3rd September 2010 Archive

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Acer Stream Android smartphone

Review PMP trickle-down effect

Typically, smartphones make less than satisfying PMPs, especially given the issue of video formats, with very few phones supporting the good old AVI container or Xvid/DivX codecs. Also, sound quality is usually a bit iffy and there is often little in the way of external controls for media navigation that you can use without …

Phones 3 Sep 2010, 07:01
Nokia seeks to tap the X-Factor

Ovi could do with the support

Nokia is backing ITV's X Factor with a dedicated application and exclusive content, but it will take more then Auto Tune to make Ovi a Christmas number one. The X Factor application can be downloaded from the Ovi store from today, and features "backstage gossip", "exclusive video content", a rating function and "lots of …

Mobile 3 Sep 2010, 07:08
Ubuntu 10.10 released to beta

Maverick Meerkat skips Alpha 4

The beta instalment of Ubuntu's Maverick Meerkat has arrived slightly earlier than expected. The Linux distro team on Thursday said they'd delivered the Ubuntu 10.10 beta, when the code's Alpha 4 had been expected instead. No reason was given for the change, but the plan remains for final delivery of the code as intended on …

Operating Systems 3 Sep 2010, 08:20
Phone bugging scandal reignited as NotW suspends reporter

The story that refuses to die

New allegations of phone hacking at the News of the World have resulted in the suspension of one of the Sunday paper's reporters, pending legal and disciplinary action over allegations of tapping into the voicemail messages of an unnamed television personality. A detailed investigation by the New York Times has reignited a …

Security 3 Sep 2010, 08:30
'Rock star' spewed guts after emitting vast pearl necklace

Prehistoric luminary's explosive antics revealed

The equivalent of a "rock star", having lived a "fast, flashy life and died young" apparently exploded with unimaginable violence in the year 161,000 BC and spewed "guts" across an enormous area. The exploding prehistoric luminary had previously ejected a "string of pearls", according to investigating boffins. Live fast and …

Science 3 Sep 2010, 08:39
Toshiba warns of fiery laptops

Worldwide recall of ball burners

Toshiba and US and Canadian consumer watchdogs are recalling three laptop models after receiving reports that people have been burned by the AC adapters. Tosh said about 41,000 machines had the fault, which can cause the plug-in AC adapter to overheat. The company has received 129 reports of overheating causing the plastic …

Laptops 3 Sep 2010, 09:05
Virgin punts cheap BlackBerry Curve

Yours for £12 a month

Virgin Media is offering the BlackBerry Curve 8520 - reviewed here - in what it claims os the "most competitive" pay-monthly package this smartphone can be found on. The phone is free and you're expected to fork out £12 a month for two years - £288 in total. If you're a Virgin telly or broadband subscriber, it'll set you …

Mobile 3 Sep 2010, 09:06
Symantec Snoop Dogg rap contest site rickrolled

#hackiswacked

Symantec's attempts to link up with Snoop Dogg to launch a cybercrime rap contest have descended into farce after it emerged that vulnerabilities with a dedicated site can be easily rickrolled. The HackIsWack.com site was reportedly taken down for maintenance on Tuesday but still harbours cross site scripting security problems …

Security 3 Sep 2010, 09:09
UN steps into Blackberry debate

Firms will just have to get used to it

The secretary general of the International Telecommunications Union has stepped into the lawful interception debate, saying that companies are just going to have to provide governments with access somehow. In an interview with the Associated Press, Hamadoun Toure said that governments had the right to demand access to …

Mobile 3 Sep 2010, 09:22
TomTom intros voice-control satnavs

Back to your routes

TomTom has introduced a set of mid-price satnavs it claims are the first of their kind to provide voice control. TomTom Via 120 Available in versions with and without bundled Live servies, the slimline Via series sport an integrated, 180°-flip mount. They also come with the latest maps, updated POI databases, speed camera …

Science 3 Sep 2010, 09:31
Samsung shows 'airfoil' luxury laptops

Apple flavoured?

