6th May 2010 Archive

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Report reams IT admins for secretly snapping student pics

More than 58,000 images captured

A suburban Philadelphia school district secretly captured more than 58,000 images of students and their friends and family members as a result of an "overzealous" campaign to track the whereabouts of school-issued laptops, according to an independent report. Although the tracking technology was supposed to be used only in …

ID 6 May 03:34
Opera moves Dragonfly to Apache for patent promise

Web 2.0 Expo Browser closed. Debug open

Opera has switched its Dragonfly open source debug tool to an Apache 2.0 license to include a promise that users are protected from patents owned by Opera or any other contributor to the project. Dragonfly - similar to Mozilla's Firebug tool - completed its open sourcing in February, when it was moved from Opera servers to …

Developer 6 May 04:49
Tories buy YouTube home page

Plus: The Reg voter's guide

The Tories are making an election-day buy on YouTube's home page in a bid to get their message in front of "millions of voters." As announced by a Tweet from BBC tech and econ man Rory Cellan-Jones - nom de tweet: ruskin147 - the Tories have bought the main ad on YouTube for election day. The ad - a video of a David Cameron …

Music and Media 6 May 06:02
Javascript guru calls for webwide IE6 boycott

Web 2.0 Expo 'In China,' says MS, 'it's still a great browser'

Douglas Crockford - the man who "discovered" JSON and a senior Javascript architect at Yahoo! - has called on all major websites to simultaneously force the world's IE6 users to download a browser that isn't nearly nine years old. "My proposal for solving the IE6 problem? It has to be solved by the major website developers. …

Applications 6 May 06:02
Iomega StorCenter ix2-200 4TB Nas box

Review Hard'n'heavy

Iomega has introduced its second-generation StorCenter ix2-200, aimed at the 'prosumer' home user and which offers a wealth of features ranging from a BitTorrent client and remote access to surveillance camera support. Iomega's StorCenter ix2-200 While most other Network Attached Storage (Nas) manufacturers are trying to …

reghardware 6 May 07:02
STEC going SAS and PCIe

SAS version of Zeus

Enterprise flash drive supplier STEC is sampling a SAS version of its ZeusIOPS solid state drive with its major OEMs and developing a PCIe product. Currently the ZeusIOPS flash product ships with a 4Gbit/s Fibre Channel interface. This is sold by EMC, IBM, Compellent and others as an enterprise solid state drive (SSD). STEC …

Storage 6 May 07:02
Google drops cash on soothsayers

Predicts company will predict the future

The word "impossible" is apparently absent from the Googlonian lexicon. Mountain View's investment arm has just sunk a chunk of coin into a company whose goal is to predict the future. According to a Bloomberg Businessweek report, Google Ventures has invested an "undisclosed sum" in Recorded Futures, which GV says "extracts …

Financial News 6 May 07:02
Scammers attempt to cash in on volcanic ash travel chaos

Bizarre LHC black hole scam also runs

Scammers are hoping to hoodwink travellers who were stranded by the volcanic ash cloud last month as fresh plumes have disrupted flights once more in the UK. The emails invite recipients to apply to a compensation fund from Frank Adam at the Civil Aviation Authority. In reality there is no Frank Adam and no fund - the emails …

Spam 6 May 07:55
US lawmakers publish internet privacy Bill

Draft law to regulate online info sharing

A new law has been proposed that mandates information to be given to website visitors to improve privacy protections in the US. It also lists types of data that can be used until people opt out, and others that can be used only with their consent. The proposal (pdf) has been published by members of the House of Representatives …

Law 6 May 08:13
Sheffield hospitals pay thousands for dodgy software

Ex-employee tips off FAST

Sheffield Teaching Hospitals are to pay £13,000 for inadequate software licensing, after an ex-staff member reported them to the Federation Against Software Theft. The hospitals had failed to get enough licenses for Esker's SmarTerm emulation software. The failure was reported to FAST by a presumably disgruntled ex-employee of …

CIO 6 May 08:22
Man uses meat cleaver to fashion UK-ready iPad

Trimming down the SIM

The MicroSIM being used by Apple's iPad is smaller than a normal SIM, but that's easily solved with a pair of scissors, or a meat cleaver if you'd prefer. Certainly that's John Benson's preference: he got hold of a US-issue iPad 3G, sliced down his Vodafone SIM and managed to squeeze it into the MicroSIM slot on the iPad. He …

