7th May 2010 Archive

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FCC chair floats 'Third Way' to regulate net

'Narrow and tailored'

US Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski has issued his much-anticipated response to the April federal appeals court decision that threw a spanner into the works of his net-neutrality crusade. That decision said that the FCC had exceeded its authority when it ordered Comcast to stop choking BitTorrent …

Networks 7 May 2010, 00:23
Google Latitude not dead despite Buzz

Web 2.0 Expo More ways to tell people where you are

Google is pushing ahead with Latitude - the mobile service that tells your friends where you are - despite its high-profile introduction of somewhat similar mobile services that hook into its new Google Buzz social networking setup. During a panel discussion at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Google man Steve Lee - who …

Mobile 7 May 2010, 00:24
UK polling stations turn away 'hundreds' of voters

Doors close on queues

UK polling stations turned away "hundreds" of voters on Thursday, shutting their doors as people continued to queue for ballots. The BBC reports that police were called to a polling station in Lewisham, south London, where a queue of roughly 300 people had yet to vote when the doors closed at 10pm BST, and that about 200 …

Government 7 May 2010, 03:41
Cheeky voters oust Lembit Opik

Small explosion in mid-Wales, asteroid not to blame

In a night mostly lacking in spectacular surprises, one result struck like an asteroid out of the blue. Colourful Lib Dem MP, Segway rider, chat show regular and Cheeky Girl admirer Lembit Opik lost Montgomeryshire – one of the safest Lib Dem seats in the country – by a landslide. In one of the night’s more spectacular …

Government 7 May 2010, 06:28
Voting chaos in not-fit-for-purpose electoral system

Comment Ballot bollox and proportional misrepresentation

As the dust cleared on a strangely uneventful election night, two aspects of the supposedly cast-iron British electoral system may finally have been found to be "not fit for purpose". First up is the antiquated and now thoroughly discredited way in which we, the electorate, express our views about our would-be politicians …

Government 7 May 2010, 06:43
Mili HI-P60 Power Pico Projector

Review Turn your iPhone into a cinema

There sure is a buzz about compact, portable "pico" projectors thanks to notion that they will allow us to cast content kept on mobile phones up onto a handy wall, cinema style. Coupling one with an iPhone, China's Hali-Power, operating under the brandname Mili, reckons it has a winning combination. Mili's HI-P60 Power Pico …

reghardware 7 May 2010, 07:02
Iomega iConnect Wireless Data Station

Review Build your own Wi-Fi network storage

"A new version of Iomega Storage Manager is available," the app announces on launch. "Click here to download it." And then it "quits unexpectedly", as Mac OS X politely describes the event, although this happens every time you run it. Click for the upgrade and install it, and the same message about a new version being available …

reghardware 7 May 2010, 07:02
2010 Fifa World Cup South Africa

Review Off-side

The summer months provide gamers and armchair football fans with a compulsory Why Don’t You moment, where we’re all forced to ‘just switch of our TV sets and go outside and do something less boring instead.’ And we all like vindaloo... For us Brits, this usually means finding a nice spot on the village green within …

reghardware 7 May 2010, 07:48
Servers: Refurbish, repurpose or recycle?

Workshop Life in the old dog yet?

With the worst of the recession looking to have passed (touch wood), things are looking up and growth is returning, even if it is erratic. Companies are hiring again and people are buying more, resulting in an increasing pressure on systems and applications. The past couple of years have seen budgets slashed and renewals put on …

Server Management 7 May 2010, 08:02
Copyright law must be relaxed, says new group

'Exceptions are key to legitimate reuses'

Librarians, digital activists, ISPs, music managers and other associations and trade bodies have called for the relaxing of copyright law in the EU to allow more people to access and re-use copyrighted material. The bodies have joined together to launch a series of demands in a declaration they have called Copyright For …

Law 7 May 2010, 08:25
Indo-Mancunian Windows support scammer phones Reg hack

Cold caller from tropical climes

Yesterday I got a call from a chap claiming to be from Windows Support, letting me know that my computer was dangerously infected, and that only he could help. The scam isn't new - we reported on it a year ago - but tough times are driving miscreants to expand operations to the point where even Reg staff are being targeted in …

Crime 7 May 2010, 08:26
Jacqui Smith and Charles Clarke shown the door

Being Home Secretary proves unpopular

Former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith heads the list of high profile Labour casualties this morning. Meanwhile current party top brass thought to be under threat, such as Ed Balls, have so far been returned by their constituents. Karen Lumley, Smith's Tory opponent in the Redditch constituency overturned a majority of 1,948 to …

