4th November 2009 Archive

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Newfangled cookie attack steals/poisons website creds

Google, Facebook risk

A security researcher has discovered a weakness in a core browser protocol that compromises the security of Google, Facebook, and other websites by allowing an attacker to tamper with the cookies they set. The weakness stems from RFC 2965, which dictates that browsers must allow subdomains (think www.google.com) to set and …

Security 4 Nov 00:24
Data-gobbling, dollar-munching iPhone bug unearthed

The $15,000 download

The reason why you found an enormous but unexpected iPhone data-connection charge on your phone bill may have been discovered in Estonia. From Cult of Mac comes word that Estonian blogger Oliver K. has discovered a bug in Safari for iPhone that will leave open a Motion JPEG video stream even if you close the Safari app. The …

Mobile 4 Nov 00:52
PayPal to embed X apps in self

PayPal X Innovate iPhone meets Facebook meets 'all of ecommerce'

In Facebook-like fashion, PayPal will open its own website to third-party applications as it continues its quest to "power all of ecommerce." At its inaugural developer conference in San Francisco on Tuesday - PayPal X Innovate 09 - the eBay-owned outfit took the beta tag off its PayPal X developer platform, a set of APIs for …

Developer 4 Nov 01:01
(Galway) Baywatch - IBM monitors Ireland's beaches

Teams with EPA to log water quality

IBM and Ireland's Environmental Protection Agency are helping Irish bathers avoid floundering into a warm pool of industrial sludge with a website that tracks water quality and conditions across more than 130 beaches and lakes in the country. Along with An Taisce (AKA the National Trust for Ireland), the organizations are now …

Government 4 Nov 06:02
Hacker frees iPhone from Jobsian tyranny (again)

$10,000 worth of integrity

Would-be iPhone jailbreakers and unlockers around the globe can breathe a sigh of relief today. Not only has the latest iPhone baseband update been unlocked, but the hack's young developer is determined that it can be accessed for free. Since the iPhone was first released in June 2007, many iPhone owners have argued that after …

Mobile 4 Nov 06:02
Coming soon: Freetard, The Movie

Music biz rise and fall hits the, um, small screen

You've read all about music labels screwing the pooch. Now see the motion picture! US premium cable network HBO is making a movie based on the Recording Industry Ass. of America's impudent and decades-long battle with freetards and the internet, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The flick is based on the book, Appetite for …

Odds and Sods 4 Nov 06:02
Dell schools net 'dolphins' in ways of Microsoft 'whale'

Lessons in custom iron

Cloud computing has helped Dell carve out a healthy business building customized servers for the biggest and most fashionable web properties. Feeding services like Bing and Azure, outfits like Microsoft have had Dell build them machines for their data centers that are smaller, faster, more powerful and consume less power then …

Servers 4 Nov 06:37
New EU rules force telcos to 'fess up for data breaches

Non-telcos can still lose data whenever they want

The European Council has approved a data breach notification rule for Europe's telecoms firms. The amendment to an EU Directive will force telcos to tell customers if they lose their data. The European Parliament and Commission have already approved the amendments, which will become law after it has been published in the EU's …

Law 4 Nov 07:02
Bookeen Cybook Opus

Review Kindle who?

While the Amazon Kindle’s appearance in the UK may help nudge the e-book reader closer to the mainstream, there are plenty of other devices to measure it against. Sony’s Reader variants are the best know, but Interead's oddly named Cool-er and iRex's DR1000S are also in the running. To that list we can now add Bookeen's latest, …

Reg Hardware 4 Nov 08:02
Open University talks clouds with MS and Google

It's a learning process

The Open University is in negotiations with Microsoft and Google about cloud computing services for students and staff. Niall Sclater, the OU's director of learning innovation, told GC News that the university will shortly be taking a decision about whether to deploy Google Apps or Microsoft Live@edu. He said that not only …

