The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Feeds

24th September 2010 Archive

Browse by publication date, or search the site.

  • Spear phisher targeted eBay employees

    Updated Fake ATM scam alleged, too

    This article has been updated to correct erroneous information included in DIICOT's press release and an earlier blog post by Gary Warner. Romanian authorities said they have detained a man suspected of absconding with more than $3m through a series of computer crimes that included phishing attacks that targeted eBay employees …

    Crime 24 Sep 00:03

  • Nvidia boss: cloud, ¡Si! Intel, ¡No!

    GTC The times they are a-changin' — big time

    Nvidia chief exec Jen-Hsun Huang sees the computer industry on the cusp of radical changes. And with his company now about 65 per cent devoted to parallel computing, you can easily guess which technology he believes will drive that transformation — and which company he believes will lose. "Whatever capability you think you …

    HPC 24 Sep 04:52

  • Coalition's quango hit list revealed

    BBC World Service, Carbon Trust await their fates

    A hit list of 177 quangos which the coalition government plans to abolish in order to save money has been revealed. The list includes British Nuclear Fuels, British Waterways, the Commission for Integrated Transport, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority and the National Policing Improvement Agency. A further four …

    Government 24 Sep 08:31

  • Fraunhofer boffins develop 'Titanium foam' endoskeletal implants

    Vorsprung durch bendo-Materialforschung

    Titanium - it's everywhere these days, long having spread beyond its initial uses in aerospace. Fruitbite laptops are cased in it, high-end tools and cutlery are made from it, there's even jewellery. The latest in foamalloy endoskeletons. Titanium alloy is also used for medical implants, and is well thought of in that role …

    Science 24 Sep 09:00

  • When double D isn't enough - go 3D

    GTC Video Blog Stunning and flinch-inducing

    The inflatable black cone in the corridor of the GPU Technology Conference, along with the table piled high with 3D glasses, was a dead giveaway. Ok, so it's yet another 3D demonstration. These are fairly common at this conference and the first keynote address was full of astounding graphic routines - all of them in stunning 3D …

    HPC Blog 24 Sep 09:08

  • Facebook blames outage on internal config flaw

    Cascading failure feedback loop calamity

    Facebook has published a detailed explanation of an internal configuration flaw that left the site unavailable for around two and a half hours overnight - the social network's worst downtime in four years. The outage stemmed from a cascading series of problems involving an error correction system that feed into a feedback loop …

    IT Director 24 Sep 09:16

  • Tribunal orders DWP to release IT contract details

    Disclosure in public interest

    The Information Tribunal has ordered a government department to publish most of the till-now withheld details of a major IT contract, after ruling that the public interest was served better by disclosure than secrecy. The First Tier Tribunal has said (pdf) that most of the withheld material in a contract between the Department …

    Government 24 Sep 09:26

  • School caretaker jailed for fitting up colleague

    Put abuse images on laptop, call police

    A school caretaker has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for a "wickedly evil and vile plot" to get a workmate sacked by putting child sex abuse images on his laptop. Neil Weiner, 40, put images on fellow caretaker Eddie Thompson's laptop and sent a CD of images to police which he claimed to have found on his workmate's …

    Law 24 Sep 09:33

  • Vodafone secures email-flashing barn door

    Horse settled down, bringing up foals

    Vodafone has secured the security breach that allowed anyone with a bit of time on their hands to collect subscribers' email addresses and phone numbers. The hole came to light on Wednesday and allowed anyone to enter a phone number and get the corresponding email address, or enter a valid user name to get both the email and …

    Mobile 24 Sep 10:01

  • Daily Mail savages Data Protection Act over stolen dog

    Maybe a bit of sense would have helped?

    The Daily Mail is laying into the Data Protection Act again, this time accusing the legislation of keeping a stolen dog from its rightful owner. Dave Moorhouse claims his dog, which had been implanted with an identity chip, was stolen in 2007, but that he recently received a letter from Animal Care (which manages the pooch ID …

    Law 24 Sep 10:31

  • Dell getting serious about networking

    Recruits network body builder

    Dell has recruited a Cisco vet as the first VP of a boosted networking division. Until now Dell has not had a separate executive focus on networking, having lumped it in with storage under VP and storage business general manager Darren Thomas. Dario Zamarian, a 20-year industry vet, was VP and general manager of the access …

    Data Networking 24 Sep 10:36

  • Sony Ericsson delays X10 Android 2.1 update

    We need a couple more weeks, OK?

