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1st June 2010 Archive

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  • Intel puts x64 in a parallel universe

    Taking the MIC out of Larrabee

    We've all been wondering exactly what Intel would do with various multicore x64 processors that had been designed as co-processors to accelerate graphics and other applications with lots of number-crunching. The answer, as Intel explained at the International Super Computing conference in Hamburg, Germany this week, is simple: …

    HPC 1 Jun 05:24

  • Fraudsters limber up for World Cup themed scams

    Can I click it? Yes you can (but probably shouldn't)

    Fraudsters as well as footballers are gearing up for this month's World Cup extravaganza in South Africa. Football governing body FIFA has already warned supporters to be wary over various forms of scams that are likely to crop up in the run-up to the start of the tournament, which kicks off in ten days. FIFA lottery, prize …

    Crime 1 Jun 07:01

  • Bangladesh cuts off Facebook

    You draw Mohammed and we'll rub you out

    Bangladesh blocked Facebook over the weekend, leaving the social networking site marooned from another tranche of Muslim users even as Pakistan largely restored access to the site. The latest action against the site is, again, down to the "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" group. Depictions of the prophet are considered blasphemous …

    Government 1 Jun 07:38

  • Capita pays £60m for medico screening firm

    Claims interest no accident

    Services monolith Capita has sucked up medical reporting and screening firm Premier Medical Group in return for £60m. PMG expects to make £6m operating profit on revenues of £51.2m this year, and has around 285 staff. It describes itself as "a leading provider of medical reporting and screening services" which works "on …

    Government 1 Jun 07:53

  • Hitachi touts skinny drives for skinny devices

    Who needs flash?

    Hitachi GST is making a major push this year into skinny 2.5in hard drives designed for skinny netbooks, laptops and emerging classes of portable devices . It says that half of its Z Series drives in the market will be single-platter by the end of the year. Single-platter drives are thinner than standard dual-platter drives, …

    Storage 1 Jun 08:31

  • Net shakeup looms as IPv4 resources start running low

    Analysis There's a bit of unused space, just behind the sofa

    A new study has called into question the previous received wisdom that IPv4 addresses are running out, forcing the long-heralded move to IPv6. The migration to IPv6 is needed because it offers a massively increased address space as well as advantages in mobility and security. The use of technologies such as Network Address …

    Telecoms 1 Jun 08:49

  • Sadsack EU regulator relegated to Latvia

    BEREC office now 900 miles down the corridor

    Castrated EU telecommunications regulator BEREC has now been relocated to Riga, Latvia - a mere 900 miles from everyone else. The Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications was going to be a superpower: able to dictate policy across the EU and ride roughshod over national regulators. Since then its power has …

    Telecoms 1 Jun 09:53

  • Hitachi launches Blu-Ray-SSD hybrid drive

    HyDrive is go

    Hitachi is launching HyDrive, a Blu-ray drive with an embedded solid state drive (SSD), and working with AMD and ASUS to deliver notebooks using it. The part of Hitachi doing this is Hitachi LG Data Storage (HLDS) and the idea is to use the 32GB or 64GB as a place to store Windows and system applications and get the SSD …

    Storage 1 Jun 10:04

  • Should we be encrypting backups?

    Workshop It’s about the restore, stupid

    We all know that data protection regulations are gaining teeth. As we discussed before, it is becoming more difficult to keep data losses private, and the damage to reputation and other penalties incurred following data breaches are now significant. Data protection laws in particular are being tightened up, with the potential …

    Security that Fits 1 Jun 10:13

  • Action day targets callous conmen

    Gunning for the grifters

    International organisations have teamed up to run a day of action against fraud on Tuesday 1 June. Brits lose an estimated £3.5bn a year to mass mailing frauds, according to the organisers. Organisations from the UK, USA, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands are involved. Mass market scams take many forms including fake …

    Crime 1 Jun 10:16

  • Firefox takes walk down 64-bit Windows street

    Strictly developer-only playground for now

    Mozilla has created a pre-release 64-bit version of Firefox for Windows for hardcore coders to test-drive. The open source browser maker confirmed on Friday that it had begun pushing out automated pre-release builds of a 64-bit flavoured Firefox for developers to download and play with. “The purpose of automating these pre- …

    Applications 1 Jun 10:19

  • Confessions of a sysadmin

    Blog I found a virus on my network today…

    I would like to say that it has been a few days since my last malware infected computer. I have been dealing with a string of these lately, and I’ve had quite enough of them for now, thank you. I would also like to say my network was the epitome of configuration perfection, with every system fully patched, and a team of …