Servers 4 Nov 08:02
Jobs go at Novell

And pensions suspended

Novell is cutting jobs in various departments and in various countries. The Linux vendor, which has spent recent weeks cutting its UK distributors, will trim between 100 and 130 jobs from its total headcount of 3,900. The cuts come across geographies and departments and staff are getting severance packages based on length of …

Channel Register 4 Nov 09:11
The x-texting Metrotextual comes out of the closet

C u in pub x

It's time for the chaps out there who commonly end their text messages to chums with an affectionate "x" to come out of the closet - because demonstrating your "metrotextuality" is apparently nothing to be ashamed of. That's according to T-Mobile, which found that a shocking 22 per cent of blokes "regularly include a kiss on …

Mobile 4 Nov 09:13
USB 3.0 thumb drive pops up

Super Talent goes SuperSpeed

Flash vendor Super Talent is leading the pack again and has come up with a USB 3.0 thumb drive. Its SuperSpeed USB 3.0 RAIDDRive comes in 32GB, 64GB and 128GB capacities and works with current USB 2.0 ports, but obviously at USB 2.0 speed. Plug it into a proper USB 3.0 port and it transfers data much, much faster, at up to a …

Storage 4 Nov 09:56
Messenger beams back colour snap of Mercury

NASA releases new data from third fly-by

NASA has released a fetching composite colour snap of Mercury, captured by the Messenger spacecraft on its third and final fly-by of the planet prior to orbital insertion in 2011: The agency explains that the photograph was obtained by Messenger's Wide Angle Camera using three separate images captured through 1000, 700, and …

Space 4 Nov 10:19
Brussels readies full investigation of Oracle Sun

Larry's stubbornness backfiring?

Oracle has resigned itself to the likelihood of a full European competition investigation into its takeover of Sun Microsystems. Although the deal has already been approved by US regulators, the European Competition Commission is less happy with the deal. Larry Ellison's high-handed strategy of refusing any compromise seems …

Applications 4 Nov 10:22
Hands on with Asus' redesigned Eee Keyboard

But launch delayed - again

Despite promising to launch its Eee keyboard last month, Asus has demoed a revised version of the computer-in-a-keyboard, which is now due to ship early next year. Asus has revised the Eee keyboard's features and launch date Among the changes Asus has made to the device are the replacement of its 5in resistive touchscreen …

Reg Hardware 4 Nov 10:24
Nvidia taps Transmeta team for x86 chip, claims analyst

Shoring up, not quitting chipset biz

Nvidia has taken on staff from one-time star of low-power processor design Transmeta, an analyst has claimed, to drive its own x86 core development programme. In a note sent to investment clients yesterday, Doug Freedman of research house AmTech said Nvidia has to be considering a move into the x86 CPU market "by necessity to …

Reg Hardware 4 Nov 10:56
STRONG REAL SEX? That's not porn, rules ASA

The kids'll never notice

British parents can be reassured that a newspaper picture of a man and woman having sex at the base of tree to advertise a film which "CONTAINS STRONG REAL SEX, BLOODY VIOLENCE AND SELF-MUTILATION" is not pornographic. The Advertising Standards Authority made the ruling after seven complainants turned to it in horror after …

Music and Media 4 Nov 10:58
What does a server environment look like anyway?

Workshop And how well do things function as a result?

Stock photo companies have got a lot to answer for. For most people, the phrase ‘server environment’ generally conjures images of sleek racks of equipment, all glistening chrome and black with just the suggestion that the equipment requires no management at all, or if it does, it will be conducted in some place far away like the …

Server Management 4 Nov 11:02
Conservatives promise 'lights on, lights off' IT policy

Budgets to go from 100w to 40w

Government systems spend is about to be seriously slashed, with future emphasis being on small, open source, user-friendly projects. That was the message from key speakers at the Conservative Technology Forum on Monday, with a warning to consultancies and major systems developers grown fat on over-complex and excessive IT …

Servers 4 Nov 11:02
Number of local council snoopers clipped

RIPA abuse curtailed

The number of local officials who can authorise access to communications records and order surveillance operations will be cut under changes to snooping regulations announced today. The Home Office's move follows repeated controversy over the use of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) by local authorities probing …