    Sony Ericsson has revised its roll-out schedule for Android 2.1 updates to its X10 smartphones. The news is not good, but the delay might have been longer, we guess. According to the company, "we need a couple of more weeks before we are ready" to release the updates. The update was originally planned for "late Q3" - about …

    reghardware 24 Sep 10:37

  • RUSE

    Review Time for some tactics

    “Time is everything,” said Horatio Nelson. “Five minutes make the difference between victory and defeat.” Risky move It's a war quote repeated several times in RUSE's loading screens. But it could just as easily apply to game release schedules. Arriving just a few weeks after Starcraft II on the PC, and almost …

    reghardware 24 Sep 10:46

  • Channel islanders attack Street View car

    Another blow to Google's Domesday Book

    Two of Google's Street View cars have been vandalised on the Channel Island of Guernsey. The camera-cars were on their second visit to the island. They were originally due in May but were delayed by the discovery that the cars were slurping up data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks, the BBC reports. The cars had their tyres …

    Law 24 Sep 10:48

  • CIA used 'illegal, inaccurate code to target kill drones'

    'They want to kill people with software that doesn't work'

    The CIA is implicated in a court case in which it's claimed it used an illegal, inaccurate software "hack" to direct secret assassination drones in central Asia. The target of the court action is Netezza, the data warehousing firm that IBM bid $1.7bn for on Monday. The case raises serious questions about the conduct of Netezza …

    Storage 24 Sep 11:12

  • Microsoft splatters Hotmail with even more updates

    That's a lotta lipstick

    Microsoft has plastered Hotmail with yet more updates, after customers continued to complain about the firm’s recent shaky overhaul of its free web email service. The software vendor didn’t want to draw too much attention to those gripes, by instead saying it had responded to user “feedback”. But since the re-launch of …

    Applications 24 Sep 11:28

  • Second piracy threat lawyers withstand DDoS attack

    Updated Attack? What attack?

    The attack on a second law firm with a history of involvement in copyright litigation has turned out to be something of a damp squib. Anonymous extended its fight against organisations supporting anti-piracy efforts to solicitors Davenport Lyons on Thursday night, with plans to flood its website with spurious traffic and carry …

    Enterprise Security 24 Sep 11:31

  • Dell, Samsung Android iPad rivals demo'd

    Video Tablet tasters posted online

    For your lunchtime viewing pleasure, we have a couple of items of interest to those of you with an eye on the emerging Android tablet biz. First up, we have a segment from Michael Dell's OracleWorld keynote, which, as we reported yesterday, involved the CEO whipping out the upcoming 7in Streak tablet. Next, here's …

    reghardware 24 Sep 11:43

  • PGI compiles on GPU train

    GTC Video Blog Compile this, Intel!

    The Portland Group (PGI) came in for a fair amount of attention at the 2010 GPU Technology Conference in San Jose. The company announced that it will offer a CUDA C compiler for garden variety x86 based systems. This will allow developers to use the same code they developed using CUDA for GPUs (albeit recompiled) on x86 boxes - …

    HPC Blog 24 Sep 11:44

  • ConLibs get shifty on spam and behavioural ads

    Consultation shifty in the extreme

    Last week, the government published its ideas as to how it would implement the changes to EU Directive 2002/58/EC. In relation to spammers and behavioural advertising it has decided to keep the low privacy standards that were acceptable to the previous New Labour government. The changes discussed in the consultation (pdf) are …

