-up Don't leave town without them

    As another British summer disappears down the meteorological toilet amidst howling gales and driving rain Reg Hardware's mind turns to getting away from it all for a few weeks to a place where carrying a solar charger is not an act of near criminal optimism. To help ease the miles we decided to take a look at a dozen gadgets for …

    Reg Hardware 31 Jul 13:09

  • Virtualization rocks - but who cares beyond consolidation?

    Reader Workshop Roundup of discussion from Week 1

    The feedback on virtualization experiences from those participating so far in our latest online workshop has been generally very positive. A main focus of the comments has been on server consolidation and the cost savings that come with it, and some of the results achieved seem pretty impressive: We're running about 15 VMs …

    Software 31 Jul 13:13

  • Now Apple expands time

    Twice the Capsule for your money

    Apple has quietly doubled the capacity of its Time Capsule wireless-link backup disk appliance, from one to two terabytes. Time Capsule is a networked hard drive, a 7200rpm SATA drive, in a typically Apple-style minimalistic curved white box, along with a dual-band - 2.4GHz and 5GHz - 802.11n Wi-Fi base station, which also …

    Storage 31 Jul 13:26

  • Intel's flash new SSDs hit by bugs

    Don't alter a set BIOS password

    Intel's latest brace of solid state drives has been pulled from the market while a firmware bug gets fixed. Once the firmware bug has been fixed, the drives will go back on sale by etailers and, no doubt, a firmware upgrade will be made available to existing customers. Built on Intel's 34nm process, the generation 2 X25-M and …

    Storage 31 Jul 13:38

  • Malware afflicts 1.5% of Symbian handsets

    According to a malware removal company, at least

    A survey carried out by SMobile, creators of mobile-security software, reports that 1 in 63 Symbian handsets is infected with some sort of malware - though things might not be quite as bad as they seem. The survey sampled 1958 Symbian devices in India and Europe, and discovered that 1.6 per cent of them were infected with …

    Mobile 31 Jul 13:55

  • Government slashes final Eurofighter order

    No more love for outdated planes

    The UK is buying only 40 out of an expected 88 aircraft as part of the third tranche of orders for the controversial Eurofighter Typhoon. The 40 planes will cost £3bn - 24 are replacing RAF planes which have already been sold and sent to Saudi Arabia, and 16 are actual extra planes. The first aircraft should go into active …

    Government 31 Jul 14:03

  • Flash update plugs zero-day Adobe vuln

    Plethora of patches perplexes punters

    Adobe released an update to its Flash Player software on Thursday, completing a busy week of security updates from the software developer. Users are advised to upgrade to Flash version 10.0.32.18 to defend against a cross-platform flaw that has become the focus of hacking attacks since last week. Components of the vulnerable …

    Enterprise Security 31 Jul 14:39

  • Endeavour glides back to Kennedy

    STS-127 mission ends

    Space shuttle Endeavour landed today at Kennedy Space Center at 14:48 GMT, marking the end of its STS-127 mission to the International Space Station. During five spacewalks, crew members installed the final Exposed Facilty component of Japan's Kibo laboratory and replaced some of the orbiting outpost's batteries. Before …

    Space 31 Jul 14:57

  • Amish farmers lose court battle against RFID

    Beasts must still be numbered, says court

    Michigan farmers have failed in their attempt to block the introduction of RFID tags for cattle, despite arguments about the cost and the risk of upsetting an otherwise benevolent deity. The case was bought by the catchily-named Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defence Fund (FTCLDF), representing small farmers in Michigan as well as a …

    Wireless 31 Jul 15:14

  • Volvo opens e-car kimono

    Leccy Tech More than an evaluation mule

    Volvo has shed more light on its electric car plans, revealing that a wholly battery-powered version of the C30 three-door coupe will launch in 2012. A battery-powered version of Volvo's existing C30 (above) is set for 2012 Speaking to Register Hardware at the recent UK launch of its latest C30, S40 and V50 DRIVe models, …

    Reg Hardware 31 Jul 17:02

  • Microsoft 'update' breaks Office for Mac

    Can't open PC-created files

    Microsoft's recently released Service Pack 2 for Office 2008 for Mac makes it impossible for many users to open Office files created on PCs. The "update" - Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Service Pack 2 (12.2.0) - was released last Monday. In its release notes, Microsoft promised that it would "improve stability, reliability, …

    Applications 31 Jul 17:58

  • EU court rules 11-word snippets can violate copyright

    AP cackles with glee

    Amidst angry howls by the Associated Press over the internet CTRL C-ing its stories, Europe's highest court has whittled the line of potential copyright infringement down to just 11 little words. The bar was set by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) this month in a legal dispute between the Danish media monitoring firm …

    Law 31 Jul 18:47

  • Apple patches Black Hat SMS vuln

    Claims 24 hour turnaround

    Yesterday, The Reg reported that researchers had discovered a vulnerability in the iPhone and other mobile devices that made them vulnerable to an SMS hack. This morning, Apple fixed it. Apple spokesperson Tom Neumayr told The Reg about the fix when we contacted him after the BBC reported that O2 had said a fix was on the way …

    Security 31 Jul 19:15

  • Amazon sued for sending 1984 down Orwellian memory hole

    The web giant decoupled my homework

    A seventeen-year-old high school senior has sued Amazon for vanishing George Orwell's 1984 from his Kindle ebook reader - and removing his personal annotations in the process. Two weeks ago, in an amusingly ironic moment, Jeff Bezos and company deleted all copies of both 1984 and Animal Farm from citizen Kindles after the …

    Music and Media 31 Jul 21:13

  • UK border control can't count

    6? 147? What's the difference

    Are UK immigration officials bungling the proper checks on visa applications? If their fact-checking abilities are any indication, there's reason to worry. This July, Linda Costelloe Baker - the then-Independent Monitor for Clearance Refusals - claimed that border control offices overseas are understaffed, overworked, and …

    Odds and Sods 31 Jul 21:52