Government 4 Nov 11:14
Wallace and Gromit get the Google doodle treatment

Search monolith celebrates pair's 20th anniversary

Google's UK search tentacle has decided to ignore the fact that 4 November marks the day in 1890 that Edward, Prince of Wales, inaugurated the City & South London Railway* and instead is currently flourishing a Wallace and Gromit "doodle" to celebrate the pair's 20th anniversary. Yes indeed, it's 20 years since the lads …

Bootnotes 4 Nov 11:18
AMD dual-Radeon HD 5870 card spied on web

What all were expecting, surfaces

AMD is no stranger to banging a couple of its high-end GPUs onto a single graphics card, connecting them in CrossFire mode, and offering the result as a top-of-the-line gaming card. World+Dog expects it do the same with its Radeon HD 5870 chip - reviewed here - and here it is. Unofficially, mind, courtesy of a card leaked to …

Reg Hardware 4 Nov 11:20
Orange coughs up cash for old kit

Any, any, any old iron

Orange is offering to value any mobile tech you've got lying around, and will send a cheque within seven days if you leave it with them. Orange's Recycle & Reward deal is supposed to underline its green credentials, but should be good for everyone with kit staying out of landfill and Orange getting you into its stores. While …

Mobile 4 Nov 11:34
PrevX piles in against bank Trojans, phishing

Plugging gaps in traditional anti-malware

The fight against banking Trojans and phishing attacks has stepped up a gear with the launch of a new product on Wednesday targeted at securing online transactions. PrevX SafeOnline, a client-side security software package that isolates transactions from everything else on a user's Windows PC, is designed as an added layer of …

Enterprise Security 4 Nov 11:42
Parallels 5 skins Windows

Win7 support added

Parallels' annual update to its eponymous virtual machine software is out today, looking a bit smarter, and promising to be even more seamless than before. A new Coherence mode sees Windows applications skinned with a Mac-like scheme. Dialogues look like Windows dialogues, and there's easier keyboard mapping - so your Windows …

Virtualization 4 Nov 11:42
Lords want help on cyber attacks

Give the learned gents a hand

A Lords Committee is investigating European Union policy on cyber attacks and is calling for evidence from industry and other interested parties. The ermine-clad gents, and two ladies, are particularly interested in how vulnerable the internet is to a widespread failure because of an attack such as those previously aimed at …

Enterprise Security 4 Nov 11:51
You can't sack me, I'm with Gaia

"Message: I care"

Sacked employees can play the 'Green Card', and make wrongful dismissal claims against their former employers on grounds of their belief, a judge has ruled. Paradoxically, this could also protect non-believers - such as climate skeptics and atheist vicars, the latter being the norm in the Church of England, which we'll come to …

Environment 4 Nov 12:09
Chinese store exposes iPhone 4's midriff

Metal plate gets fans hot and bothered

Parts supplier China Ontrade has posted what appears to be the middle of the next-generation iPhone, revealing almost nothing about the product beyond its existence. The plate, described as an "Apple iPhone 4 Generation Midboard", has a hole for a camera and a dock connector at the bottom. Fansites have interpreted this …

Mobile 4 Nov 12:13
Large Hadron Collider team flicks switch on Xeon grid

But hurry up with octo? We switch on tomorrow

CERN today unveiled the upgraded grid that will support the Large Hadron Collider when the titanic particle-punisher finally kicks back into life. Sverre Jarp, CTO at CERN OpenLab supporting the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) buried beneath the Franco-Swiss border outside Geneva, described the network, powered by Intel Xeons, as …

Server Management 4 Nov 12:30
BAE mounts the Last Charge of the Light Cavalry

~~British~~ Swedish tank to slip through MoD's closing door?