    Law 24 Sep 11:55

  • Nokia E5 Qwertyphone

    Review Maps, snaps and office apps

    Under Nokia's new naming regime all future handsets will fall into one of four series; X for entertainment, N for high-end smartphones, C for consumer handsets and E for business and enterprise. Each handset's place within its series will be denoted by a number between 1 and 10. Mid-range smartie: Nokia's E5 Given that …

    reghardware 24 Sep 12:00

  • Microsoft injects more juice into Office Web Apps

    90% of docs still created on desktop, not in cloud

    Microsoft claimed yesterday that more than 20 million people have accessed its Office Web Apps service in the past 100 days. As a result of that attention, the company has responded to customer comments about the product and added some new features to its cloudy productivity suite. It’s added a tool that allows customers to …

    Applications 24 Sep 12:08

  • Pirate Bay appeal finally drops anchor in court

    Timbers to be shivered next week

    The Pirate Bay appeal will finally have its day in court next week, nearly a year and a half on from the high-profile trial that saw the four operators of the notorious BitTorrent site hit with a guilty verdict. The Svea Court of Appeal in Sweden will hear the appeal from Peter Sunde, Carl Lundström, Frederik Neij and Gottfrid …

    Music and Media 24 Sep 12:27

  • Ellison smacks lips over chips, NetApp

    Oracle execs flutter kimonos in front of analysts

    Oracle boss Larry Ellison said he'd love to have the 60 per cent of NetApp's business that plugs NetApp boxes into Oracle software, hinting that a NetApp purchase could be on his mind. The Oracle boss has also hinted that a chip maker could be on his buy list, as he looks to build-out his stack-in-a-box vision. He was …

    Storage 24 Sep 12:33

  • How do you copy 60m files?

    Sysadmin blog Apart from telling someone else to do it, that is

    Recently I copied 60 million files from one Windows file server to another. Tools used to move files from system to another are integrated into every operating system, and there are third party options too. The tasks they perform are so common that we tend to ignore their limits. Many systems administrators are guilty of not …

    Desktop Mgmt Blog 24 Sep 12:48

  • Moms stand firm against antenna madness

    Won't someone think of the children

    The American town of Hempstead, Long Island, has decreed that phone masts can't be placed within 1500 feet of children, making coverage nearly impossible. The restrictions specify a 1500-foot exclusion zone around homes, day-care centres, schools and churches - all the kinds of places where one might want mobile phone coverage …

    Mobile 24 Sep 13:10

  • 419ers take council for £100k

    Lads from Lagos lure Lanarkshire

    A Scottish local authority lost £102,000 to an African gang after being duped by a targeted letter scam. The letter, received at the end of July, purported to come from one of South Lanarkshire Council's legitimate suppliers, and requested that payments be made into a different account. The finance department complied, …

    Crime 24 Sep 13:39

  • The BSA's fading twentieth-century piracy fight

    Open...and Shut Misreading the data

    The Business Software Alliance (BSA) has been wringing its hands about software piracy since 1988, but victory may soon be at hand. No, not because pesky pirates are about to come clean, but rather because the BSA's twentieth-century battle is about to get steamrollered by twenty-first century software practices. The web and …

    Software 24 Sep 14:00

  • Mimecast digs its way into the information bank

    Analysis Outside the vault box thinking

    Mimecast is recasting itself as an information banker and looking for new types of data it could store and new ways to mine the banked information. The company is a UK-based concern offering e-mail as a service and working to add the storage of unstructured files and SharePoint information to what is an e-mail capture, …

    Storage 24 Sep 14:25

  • Sex Party proposes new classification system for Oz

    Non-violent erotica category

    The Australian Sex Party (ASP) today issued a direct challenge to what it sees as Australia’s narrow, repressive and intolerant regulations governing the censorship of erotic material. In the process, it may find it has set the ball rolling on a debate with global ramifications. The Sex Party proposals are wide-ranging and …

    Government 24 Sep 14:26

  • Apple's 11.6in MacBook Air release imminent?