More laptops have been announced at the IFA show by Samsung. This time it's the "premium" QX series - given a "airfoil design exterior" that's aluminium clad like as certain fruit-branded manufacturer's notebooks. But not entirely constructed from metal: Samsung's release suggests it's just the lid that's fashioned from …

Laptops 3 Sep 2010, 09:58
Spammers latch onto Ping to pump iPhone survey scams

Quick off the mark

Spammers have been quick off the mark in exploiting Apple's new iTunes social network to punt survey scams. Ping only launched on Wednesday but is already being deluged with scams and spam messages, some attempting to dupe surfers into wasting their time completing online surveys under the false promise that they stand a …

Security 3 Sep 2010, 10:03
Netgear launches next-gen powerline Ethernet kit

But no Gigabit performance just yet

Netgear has announced what may well be the world's first consumer networking products based on the as-yet-unratified IEEE P1910 next-gen powerline Ethernet standard. Netgear's Powerline AV 500 series comprises single-adaptor and two-adaptor starter kits. Each adaptor delivers speeds of up to 500Mb/s, Netgear said, fed through …

Hardware 3 Sep 2010, 10:21
Digital Carter returns, uncensored

Europe's stuck in the mud, says former Ofcom head, comms czar

Lord Stephen Carter, the founding head of Ofcom whose blockbuster report provided the basis for the Digital Economy Act, made a return to the public stage this week. He's at Alcatel-Lucent, and without the shackles of Thick of It-style PR minders, was actually very good value. His brutal analysis of the state of British …

Media 3 Sep 2010, 10:45
Capgemini buys big Brazilian dealer

£194m shelled out

Capgemini has bought a 55 per cent stake in Brazilian reseller CPM Braxis for £194m. Braxis has 5,500 staff and expects to turn over £375m in 2010. It specialises in financial clients, and until the buyout its largest customer, the bank Bradesco, was also its largest shareholder. Capgemini said the deal would extend its reach …

The Channel 3 Sep 2010, 10:47
ViewSonic outs Windows/Android 10in tablet

For OS fence-sitters

Here is ViewSonic's other Android-based tablet, though here the Google OS is secondary to Windows 7. Demo'd at this year's IFA consumer electronics show, the ViewPad 100 has a 10.1in, 600 x 1024 capacitive multi-touch display, 16GB of Flash storage and uses Intel's netbook-oriented 1.66GHz Atom N455 chip, needed to run …

Tablets 3 Sep 2010, 10:48
Superhuman Chinese monk does a bunk

Celeb Taoist conman on the run

A celebrity Taoist monk has gone awol after it was revealed he probably couldn't in reality sit crossed-legged under water for two hours. "Supreme Master" Li Yi, 40, attracted a following of 30,000 faithful, including the rich and famous who were willing to cough up to 9,000 yuan (£900) a week to attend "health and philosophy …

Bootnotes 3 Sep 2010, 10:51
Energizer bunny hits iPhone, BlackBerry - wirelessly

Qi gets branded products

The wireless power consortium, Qi, is celebrating the launch of a solution with a known brand - Energizer - attached, but the technology is still a long way from the mainstream. The Energizer Inductive Charger will be available in the USA next month, along with a sleeve that fits round an iPhone 3GS to Qi-enable it, and a …

Mobile 3 Sep 2010, 10:55
Apple Ping unfriends meanie Facebook

Snazzy new social thing walled off

Ping, Apple's latest foray into social networking, won't play nice with Facebook - despite the connection appearing in Steve Jobs's on-stage demonstration and in the documentation. Facebook integration was obviously planned, and references persist in the application and documentation - some early adopters even report being …

Applications 3 Sep 2010, 11:02
Glasses-less 3D TV by Xmas? Not likely, says 3D TV exec

More like 2013

Toshiba may be gearing up to release a no-specs 3D TV in Japan by the end of the year, but Philips' 3D TV development partner reckons we will have to wait longer. It doesn't reckon any vendor will have one out before 2013. So says, Maarten Tobias, CEO of Dimenco, a firm founded by four former Philips people and which is now …

