23rd November 2009 Archive

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EU ministers agree e-government aims

Get smart

European ministers have signed a declaration outlining policies to deliver 'smarter' online public services by 2015. At the fifth Ministerial eGovernment Conference in Malmö in Sweden on 19 and 20 November 2009, EU ministers agreed measures to make e-government more accessible, interactive and customised. The aims over the …

Government 23 Nov 07:02
Freeview HD - your questions answered

All you need to know

With the first Freeview HD transmissions scheduled to start on the 2 December in the London, Liverpool and Manchester areas, Register Hardware answers all your questions about the new telly technology. New Zealand's Freeview HD logo. What will Blighty' look like? What do I need to receive Freeview HD? You’ll need a TV or …

Reg Hardware 23 Nov 08:02
Imation ships wirelessly-connected hard drive

USB 2.0 wireless

Imation has announced its external hard drive that connects by wireless USB to PCs and Macs is now shipping. The Pro WX Wireless USB hard drive comes in a 3.5in form-factor and holds up to 1.5TB of data. It is based on Imation's Apollo external hard drive platform fitted with a USB wireless facility that talks on a one-to-one …

Storage 23 Nov 08:02
Chrysler dumps e-car plans

Leccy Tech Gone, but not forgotten?

Chrysler's e-car strategy has vanished down the plughole, taking with it any chance of us getting intimate with the Lotus Europa-based Dodge Circuit. Chrysler's ENVI arm is to close, ending hope of the Lotus Europa-based Dodge Circuit Things have been ominously quiet at Chrysler's ENVI e-car division for a while and now the …

Reg Hardware 23 Nov 09:02
Murdoch puffs Microsoft over Google

Redmond aligns with the empire of The Sun

Rupert Murdoch is in talks with Microsoft over his plans to delist his newspaper websites from Google. Of course, if he was serious about this, he could get his techies to add a robots.txt file to all News Corp sites and effectively disappear from Google immediately. But he needs to keep an audience or he'll lose advertising …

IT Director 23 Nov 09:27
eBay stamps on Mussolini's brain

Pulls Il Duce body bits auction

Customers of online tat bazaar eBay were on Friday denied the chance to bid for bits of former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, when the site swiftly pulled a listing for samples of his blood and brain. The alleged remains of Il Duce, in three glass ampoules, were pitched at a starting price of €15,000. His granddaughter …

Bootnotes 23 Nov 09:30
New sensitive space gloves: NASA spends wad freely

Glovely cash for astro haberdashers

NASA handed out $350,000 in prize money to astronautical haberdashers vying for glory in the space agency's Astronaut Glove Challenge this weekend. They said I was mad. Mad! Peter Horner of Maine, a previous Glove Challenge victor, saw off stiff opposition from Ted Southern of Brooklyn. Horner's glove was deemed to have all …

Space 23 Nov 09:57
Virtualisation in the smaller business

Lab Are things really any different to the big boys?

Many of your comments on some of the virtualisation articles we have written to date have suggested that smaller organisations have different challenges and priorities when it comes to virtualisation. Here we report back on what we have been told so far and ask you for your insights. The majority of vendors assume that small …

Virtualisation Lab 23 Nov 10:37
DVLA doubles annual IT spend

IBM can buy itself a Bentley

The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency is to more than double what it spends annually on its IT deal with IBM. It has signed a three-year extension to its existing Partners Achieving Change Together (Pact) ten-year deal, which covers technical infrastructure, operation and support, as well as transformation and system …

Government 23 Nov 10:39
E-book readers to stay pricey next year

Won't hit $100 for ages, says screen supplier

Holding out for a £100 e-book reader before snapping up one of these gadgets for yourself? You may get lucky this year, but don't expect prices to fall any further. Scott Liu, head of screen maker PVI - the Taiwanese firm that recently bought e-ink pioneer E Ink - forecast today that readers will not drop to hit the $100 (£61 …

Reg Hardware 23 Nov 10:41
eBay blames success for failure

Saturday search fail

eBay suffered an embarrassing failure on Saturday as no one was able to search on the site - not a good thing at the start of Christmas shopping season. The outage is made worse for the online tat bazaar because it is moving away from mom'n'pop traders to more professional sellers who expect better service, in exchange for …

Applications 23 Nov 10:44
O/S bloat: What's the cure?