Global arms multinational BAE Systems has announced its bid to squeeze a last bit of cash out of the Ministry of Defence before next year's probable change of government and certain major reorganisation of MoD procurement plans. The company says that it will put forward an offer tomorrow (Thursday) to supply a version of its …

Government 4 Nov 12:31
X-rays beat computer as best invention ever

Science Museum poll looks backwards

As part of its centenary celebrations the Science Museum's curators chose ten objects from its collection and asked the public to vote on their favourite. From a list which included a Pilot ACE Computer, based on Alan Turing's work, the Apollo 10 Capsule, a Model T Ford, penicillin and the DNA double helix the public chose the …

Science 4 Nov 12:39
US start-up punts family friendly netbook appliance

Litl launches foldable Webbook

It's not a tablet, it's something new, claims manufactuer Litl, developer of the Webbook, a 12in machine designed to be used not only like a laptop but also be mounted on its side like a touch-operated all-on-one desktop. Lilt's Webbook: 12in cloud appliance for all the family? OK, so it's essentially a laptop you can fold …

Reg Hardware 4 Nov 12:48
Whitehall plans 'White Noise' phone network collapse

Unjoined-up government, coming next week

The government will simulate a shutdown of the national phone network next week in an exercise involving hundreds of government and industry players. The exercise - codenamed "White Noise" - is designed to simulate a catastrophic nationwide communications failure, will take place over Wednesday 11 and Thursday 12 November. It …

Government 4 Nov 12:50
Sony Bravia KDL-46Z5500 200Hz 46in LCD TV

Review Striking picture quality

Remember how flatscreen TVs used to look: dominated by huge side- or bottom-mounted speakers and with large silver or grey bezel frames? The latest models are positively anorexic in comparison, shaving centimetres off every dimension except the display itself. Sony's Bravia KDL-46Z5500: handsome So this handsome 1080p model …

Reg Hardware 4 Nov 13:02
HP launches Acadia counterattack

Returns fire at Cisco/EMC/VMware alliance

Just one day after Cisco and EMC's love-in with VMware, HP is going to answer that blast with one of its own, one with integrated components from just one company and not three. According to an early report, which has appeared before HP's announcement, HP is announcing an Infrastructure Operating Environment which puts apps …

Virtualization 4 Nov 13:22
Naked Win 7 still vulnerable to most viruses

User Account Control easily bypassed

Out-of-the-box Windows 7 machines are still vulnerable to eight out of ten viruses, according to a test by security firm Sophos. The experiment proves that the improved User Account Control (UAC) features built into Windows 7 are not enough and that additional anti-virus protection is still required. In fairness to Redmond, …

Operating Systems 4 Nov 13:22
BBC iPlayer to hit Freesat boxes by month's end

MHEG implementation paves way for Freeview HD release too

The BBC's iPlayer will be coming to Freesat later this month, finally giving free-to-air satellite television set-top boxes' Ethernet ports something to do. Rahul Chakkara, BBC Future Media & Technology's head of TV Platforms, this week wrote on his blog that the service could be introduced before the month is out. The …

Reg Hardware 4 Nov 13:23
STEC booms but shares are falling

Wall Street worries low hanging disk fruit plucked

A twenty-fold profit increase for solid state drive supplier STEC in its third 2009 quarter was followed by a share price drop on worries that its golden growth years are coming to a close. STEC recorded revenues of $98.3m in the quarter, 13.8 per cent up on the second quarter and a solidly satisfying 54.3 per cent higher than …

Storage 4 Nov 14:00
Blade servers are hot!

That's a good thing, right?

Whitepapers Against a backdrop of awful server revenues and shipments, Blade server sales continue to grow, accounting for 20 per cent of server shipments today, according to the industry body Blade.org. The blade server is the 'pile 'em high , sell 'em cheap' box du jour for all those penguin-killing data centres popping up …

Servers 4 Nov 14:02
BT squares up to Google Voice with Ribbit Mobile

Industry comment It's all internetty but also very telecommy

Carriers may be watching Google Voice with trepidation, especially as it goes mobile, but one unlikely telco is determined to make sure the search giant does not have it all its own way. British Telecom has extended its Ribbit internet telephony platform to cellphones (despite having no mobile network of its own) with the …

