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9th October 2009 Archive

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  • Botnet caught red handed stealing from Google

    And Yahoo!... and Bing

    A recently discovered botnet has been caught siphoning ad revenue away from Google, Yahoo! and Bing and funneling it to smaller networks. According to researchers at Click Forensics, computers that are part of the so-called Bahama Botnet are infected with malware that sends them to counterfeit search pages instead of the real …

    Security 9 Oct 2009, 02:13

  • Windows 7, Bing and mobile will determine Ballmer's future

    Microsoft's ticking time bomb

    The wheels continue to roll, and fall off, of Steve Ballmer's pan-European tour of serious-minded national and broadcast media. Stopping in the Netherlands, Ballmer dealt with the obligatory questions on whether Microsoft would build its own Kindle-style reader. We've been here before on hardware, when the wishful thinking and …

    Software 9 Oct 2009, 03:11

  • IBM throws DB2 Power cluster at Ellison's Exadata

    Sun thunder stealer

    The war of words and technology between IBM and Oracle will get a little warmer today as Big Blue launches its DB2 PureScale clustering technology for its DB2 database and Power Systems Unix servers. As El Reg reported earlier this week, IBM's database and server techies have been cooking up a clustered DB2 database …

    Servers 9 Oct 2009, 04:02

  • Cisco readies rack servers for the holidays

    Hitting that Q4 launch date

    Back in early June, server wannabe Cisco Systems launched its C-Series rack-based x64 servers, companions to the B-Series blade servers that came out in March as part of its "California" Unified Computing System. Cisco got its first taste of the trials and tribulations of the server racket when the B-Series blades shipped later …

    Data Networking 9 Oct 2009, 04:02

  • Spotify scores over £1m a month from subs

    Sweet subscriber revenue music

    Music streaming pioneer Spotify earns more than £1m a month from its premium subscribers, OUT-LAW.COM can reveal. Earnings could be as high as £72m a year. The figure is derived from statements made by Spotify executives. Spotify has been reluctant to reveal how many of its users have upgraded to its premium version. Costing £ …

    Media 9 Oct 2009, 06:02

  • Desktop minipoll results – user ignorance is bliss?

    Workshop On user training and other improbabilities

    The results are in from yesterday’s mini-poll, and they are pretty conclusive – even if we take into account that removing users altogether is not an option. The top two types of call may be quite easily balanced – as you can see from the chart, between ‘don’t know how to do something’ and ‘application not responding’. When …

    PC Management 9 Oct 2009, 06:40

  • IBM multi-petabyte cloud defies XIV storage

    Comment How does it scale that much?

    With its Smart Business Storage Cloud, IBM says we have its GPFS and XIV being used to build a system capable of multiple petabytes of capacity and supporting billions of files with high-performance computing-like I/O performance. But XIV has a maximum usable capacity of 79TB. We can envisage an IBM BladeCenter server set …

    Storage 9 Oct 2009, 07:02

  • Oracle not interested in Brocade

    Larry say so

    Oracle's chief oracle has said he isn't interested in buying Brocade. A couple of days ago it became known that Brocade might be readying itself for a buy-out, and the acquisitve Oracle was fingered as a possible parent. But Larry Ellison reportedly answered a shareholder question at Oracle's annual shareholder conference on …

    Data Networking 9 Oct 2009, 07:11

  • Bitbucket's Amazon DDoS - what went wrong

    A cautionary cloud tale

    After a DDoS brought down Bitbucket's web-based code-hosting service for more than 19 hours over the weekend, Jesper Nøhr speculated the attack had exposed a flaw in the sky-high Amazon infrastructure that hosts the site. Nøhr - who runs Bitbucket - has since spoken to an "Amazon executive" about the attack, and according to his …

    Security 9 Oct 2009, 08:01

  • Sony HDR-TG7VE

    Review Full HD point and shoot perfection?