Mobile 6 May 09:22
Sony Ericsson pledges Xperia X10 Android 2.1 update

But not any time soon

Sony Ericsson is to update its Xperia X10 smartphone - reviewed here - with Android 2.1, but you're going to have to wait until October for it. "We can also confirm that the X10 Mini and X10 Mini Pro will be upgraded to Android version 2.1, during Q4 2010," the company's bloggers said this week. They revealed that the X10's …

reghardware 6 May 09:47
Soot, hydrofluorocarbs 'low-hanging fruit' to fight warming

Federal boffins insist heat tree be picked bare, though

Government-funded boffins in the USA say that "low-hanging fruit" plans to tackle climate change must be considered alongside CO2 reductions: in particular they say that emissions of black soot and shortlived greenhouse gases must be tackled in order to offset the warming caused by clean-air regulations. Veerabhadran …

Environment 6 May 10:02
'Minimalist, whimsical' Google search given Bing-like overhaul

Who said a swing to the left was impossible?

Google has overhauled its search results web page in a clear nod to the layout of Microsoft’s Bing. The company said yesterday that it had added tools on the left of its lucrative online search estate. “While we are constantly rolling out small changes and updates, today’s changes showcase the latest evolutions in our search …

Applications 6 May 10:04
Virgin Media deletes customers

Database purge leads to lengthy outages

A purge of unregistered cable modems by Virgin Media, part of a records clean-up, has left hundreds of customers without internet access for up to 10 days. The programme has been running without problems since February, but in the last two weeks has hit active customers using old hardware. Virgin Media has been trawling its …

Telecoms 6 May 10:29
Mobe-wielding drivers getting away with it

More law breakers, fewer fines

More people than ever are talking on their mobiles while driving, which is strange as the police have been handing out fewer and fewer fines over the last few years. The number of fines handed out has been dropped steadily over the last few years, despite the fact that roadside surveys claim that more people than ever are …

Mobile 6 May 10:44
Google sues tiny indie label

Woke up this morning, got the Goliath vs David Blues

You might call this one asymmetric copyright warfare. Google, the $167bn internet company, is suing a tiny indie label that releases blues records. Blue Destiny Records, based in Florida, first sued Microsoft, Google and porn hounds' favourite cyberlocker Rapidshare last December. Blue Destiny claimed Rapidshare provided "a …

Music and Media 6 May 11:08
Lorentz-loaded Firefox 3.6.4 hits third beta stage

Second Thunderbird 3.1 test build also released

Mozilla sped out a third beta of Firefox 3.6.4 on Tuesday less than two weeks after releasing the first test build of its latest browser update. Firefox 3.6.4 beta 3 comes loaded mostly with bug fixes connected to OOPPs (out-of-process plugins), with more than 10 patches marked as critical by the open source browser maker. …

Applications 6 May 11:15
HP India probed by taxman

Nothing to declare

HP is under investigation by India's Directorate of Revenue Intelligence for allegedly dodging $322m in taxes. The ink giant should have paid import duty on computers, printers and scanners which it brought into the country to sell there, the authorities claim. Sources told the Wall Street Journal that the results of an 18- …

Financial News 6 May 11:19
Tory twit accused of touting shanghaied tot shots

Parents shocked to be asked 'Are you a Tory?'

Tory incumbent David Tredinnick has angered parents and constituents in Bosworth and Hinckley for allegedly using photos of their children in campaign literature without permission or acknowledgment. In a move that might in other circumstances have had police beating down his door, it is alleged that Tredinnick’s companion …

Law 6 May 11:36
Capellas comes back to head Acadia

From Compaq through HP to VCE

Michael Capellas has become CEO of Acadia, the Cisco-EMC joint-venture set up to implement integrated IT stacks of Cisco and EMC gear. Capellas will lead the VCE (Virtual Computing Environment set up by VMware, Cisco and EMC) coalition which also has investment from Intel. Capellas will report to EMC boss Joe Tucci, Cisco …

Servers 6 May 11:47
Samsung Diva fashion phone

Reviews Here come the girls, etc, etc.

The design and marketing of the Diva clearly makes this a phone that Samsung is aiming at women. The clues are in the pearl white colour scheme and quilted pillow effect casing and the default pink screen theme, just in case you missed all those ads - haven't there been a lot of them lately? Samsung's Diva: diamond head …

reghardware 6 May 12:02
Sony coughs to PSN update woes

Servers feel the strain

Sony has coughed to a series of woes affecting gamers trying to pay for content on its PlayStation Network following a major behind-the-scenes upgrade applied to the online service yesterday. The new PlayStation Network Store went live yesterday morning and to encourage some purchasing activity, Sony announced dozens of …

reghardware 6 May 12:16
Live PARIS GPS tracker test tomorrow

Follow us online as we go walkabout

Tomorrow, the El Reg Paper Aircraft Released Into Space (PARIS) team will be conducting a live test of the the GPS tracking device which we hope will enable us to locate and recover our main payload, once it's floated gently to Earth. The unit is an off-the-shelf tracker - Blue Tree Service's KoolTrax Lite - which we ran …