Telecoms 4 Nov 14:20
The Beatles go digital, sort of

USB outprices box set? We can't work it out either

The Beatles are releasing their whole back catalogue on a USB stick. It's a limited edition release, with just 100 sticks available to UK punters out of a total release of 30,000. The group has attempted to keep its music off the internet and have refused to have anything to do with Apple's iTunes malarkey. Of course that …

Music and Media 4 Nov 14:26
T-Mobile back up after US outage

Five-hour fubar fixed

T-Mobile's US network is back on its feet after yesterday's five-hour outage that left customers disconnected. In a statement posted to the T-Mobile forum discussing the outage the company apologised for "intermittent service disruptions" that affected "About five percent of our customers across various geographies" and …

Mobile 4 Nov 14:32
Feds bust cable modem modder kit maker

Faces 20 years for showing how to bust speed caps

An Oregon man faces up to to 20 years in prison for allegedly selling modding tools that allowed his customers to swipe high-speed internet access without paying. The US attorney's office for Massachusetts revealed the arrest yesterday, when charges were unsealed. The federal authorities and the FBI said they had nabbed 26 …

Telecoms 4 Nov 15:11
Google opens up OAuth to tackle password chores

Cleverness to dispose of onerous task of logging in

Google has opened up a technology designed to cut back on the number of passwords users need to access multiple websites to web developers, effectively moving the technology into the mainstream after a restricted beta lasting almost a year. Plaxo, Facebook and Yahoo! signed up to support so-called "hybrid onboarding" …

ID 4 Nov 15:54
Sacked drugs advisor pledges new expert body

Reckons more resignations are to come

Professor David Nutt, sacked last week by Home Secretary Alan Johnson for disagreeing with government policy, is considering setting up a new drugs advisory body. Quite how this would work, when the government seems unwilling to listen to the independent advice it is already being given, is not clear. Nutt said the current …

Government 4 Nov 16:08
Woman rings cops to decry daughter's superior BJ skills

Both blew pop, as is the Ohio custom

The local paper covering Findlay, Ohio, has secured its place in journalistic history by printing a brief report of a woman who rang cops to complain that her daughter boasted superior oral relief skills. TheCourier.com explained on Monday: "A woman called the police early Saturday morning during an argument with her husband …

Bootnotes 4 Nov 16:50
HP to throw Matrix tech beyond x64 blades

Neoview data warehouse ported to blades

Like the rest of the IT industry, Hewlett-Packard was apparently expecting Cisco Systems and EMC to announce their Acadia joint venture and Vblock virtualized data center infrastructure on Wednesday. Hence the timing of a hodge-podge of system announcements that HP is stacking up against the Vblock stacks and whatever …

Servers 4 Nov 16:50
Asus talks up turbo-charged thin'n'light laptops

A 33 per cent boost at the flick of a switch

Asus has outlined the main benefits of Turbo 33 - an overclocking technology it has installed on its new UL netbook series. Each of the seven less-than-an-inch-thick 12in to 15in UL laptops are based on Intel CULV processors. However, Asus has claimed that its proprietary Turbo 33 technology provides performance-related …

Reg Hardware 4 Nov 17:19
Asus waves farewell to (laptop) fans

'Thermal holes' demoed on concept 'folding' notebook

Asus may launch a laptop able to cool its technical innards without a fan, if the firm’s latest concept is anything to go by. Can't see the video? Download Flash Player from Adobe.com Peter Clark, a Senior Designer at Asus, today demoed a prototype notebook to Register Hardware that he said could “potentially” run without …

Reg Hardware 4 Nov 17:42
Mac art project game destroys ~~aliens~~ files

Lose / Lose

A Mac game that deletes users' files has sparked a debate about whether it's malware or not. The Space Invaders-style game deletes a file from the Mac home directory every time a user destroys an alien ship. The application, released as part of an art project, clearly warns this is what it does... in big red letters (link to …

Malware 4 Nov 17:50
New York's top lawman slaps Intel with lawsuit

Charged with 'bribery and coercion'