Hardware 3 Sep 2010, 11:11
Google Wave washes ashore in soggy cardboard Box

Drops unwanted code in open source developer laps

Google has boxed up its unsuccessful Wave project and handed the unwanted code to open source developers. The company announced the “Wave in a Box” project yesterday, and said it had already dished up two hundred thousand lines of Wave protocol code. Mountain View plans to beef up its existing Wave server and web client …

Applications 3 Sep 2010, 11:18
HP and EMC vie for disk storage lead

IBM looking peaky

IDC's latest quarterly disk storage tracker shows EMC and HP competing for the market lead, with EMC growing faster than HP. NetApp is growing faster still but has a lot of ground to make up. IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Disk Systems Tracker looks at the total disk storage market in terms of factory revenue along with the …

Storage 3 Sep 2010, 11:32
Monster Afghan spy airship to feature quad drinking straws

Also: New vid of unsold P-791 Walrus suck-belly ship

US aero-weapons goliath Lockheed, builder of the famous P-791 airship prototype, was beaten to a half-billion-dollar deal to supply spy ships above Afghanistan earlier this year - but the firm is still marketing its P-791 technology aggressively. Meanwhile details have emerged of the powerful surveillance gear to be carried by …

Science 3 Sep 2010, 12:01
Vulture 1 Mk 2 release mech prepped for testing

Coming soon: Hypobaric chamber - The Revisiting

The Paper Aircraft Released Into Space (PARIS) team is preparing to turn down the pressure with a second visit to QinetiQ's hypobaric chamber. You'll recall that our first attempt to put together a pressure-operated release mechanism for the Vulture 1 aircraft didn't quite run on rails. Undaunted, we stuck with our plan to …

SPB 3 Sep 2010, 12:20
Apple TV: Third time unlucky, Mr Jobs

Comment Going down for the last time

This is the day that Apple lost the war for Over The Top content, not only in America, but globally. The winner can’t yet be announced, but this was the shot that Apple had to get it right, and to us it’s bungled it. We got the same story from Apple, Amazon and Sony all at the same time and a similar one from Google. And while …

Media 3 Sep 2010, 12:47
Ex-spook jailed for selling secrets

12 months for CD & USB shenanigans

Ex-MI6 worker Daniel Houghton has been sentenced to 12 months in prison for unlawfully disclosing top secret material, in breach of the Official Secrets Act. Houghton, 25 years old and previously living in Hoxton, London, worked for MI6 for just under two years. He left the organisation with Top Secret files which he then …

Government 3 Sep 2010, 12:50
TomTom drums up upgrade for iPhone app

Follow that photo!

An update for the TomTom app on the iPhone is "coming soon". That's what TomTom is saying today at the IFA consumer tech show in Berlin. Version 1.5 is optimised for iOS 4 and contains one very show-offy feature - Navigate-to-photo. Users can "easily navigate to a location by selecting a photo stored in the iPhone gallery. …

Phones 3 Sep 2010, 13:38
German gov pooh-poohs biometric ID card hack

Nicht ein biggie

German hackers successfully used off-the-shelf kit to extract personal data from the federal government's supposedly secure ID cards, but the government has downplayed the significance of the attack. The biometric ID cards store a scan of a user's fingerprints along with a six-digit PIN that can be used to digitally sign …

Government 3 Sep 2010, 13:52
Paul Allen's patent madness not worth single penny

Open...and Shut Execution wins. Not ideas

Businesses aren't built on ideas. They're built on execution. Google didn't win because it was the first to the search market. It won because it did search better than anyone else, and devised an ingenious way to monetize it. This, more than anything else, is what makes the US patent system, overrun by patent trolls, so broken …

Software 3 Sep 2010, 14:00
IT workers getting back to work - sort of

June and July not as bad as all that

The US Department of Labor kicked out its monthly jobs report, and there's some good news for once. First of all, private sector employers added 67,000 jobs last month, although the overall economy shed 54,000 jobs as the federal government winds down the 2010 census and lays off temporary workers hired to count heads. The …

Financial News 3 Sep 2010, 14:27
Google's Schmidt satirised as privacy pervert

Run for your lives, kids. The ice cream man is coming!