Comment Code belly's gonna get you

It is becoming increasingly obvious that a virtual server wastes great chunks of its memory occupied by the operating system wrappers around the applications in the virtual machines (VM) running in the physical server. If each VM occupies 50MB, and 20MB of that is the Windows O/S, then around 40 per cent of the servers's DRAM …

Virtualization 23 Nov 10:48
Dell details smartphone spec

Mini 3i internals revealed

Dell has come clean on the full specifications of its Mini 3i smartphone, and it doesn't impress. Dell's Mini 3i: not the iPhone killer some had hoped for Dell announced earlier this month that its Mini 3i smartphone – which runs China Mobile’s Android-based oPhone platform - would launch in China towards the end of this …

Reg Hardware 23 Nov 11:05
Looking back at packaged application rigidity and lock-in

Workshop Have we progressed that much in 25 years?

When packaged applications first appeared on the scene a quarter of a century ago, it was normal for them to be very proprietary in nature. Modifications and extensions were generally implemented through toolsets and programming languages that were each specific to the application concerned. Integration between systems was …

Evolving Apps 23 Nov 11:06
New hacker peril for older IE versions

New species of unpatched bug bites IE6 and 7

Internet Explorer users are at risk from a newly discovered and unpatched vulnerability in older versions of Microsoft's browser. A security flaw involving a dangling pointer in Microsoft's HTML Viewer (mshtml.dll) creates a possible mechanism for hackers to crash the browser and inject malware, providing they can trick marks …

Applications 23 Nov 11:19
Fusion-io whips out fast gov-grade ioDrive

Cramming eight on a card

Fusion-io has put eight of its ioDrives on a single PCIe card to produce 800,000 IOPS and 6GB/sec bandwidth. The ioDrive is a NAND flash solid state drive (SSD) that sits on a PCIe X4 card and comes with 80 or 120GB of single level cell (SLC) flash or 320GB of slower but cheaper multi-level cell (MLC) flash. These ioDrives …

Storage 23 Nov 11:28
Microsoft stands tall over Xbox Live lawsuit threat

'We're well within our rights,' claims software giant

The possibility of class-action lawsuit arising from the ban of roughly 1m gamers from Xbox Live doesn’t worry Microsoft, because the firm believes it is in the right. With a view to launching a class action lawsuit against the software giant, US law firm Abington IP last week published a webpage calling for anyone remotely …

Reg Hardware 23 Nov 11:29
Palm Pre update inbound

From WebOS 1.1.3 to 1.3.1

The Pre smartphone will be refreshed with an updated webOS “within the next few days”, manufacturer Palm has promised. A Pré update is due within days Customers of Telefonica – that’s O2 to you and me – in the UK, Ireland, Germany and Spain will be automatically updated from WebOS 1.1.3 to version 1.3.1 when within range of …

Reg Hardware 23 Nov 12:10
Coprocessors ride again

Hybrid-core computing

The idea that hybrid computing is becoming a mainstream technology was one of the major threads running through SC09 last week. Convey Computer, founded in 2006, has a different take on how to best implement hybrid architectures, to deliver better performance and to simplify use. Its approach is to add an FPGA coprocessor that …

HPC Blog 23 Nov 12:10
MIT boffins invent robot clam-grapnel

Tech has important mole-cruiser implications, too

MIT boffins are pleased to annouce that they have at last perfected a long-sought-after technology - that of the robot clam. It seems that metal shellfish able to dig themselves into the seabed will make excellent anchors for somewhat larger droid submarines. Amos Winter and colleagues at MIT unveiled their mechanical …

Science 23 Nov 12:17
GPS alarm seems alarmingly useless

You're safe with me. Unless stuff crashes

The Freedom Personal Safety is a GPS device that's supposed to alert loved ones that you're in trouble, but actually seems about as trustworthy as the only other man in the train carriage who appears to have moved a seat closer to you every time you look. The product will set you back £79.95, but comes in a nice yellow box …

Mobile 23 Nov 12:23
Microsoft's IE 9, Silverlight 4 and the whiff of lock-in

Radio Reg Shoulda bought ~~Yahoo!~~ Amazon

Basking in the afterglow of the recently released Windows 7, Microsoft has rallied the faithful to share the love at its annual Professional Developers' Conference in Los Angeles, California. Traditionally, PDC has been about looking ahead and charting the roadmap of the next few years. Previous years saw Windows Vista and …

Microbite 23 Nov 12:24
Google to anoint Android, Chrome OS love (eventually)

When two become one

Google has confessed that its Chrome OS and Android projects are likely to come together at some stage down the line as the firm continues to tinker with its operating system vision of the future. The world's largest ad broker has been developing two platforms independently from one another. Android is an operating system …

Operating Systems 23 Nov 12:35
Credit crunch? It won't be over by Christmas

Cheap credit is over and its not coming back, says CBI

The impact of the recession on British businesses may well be permanent, and will certainly last until well into the next decade, the UK's union for bosses has declared. The downturn has had four major impacts on UK firms, according to business lobby group the Confederation of British Industry. British business does not …

Small Biz 23 Nov 12:44
Lenovo IdeaPad S10-2

Review Windows 7 on a netbook - worth the wait?