    The HDR-TG7VE could be seen as Sony's answer to cheap and cheerful camcorders like the Flip Mino HD. However, whereas the latter could be viewed as a bit of a toy, the TG7 is more of a proper camcorder - both when it comes to features and price. Swift shooter: Sony's HDR-TG7VE The TG7 is the successor to the TG3, which …

    Hardware 9 Oct 2009, 08:02

  • AutoVirt adds archiving and tiering

    Automating storage management policies

    With v3.0 of its software AutoVirt is betting that it can succeed in the file virtualisation market when Brocade, EMC, and F5/Acopia have made relatively little impression. AutoVirt is a 2007-founded start-up focussed on mid-market organisations, with its file data virtualisation, replication and migration software, …

    Storage 9 Oct 2009, 08:31

  • Taming the monster VoIP survey

    Reg reader studies Business communications revisited

    Every now and again, we don't nail things first time when it comes to questionnaire design, so first, apologies to all those who took one look at our monster Unified Communications survey last week and decided, understandably in hindsight, it wasn't for them. The problem we had was wading into the specialist stuff right away, …

    VoIP 9 Oct 2009, 08:54

  • Zero-day fixes star in biggest ever Patch Tuesday

    13 updates (8 critical) in record haul

    Microsoft is preparing its biggest ever Patch Tuesday update for next week. The bumper batch of 13 bulletins collectively address 34 security flaws across a wide spectrum of Microsoft products. Eight of the baker's dozen bulletins earn the dread classification of critical, Microsoft's highest severity rating. Two of these …

    Security 9 Oct 2009, 09:00

  • Greenpeace applauds Apple climate change flounce

    Strange planetfellows

    Greenpeace - the environment-obsessed organization that famously protested outside of Steve Jobs' inaugural iPhone keynote - is now praising Jobs and his Apple cult for their stance on climate change. Earlier this week, Apple flounced out of the US Chamber of Commerce after the chamber came out against a Congressional climate …

    Hardware 9 Oct 2009, 09:08

  • Lunar ice-mine pole prang probe looking good, says NASA

    Future of off-Earth rocketfuel industry in the balance

    NASA's mission to crash a spent rocket stage and a following survey craft into a dark crater at the Moon's south pole is now in its final stages. The empty Centaur upper-stage booster has now successfully separated from the LCROSS probe-craft and the two are plunging down toward the lunar antarctic. Here's a rather groovy vid …

    Science 9 Oct 2009, 09:21

  • 3PAR rolls out adaptive provisioning

    Complete Compellent competition

    3PAR is developing technology to move data blocks automatically between different tiers of storage, according to a person familiar with the situation. With the massive scale of storage forecast to be needed in the future, the ability to keep only the highly active data blocks on the fastest and most expensive tier of storage ( …

    Storage 9 Oct 2009, 09:52

  • UK Supremes turn down McKinnon hearing

    Updated Pentagon hacker one step closer to extradition

    Gary McKinnon has been refused leave to appeal to the newly-established UK Supreme Court against his extradition to the US on hacking charges. The legal setback follows failed appeals to the House of Lords and European Court of Human Rights last year. In July two senior judges rejected judicial reviews into the handling of …

    Government 9 Oct 2009, 09:54

  • Nvidia halts future Intel chipset development

    Until we get a bus licence, at least

    That's it. Enough. No more. We're not doing any new chipsets for Intel processors. So says Nvidia, echoing a forecast made a year ago. Well, for the moment, at least. "Until we resolve this matter in court next year, we'll postpone further chipset investments for Intel DMI CPUs," the GPU specialist said in a statement sent …

    Hardware 9 Oct 2009, 09:57

  • BT to push fibre to 1.5m more homes and businesses

    Upgrade upgraded

    BT has abandoned its plans to limit its fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) programme to new build sites. Today, it announced one and a half million copper lines into homes and businesses will be joined by optical cables, initially offering broadband at 100Mbit/s downstream and capable of delivering 1Gbit/s. BT had previously only …

    Networks 9 Oct 2009, 10:01

  • Almighty rumpus in Swedish lesbian enclave

    Drunken Welshmen cop a pink pasting

    The news earlier this week that Chinese state news agency Xinhua had identified a hitherto unknown lesbian enclave buried deep in the forests of northern Sweden prompted sceptical commenters to demand photographic evidence of the sapphic paradise. Well, ever eager to oblige, we've quite amazingly got hold of a photograph of a …

    Bootnotes 9 Oct 2009, 10:02

  • Kindle DX to ship outside US, says Amazon

    But Microsoft doesn't care

    The Kindle DX will be available internationally during 2010, Amazon has confirmed. Company spokesman Drew Herdener has said that the DX – which has a larger, 9.7in screen than the original Kindle, which has a 6in screen – will be available internationally “sometime next year”, according to reports. A specific UK launch date …