Space 6 May 12:34
Germans plan to make 'synthetic natural' gas from CO₂

Megawatt trial: Could be huge for renewables, nuclear

Remorseless German and Austrian boffins have a cunning new plan which could be good news for cutting down on fossil fuel use: they can make "synthetic natural gas" using electric power, water and carbon dioxide. "Our demonstration system in Stuttgart splits water using electrolysis. The result is hydrogen and oxygen," explains …

Environment 6 May 12:49
Reader Top 10s: an experiment in crowd pleasing

Site news Try out our new voting system. Please

In recent weeks, reghardware has run a series of top 10s - rounds up of "essential" or "best" apps and peripherals. And very popular they have proved too, especially this one: Ten free apps to install on every new PC. This prompted 187 comments, with readers in their dozens suggesting dozens more apps - and slating us for …

reghardware 6 May 12:52
EU plans changes to competition rules on technical standards

Sometimes collusion is a good thing

The European Commission has revised its rules on when competing companies can cooperate to set technical standards without prompting a competition investigation. The Commission enforces EU competition law, which restricts cooperation between competing companies for fear that they will fix prices or establish cartels. There …

Law 6 May 13:46
Met issues internet cafe terror warnings

Your favourite jihadi porn site is inappropriate

The Met's plan to counter terrorism by putting up posters in internet cafes has been put into action, with broad warnings against "inappropriate" web and email use. Two notices labelled "internet code of conduct" and "internet policy" have been spotted by patrons in London cafes. "Do not access, upload, download or view any …

Policing 6 May 13:49
Samsung NaviBot robot cleaner

Review Today, the carpet - tomorrow, the world

There’s no doubt about it - cleaning is a chore, for some much more than others. I tend to the view that vacuuming isn’t fun unless it makes the carpet change colour. Add a moulting cat, and a lot of clutter, and you can understand why people suggest I get a cleaner. Samsung's Navibot: taking the metal mickey? Enter Samsung …

reghardware 6 May 14:04
Will Google have its chips?

Yeah, it might...

An interesting story a few days ago from our pals Cade and TPM put forward some interesting theories about how Google’s activities and acquisitions of companies and talent might add up to the searcher building its own server chip. Plausible? Yeah, I think it might be. We’re not talking about a chip designed to compete with the …

HPC Blog 6 May 14:17
Californian university drops Gmail over privacy concerns

Not getting high on Chocolate Factory information handling

US academics at the University of California-Davis have reportedly canned a Gmail pilot project over privacy fears regarding Google’s ill-conceived launch of Buzz. According to Information Week the university’s IT officials backed out of plans to shift its email system for its 30,000 faculty and staff members over to Gmail …

Applications 6 May 14:25
IT governance: Making the case without cutting your throat

Lab Think outside the black box

‘IT governance’ sounds like a grandiose idea, but what is it? In simplest terms, it’s a subset of the (even more grandiose sounding) discipline of corporate governance, focused, unsurprisingly on IT. The idea is to reduce the ‘black box-ness’ of IT by guiding the way it is approached through taking the requirements of …

Platform Evolution 6 May 15:14
Compellent plans 900GB 2.5-inch disk drives

15,000rpm speedsters coming too

Compellent's hardware road map shows larger capacity and faster 2.5-inch drives coming. The C-Drive conference was told that 900GB 2.5-inch drives spinning at 10,000rpm lay in the relatively near future. A 15K rpm 2.5-inch drive with 300GB capacity is coming too. This would be the fastest small form factor disk drive available …

Storage 6 May 15:30
Atlantis looking good for 14 May launch

Last shuttle flight knocked back to November, though

Space shuttle Atlantis is good to go on 14 May on its STS-132 mission to the International Space Station, NASA has confirmed. All being well, Atlantis will depart Kennedy Space Center's Launch Pad 39A at 18:20 GMT, bearing its cargo of "Integrated Cargo Carrier and a Russian-built Mini Research Module". The crew for the 12- …

Space 6 May 15:34
Berlin Phil to appear on Bravia internet tellies, says Sony

Dah-dah-dah-daaah. Dah-dah-dah-daaah

Sony has signed the Berliner Philharmoniker to provide classical concert performances to owners of internet-connected Bravia tellies. Not that Sir Simon Rattle will immediately descend upon your living room with cellos, bassoons, kettle drums and all, but rather you'll be able to call up their performances on a TV - such as …

reghardware 6 May 15:45
Teradata's 2010 starts with a bang

'Things have never been better'