Lenovo’s new IdeaPad S10-2 is an update of the S10e. The hardware is conventional netbook fare with a dual-core Atom processor and a 10.1in screen all dressed up in a smart chassis that makes it look like a baby ThinkPad. There have been a number of updates for this model, such as an increase in the frontside bus speed for the …

Reg Hardware 23 Nov 12:57
We're going for optimised workload delivery...

Workshop Are we nearly there yet?

Who wouldn’t want IT to be delivered in a more dynamic, flexible, agile, [insert your least detested buzzword here] way? Optimal configurations for server and desktop workload delivery have been discussed, and indeed, attempted, for many years. So how close are we to really nailing this? The answer to this question may depend …

Server Management 23 Nov 13:23
iPhone worm hjacks ING customers

Updated No messing this time

The second worm to infect jailbroken iPhone users reportedly targets customers of Dutch online bank ING Direct. Surfers visiting the site with infected devices are redirected to a phishing site designed to harvest online banking login details, the BBC reports. ING Direct told the BBC it planned to warn users' of the attack via …

Mobile 23 Nov 13:28
Drobo restrings boxes to double-up product range

New storage boxes are bigger on the inside

Data Robotics has added two new products, enhancing both the basic Drobo and the more capable Drobo Pro. It now claims to provide the simplest and best value iSCSI SAN in the world. Drobo has - had - two products; the basic Drobo and Drobo Pro. These provide a protected and consolidated pool of storage that can withstand drive …

Storage 23 Nov 13:39
Pegatron smartbook uncloaked?

Early 2010 release possible

Following recent confirmation that Taiwanese contract manufacturer Pegatron plans to launch a machine of its own early next year, a 10in fanless netbook sporting the firm’s logo has been spotted. Pegatron has confirmed plans to launch a smartbook in Q1 2010 Source: Shanzai Powered by an ARM processor and running the Ubuntu …

Reg Hardware 23 Nov 13:50
Erotica 09: Bit limp, but crowds still up for it

NSFW I'll have what she's having

In a week when scientists trumpeted the discovery of a new drug to boost flagging female libido, Erotica 2009 - the UK’s premiere female-friendly erotic event - was looking decidedly limp. According to its lavishly illustrated brochure, Erotica is all about "serious fun". The annual event, now in its 14th year, is starting to …

Bootnotes 23 Nov 14:33
AOL taps strategy boutique ahead of Time Warner spin-off

Dotty logo revamp strikes bum note

AOL has revamped its logo and plans to launch the new look after its parent company Time Warner dumps the struggling web outfit early next month. What starts with A, ends in L and has a big fat O in the middle? The firm, like an ageing divorcee whose husband ran off with a younger, leggier mistress, announced its brand …

Music and Media 23 Nov 14:34
Savage roo mauls Oz man

What's that Skippy? You're trying to drown my dog?

An Oz man has taken a serious pasting at the hands of a "savage" kangaroo which was attempting to drown his dog, the Herald Sun reports. Chris Rickard, 49, was walking on his property in Arthurs Creek, Victoria with his pet mutt Rocky when the pair woke the 'roo, which was having a kip in long grass next to his farm dam (water …

Bootnotes 23 Nov 14:52
Spotify embraces Symbian

Appy talking

Music-streaming service Spotify is now available on Symbian handsets too, for paying subscribers at least. Spotify already has a mobile client, but that's limited to Apple's iPhone and devices running Android; Symbian might not have as many headlines, but it's running on more than half the world's smartphones and Spotify needs …

Mobile 23 Nov 14:54
Moller Skycar to finally crash and burn?

Desperate last-gasp spin: 'Virtual flight tests' start

(In)famous flying-car firm Moller International - whose four-decade quest to produce an Everyman aerial ride has seen no aircraft delivered and a 2003 fine from the SEC for selling "fraudulent unregistered stock" - has now announced "Virtual Test Flights of [a] New Flying Car". It seems that Moller has "created a full-featured …

Science 23 Nov 15:19
Exascale computing: How do we get there from here?

IBM guru Dave Turek tells us what's what

Exascale supercomputers, the computing industry’s next frontier, will run 1,000 times quicker than the fastest computers of today – and the world’s scientific researchers are sure to drum up plenty of projects to harness their compute power. But how do we get there from here? It won't be easy. So who better to ask than Dave …

HPC 23 Nov 15:38
T-Orange won't share the airwaves

Get your own damn spectrum, mooch

T-Mobile and Orange won't be handing over any radio spectrum when they merge, despite the fact that T-Orange will own almost half the available airways. The combined force will have licences to operate in 170MHz of radio spectrum, compared to Vodafone's holding of 76MHz and Orange's 66MHz, but the operating officers of both …

Mobile 23 Nov 15:49
Wind turbines to power phone masts

~~Cold~~ Green calling?

