17th May 2010 Archive

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Site auto-trawls embarrassing Facebook posts

'Delete Facebook account' surges into Google top 10

A new site illustrates the privacy perils of users who leave their public updates searchable outside of Facebook. Youropenbook (formerly Facebooksearch) allows interested parties to search for status updates containing potentially embarrassing information such as "playing hooky", "stupid boss" or "control urges" simply by …

Media 17 May 2010, 02:53
Emulex and QLogic both claim to be best

Fight fight fight

Emulex and QLogic have both released statements saying they are winning in Fibre Channel adapter-land, and it's emerged that Emulex's claim to FCoE adapter leadership might be flaky. The Fibre Channel host bus adapter (HBA) market is basically a two-horse race between Emulex and QLogic with new entrant Brocade not having large …

Storage 17 May 2010, 07:02
Big Blue's big iron: The Biggening. Screening 2010

'This enormous mainframe will devour us all'

IBM, like other server makers, has rolled out a bunch of new iron this spring, but still has a ways to go to completely revamp its product lineup in 2010, as it plans to do. The company rolled out its first machines to make use of the eight-core Power7 processors in February, the midrange Power 750 (with up to four processor …

Servers 17 May 2010, 08:02
Met Police new HR technology broken, bloated, absent

Fell down the stairs, presumably

An attempted programme to modernise the Metropolitan Police's human resources systems is behind schedule and over-budget. The force was originally going to spend £38m to create a self-service HR system which it hoped would save it £15m a year in costs. The system was meant to go live in December 2009 - but it is now hoped it …

Law 17 May 2010, 09:02
Grow-lamps roast Yorkshire dope farmer in his sleep

Cops swoon on entering deadly hothouse

A West Yorkshire cannabis grower died of hyperthermia after halogen lamps in his illicit indoor dope plantation heated his house to a fatal 38°C, the Sun reports. Luke Holmes, 28, constructed "three foil-lined tents each containing marijuana plants", nurtured by a "battery" of halogens. He died in bed and was discovered by …

Bootnotes 17 May 2010, 09:15
Simpana getting object storage, added de-dupening

Onward, up the storage stack

CommVault is readying a major release of its Simpana software, adding object storage and enhancing deduplication. Simpana, currently at version 8, is CommVault's data protection and management software suite that provides backup, recovery, archiving, replication, resource management and search facilities. The next version is …

Storage 17 May 2010, 09:31
Five in slammer over iTunes/eBay card-laundry caper

Rochdale quintet nabbed in laptop grab bust

Five UK residents were jailed on Friday over a conspiracy to launder money using iTunes gift vouchers. The gang used stolen credit card details to buy vouchers which they sold at a discount via eBay and other auction sites. Suhail Tufail, 35, of Rochdale, Lancashire, masterminded the scheme which was estimated to have …

Security 17 May 2010, 09:50
Cops back in on BT/Phorm case

Plods backtrack on tracking of track-pact

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has called in City of London Police to assist as it decides whether to go to court over BT's covert trials of Phorm's web interception and profiling system. The City force ran the original criminal investigation into the trials, which saw tens of thousands of BT customers' broadband traffic …

Law 17 May 2010, 10:02
Samsung offers $2.7m of grease for wrestling Bada devs

Paltry £2k tucked in Android champ's thong

Samsung likes to play the tart when it comes to a mobile OS, but the Bada Developer Challenge for its in-house environment shows where its affections really lie, with a top prize of $300,000. That compares with the £2,000 that Samsung was prepared to give to the best Android application while promoting its Galaxy handset. The …

Applications 17 May 2010, 10:20
Flash! Enterprise SSD looming at HP

Dance of the spinning platters to cease. Partly

HP will soon introduce enterprise-class solid state drives (SSD) with a 6Gbit/s SAS interface for its servers. Currently it offers 3Gbit/s SSDs from Samsung for its G6 and certain G5 servers. These have a sustained read speed of 230MB/sec and a sustained write speed of 180MB/sec. TechEye reckons the coming SSDs have sustained …

Storage 17 May 2010, 10:32
Atlantis 'nauts suit & boot up for bolt release spacewalk

'Righty tighty, lefty loosey', remember

Atlantis mission specialists Steve Bowen and Garrett Reisman are due to exit the International Space Station this afternoon for the first of three STS-132 mission spacewalks. The pair are tasked with installing "a second station space-to-ground Ku-band antenna and a spare parts platform on Dextre, the two-armed robotic Special …