    Hardware 9 Oct 2009, 10:15

  • MySQL's ex-boss demands Europe OK Oracle's Sun buy

    'Trust my unique insight' says Mickos

    MySQL's former CEO Marten Mickos is flying the flag for his fleeting former employer, sending a heartfelt plea to the European Union to wave through Oracle's takeover of Sun Microsystems. Mickos left MySQL earlier this year - just over a year after Sun bought his open source database outfit - after apparently becoming …

    Software 9 Oct 2009, 10:21

  • Apple posts iPhone update

    Wireless and wake-from-sleep (not) woes fixed

    Apple has released a firmware update for the iPhone which supposedly fixes several “sporadic” and “intermittent” bugs in version 3.1 of the handset's system software. Firmware 3.1.2 fixes several iPhone bugs Version 3.1.2 supersedes version 3.1, which was released back in early September. Since then iPhone users have made a …

    Phones 9 Oct 2009, 10:26

  • Barnes & Noble preps Kindle punching Google machine

    Android ereader with virtual keyboard

    Amazon nemesis Barnes & Noble is on the verge of challenging the Kindle with its very own ebook reader based on Google's open source Android operating system. According to a source speaking with The Wall Street Journal, B&N could begin selling an ereader as early as next month in the US, and gadget-obsessed blog Gizmodo pegs …

    Hardware 9 Oct 2009, 10:51

  • StorSpeed pushes delicious filer flash cacher

    Issues passionate wish for success

    Startup Storspeed has launched an application-aware clustered file caching product: the SP5000. The aim is to correct a claimed imbalance between a server's hunger for data and the storage subsystem's inability to deliver it fast enough. Like Avere and Symantec with FileStore, and Dataram for block access, StorSpeed says it …

    Storage 9 Oct 2009, 10:54

  • Toyota Prius fourth-generation e-car

    Review Still king of the hybrid hill?

    While the name Prius hasn't achieved the same degree of synonymity as Transit or Mini, it's still the one nine out of ten motorists will think of when you say the word 'hybrid'. You can thank Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio for that, and the fact that Toyota have sold 1.2 million of the things since the first one rolled off the …

    Science 9 Oct 2009, 11:02

  • Web firms seek Royal Mail rivals with GSOH for delivery fling

    Nothing to do but cut and run

    Online UK retailers are outlining plans to flee Royal Mail’s service following yesterday’s Communication Workers Union vote, which came out massively in favour of a national strike. The ballot showed two thirds of posties voted "yes" for strike action. The CWU currently has 121,000 members. The Royal Mail condemned the action …

    Government 9 Oct 2009, 11:17

  • Virgin to launch Music Unlimited 'without unlimited music'

    Exclusive Big label paranoia strikes again

    For the second time in a year, UK punters look like losing out on a ground-breaking music service, thanks to big label paranoia. The Register understands that Virgin Media's "unlimited" downloads service will launch without the unlimited, untethered top-tier offering - the first in the world of its kind. Virgin told us that it's …

    Media 9 Oct 2009, 11:18

  • Phorm takes a bullet for the advertising industry

    Lightning conductor or plague carrier? You decide...

    The unlikely image of Phorm boss Kent Ertugrul as some kind of John the Baptist of behavioural targeting was conjured yesterday as advertising industry leaders pondered the future of online advertising. "I think from a media owner perspective it was good that Phorm drew the sting for everybody else," Microsoft Advertising …

    Media 9 Oct 2009, 11:33

  • ID card support hits bottom under Brown

    Still more popular than Gordo though

    Support for the government's ID card scheme has slumped to its lowest level yet, according to research by NO2ID. The research, carried out by ICM research, showed that 60 per cent of the UK population think that ID cards are a "bad idea" with 38 per cent saying they are a good idea. The national identity database - which will …

    Security 9 Oct 2009, 11:34

  • Giant megaships to suck 'stranded' Aussie gas fields

    Biggest vessels ever to feed world's BBQs, patio heaters

    Energy globocorp Royal Dutch Shell has announced plans to deploy a fleet of monster processing ships - the biggest ever constructed - to exploit so-called "stranded" gas fields, ones which can't be harvested economically by conventional means. In an announcement yesterday, Shell said that the first targets for its proposed …

    Science 9 Oct 2009, 12:00

  • Amazon slashes Wii's UK price

    Console, controller and game now £140

    Nintendo might be unwilling to drop the Wii’s price any further, but at least Amazon’s UK arm isn’t. Despite the Wii carrying a Nintendo-imposed trade price of £180 ($295/€200), Amazon has slashed the console’s price down to just £140 ($223/€151), though it's not the same bundle that's currently being punted for £180. Amazon’ …