Forget mobile phone covers made of recycled plastic bottles or handsets powered by sunlight. If you really want to make a green phone call then move to California, where some phone masts will soon run on wind energy. Helix Wind's turbines capture wind using a helix shaped blades Wind turbine manufacturer Helix Wind has …

Reg Hardware 23 Nov 16:03
New analysis points to ancient Martian ocean, river valleys

Just a matter of finding sea-monster skeletons, now

NASA-funded boffins say they have found convincing evidence that much of Mars was once covered by an ocean of liquid water, and that rain fell on the red planet long ago. The new research comes from scientists at Northern Illinois University and the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, who have done a new computer …

Space 23 Nov 16:10
Symantec Japan website bamboozled by hacker

Plaintext passwords revealed

A Symantec-run website was vulnerable to Blind SQL Injection problems that reportedly exposes a wealth of potentially sensitive information. Romanian hacker Unu used off-the-shelf tools (Pangolin and sqlmap) to steal a glimpse at the database behind Symantec's Japanese website. A peek at the Symantec store revealed by the hack …

Enterprise Security 23 Nov 16:58
PC sales bounce up (and down)

Netbooks drag year-end uptick

The box counters at Gartner have revised their PC shipment estimates for 2009, saying that PC makers did better than expected pumping out machines in the third quarter. But because average selling prices are falling - thanks in part to the advent of cheap netbooks and general price erosion across all PC types - sales are still …

Channel Register 23 Nov 17:20
Weather balloons no longer a crazy idea for rural coverage

Base jumping

As the US gets serious about opening up mobile broadband to its entire population, it is hunting for new spectrum options to support that. The UHF digital TV switchover spectrum sell-off brought in around $20bn, and one of the key uses of this 700MHz band will be to support long range radio signals to cover rural America more …

Networks 23 Nov 18:02
Cisco pumps out iPhone security app

World of IT threats in your pants

Cisco has pushed out a new iPhone app that helps IT managers respond to newly-detected security threats by the seat (pocket) of their pants. The Cisco SIO To Go iPhone application beams in data from the company's Security Intelligence Operations (SIO) to show a customizable menagerie of security information that could …

Security 23 Nov 18:25
Google hoodwinked into pushing Chrome OS scareware

Tamper tantrum

Rogue anti-virus scammers have tainted search results for Chromium OS - the open source version of Google's Chrome OS - in a bid to expose surfers hunting the web operating system to a fake anti-virus scan scam instead. Search terms such as "chromium os download" point to sites featuring scripts that redirect stray surfers …

Security 23 Nov 18:46
Bing search bribery a retailer magnet

Microsoft's Black Friday redemption

Bing has boosted Microsoft's retailer revenues by nearly 50 per cent, according to a new search-ad study. With a report released this morning, the click counters at SearchIgnite tell the world that during the first half of the all-important fourth quarter, US retailers spend 47 per cent more on Redmondian search ads they did …

Music and Media 23 Nov 19:02
Rogue iPhone dev unmoved by App Store spin

Jobsian VP defends trademark police

Apple marketing veep Phil Schiller has put another smiley face on company's capricious iPhone App Store approval process - but at least one developer who spent months battling the App Store police isn't buying Schiller's spin. As The Reg reported ten days ago, a bug-fix to Airfoil Speakers Touch - an iPhone app from long-time …

Developer 23 Nov 19:31
IE bug leaks private details from 50m PDF files

Black hat recon courtesy of Microsoft

A bug in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser is causing more than 50 million files stored online to leak potentially sensitive information that could compromise user privacy, a security researcher said. The documents stored in Adobe's PDF format display the internal disk location where the file is stored, an oversight that …

Security 23 Nov 20:54
IBM's cat-brain sim a 'scam,' says Swiss boffin

Neuroscientist hairs on end

Responding to its nation's sovereign call to develop electronics with the intelligence of a cat, IBM last week announced a major step in feline gray matter simulation. But professional rivalries clearly run deep inside puss brain replication circles, with a leading neuroscientist blasting the project as a "scam" and a "mass …

HPC 23 Nov 22:11
Facebookers hit with steamy clickjacking exploit

'Click da button, baby!'

Facebook administrators have blocked a clickjacking exploit that displayed images of a scantily clad woman on profile pages without first prompting the user for permission. The attack began when a victim encountered the image of the near-naked woman on a friend's profile page along with the words "Want 2 C something hot? Click …

Security 23 Nov 23:18