Government 7 May 2010, 08:48
Can't find a smartbook to buy? Blame Adobe

Vendors waiting for Flash, suggests ARM exec

Adobe's failure to release a version of Flash optimised for ARM CPUs, not the hardware itself, is what is holding back the release of netbooks based on the chip platform. That's the clear conclusion to be drawn from comments made by ARM marketing chief Ian Drew in an interview with ZDNet UK this week. "We thought they would …

reghardware 7 May 2010, 08:54
Brighton goes Green

Radical new voice in parliament

Perhaps the only party to emerge with a smile from last night’s ragbag of results was the Greens, whose leader, MEP Caroline Lucas, scored a first for them, gaining a parliamentary seat for Brighton Pavilion. The swing of 8.4 per cent from Labour to Green was just enough to leave Lucas with a majority of nearly 1,252 in what …

Energy 7 May 2010, 09:14
Vodafone to introduce out-of-bundle data charges

Download beyond your limit and you'll have to cough up

Vodafone has indicated it will start charging pay monthly customers for extra data they transfer beyond the limit stated in their contract, though the company's own Ts&Cs may prevent it doing so on 1 June as planned. In a posting on telco's online forum yesterday, a company representative going by the handle 'Tom_Vodafone' and …

reghardware 7 May 2010, 09:32
Perv scanner todger quips provoke Miami airport assault

Exposed security screener clubs co-worker

A perv scanner operator at Miami International Airport has been arrested for allegedly laying into a co-worker over quips about the size of his manhood, the Miami Herald reports. Rolando Negrin was exposed to fellow Transportation Security Administration (TSA) operatives' ridicule during training on the body scanners, when …

Policing 7 May 2010, 09:41
EU to evict broadcasters from upper end of spectrum

Ofcom calls it right

The EU has decided that broadcasters across Europe should clear out of 790-862MHz, committing to a plan accurately predicted by Ofcom. Ofcom cares because the top end of that band is currently used by the Programme Making and Special Events (PMSE) crowd, whom Ofcom is hoping to relocate down to the dial to somewhere around …

Mobile 7 May 2010, 09:48
Pirate Party UK sinks on maiden voyage

Bad night for anti-copyright parrot boys

The Pirate Party UK put in a dismal performance at the General Election last night, after its nine candidates garnered a total of just 1,127 votes between them with one result still to come in. The party's leader, Andrew Robinson - who picked up just 173 votes in Worcester - claimed his anti-copyright outfit had a "relatively …

Government 7 May 2010, 10:08
The internet, as imagined in 1965

Bloggers, mind control and the death of newspapers

A fascinating insight into how the world might look in the future, from the 1960s, comes courtesy of veteran science editor Nigel Calder. As editor of the New Scientist in 1964 Calder commissioned a hundred scientists to imagine the world 20 years hence. What 'major technological revolutions' might we see? Number one was "the …

Music and Media 7 May 2010, 10:28
Wii will, Wii will Rock You

UK music games ring up £100m in '09

Music games are "burgeoning in the UK, ringing up £95.1m sales in 2009. This is not quite as good as it sounds - sales were £107.7m in 2008. Ubisoft's Just Dance for Nintendo Wii was Leader of the Pack, outselling all other music games in the year. Activision's Guitar Hero series took six places in the top ten. Take That's …

reghardware 7 May 2010, 10:53
Boffins snare swollen 'excited giant' in forcefield prison

Ponderomotive prison cells could make quantum computers

Boffins in Michigan say they have created a promising "quantum gate" for use in literally and figuratively hard-to-grasp quantum computers of the future. The scientists achieved this, put simply, by tickling a soft-metal Rubidium atom with frikkin laser beams until its outer valence shell became highly excited and the atom …

Physics 7 May 2010, 10:54
T-Mobile Pulse Mini

Review Google goodness for under a ton

'Smartphones For All' is the thrust of T-Mobile's latest marketing campaign, and destined for the sharp end of its crusade to get the pay-as-you-go brigade on board is the Pulse Mini, a fully functioning Android handset with a PAYG price tag of under a ton. T-Mobile's Mini: second in the Pulse canon Like its big brother, …

reghardware 7 May 2010, 11:02
Fewer titsup firms, more titsup people

Insolvency service reports

Fewer businesses went into insolvency in the first quarter of 2010 than last year, but a record number of individuals were declared insolvent. In total there were 35,682 individual insolvencies in England and Wales in the first quarter of 2010 - up 17.9 per cent on the same period of 2009. Bankruptcies were down 10.7 per cent …

Small Biz 7 May 2010, 11:21
iPad users are young, rich geeks

And wear polo necks?