    Desktop Mgmt Blog 1 Jun 10:26

  • Skype to start charging for iPhone VoIP

    Over 3G, on the iPhone

    Skype has launched a new iPhone version, enabling calls over the 3G data network, but come 2011 users will be expected to start paying for those calls too. Skype-to-Skype calls over Wi-Fi will remain free, along with Skype over the fixed internet, but if you're expecting free VoIP over your 3G connection (without a premium …

    Mobile 1 Jun 11:02

  • Apple sells 2m iPads to hungry fanbois

    Early adopters 'experience the magic'

    Apple has sold two million iPads since its 3 April arrival in the US, the company revealed yesterday. The Jobsian fondle slab went on sale in the UK and eight other countries last Friday, with some saddos keen fans queuing overnight to be among the first customers to get their hands on the device. “Customers around the world …

    PCs & Chips 1 Jun 11:05

  • Senior IT officials among top paid civil servants

    Lend us a fiver then

    Seven senior IT officials are on the newly published list of top paid civil servants. In the list published by the government to provide greater transparency of high earners' salaries, Joe Harley, IT director general and chief information officer (CIO) at the Department for Work and Pensions, comes out top of the information …

    IT Director 1 Jun 11:07

  • SanDisk soups up SSD storage to 256GB

    Double trouble

    SanDisk has doubled the capacity of its solid state drive (SSD) with a G4 model lifting it to 256GB. The previous G3 model offered 60 and 120GB with a 220MB/sec read speed and 120MB/sec write speed, and an endurance of 80TB written. Its shiny new G4 offers sequential read/write speeds of up to 220 and 160MB/sec and a 160TB …

    Storage 1 Jun 11:12

  • Met lab claims 'biggest breakthrough since Watergate'

    Power lines act as police informers

    Police scientists have hailed a new technique that recently played a pivotal role in securing a murder conviction as the most significant development in audio forensics since Watergate. The capability, called "electrical network frequency analysis" (ENF), is now attracting interest from the FBI and is considered the exciting …

    Policing 1 Jun 11:16

  • Rave reviews at robotic robot-roaster raygun rollout

    US Navy in hot, wet droid-on-droid blaster action

    There's big news from the world of rayguns this week, as the US Navy has announced successful use of a laser cannon fitted to its well-known "R2-D2" robotic gun turret installation to shoot down other, flying robots in a test. Shark-portability issues continue to dog the technology's entry into the supervillainry sector. …

    Science 1 Jun 12:01

  • MSI Wind U160

    Review Nifty netbook

    MSI was one of the first companies to see the importance of the Eee PC as a new category of portable. The Wind U160 is its latest response to a growing range of netbooks based on Intel’s low-power Atom chips. Yet can it break the ‘me-too’ mould and offer something extra? A mighty wind? MSI's U160 MSI’s original Wind netbook …

    reghardware 1 Jun 12:02

  • Quit Facebook Day flops

    Breaking the habit ain't easy

    Monday's Quit Facebook Day turned out to be something of a damp squib. Just 34,100 of Facebook's more than 450 million members pledged to quit over privacy concerns. The low number is probably more a reflection of how hard it is to break the Facebook habit, rather than signifying acceptance of the simplified privacy controls …

    ID 1 Jun 12:06

  • Woman sues Google after highway knockdown

    Did it say play with the traffic?

    An LA woman is suing Google after accusing its mapping service of encouraging her to walk along a high speed State Route in Utah. The Salt Lake City Tribune reports that Lauren Rosenberg's suit claims that while visiting Salt Lake City, Utah she used Google Maps via her BlackBerry for directions to to walk from 96 Daly Ave to …

    Mobile 1 Jun 12:07

  • Google tells staff to snub Windows after China hack snafu

    Will boarding up windows make Chrome shine?

    Google employees are reportedly being told by their Mountain View overlords to dump Microsoft’s Windows because of security concerns about the operating system. According to a report in today’s Financial Times, which cites several Google workers, the ad broker has been telling its staff to move away from the Windows OS since …

    Operating Systems 1 Jun 12:10

  • HP TouchSmart PC Competition- The winner

    News Who had the winning Touch?

    Last month Reg Hardware ran a competition to win an HP TouchSmart 600 PC. Almost 6,500 people entered the draw and the winner is... Samantha Robinson from Winchester, UK, who says: "Thank you so much, I can't believe it, I'm thrilled!" Quite. Reg Hardware is running two more competitions, for a Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 and …

    reghardware 1 Jun 12:13

  • Apple opens doors to vanity publishers

    Fancy getting published on the iPad?