Intel's ongoing legal troubles increased markedly Wednesday morning when New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo filed a lawsuit alleging that the world's largest microprocessor manufacturer conducted "an illegal campaign to deprive AMD of distribution channels." The exceptionally detailed 83-page complaint (PDF) alleges that …

PCs & Chips 4 Nov 18:41
Twitter fanatic glimpses dark side of OAuth

'Secure' authentication can be anything but

A mobile enthusiast and professional internet strategist got a glimpse of OAuth's dark side recently when he received an urgent advisory from Twitter. The dispatch, generated when Terence Eden tried to log in, said his Twitter account may have been compromised and advised he change his password. After making sure the alert was …

Security 4 Nov 19:03
Ericsson calls on carriers to out-app-store Google

OpenMobileSummit The Everything Marketplace

Ericsson senior vp Jan Uddenfeldt has called on the wireless industry to build its own "horizontal" mobile app stores that span operating systems and devices. Speaking this morning at an open-happy mobile conference in downtown San Francisco, Uddenfeldt hailed Google's momentum-building Android setup, but he urged carriers to …

Mobile 4 Nov 19:42
Google embraces Wave's permission chaos

Enterprise 2.0 It's for your own good

Google is embracing complete user-access anarchy in its new-age collaboration tool, Google Wave, so that early testers won't be tempted to fall into their old emailing habits. A puzzling attribute of Google's new open-communication sandbox is the complete lack of permissions. As it stands today, if a person is invited to a …

Applications 4 Nov 20:28
Microsoft axes another 800 jobs

More 'headcount adjustments' still possible

The bloodletting at Microsoft continues, as the software behemoth said Wednesday it would eliminate 800 jobs in addition to the 5,000 positions it has already pared this year. A Microsoft spokesman said the cuts will be broadly "spread across multiple businesses and locations," and added that the company will continue to hire …

Financial News 4 Nov 20:32
iPhone apps top 100,000

Android, Palm lag far behind

Less than six weeks after announcing that downloads from its iTunes App store had topped two billion, Apple on Wednesday let it be known that its online collection has now topped one hundred thousand apps. In a statement, Apple SVP of marketing Phil Schiller tossed a not-so-subtle jab at Cupertino's Palm Prē and Android …

Mobile 4 Nov 21:19
ScaleMP cuts InfiniBand out of virtual SMP clusters

Fake SMPs for SMBs and clouds

ScaleMP, a maker of virtualization and aggregation software that allows a cluster of x64 servers to look like a big, bad, symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) shared-memory system to operating systems and selected classes of applications, is going downstream to target SMBs and upstream to chase cloud infrastructure providers. While …

Servers 4 Nov 21:35
SGI-Rackable combo posts big revenue gains

And a whopping loss

On the revenue front, the acquisition of the carcass of supercomputer maker Silicon Graphics by niche hyperscale server maker Rackable Systems looks like it was a good idea as the combination, now known as Silicon Graphics, closed out its first quarter of fiscal 2010. But in terms of profits - or the lack thereof - it doesn't …

Financial News 4 Nov 22:56
Apple not plotting to slay netbook hackintoshes after all

Breakage unbroke again, move along...

Remember how a report recently zipped around the blogosphere about Apple disabling support for Intel's Atom processor in its most recent build of the soon-to-be-released Mac OS 10.6.2? Well, fuggedaboutit. As The Reg noted on Monday, Apple's deAtomization of the Snow Leopard OS was reported by a blogger named Stell. If true, …

Hardware 4 Nov 23:30
Cisco profits slip 19%, but pass 'tipping point'

Signs of recovery sighted

Cisco's fiscal first quarter profit dropped 19 per cent based on lower sales, but the networking equipment giant believes it had already hit the recession's bottom in Q3 and is optimistic about the overall economic outlook. Chief executive John Chambers said results in Cisco's fiscal Q1 2010, which ended October 24, "continue …

Financial News 4 Nov 23:36