iPad users are young, rich and stupid like Flickr. The findings come from users of Yahoo!'s properties. Even though the iPad has only officially gone on sale in the US, Yahoo! found that one in ten iPads using Yahoo! sites were accessing them from Europe and Asia. France, Germany and the UK were top territories for the Flash- …

Mobile 7 May 2010, 11:28
PARIS hits the road with live GPS tracker test

Updated Join us at 2pm

At 2pm UK time this afternoon the El Reg Paper Aircraft Released Into Space (PARIS) team will be running a one-hour live test on the GPS tracker unit designed to allow us to locate and recover the project's main payload. Blue Tree Service's KoolTrax Lite delivers its location over the mobile phone network, so if it can't get a …

PARIS 7 May 2010, 11:30
Samsung's Bada gets a developer kit

When I'm Bada I'm better?

Developers desperate to start creating applications for Samsung's Bada platform can now start coding, though it will be few more weeks before there's a handset to run them on. The Software Developer's Kit version 1 is available from the Bada Developers' portal, which promises that the Bada-based Wave phone (which should be …

Mobile 7 May 2010, 11:48
A new wave in data center cooling?

Webcast Chilling with Phil Tuma

During the SC09 HPC show last November, I walked around with a small video cam and did some interviews from the floor, posting them to The Reg in lieu of blog entries. It was a lot easier than actually writing blog entries and quite a bit of fun too. One of the booths I visited was displaying their solution to removing system …

HPC 7 May 2010, 11:49
China Mobile sees time-sliced evolution

Speedy 4G at Shanghai Expo

Huawei and Motorola have been working with China Mobile to get a time-duplexed LTE network deployed at the Shanghai Expo, offering 20Mb/sec over cheap and cheerful spectrum. The deployment is experimental and will only last as long as the Expo, but the companies involved have been demonstrating peak speeds of 80Mb/sec, with 24 …

Mobile 7 May 2010, 12:24
EU Parliament calls for internet rights charter

And individual control of data

Internet users should be able to demand that their information is removed from company systems even if it was collected with their consent, the European Parliament has said. The Parliament has also called for a charter of individuals' internet rights. The Parliament has adopted a new digital strategy called 2015.eu which …

Government 7 May 2010, 12:27
Green Berets to get Judge Dredd computer smart-rifle

No need to shout out ammo type, though

A radical Judge Dredd style computer smart-rifle able to strike at enemies hiding around corners is to be issued to US special forces units in Afghanistan, according to reports. The weapon in question is of course our old friend the XM-25, long under development by the US Army's weapons boffins. The main idea of the XM-25 is …

Science 7 May 2010, 12:56
Motorola upgrades Milestone to Android 2.1

Gentlemen, start your downloads

Motorola has posted an update for its Milestone smartphone - reviewed here - taking the Android-based handset to version 2.1 of the Google operating system. "This highly anticipated software release makes Milestone Europe’s first Qwerty smartphone to be powered by Android 2.1 in the UK," the company chirped. The update brings …

reghardware 7 May 2010, 13:15
Gary McKinnon's mum not prime minister

Another shock result

Janis Sharp - Gary McKinnon's mother - was pushed into last place in Blackburn, where she was standing as an independent. Although never expecting to win, Sharp was running to increase awareness of civil liberties which she believes are under increasing attack. Standing against former Home Secretary Jack Straw Sharp managed …

Government 7 May 2010, 13:51
Cameron aims to bring LibDems into government

Electoral reform dilemma for Kingmaker Clegg

David Cameron has issued an invitation to the Liberal Democrats to form a stable government with the Conservatives, preferring long-term compromise to trying run a minority administration. If taken up, the "big, open, comprehensive offer" is likely to mean Liberal Democrats would take up cabinet positions, rather than merely …

Government 7 May 2010, 14:07
Apple prices up iPad for UK

Rip-off Britain?

Apple has said how much the iPad will cost Brits when its 'magical' device goes on sale on 28 May. The Wi-Fi only version will be priced at £429, £499 and £599 for the 16GB, 32GB and 64GB models, respectively. Add 3G to the package and you'll pay an extra £100 for each of those storage capacities: £529, £599 and £699. Prices …

reghardware 7 May 2010, 14:08
Virtual Instruments nabs Symantec ex-CEO

Mark Urdahl sticks around to advise

US business establishment great and good member John Thompson, the ex-CEO of Symantec, has become CEO of tiny Virtual Instruments. Virtual Instruments (VI) is a tiny but fast-growing firm supplying products to monitor virtualised data centre infrastructures, such as NetWisdom and VirtualWisdom. It recently introduced a …

