26th October 2010 Archive

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Adobe enlists tablet and cake makers to rally Flash

Adobe MAX Apple claims of Flash death greatly exaggerated

Adobe Systems is fighting back against Steve Jobs' claims that its beloved Flash is sliding into inevitable irrelevance against HTML5 on the web. Adobe's chief technology officer Kevin Lynch previewed a bevy of Flash-friendly tablets from Samsung, Malata, and Research in Motion, and innovations in and around Flash targeting …

Applications 26 Oct 00:16
Intel stretches hypervisor across Xeon 5600, Freescale

Multi-core ARM chip support due next year

Last week, chip maker and operating system wannabe Intel revved up its Wind River Linux with a version 4 update, putting a piping hot and steamy fresh Linux kernel at the heart of its cross-platform, embedded Linux platform. This week, the related Wind River Hypervisor is tweaked with a 1.2 release. Wind River was already on …

Virtualization 26 Oct 00:31
iOS bug unlocks iPhones sans password

Making calls from locked iPhone 4s

A recently discovered bug in Apple's iOS 4.1 allows users to make iPhone calls without first entering a passcode. The bug means there is no way to prevent unauthorized people from using the devices in the event they're lost or stolen. All that's required to unlock a phone is to press the Emergency Call button, enter a non- …

Security 26 Oct 03:00
EU to lift flight ban on carry-on liquids

Duty Free shop owners rejoice

The European Union has certified a liquid-detection security scanner that will allow that £20 1.75 liter bottle of Bombay Sapphire you bought at the Duty Free shop to come aboard your flight in your carry-on bag. "The next generation of X-ray technology has arrived, with a market-ready machine that can detect liquid threats," …

Government 26 Oct 04:00
Firefox engine speeds past Chrome after Jager shot

Mozilla claims (a) SunSpider crown

Mozilla has claimed the fastest SunSpider scores on the planet, after internal tests showed that its latest Firefox JavaScript engine — which includes the new JagerMonkey extension — outperforms both Google Chrome's V8 engine and Apple Safari's Nitro. Director of community development Asa Dotzler made the claim on Monday …

Applications 26 Oct 04:00
Judge tosses lawsuit from copyright troll

Only 156 more to go

A federal judge has summarily shot down a lawsuit filed by a copyright enforcer that's filed more than 150 complaints against websites for quoting all or parts of articles published by a Las Vegas newspaper. The order dismissing Righthaven's lawsuit is significant because it lends credence to arguments leveled by critics that …

Music and Media 26 Oct 05:00
Ms. Gates: 'Bill does not use a Mac'

Zune child abuse continues

Bill's better half, Melinda Gates, is no fan of Apple's magical and revolutionary tablet. "Of course not," Ms. Gates told The New York Times when asked if she owned an iPad. There's no love for Apple products at Chez Portes. When asked about the persistent urban myth that her hubby uses an Apple laptop, the co-chairwoman of …

Mobile 26 Oct 06:00
Motorola Backflip Android smartphone

Review Twisted thinking?

Motorola's embrace of Android has certainly got the company's creative juices flowing. For the Backflip it has eschewed the traditional slide-out keyboard design and cooked up something altogether new. Star turn? Motorola's Backflip The name Backflip perfectly describes the new form factor. Hold the phone in landscape with …

reghardware 26 Oct 07:00
House and Heroes tip up on Virgin on Demand

More shows when you want

Virgin Media has bought in a bunch of past seasons of popular US shows - including House, Heroes, The Office (US) and 30 Rock - to its TV On demand service. The programmes are also available in HD and also online and on mobile. from December 1. And they arrive courtesy of a deal signed by Virgin with NBC. Virgin says it …

reghardware 26 Oct 07:49
Oracle's billboard bonker gets new job

Infor a penny, etc

Charles Phillips, ex-Oracle president, has got himself a new job at Infor. Phillips came to the world's attention when his mistress rented a bunch of billboards in New York, San Francisco and Atlanta. The adverts, complete with the message "You are my soulmate forever", were apparently designed to show the significance of the …

Financial News 26 Oct 09:18
Ofcom caught between picts and luvvies on 600MHz

3D TV, mobile broadband or give it to Scotland?