    Apple has provided a publishing service on the iPad for those who don't want to go through all the hassle of finding a publisher. Responding to a long-standing enquiry from Mac Life, Cupertino is now inviting budding authors to sign up for self-publishing, as long as the work is in ePub format, the author has an ISBN and a US …

    Mobile 1 Jun 12:13

  • JBL flogs monster speakers at monster prices

    Speakers that roar, refined for the home?

    Here's a picture: a 300W loudspeaker designed for the Project Synthesis home theatre system. A rich sound? Standing at just over a metre tall and weighing 52kg a piece, JBL's 1400 Array floor-standing speakers are not for the shallow-pocketed - a single pair retails at an eye-popping £8,500. Incorporating an original …

    reghardware 1 Jun 12:31

  • Windows Mobile Trojan frags gamers

    Premium-rate calls on the sly

    Scammers have hidden a nasty surprise for users who downloaded doctored copies of a Windows Mobile game. Hackers adapted a demo version of 3D Anti-Terrorist Action to include a Trojan that makes premium-rate calls costing around US$6 a minute on the sly. Doctored copies of the Counter-Strike-alike game are designed to call …

    Crime 1 Jun 12:47

  • Tesco to flog secondhand games

    Behemoth spies fresh meat

    Tesco is getting into the computer games exchange business. The retailing giant has worked out a sliding scale of prices – so gamers will get £27 for a mint condition video game that they paid £40 for. Tesco will resell this at £30. Which is nice. Except if you are Game PLC, the UK’s leading purveyor of secondhand games …

    reghardware 1 Jun 13:33

  • NHS is top sector for data losses

    300 breaches in 3 years

    The NHS has reported 305 data breaches to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) since November 2007. The figure for the NHS compares to 288 for the private sector, 132 for local government and 18 for central government. "It could be because of reporting differences or the NHS could be more prone to data breaches because …

    IT Director 1 Jun 13:36

  • Audi dreams up App Store for user-designed cars

    'Create your own world in your car'

    Audi’s A2 city car was a failure. Too pricey, maybe ahead of its time, the car was put on ice in 2005. But it could be back on the roads soon – as an electric-powered vehicle with its very own apps store to “customise the car’s interior, features and driving style”. This is how it would work. You buy the vanilla version and …

    reghardware 1 Jun 14:14

  • US space dirty-tricks spysat spying sat is go for July

    Crafty Antipodean orbit shifts now harder to manage

    Delayed US military plans to deploy a special spysat-spying sat which will monitor other nations' spysats and watch out for attempts to nobble America's ordinary spysats are to move forward this summer. We gotcha this time! Disused telecoms satellite, my ass The first Space Based Surveillance System (SBSS) spacecraft was to …

    Space 1 Jun 14:20

  • HP to fire 9,000 due to 'productivity gains, automation'

    Not automatic for the people, then

    Hewlett-Packard will axe 9,000 jobs at the ink and computer giant over the next three years. The company confirmed its plans today saying it hoped to improve its corporate services business, after it bought EDS in 2008 for $13.9bn. HP said it would swallow a $1bn charge between now and its 2013 financial year, half of which …

    Servers 1 Jun 14:22

  • Acer revs up Ferrari smartphone

    Vroom vroom

    First laptops, now smartphones. Acer is applying the Ferrari touch once again, this time for a makeover of the Liquid E Smartphone. Aside from the Ferrarified exterior, what else is different? There's a Bluetooth headset that cancels echo and automatically regulates volume levels and, umm, and...several Ferrari ringtones, …

    reghardware 1 Jun 16:04

  • Win free tickets to Hadoop Summit

    Competition Open source Big Data confab wants you

    The Register is offering readers the chance to win free tickets to Yahoo!'s third annual Hadoop Summit, a one-day Silicon Valley confab dedicated to the open source platform of the moment. This year's summit kicks off at 8am on June 29 at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Santa Clara, California. Yahoo! is the largest contributor to …

    Site News 1 Jun 16:14

  • Panasonic hybrid compact is so bright!