Science 17 May 2010, 10:43
Gov beats BOFHs to snatch worst-for-service crown

Civil servants: Even less use than tech guys

Government services have come last in a survey of how easy various services and service providers are to contact by the public. Almost 2,000 people were asked to rank different organisations according to how easy they were to contact. Out of 11 options, central government services came 11th. Top of the list were banks, …

Government 17 May 2010, 10:51
Ten Essential... Android Games

Product Round-up Get gaming on your Google phone

If there is one thing that iPhone owners can be smug about it's the number of quality games available from the iTunes App Store. But Android owners needn't feel too badly done by - the Android Market has a few choice gaming applications all of its own. This list is unapologetically personal, and several well regarded games …

Top Ten 17 May 2010, 11:02
Vulture 1, Eyjafjallajökull nil (half time)

From the Ash Cloud BA, beaks, unions invade pitch in second half

If the latest tranche of volcanic ash has cut off chunks of the UK from Europe again, it certainly didn't hit the traffic of the M25 yesterday morning. But as the taxi came out of the umpteenth 40mph zone, just ahead of the Terminal 5 turnoff the driver looked up to the sky and declared, "Nope, it's very clear. Not a plane in …

Bootnotes 17 May 2010, 11:11
BI for real people: Information delivery today

Webcast A Reg live broadcast

When business intelligence (BI) technology first appeared on the landscape the image (and reality) we got was that it was a ‘big ticket project’ and ‘for the favoured few’. The idea of putting all your data in one place and running reports on it was fair enough, but for many, especially smaller businesses, the perception of …

Platform Evolution 17 May 2010, 11:22
Microsoft TechNet blogs go into stasis for revamp

Redmond: One-week freeze to add web-2.0 cool factor

Microsoft has disabled comments on its TechNet blogs for the next week while it upgrades the system. The company said it wouldn’t be writing any blog posts until 24 May while it upgrades MS TechNet blog servers. Various blogs across the Redmond online estate have posts confirming the temporary shutdown of comments and …

Operating Systems 17 May 2010, 11:23
Vodafone shocks data users with roaming price rise

25MB of data could cost 400 per cent more

Vodafone is to change how it charges phone and laptop users to connect to mobile broadband services overseas. Its customers are not best pleased - heavy data users could see prices rise fivehold. From 15 June, data roaming in Europe will be billed at £1 per megabyte for the first 5MB, then £5 for each extra 5MB used. That's …

Mobile 17 May 2010, 11:34
Software liability ruling: 'Supplier beware', says IT brief

Analysis Ts & Cs offer chocolate-fireguard grade protection

A software developer's assertion that it wasn't liable for the shortcomings of its software has been rejected by the UK High Court in a case that has implications for other vendors and channel partners. As previously reported, London's Kingsway Hall Hotel had all sorts of problems when it installed hotel management software …

Software 17 May 2010, 11:43
UK border security ring-o-steel flagged 48,000 travellers

Intrusive backroom probes for EVERYONE!

The £1.2bn e-Borders security system flagged more than 48,000 travellers for intrusive background checks last year, it has emerged. Those automatically matched against intelligence watch lists are subjected to scrutiny of their criminal and financial records, as well as checks of their known associates. The system currently …

Policy 17 May 2010, 11:53
Logitech Squeezebox Touch Wi-Fi music streamer

Review Sound offering with pictureframe pretensions

Following on from the Squeezebox Duet, Boom and Radio models, the Touch is Logitech's latest wizard wheeze to help liberate your digital music files. Like the Duet, the Touch acts as a bridge between your PC and your hi-fi by hooking the two up using a Wi-Fi network. However, you can't use it as a stand alone music player, as …

Hardware 17 May 2010, 12:02
Seagate brewing bizarre Flash/Platter chimera

Interweb mutterings of unholy experiments

A Greek website is reporting that a combined solid state and spinning disk drive may be on the way from Seagate. The hw box story says the hybrid Momentus XT will combine a 4GB solid state drive (SSD) with a 7200rpm rotating hard disk offering 250, 320 or 500GB of capacity. There will be a 32MB cache, a 3Gbit/s SATA interface …

Storage 17 May 2010, 12:13
Budding Bonds offered disguised spycam

The lighter touch...

Attention all Bond enthusiasts! Asian gadget seller Brando is now selling Disposable Lighter Spy Camera Camcorders at just $20 (£14) a pop. Hidden beneath this seemingly ordinary ciggie lighter is a pinhole camera and microphone which captures Motion JPEG video at 720 x 480, 30f/s in an AVI file. There's an additional still …

Hardware 17 May 2010, 12:42
Mobile Office 2010: Free, and worth every penny

Download relief for the WinMo 6.5 ghetto denizen

Microsoft Office Mobile 2010 is now available for those using Windows Mobile 6.5: a nice enough upgrade considering it's free, but you wouldn't want to pay for it. Office Mobile came out as a beta last year, but now is available from the Microsoft Marketplace, bringing SharePoint Workspace and remote control of PowerPoint …

Applications 17 May 2010, 12:43
The IT security blame game

Workshop Poll Who carries the can and who should?