Ofcom has published responses to its digital dividend consultation, but respondents seem more interested in feathering their own nests than contributing to the future of broadcasting. This consultation only covers the lower part of the dividend, and the interleaved spectrum (white spaces), asking stakeholders what the …

Mobile 26 Oct 09:23
Twittering MP escapes with caution

#allegedelectoralfraud

Kerry McCarthy, Labour MP for Bristol East, has escaped prosecution for alleged electoral fraud. McCarthy has been cautioned by the police after tweeting the results of some postal votes in her constituency before the General Election. It is against the law to reveal votes before elections in case it influences the result. …

Government 26 Oct 09:24
DARPA fashions miracle robotic attachment from balloon, coffee

Sucking makes rubber-clad appendage go hard

Topflight robotics boffins in the States have developed a nifty new accessory that no droid should be without - a squashy "gripper" manipulator which can be fashioned out of ground coffee and a party balloon. Credit: John Amend The manipulator works by pressing the soft balloon full of loose coffee grounds down on the …

Science 26 Oct 09:33
Dutch police behead Bredolab botnet

Server slaughter

Dutch police and net security organisations have teamed up to dismantle many of the command and control servers associated with the Bredolab botnet. The Bredolab Trojan, which has spyware components that allow criminals to capture bank login details and other sensitive information from compromised machines, has infected an …

Malware 26 Oct 09:53
Amazon gives away freebie baby virty data centres

Retailing giant hopes to turn newbie moochers into paying customers

Retailing giant and utility computing pioneer Amazon is betting that virtual servers, storage, and networking capacity are like potato chips: you can't just have one. Perhaps Amazon Web Services hopes that users will get hooked on cloudy infrastructure and won't be able to get off. At any rate, starting on 1 November, Amazon is …

Servers 26 Oct 10:03
Digg slices and dices staff

Cost-cutting ahead

News and link-sharing site Digg has cut over a third of its staff. The company lost its chief revenue officer on Monday. Chief executive Matt Williams emailed staff to explain the firm needed to make serious cost cuts going into 2011. The firm brings in revenues of around $15m and hopes the cuts will push it to profit in the …

Financial News 26 Oct 10:25
KPMG to be probed over BAE accountancy

Auditor-auditors prep microscope, eye corporate ass

UK-headquartered but nowadays US-centred arms multinational BAE Systems faces negative headlines once again, as it has been announced that accountancy firm KPMG is to be investigated by UK regulators regarding its past performance as BAE's auditor. The Accountancy and Actuarial Discipline Board, the UK regulator covering …

Financial News 26 Oct 10:50
ARM still raking it in, and not just in phones

1.5bn devices to taunt Intel with

ARM has had a good quarter, powering 900 million mobile phones and 600 million other devices sold in the last three months as it expands beyond the pocket and into the world. Revenues are increasing at a similar rate as ARM's Q3 results show, though this quarter's royalties are based on the last quarter's shipments. Total …

Mobile 26 Oct 10:55
Wi-Fi starts getting chummy with its peers

Sinks teeth into Bluetooth market

The Wi-Fi Alliance has started certifying devices as being compatible with the new Wi-Fi Direct protocol. The protocol allows devices to connect to each other without an access point. The technically literate might cry that ad-hoc connections have been part of Wi-Fi since its inception, but this is different - although not …

Wireless 26 Oct 11:01
US builds net privacy brains trust

Your right to privacy vs spooks' right to snoop

The US National Science and Technology Council has set up a committee to deal with internet privacy and how it can be balanced against the needs of the government and law enforcement. The group will look at global attitudes and laws in order to draw up US policy and possible legislation. It aims to create a common set of …

Government 26 Oct 11:06
Great Scot! Wi-Fi on the Glasgow Subway

Metro networking

Glasgow Subway is Wi-Fi-ed up, a first for a British underground railway. The service is supplied by hotspot provider The Cloud and is available in all 15 stations and platforms. But no tunnels. Commuters are initially offered fifteen minutes free and then must buy on standard subscription terms - £2 for a 24 hour period. O2 …

reghardware 26 Oct 11:28
HDS adds ROBO on-ramp to content platform

Multi-tenants can sub-let now too

Hitachi Data Systems has added remote office cacheing facilities to its multi-tenant Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) archive product, and allowed tenants to sub-let with individual archive policies for the sub-lettees. HCP is HDS's archive platform, with up to 40 billion objects stored in an Ethernet cluster of ingest and …