    Manufacturer ramping up as skinny laptop shrinks

    Apple's previously rumoured 11.6in MacBook Air may be nearing release. Industry moles cited by DigiTimes say that Apple's contract manufacturing partner Quanta will ship up to half a million "11.6in MacBooks" out of its factories by the end of the year. It seems unlikely that Apple would offer an 11.6in version of its plastic …

    reghardware 24 Sep 14:41

  • Twitter joke appeal adjourned

    Justice delayed

    Paul Chambers, the Twitter joke marytr, began his appeal against a widely ridiculed conviction for sending a message "threatening" to blow Doncaster airport "sky high" on Friday. Chambers, 27, got into all sorts of trouble after posting an ill-conceived Twitter update on 6 January, days before he was due to fly over to Belfast …

    Law 24 Sep 17:35

  • VoIP hacker sentenced to 10 years

    10 million minutes hijacked

    A Venezuelan citizen on Friday was sentenced to 10 years in US federal prison for hacking into the networks of telecommunications companies and then routing millions of minutes of voice over IP calls over their systems. Edwin Andres Pena, 27, admitted in February that he pocketed more than $1m in the scam, in which he posed as …

    Crime 24 Sep 18:21

  • Google Percolator – global search jolt sans MapReduce comedown

    The machine that brews the Caffeine

    Google Caffeine — the revamped search infrastructure recently rolled out across Google's worldwide network of data centers — is based on a distributed data-processing system known as Percolator. Designed by Google and, until now, jealously guarded by Google, Percolator is a platform for "incremental processing" — a means of …

    HPC 24 Sep 18:49

  • Design mavericks show and tell

    Video: 100% Design Where else to get your salmon-skinned BMW X6?

    Smaller than last year, but still beautifully formed, 100% Design is back again, the highlight in the London Design Festival itinerary. Here, the way we do life is rethought with lateral takes on home and work environments. Prototypes abound with design concepts taking shape and new materials fashioned to deliver anything from …

    reghardware 24 Sep 19:32

  • Most smartphoners don't give a flip about apps

    Bloatware or otherwise

    Apple has over 250K offerings in its iTunes App Store, and the Android Market around 80K — but a new survey has shown that only 12.4 per cent of handset users cite the number of available apps as an influence on their decision of which phone to buy. What's more, a large percentage of smartphone users couldn't give a fig as to …

    Mobile 24 Sep 19:48

  • Apple in 873-page legal claim to word 'Pod'

    For Jobs i's only

    Apple really, really, really wants exclusive rights to the word “Pod,” in names for tech products, the company has argued in an 873-page legal brief filed earlier this week. Steve Jobs & Co submitted the voluminous document in a dispute with Sector Labs, a startup that's developing a projector called the Video Pod, Wired.com …

    Music and Media 24 Sep 20:37

  • Google 'recently extended' Apple search deal

    Schmidt: Our biggest competitor is...Bing

    Google "recently extended" its search deal with Apple, according to a new interview with Mountain View boss Eric Schmidt. Speaking with US TV personality Charlie Rose in the pages of BusinessWeek, Schmidt mentioned the extended deal in passing. "Apple (AAPL) is a company we both partner and compete with, " he said. "We do a …

    Music and Media 24 Sep 21:29

  • IBM 'one atom, one bit' storage breakthrough

    Is that a terabyte in your pocket, or...?

    If you've been hankering for a multi-terabyte USB thumb drive, you may be in luck: IBM scientists have developed a technique that could — eventually — help increase data-storage densities by orders of magnitude. The breakthrough, announced Friday, allows researchers to measure how long a bit of information can be retained in …

    Storage 24 Sep 22:10

  • Apple now world's second-largest company

    Only $47bn short of oily #1

    Apple is now the world's second-largest company, in terms of market value. In after-hours trading on the US's tech-heavy NASDAQ market, Apple's share value hovered around $293 per share. At that level, Cupertino's market value comes in at over $267bn, surpassing the former number two, PetroChina, which is valued at a paltry $ …

    Financial News 24 Sep 22:57

  • Men sentenced to prison for Comcast hijack

    18 months in the slammer

    Two of the three men convicted of commandeering the comcast.net domain name have been sentenced to 18 months in federal prison. Christopher Allen Lewis, 20, of Delaware and Michael Paul Nebel, 28, of Michigan were also ordered to pay $89,778.13 in restitution each, according to federal prosecutors in Philadelphia. Part of a …

    Crime 24 Sep 22:58