Eric Schmidt has been portrayed as a depraved privacy pervert by the US-based ConsumerWatchdog.org, which is running an advert in New York’s Times Square that mocks the Google boss. The ads are part of CW’s campaign that calls on Congress to bring in a national “Do Not Track Me” list. CW, which routinely grumbles about Google …

Law 3 Sep 2010, 14:42
Wells Fargo hops NFC train

Joins BoA and Visa in trials

Wells Fargo is joining the effort spearheaded by Visa to help NFC break in the difficult American market. The addition of Wells Fargo, reported by Reuters, means that three US banks - the others being Bank of America and US Bancorp - are now working with Visa to proximity-payment enable mobile phones, bypassing the network …

Mobile 3 Sep 2010, 14:46
Desktop pleasure, desktop pain

Evolution and management of the client computing environment

Let's face it, the desktop and laptop environment is one of the major points at which the rubber meets the road when it comes to business computing. From a user perspective, the machine they use is the gateway to IT, and its performance and reliability plays a big part in determining levels of satisfaction. But if you’re …

Desktop Management 3 Sep 2010, 14:47
Sony debuts touchscreen personal camcorder at IFA

Bloggie gets touchy-feely

Sony had given its Bloggie video camera line the touchscreen treatment. The upcoming Bloggie Touch sports a 4in LCD on the back and a 12.8Mp camera on the front also capable of capturing 1080p video at 30f/s or 720p at 60f/s. Sony will bundle a clip on adaptor to all the cam to take full 360° shots. There's 8GB of on-board …

Hardware 3 Sep 2010, 14:59
Sharp shades in plans for quad-colour 3D TVs

And a snazzy 3D BD player too

Sharp has introduced its first 3D TV - and it's based on the Japanese giant's Quattron four-colours-per-pixel technology. If you want anything smaller than a 60in set, you'll have have to wait until after Christmas for it. While the first Quattron 3D TV will go on sale in the UK next month, Sharp said, smaller models won't …

Hardware 3 Sep 2010, 15:13
Joy Division designer tackles England footie strip

'I've lost the ball again...'

Football minnows Bulgaria face an uphill struggle in their forthcoming clash with England, because not only will they confront some of the most talented, hard-working and successful players in the history of the beautiful game, but their opponents will be clad in a new strip created by former Joy Division designer Peter Saville …

Bootnotes 3 Sep 2010, 15:24
Is a HAMR blow falling on Seagate?

The opposite of NIL desperandum

Seagate may be facing the abandonment of a favoured future technology as the price for hard disk drive (HDD) industry unity. The HDD industry is coming to a post-PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording) technology crossroads. The two ways ahead are both hugely expensive and the industry trade body, IDEMA, is setting up the …

Storage 3 Sep 2010, 15:29
IFA 2010: Complete Coverage

The key products, the top stories

Tablets ViewSonic outs Windows/Android 10in tablet Toshiba touts £329 Folio Android tablet Samsung specs up 7in Android tablet Sony updates e-book readers Archos announces five Android tablets TV Sharp shades in plans for quad-colour 3D TVs Glasses-less 3D TV by Xmas? Not likely, says 3D TV exec Toshiba launches telly- …

Hardware
Gordon Brown joins World Wide Web Foundation

That's Doctor Brown to you, says unemployed PM

Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown has buddied up with the Greatest Living Briton by becoming a director of the World Wide Web Foundation. The venerable Dr Brown, as he is repeatedly referred to in a statement released by the WWWF yesterday, will advise the foundation on ways to bring poor communities and world leaders closer …

Software 3 Sep 2010, 15:51
Acer to chip up home Nas box

EasyStore gets faster, more power hungry CPU

Acer has said it'll update its EasyStore four-drive Nas box later this month with a new Intel Atom processor. The EasyStore H341 has the 1.66GHz Atom D410 on board - its predecessor, the H340 - reviewed here - had the 1.60GHz Atom 230, now officially end-of-lifed by the chip maker. That should speed up the box's Windows Home …

Hardware 3 Sep 2010, 15:55
All the week's Reg Hardware reviews

Can you handle the truth?