Financial News 7 May 2010, 15:02
US economy adds 290,000 jobs in April

Telcos down, computers up

The addition of workers to perform the census and a boost in the employment of temporary workers helped the US economy add 290,000 jobs in April, according to a report from the Labor Department this morning. But ex-workers piled back into the labor pool, many looking for jobs for the first time in many months thanks to the …

Financial News 7 May 2010, 15:04
Election losers? Our clapped-out parties

Opinion Worst past the post

Here's an opinion you won't hear professional political experts utter today. The political parties came out worst from the election, they failed to inspire anyone, and don't really stand for anything any more. If you think this is remotely controversial, hop over to our earlier article featuring 1965 predictions of the future. …

Government 7 May 2010, 15:16
Nokia takes Apple to court, again

This time it's Wisconsin

Nokia, not content with the pair of existing patent actions in Delaware, has filed another action for five patent infringements. This time it's in Wisconsin, presumably for variety. These patents cover speech codecs, data transmission, the use of location information in applications and compact-antenna designs, all of which …

Mobile 7 May 2010, 15:58
Orange offers 'pay per meg' iPad 3G data plan

Cellco readies micro Sim supply

Orange has revealed its iPad data plan pricing, including a novel pay-for-what-you-use scheme. The key plan bills data at a rate of five pence per megabyte up to a monthly maximum of £40. That's 800MB. Orange will also offer daily and weekly one-off connectivity. A day's surfing costs £2 and gives you 200MB of data. A week's …

reghardware 7 May 2010, 15:59
Google Apps to embrace all Chocolate Factory services

Blogger, Reader, AdWords, Picasa...

Mountain View will soon allow businesses, government agencies, schools, and other organizations to use any Google service from their Google Apps accounts. Currently, with Google Apps, an organization can use a limited collection of services from a custom domain, including Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar. But beginning …

Applications 7 May 2010, 16:19
New attack bypasses virtually all AV protection

Bait, switch, exploit!

Researchers say they've devised a way to bypass protections built in to dozens of the most popular desktop anti-virus products, including those offered by McAfee, Trend Micro, AVG, and BitDefender. The method, developed by software security researchers at matousec.com, works by exploiting the driver hooks the anti-virus …

Security 7 May 2010, 18:17
F*ck you, thunders disgruntled ~~fanboi~~ Apple user

FoTW 13-year-old hack rattles Friend of Cupertino

Here's a poser for you: What's the difference between a fanboi and an informed Apple user? The answer? Well, here's the opinion of one Aaron, in response to our piece Apple in Brazilian iPad shocker, in which this hack evidently failed to distinguish between discerning technology aficionados and slavish worshippers at the …

Odds and Sods 7 May 2010, 18:41
RHEL 6 - your sensible but lovable friend

Review Ubuntu it isn't

The first major update for Red Hat Enterprise Linux in more than three years hit last month, and judging by the traffic that took down Red Hat's download servers, it's long over due. RHEL 5 came out in March 2007 with the Linux 2.6.18 kernel and while incremental updates have added kernel updates and new features, it's showing …

Operating Systems 7 May 2010, 18:42
Apple in shock talks with Reg reader

'Dear Steve: iTunes for Windows is crap...'

Apple has engaged in a shock conversation with a man who admits to reading The Register. Last Friday, after noticing in these pages that Steve Jobs is actually reading and responding to messages from the outside world, Irish software developer Jason Croghan took it upon himself to email the Apple cult leader and inform him …

Odds and Sods 7 May 2010, 18:49
Feds seize $143m worth of bogus networking gear

From China, with bugs

Federal authorities over the past fives year have seized more than $143m worth of counterfeit Cisco hardware and labels in a coordinated operation that's netted more than 700 seizures and 30 felony convictions, the Justice Department said Thursday. Operation Network Raider is an enforcement initiative involving the FBI, …

Data Networking 7 May 2010, 20:24
Nokia tops iPhone and BlackBerry (again)

Apple as Nick Clegg

Apple's iPhone is the Nick Clegg of smartphones: attractive, media-savvy, and firmly in third place when matched up against its more-experienced rivals. The top worldwide smartphone manufacturer - by a hefty margin - remains neither Apple nor Research in Motion but Nokia, according to the IDC's latest Worldwide Quarterly …

Mobile 7 May 2010, 22:27
DNSSEC: the internet's International Criminal Court?

INET Trust and confidence in the domain name system

The DNSSEC protocol could have some very interesting geo-political implications, including erosion of the scope of state sovereign powers, according to policy and security experts. “We will have to handle the geo-political element of DNSSEC very carefully,” explained Peter Dengate Thrush, a New Zealand patent attorney and …

Networks 7 May 2010, 23:03