The word “governance” is one that tends to make most peoples’ eyes glaze over. But whether we are talking about running a corporation, managing an IT department or dealing with IT security, there has to be a mechanism in place for making sure that the right things are taken care of in an acceptable manner. And cutting through …

Security that Fits 17 May 2010, 12:46
Lost Planet 2

Review So-so shooter

Red-Eye, the Railway Gun, or just Episode 3, Chapter 3. Call it what you want, but you won’t find a more defining moment in Lost Planet 2. It’s a level that will stick in the mind for a long time to come - unfortunately for all the wrong reasons. We need a frog grenade Around an hour in length, it’s typical of the game’s …

Games 17 May 2010, 12:49
Costa Rican elbows out South African as UN climate boss

SA not small and powerless enough, insist delegates

A Costa Rican bureaucrat is set to take the top job at the United Nations climate convention after a mini-revolt from small island states. South African Tourism Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk was in line for the post until the intervention from several smaller countries asking for a representative from a smaller developing …

Science 17 May 2010, 13:39
Siphon Wars: Pressurist weighs into Gravitite boffin

'The professor sucks' insists angry reader

We've just had a missive from a US reader regarding that most pressing scientific question of the moment: Just how do siphons work? Those of you with a scientific bent will recall the recent Oxford English Dictionary outrage, in which one Dr Stephen Hughes of Queensland University of Technology laid bare a 99-year-old gaffe in …

Bootnotes 17 May 2010, 13:56
US military chokes on stream from robots' fat pipes

'Swimming in sensors and drowning in data'

A lack of decent software means that information harvested from unmanned aerial drones in Afghanistan is not being used properly. The military is deploying thousands of these pilotless machines in Iraq and Afghanistan but is hamstrung by a lack of resources to properly deal with all the video footage created and by …

Broadband 17 May 2010, 14:05
Steelie Neelie batters at China's Great Firewall

Censorship screen also illicit trade barrier, claims EC

China's Great Firewall is acting as a block to international business and should be tackled by the World Trade Organisation (WTO), according to European Competiton Commissioner Neelie Kroes. In Shanghai today, she said that the array of technical measures designed by Beijing to stop citizens accessing banned websites was also …

Security 17 May 2010, 14:19
Samsung tellies get Lovefilm on-demand movies

Joins Sony

Lovefilm's on-demand movie streaming service is now available on Samsung net-connected tellies and not just Sony ones. The DVD rental company streams a sub-set of its disc catalogue to the TVs free to folk who have subscriptions for an unlimited number of titles each month. The range will appear as an app in Samsung's …

Media 17 May 2010, 14:22
The Remote Access arsenal

BOFH "killer feature"

Of all the tools in a system administrator’s arsenal, perhaps the most important are those related to remotely managing and administering the systems under their care. Just as computers span dozens of processor architectures and operating systems so to are the tools to manipulate these systems equally diverse. The rise of the …

Servers 17 May 2010, 14:31
Where to use Remote Access

Remotely accessing the GUI

The ability to remotely access computers has become a ubiquitous tool used by individuals ranging from systems administrators to roaming business users and the proverbial Aunt Tilly. This is not about accessing the hosted services of a computer (such as a webpage) remotely, but rather remotely accessing the graphical user …

Servers 17 May 2010, 14:32
Daleks poised to ~~invade~~ tour UK

Doctor Who Live promises hot arena action

Fans of Doctor Who will later this year be able to enjoy Doctor Who Live - the arena manifestation of the BBC hit which promises "the same excitement, adventure and suspense that viewers have come to expect from the TV programme". The blurb explains: "Opening in wartime London and concluding in an epic onstage battle, …

Hardware 17 May 2010, 14:36
European PC racket's rocket rebound

Soon we'll all be knee deep in computers

Home PC buyers have done their consumerist duty and bought lots of new machines in the first quarter of 2010, helping the PC biz in Western Europe get on with a recovery. According to data just released from box counter Gartner, Western European consumers and companies together bought 18.1 million PC units across all types and …

Hardware 17 May 2010, 14:48
HTC unwraps Wildfire Android 2.1 smartphone

Not on fire and certainly not wild

HTC has introduced yet another Android handset, this one clearly set to be pitched at the less well-heeled if the spec is anything to go by. Dubbed Wildfire, the handset is an Android 2.1 offering, running the Google OS on a 528MHz Qualcomm processor and presenting it on a 3.2in, 240 x 320 capacitive touchscreen display. …