Storage 26 Oct 11:30
NetApp and Fujitsu set up one-stop-shop after dedupe deal

Partners say they're a 'one-stop shop' - but only in EMEA

Fujitsu and NetApp have extended a reseller partnership, marking the effective end of the Japanese firm's EMC storage hardware relationship. NetApp will now resell Fujitsu's CS800 S2 Data Protection Appliance, but only in 22 EMEA countries, while Fujitsu will spread its NetApp resales to more countries around the globe. …

Channel Register 26 Oct 11:38
iPhoto 11 ate my library, say users

Upgrade glitch worries prompt fanboi rush to backup and rebuild

Apple fans upgrading to the latest version of iPhoto are finding that their photos are being gobbled up and spat out to god knows where. Users have reported albums being reordered, messed up, and in some instances apparently eaten up, either in part or completely. Unhappy snappers have taken to the vendor's support forums to …

Applications 26 Oct 11:46
Equality Act causes logistics nightmare

Opinion Public bodies scramble to meet demands of new legislation

Public authorities are having to gamble on how to try to meet the impossible demands of new equalities legislation. Authorities will have to try to second-guess a consultation process if they are to have any chance of meeting an April deadline. Most of the Equality Act came into force earlier this month. One key part, though, …

Government 26 Oct 11:59
Samsung Omnia 7

Review Big display for Redmond's redial

Samsung's Omnia 7 is one of a handful of Windows Phone 7 devices that have gone on sale this month, and is certainly one of the largest owing to its impressive 4in touchscreen. Yet, there's something about the 1980s to the look of this phone. Quite a handful: Samsung's Omnia 7 Maybe it’s the bevelled edges with their sharp …

reghardware 26 Oct 12:00
Schmidt: I 'misspoke' over Street View

Gaffe-prone search kingpin puts Opel in reverse

Google CEO Eric Schmidt today said he "misspoke" when he suggested that people who don't like pictures of their homes appearing on Street View should "just move". A Google spokeswoman contacted The Register this morning with further musings from her gaffe-prone boss. "As you can see from the unedited interview, my comments …

Music and Media 26 Oct 12:15
Botnet-harbouring survey fails to accounts for sinkholes

Updated Let the right one in

Damballa has pulled its original blog post after admitting that the methodology of its botnet survey was incorrect. The security firm's analysis of active, malicious botnet command and control servers ignored the existence of deliberately established sinkholes, rendering its findings misleading. In particular it misrepresented …

Crime 26 Oct 12:38
eBay opens Instant Sale for lazy gadget sellers

Gets jiggy with used traders

eBay is rolling out a secondhand buying service called Instant Sale for people who can't be bothered to list their unwanted gadgets for auction or through the classifieds. The online tat bazaar has teamed up with some unnamed dealers in the US for the service and is accepting laptops, phones, tablets, PDAs, digital cameras, …

reghardware 26 Oct 12:39
BBC Trust: Unsupportable opinions are OK

Mandybill bias was just an opinion, says broadcaster

The BBC Trust has partially upheld a complaint against The Culture Show on the Digital Economy Act - but strangely ignored the most serious allegations of inaccuracy and bias. The complaint was made by UK Music chief executive and former Undertone Feargal Sharkey about a 10-minute film broadcast on 4 February, and featured …

Music and Media 26 Oct 12:39
Expedia and friends team up to stop Google's travel play

ITA buy would be anti-competitive

A group of travel sites are teaming up to fight Google's proposed takeover of ITA Software. The group calls itself Fairsearch.org and includes Expedia, Kayak, tripadvisor, travelocity and Sabre Holdings. Google's $700m bid for the firm has already attracted interest from the Department of Justice. Google said in August it had …

Applications 26 Oct 12:47
UK border police seize £500k from Nigerians' hand luggage

Be careful when opening the overhead lockers...