    Games 9 Oct 2009, 12:03

  • Nokia netbook to land on 22 October

    In Germany, at least

    Nokia has confirmed that its first laptop will arrive in Europe later this month. Nokia's Booklet 3G will hit Germany later this month The Finnish phone firm announced on its official blog that its Booklet 3G will be available to buy across Germany from 22 October. Although Nokia hasn’t said when the machine will hit …

    Hardware 9 Oct 2009, 12:04

  • NASA iceberg-finder prangs into Moon's south pole

    Update Place where sun doesn't shine probed

    NASA has successfully crashed a spent rocket stage and accompanying probe-craft into the Cabeus crater in the lunar antarctic. Space-agency boffins are now eagerly harvesting a flood of data from telescopes, orbiters and the probe itself in order to find out if valuable water ice has been discovered by the impact. Here's a …

    Science 9 Oct 2009, 12:08

  • Mobile web polarizes as duellists pick their seconds

    Verizon/Google vs AppleT&T

    The two largest US cellcos went on the warpath this week with contrasting statements about their web strategies. Verizon Wireless formed a far reaching partnership with Google, echoing the search giant's existing alliance with Sprint and pointing to Android dominance of the CDMA carriers' own-branded web services platforms, …

    Mobile 9 Oct 2009, 12:28

  • Does the Help Desk have a future?

    Workshop On the slope to being a thing of the past?

    With the rapid development of service desk ‘self help’ tools and the even faster adoption of ‘community’ web sites by many users to help them work things out is the help desk on the slippery slope to becoming a thing of the past? If desktop virtualisation takes off does that mean the end of the help desk as we know it? Or are …

    Service Management 9 Oct 2009, 13:02

  • Pirate Bay co-founders deny ownership of site

    BrokeP says TPB should have got Nobel peace prize

    Lawyers representing The Pirate Bay co-founders, Frederik Neij and Gottfrid Warg, denied in a Dutch civil court yesterday that the Swedish men currently own the notorious BitTorrent tracker site. They told the court that Neij and Warg sold TPB in 2006, and added that the outfit’s ex-mouthpiece, Peter Sunde, had never owned the …

    Media 9 Oct 2009, 13:32

  • Spotify: Live revenues, or the kitten gets it

    The thoughts of Chairman Ek

    Spotify founder Daniel Ek says the service can't keep giving away free music, and wants cheaper music and a cut of concert revenue to keep it going. Writing on the company's first anniversary of delivering a streaming music service, Ek repeated his desire to capture new revenue from people who might otherwise use unlicensed …

    Media 9 Oct 2009, 13:34

  • W3C sidesteps Apple over widget-patent

    Nimble footwork could dodge legal elephant trap

    The W3C has spent the last three months poring over Apple's patent on remote updating, and the web standards organization thinks the patent can be avoided by careful wording and tweaking a couple of APIs. Apple revealed its patent in March this year, throwing the W3C's attempts to create a standard for widgets into confusion …

    Media 9 Oct 2009, 13:37

  • UK Border Agency suspends 'flawed' asylum DNA testing

    To try head measuring?

    The UK Border Agency has quietly suspended its heavily-criticised attempt to test asylum seekers' nationality by DNA fingerprinting and isotope analysis. Officials have been told that the "Human Provenance Pilot", described as "naive and scientifically flawed" by Sir Alec Jeffreys, the inventor of DNA fingerprinting, has been …

    Security 9 Oct 2009, 13:57

  • Volkswagen boffins turn staircase into giant working piano keyboard

    Stairway to heaven?