Phones 17 May 2010, 15:02
Shock! Facebook cycle-slut smutvid is adware front

You'll get your screen all splattered ... with popups

Facebook users should suppress any temptation to check out a link supposedly touting the "world's sexiest video", which is slutting its way around the social network. Malicious posts, seemingly from a user's friend on Facebook, promise "candid camera" footage by clicking on a thumbnail of a woman wearing a short skirt and …

Security 17 May 2010, 15:14
Symantec fires off false alarm on WoW update

Updated Here be dra... oh, ignore me

World of Warcraft denizens are complaining that an anti-virus update published by Symantec over the weekend falsely labelled a component of the game as potentially malign. Instead of throwing spells or wielding axes, fans of the role-playing game who choose Symantec for their security protection complain that the firms is …

Security 17 May 2010, 15:42
Microsoft, martyrs, and the sizzle of Natal

Radio Reg Curb your enthusiasm for Windows Phone 7

Sure, Microsoft has just released the latest installment in its multi-billion-dollar Office story, but it's not Microsoft's most exciting launch of 2010. No, we don't mean Windows Phone 7 tops the excitement list - even though Windows Phone 7 certainly reinvents Windows for the smartphone crowd. Nope. The product designated …

Microbite 17 May 2010, 17:01
Getting your head around mainstream mind mapping

RegCast Niche technology now ready for prime time?

If you haven't heard the term ‘mind mapping’ before, you could be forgiven for thinking it was something sinister from 1984, or perhaps some high tech secret service interrogation technique. It is, in fact, a diagramming technique that's been used for many years for capturing, analyzing, and expressing thoughts and ideas in a …

Evolving Apps 17 May 2010, 17:29
Security guard admits he hacked hospital PCs

Ghost Exodus undone by YouTube vids

A former security guard has pleaded guilty to compromising more than a dozen computers that belonged to the hospital he was supposed to be protecting and posting some of his exploits on YouTube. Jesse William McGraw, 25, called himself Ghost Exodus in videos such as this one as he wandered the halls of the North Central Medical …

Security 17 May 2010, 18:41
Atlantis 'nauts wrap boltastic first spacewalk

Antenna installed, battery bolts loosened

Atlantis spacewalkers Steve Bowen and Garrett Reisman wrapped their first STS-132 mission spacewalk at 19:19 GMT today, having spent seven hours and 25 minutes outside the ISS. The pair successfully installed a second space-to-ground Ku-band antenna for the orbiting outpost. NASA summarises: "They connected the antenna dish to …

Science 17 May 2010, 19:27
CA rechristens self CA Technologies

The cloud maker formerly known as Computer Associates

CA has finally conceded that its name is rather silly if you're not the state of California. The company's new top brass have decided that from here on out, we should call it CA Technologies. The company has actually shelled out the millions needed to formally change its name. And even if it did, it will probably never shake …

Servers 17 May 2010, 20:13
Most browsers leave fingerprint that can ID users

Your signature tested here

The vast majority of people surfing the web leave behind digital fingerprints that can be used to uniquely identify them, research released Monday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation suggests. Using a website that compares visitors' browser configurations to a database of almost 1 million other users, EFF researchers found …

Security 17 May 2010, 21:07
Hadoop takes Big Data beyond Java

Stuffed elephant mates with Python

Apache Hadoop, the open-source version of Google's MapReduce architecture named after a kid's stuffed elephant, is still working to tame the 1.0 beast. Only a year ago, Hadoop hit its first stable release, a release that - in true open-source fashion - couldn't be called version 1.0 but contained two decimal points: version 0. …

Software 17 May 2010, 21:12
Juniper rolls out multi-product attack on Cisco

'We're the future. They're the past'

Juniper Networks rolled out an aggressive set of hardware, software, and services Monday morning, and while doing so it accused networking megacompetitor Cisco Systems of being yesterday's news. At a meeting with reporters and analysts Monday morning, Juniper CEO Kevin Johnson portrayed his company as the road to the future, …

Data Networking 17 May 2010, 23:52
Vision Solutions does a Double-Take

IBM Power player snaps up x64 outfit

Private equity firm Thoma Bravo snapped up the three major players in the high availability clustering and data replication business for IBM's proprietary Power-based midrange systems in 2006 and 2007, and now the resulting company the equity firm put together, Vision Solutions, has been given a $242m bag of cash by its sugar …

Financial News 17 May 2010, 23:58