The UK's border police were patting themselves on the back today after seizing over half a million quid in cash from the hand luggage of two Nigerian men at Heathrow Airport. Border Agency officers discovered the cash as the men tried to enter the UK through Heathrow last week, after flying in from Paris. The men said the …

Policing 26 Oct 12:52
Tesco's iPhone app gets barcode reader

Bip. Bip. Neeep. Bip.

Tesco has added the ability to read barcodes to its mobile shopping app - just as it did in 1999, only without bankrupting shoppers. Back in 1999, shoppers were asked to pay more than £200 for a Palm Pilot touting a cumbersome barcode wand, so that super-early adopters could use it to populate their shopping list when the …

Mobile 26 Oct 13:17
Coalition tears up net snoop plan's £2bn price tag

Sky's the limit?

The coalition government has torn up figures that pegged the cost of plans by the intelligence services to store records of every online communication at £2bn. A Home Office spokesman told The Register that the previous government's estimate of the cost of the Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP) has been abandoned. He …

Government 26 Oct 13:18
Android Market shows hand at 100k Apps

But how many does a girl need?

One hundred thousand apps are to be had on Android Market, Google declared today. "One hundred thousand apps in Android Market" it wrote on AndroidDev, the official Twitter feed aimed at...Android developers. Google has taken 20 months to reach this landmark while, Apple needed sixteen - and last week Apple revealed the App …

reghardware 26 Oct 13:38
Sage Pay upgrade glitch forced poor password picks

Odd spacial character snafu causes confusion

Payment provider Sage Pay is investigating a weekend upgrade that resulted in a minority of users being obliged to adopt a less secure password that only contained alphanumeric digits. The issue was brought to our attention by a number of Reg readers who told us the upgrade "knocked off users who use special characters in …

Channel Register 26 Oct 14:27
Trucker jailed for deadly motorway gamble

Played Facebook poker on laptop

A lorry driver who killed a man on the M25 by crashing into his car while using a laptop has been jailed for five years. Stephen Cook, 42, from mid-Glamorgan, was playing a poker app on Facebook when he hit Peter Kendall's Astra in September last year. The 39-year-old died of head injuries in hospital two days later. Cook was …

Policing 26 Oct 14:42
Unisys hit by mainframe, services declines in Q3

Apple deal misunderstood and overblown

The ClearPath mainframe upgrade cycle that Unisys has been enjoying for the past three quarters started to run out of steam in the third quarter, cooling off the company's revenue and profits. The top and bottom line at Unisys was also hit by declines in its various services business. For the quarter ended 30 September, Unisys …

Servers 26 Oct 14:52
Misfiring Kaspersky update reduces servers to a crawl

Windows server security users in 2-day restart loop

An update to Kaspersky Labs' enterprise anti-virus software inadvertently slowed Windows servers to a crawl, the Russian net security firm has admitted. Kaspersky has pulled the misfiring update and promised a review of its testing procedures to determine why the potential problem was not spotted prior to the release of the …

Servers 26 Oct 15:27
Sony drops PSPgo price pants

Clear the deck for Christmas

Sony has dropped the UK price of the PSPgo, a download-only version of the handheld console, in plenty of time for Christmas. From November 1, the device will sell for £160 - a £65 reduction. By comparison, the larger PSP that supports Universal Media Discs is available for £135. The cuts follow those announced yesterday in …

reghardware 26 Oct 15:52
Top 10 Kindle books outsell dead-tree versions 2-1

Amazon's most popular books slurped up by e-readers

Amazon's top 10 books are selling twice as many digital editions as hardback and paperback combined, although the company still isn't providing any hard figures to back up the claim. In July Amazon said that digital editions were outselling paper books overall, but now the top 1,000 books are selling more digital editions than …