Maybe NCR shouldn't have been so eager to spin out its Teradata data warehousing business. In the first quarter sales and profits were up like a shot, and the company has been able to weather the economic meltdown on the revenue front, with only slight declines while still boosting profits. And now, 2010 is shaping up to be a …

Applications 6 May 15:57
IDC convinced data will crush universe

Comment Short term memory

It's May, and IDC has unveiled a doom and gloom Digital Universe predication on behalf of EMC. It talks of quintillions of data containers, saying we face a perpetual tsunami of digital data which will grow 44 fold from 2009 to 2020 as the number of IT professionals grows a mere 1.4 fold over the same period. Oh, woe is us. Oh, …

Storage 6 May 16:11
Twitter and theregister. Why it doesn't work

Not ours to break

A while ago a very nice anonymous reader set up a feed to pump out an all our stories feed at http://twitter.com/theregister. He or she did this without asking us, but hey! This unofficial reregister feed attracted 1,951 followers. Not massive, but we weren't complaining. But then, on December 11, this Twitter stopped feeding …

Site News 6 May 16:14
NASA tests amazing bailout rocket which will never be used

Nyah nyah nyah, Mr President, we're not listening

NASA has spectacularly and successfully tested the launch abort system - the ejector seat, as it were - for its new Orion crew capsule. There's just one problem: according to President Obama's stated plans, Orion will never be launched with crew aboard. The Pad Abort 1 test took place today at the White Sands Missile …

Space 6 May 16:16
50 million user Scribd scraps Flash for HTML5

Web 2.0 Expo Doc sharer dubs plug-in 'incessantly bad experience'

Scribd - the document sharing site that boasts 50 million unique users a month - has told the world that after three years and "multi-millions" of dollars of development on Flash, it's ditching the beleaguered platform in favor of the fledgling HTML5 standard. Company co-founder and CTO Jared Friedman announced the move this …

Applications 6 May 18:27
Stealth installs and adware come to Facebook

Updated Apps secretly added to profiles

Already under fire for taking liberties with users' privacy, Facebook was outed on Thursday as a distributor of unwanted applications, some of which install adware or are added to user profiles without permission. As noted earlier by PC World, the social networking site silently adds apps to profiles whenever a user is logged …

ID 6 May 19:00
Netbook sales shrivel in face of Apple iPad

44% of tablet fanbois don't need keyboard

A new study indicates that the Apple iPad will shrivel the netbook market. Fortune points us to a March study from financial house Morgan Stanley and research outfit Alphawise that says 44 per cent of US consumers planning to buy an iPad will opt for the Jobsian tablet instead of new netbook or notebook. As you might expect, …

Music and Media 6 May 19:43
Motorola buys own mobile Linux firm

Cracks in the Android?

Motorola has bought a mobile Linux company, according to an industry source, potentially busting its monogamous relationship with Google's Android and undercutting a mobile Linux effort that Motorola helped found. The handset manufacturer and Google Android partner has purchased Azingo, maker of a Linux operating system for …

Mobile 6 May 20:05
Compellent fattens up for investors

Scale up, scale out - that's what it's all about

Compellent's one-trick storage pony is getting company in the next year that will scale up, scale out, dedupe replay blocks, add support for metro-clustering, and introduce a backup/archival storage product. The company's current Storage Centre platform is an X86 controller, the SC030, running block-access Storage Centre 5.2 …

Storage 6 May 20:07
Open source R in commercial Revolution

Red Hat for stats

Put on your eye patch and get out your parrot. The open source R programming language for statistical analysis and graphics is getting a commercial sponsor. What Red Hat did for Linux, Revolution Analytics wants to do for R, and it wants to use the open source subscription model to take on SAS Institute, SPSS (now part of IBM), …

Developer 6 May 20:16
VMware's SpringSource grabs a GemStone

Relational in the cloud

SpringSource has bought distributed, in-memory caching specialist GemStone to help deliver what it calls the middleware of the future. On Thursday, the VMware unit announced it has acquired both the technology and people behind Gemstone, so that its open-source Java middleware can store, query, and serve vast amounts of …

Financial News 6 May 21:31
Spammers ordered to pay tiny ISP whopping $2.6m

$650,000 per employee courtesy of CAN-SPAM

A small internet service provider has been awarded nearly $2.6m in a lawsuit it filed against a company that sent just under 25,000 spam messages over an 18-month period. Although it's questionable whether Asis Internet Services will ever see a penny of that windfall, the judgment is testament to the awesome power of CAN-SPAM …

Spam 6 May 22:00