    Can’t be bothered taking the stairs or putting your rubbish in the bin? You might change your mind when you see how electronics have been used to create a set of musical stairs and a ‘bottomless’ bin. Can't see the video? Download Flash Player from Adobe.com Car firm Volkswagen recently teamed up with some designers to …

    Hardware 9 Oct 2009, 14:02

  • NASA moon-bomb probe strikes rich seam of fruitcake

    Nutjob Parade 'As a woman I feel violated'

    Those readers who've been following NASA's LCROSS lunar pole-prang mission, which saw a brace of spacecraft crash into the Moon's south pole earlier today, will be aware that the effort wasn't popular in all quarters. In particular the self-styled "Chicago Surrealist Movement", claiming to speak for "surrealists, lunatics, …

    Science 9 Oct 2009, 14:32

  • Android to overtake iPhone in 2012 - analyst

    Symbian still on top, but BlackBerry down

    Google’s Android will have more than quadrupled its market share by the end of 2012, market watcher Gartner has claimed. But Symbian looks set to remain the dominant smartphone OS for several years to come. Android’s market share stood at a paltry 1.6 per cent during Q1 2009, but will grow to 14.5 per cent by the time Q4 2012 …

    Phones 9 Oct 2009, 14:33

  • Ralph Lauren says sorry for incredible shrinking pelvis

    We've learned that we're responsible

    Ralph Lauren has apologized for Photoshopping the pelvis of a fashion model down to inhuman proportions. Yesterday, we told you the tale of a recent Ralph Lauren magazine advert that takes the fashion world's taste for emaciated bodies to new extremes: Ralph Lauren Photoshoppery After its debut, the ad was soon the source …

    Bootnotes 9 Oct 2009, 14:45

  • Honda slips motorised unicycle into e-car

    Leccy Tech Firm's Tokyo Motor Show treats revealed

    Honda is gearing up to demo an array of electric vehicles at the upcoming Tokyo Motor Show, including an e-car incorporating the firm’s recently unveiled motorised unicycle. Honda's electric EV-N: a three-door Trabant nT? The EV-N is described simply as a “battery electric vehicle” and Honda isn’t willing to say much more …

    Science 9 Oct 2009, 15:21

  • Climate porn campaign drowns dog for £6m

    Your taxes at work

    Taxpayers are paying £6m so their children can be scared out of their wits. It's not Halloween, but a new climate change TV advertising campaign that begins tonight, which features a young girl watching a dog drown. The ad campaign is put together by "Act on CO2", the cross-department publicity machine that describes itself as …

    Science 9 Oct 2009, 15:27

  • YouTube video spam promotes Russian real estate

    A different kind of viral video

    Russian security researchers have discovered a spam campaign that points towards video ads hosted on YouTube. Previous junk mail campaigns have featured links to supposed video clips that actually point directly towards malvertised sites. The latest campaign differs because it uses videos clips rather than empty promises of …

    Security 9 Oct 2009, 16:34

  • Twitter bans security maven for sharing naughty link

    "We scan evrythng"

    A well known security researcher was banished from Twitter for more than two days for including the address of a malicious website in a two-month-old dispatch. On Tuesday, Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer for anti-virus provider F-Secure, found his Twitter account suspended with no explanation. Every one of his tweets …

    Security 9 Oct 2009, 17:31

  • Alpha-male Ellison issues $10m Exadata challenge

    Showmanship at the DBMS Corral

    Larry Ellison don't need no stinking benchmarks to prove the Exadata V2 database cluster recently announced with his minion Sun Microsystems has more oomph than IBM's "fastest computer". Well, Oracle's chief executive doesn't need standard benchmarks. But he is willing to shell out $10m to a company that can demonstrate that …

    Servers 9 Oct 2009, 18:37

  • Large Hadron boffin arrested on terrorism suspicion

    No more atom-smashing for you

    An atomic physicist who worked at the European Organization for Nuclear Research for six years has been arrested on suspicion he had links to an Al Qaeda affiliate in North Africa. The unnamed man had been assigned to an analysis project for the organization, better known as CERN, since 2003, the group said in a press release …

    Security 9 Oct 2009, 19:43

  • Nokia (officially) ports Qt to Maemo 5

    Dangles carrot for devs over Nokia N900

    Nokia has created an official port for the Qt graphical toolkit to Maemo 5, hoping to entice more developers into making apps for its upcoming N900 tablet-that-is-actually-a-smartphone. N900 will run on the Maemo 5 OS, which uses the GTK+ framework for app development. But Nokia plans the Maemo's next incarnation to use Qt, …

    Developer 9 Oct 2009, 19:53

  • Sun and Oracle to pimp synergies at OpenWorld

    Separate but equal, but mostly separate

    Sun Microsystems has been given a larger presence than usual at Oracle's annual OpenWorld conference to help showcase its products and joint work with Oracle, and plug leaking sales. The database giant is understood to be concerned about the decline in Sun business and looking for projects the pair can pursue and flag, while …

    Software 9 Oct 2009, 20:36