Music and Media 26 Oct 16:18
Apps fuel mobile games sales bonanza

Oh Appy days

Sales of mobile games will double over the next four years to fuel a global market worth $10bn in 2014. Apps are to blame. In 2010 alone, Apple's App Store, excluding iPad, is expected to generate $1.7bn in mobile games revenues - approximately 30 per cent of the market today. 'Traditional' mobile games mop up about sixty per …

reghardware 26 Oct 16:27
Sony soars, sinks, soars on Apple buyout rumor

The power of wishful thinking

Just how volatile are the stock markets these days? How about this metric: Sony's stock shot up by 3 per cent on Monday on a totally unsubstantiated rumor that Apple was eyeing it as a takeover target. Sony stock then slipped back when the source of the rumor noted that he simply made it up. Then, unaccountably, Sony took off …

Financial News 26 Oct 17:41
Google illegally divulges user searches, suit claims

HTTP referrer headers: SEO's best friend

Attorneys on Monday accused Google of intentionally divulging millions of users' search queries to third parties in violation of federal law and its own terms of service. The complaint, filed in federal court in San Jose, California, challenges Google's longstanding practice of including search terms in HTTP referrer headers, …

ID 26 Oct 19:49
Cray notches another XE6 super sale

Multi-petaflops Cascade in the bag

Cray is getting traction with its XE6 supercomputers, launched this past May summer and first shipped at the end of July. The University of Stuttgart – which has a bunch of scalar and vector systems from IBM and NEC, as well as some hybrid machines and a baby Cray XT5m – is moving into Cray systems in a big way. The university …

HPC 26 Oct 20:45
Big Blue's Big Sam gets $10bn for ~~bonus~~ stock boost

Comment IBM wastes cash, sidelines innovation

IBM needs to hit at least $11.40 in earnings per share for the company's top brass to get their 2010 bonuses, so on Tuesday its board of directors gave Sam Palmisano, Big Blue's president, CEO, and chairman, the means to engineer that number with a $10bn bag of cash. The board declared a dividend of 65 cents per share on IBM's …

Servers 26 Oct 20:54
Google streaming search in 'Instant revenue boost'

Dollars grow 2% in two weeks, says study

Google's search revenues increased almost 2 per cent in the two weeks following the introduction of its Instant search engine, according to an independent study. Marin Software — an outfit that manages $1.3 billion a year on behalf of search engine advertisers — has released a study based on the recent Google experience of "a …

Music and Media 26 Oct 21:31
Hackers plant Firefox 0day on Nobel Peace Prize website

Mozilla confirms 'critical vuln' in the wild

Malicious hackers have exploited an unpatched vulnerability in the latest version of Firefox to attack people visiting the Nobel Peace Prize website, a Norway-based security firm said on Tuesday. Mozilla representatives confirmed a "critical vulnerability" in versions 3.5 and 3.6 of the open-source browser. It came several …

Security 26 Oct 21:55
Super Micro cranks server sales

Mobo biz climbs again

Because Super Micro is a motherboard baker as well as a server maker, it is a bellwhether of sorts for the whitebox server racket. And it looks like business is pretty good, if Super Micro's first quarter of fiscal 2011 is any sign. In the quarter ended September 30, Super Micro reported sales of $207.2m, up 39.5 per cent and …

Servers 26 Oct 22:24
WebAndroidiPhone kit plugs into PayPal

Titanium woos web devs with mobile $$$$

Appcelerator — the outfit whose Titanium dev kit was recently freed from the threat of Jobsian destruction — has teamed with PayPal to offer a version of the kit for that dovetails with PayPal's mobile payments library. The idea is to offer a platform that lets traditional web developers build native mobile applications that …

Developer 26 Oct 22:27
Microsoft's Office ribbon hits Mac fans

The ties that bind

Office 2011 for Mac hit retailers Tuesday with more crossover between the Apple and Windows editions than ever before — and that might not be a good thing for Microsoft. Microsoft's productivity suite for Mac fans dumps Entourage for Outlook and includes integration with the Office Web apps — the browser-based edition of …

Applications 26 Oct 22:40
LimeWire (finally) dies under judge's gavel

P2Pware downloadable no more

P2P file-sharing enabler LimeWire finally lost its long-running battle against music-industry heavy hitters on Tuesday. "As of today, we are required to stop distribution and support of LimeWire’s P2P file-sharing service as a result of a court-ordered injunction," reads a statement by Lime Company CEO George Searle on the …

Music and Media 26 Oct 23:49