    Pan-optical

    Panasonic is making big claims for the lens quality of its new hybrid digital compact camera, the DMC-FX70. Featuring a ultra wide angle 24mm lens from Leica, the FX70 captures more than double the viewing space at the same distance of its 35mm predecessor. The lens has a brightness of F2.2 and incorporates something called …

    reghardware 1 Jun 17:17

  • Bing on iPhone rumor returns to boil

    Apple and MS 'still talking'

    Apple and Microsoft continue to negotiate the addition of Bing to the iPhone, according to a report citing sources familiar with the talks, but as things stand, this will not see the ejection of Google from Steve Jobs' handheld status symbol. All Things Digital reports that Apple and Microsoft are engaged in "long-term" talks …

    Mobile 1 Jun 17:32

  • Mac spyware infiltrates popular download sites

    'Very serious security threat'

    A spyware application that surreptitiously scans chat logs and hard drives of unsuspecting Mac users has found its way onto three of the more popular download sites, security researchers said Tuesday. Dubbed OSX/OpinionSpy, the spyware is distributed through software available on sites including Softpedia, MacUpdate, and …

    Malware 1 Jun 17:34

  • Microsoft and Novell tag team on HPC

    Comment Windows on the supercomputing world

    The old Microsoft strategy of "embrace, extend, and extinguish" is just not going to fly in the snooty high performance computing market. Microsoft needs partners and Windows needs to coexist with Linux if the company wants to get anything more than a token share of real HPC work, which is why the company is talking up its …

    HPC 1 Jun 17:42

  • ATIC pumps another $2.8bn into GlobalFoundries

    Transmuting oil into chips

    GlobalFoundries, the wafer-baking spin-out from Advanced Micro Devices, has received another cash boost as it ramps up production of new chip processes and expands beyond fabbing chips for companies other than AMD. Parent company Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC) is pumping $2.8bn more into two of the outfit's …

    Financial News 1 Jun 19:02

  • Adobe unveils emag maker for Apple iPad

    Flashless rag tech graces sacred App Store

    Adobe has announced the first step in its ambitious effort to move beyond the web and into app-based digital content delivery, and the poster child for its first foray runs on a magical and revolutionary device from Adobe's derisive frenemy, Apple. Tuesday's announcement of magazine viewer technology is but one step in Adobe's …

    Music and Media 1 Jun 19:32

  • Microsoft: IE6 lives 'cause it busts Facebook

    'But our duty is to kill it'

    Businesses are sticking with Internet Explorer 6 to prevent employees from wasting time on Facebook. At least, that's the word from Microsoft. Microsoft Australia's chief security adviser has said that customers are holding on to the nine-year-old IE6 because it doesn't properly render Facebook and other non-work-related sites …

    Applications 1 Jun 19:55

  • 'Clickjacking' worm hits hundreds of thousands on Facebook

    'This girl gets OWNED.' And you can too

    A vulnerability on Facebook forced hundreds of thousands of users to endorse a series of webpages over the holiday weekend, making the social networking site the latest venue for an attack known as clickjacking. The exploit works by presenting people with friend profiles that recommend — or "Like," in Facebook parlance — links …

    Malware 1 Jun 20:07

  • Intel unveils ultrathinnest ultrathin

    The 14mm netbook

    Intel has announced on a new "innovation platform" that it claims will enable the world's thinnest netbooks. Intel claims that its new Canoe Lake platform, a refinement of the on the company's Atom-based Pine Trail platform, will allow for netbooks to be built at an anorexic 14mm thick. By comparison, Dell's ultrathin notebook …

    Music and Media 1 Jun 20:51

  • Next-gen iPhone pegged with 320ppi display

    Czech it out

    A trio of intrepid Czech fanbois have arguably proven that the display on the upcoming next-generation iPhone will have a resolution of 960 by 640, and a pixel density of an impressive 320ppi. How Vláďa Janeček, Tomáš Holčík and Filip Kůžel got their hands on Apple's decreasingly top-secret iPhone, they don't say — and proving …

    Mobile 1 Jun 22:44

  • Steve Jobs beheads iPad apps for acting like desktops

    'Off with their widgets!'

    The Apple App Store police are now rejecting iPhone and iPad applications for behaving like "widgets" and "creating their own desktops," according to one developer who's busy eating his previous claims that Apple isn't evil. In late April, an unnamed Australian — one of a small team of cross-platform developers known as Shifty …

    Developer 1 Jun 23:12

  • Cray super lands at Swedish tech institute

    Lots o' Scandinavian flops

    Sweden's Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan, or Royal Institute of Technology, is getting a substantial upgrade for its Parallel Dator Centrum (PDC), or Center for Parallel Computers. The Swedish institute houses the country's largest supercomputing facilities, and with the installation of a Cray XT6m midrange parallel super, …

    HPC 1 Jun 23:38