In the past seven days, Reg Hardware reviewed many products from the worlds of consumer electronics and mobile communications. If you missed anything, here are those products again. Mobile Acer Stream Android smartphone PMP trickle-down effect Computing Samsung X125 11.6in notebook AMD's Athlon II Neo gets a …

Data Center 3 Sep 2010, 15:57
iHome announces AirPlay speaker

First of its kind?

There's pretty darn little to say about this box, but the headline fact: it supports - or, rather, will support - Apple's AirPlay media streaming technology. Bowers & Wilkins, Denon, Marantz and JBL have all said they too will support AirPlay, but have yet to make product announcements. Not so iHome which has revealed this …

Hardware 3 Sep 2010, 16:28
Oz school in homosexual kookaburra rumpus

~~Gay~~ Fun your life must be...

An Oz primary school head is taking a bit of stick after insisting that kiddies should not follow the exact letter of Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree. Garry Martin of Melbourne's Lepage Primary decided it would probably be better if nippers substituted the word "fun" for "gay" in the famous ditty, penned in 1934 by Marion …

Media 3 Sep 2010, 17:05
Nigerian man gets 12 years for $1.3m 419 scam

Hunting 'mugu' in America

A Nigerian man has been sentenced to more than 12 years in US prison for orchestrating an advance payment scam that bilked victims out of more than $1.3m. Okpako Mike Diamreyan, 31, was ordered to serve 151 months in federal prison and pay a little more than $1m in restitution to the 67 victims he was was convicted of scamming …

Security 3 Sep 2010, 18:58
Unity – iPhone code swap approved by Jobs (for now)

Un-Flash eyes world of Google

Steve Jobs forbids you from building iPhone applications with a language other than Objective C, C, or C++. If that other language is Adobe Flash. What if it's not Adobe Flash? Are you still forbidden? The answer is that there is no answer. Apparently, Jobs has yet to make up his mind. Unity is a cross-platform game …

Developer 3 Sep 2010, 19:14
Doctor Who goes to the Proms

Music to watch monsters go by

Love Doctor Who, love the theme music - this is hardwired into the DNA of most Brits. So clever old BBC leaned on this genetic flaw in July to work up a bit of a musical education for the masses with the Doctor Who Proms. On Monday, 6 September at 8.30pm the concert is broadcast on BBC 3 and on iPlayer soon afterwards, we …

Hardware 3 Sep 2010, 19:28
Ubuntu 'Maverick Meerkat' erects own App Store

Review Beta mongoose flaunts new face

Ubuntu fans, fire up your virtual machines. The beta release of Ubuntu 10.10 is here. Maverick Meerkat, as this release is known, is actually several weeks ahead of the original schedule, and that means Ubuntu 10.10 is on track for its final release October 10. We wouldn't suggest using the beta in a production environment, …

Operating Systems 3 Sep 2010, 20:06
It's alive! Duke Nukem Forever breaks out of vapour trail

Balls of steel, baby, balls of steel!

Duke Nukem Forever is the video games world's equivalent of the flying car: mothballed in the garage. Twelve years in the making, this infamous slice of vapourware is set to for release in 2011. Really. Take-Two Interactive, the publisher, even issued a press release today announcing its impending release so it must be true …

Games 3 Sep 2010, 21:46
Google faces antitrust investigation in Texas

EU complaint echoed in US

Google is facing an antitrust investigation in Texas over claims the company unfairly manipulated results on its search engine. The news was first reported on Friday by Search Engine Land, which said it received a tip that the investigation was underway. Search Engine Land said that Google confirmed the investigation, and five …

Media 3 Sep 2010, 23:18
Washington Supremes deliver death sentence to betting site

Betcha.com craps out

Washington state's highest court has delivered a fatal blow to a website that billed itself as a person-to-person betting platform that connected people who wanted to make wagers. Betcha.com attempted to bypass the state's prohibition against unlicensed gambling operations by giving the losers the option of backing out of their …

Law 3 Sep 2010, 23:31