12th November 2010 Archive

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Yahoo! to! ax! 10%! of! product! staff! says! report!

Irving arm under ax

Yahoo! is set to lay off about 10 per cent of its product staff, according to a report citing sources "close to the situation." All Things Digital reports that the web giant will lay off around 650 of the 6500 workers in its product organization, now headed by former Microsoftee Blake Irving, and possibly more in other …

Financial News 12 Nov 2010, 00:48
'Superb' Apple 1 on the block for £100k-£150K

Forgotten Tech 1976 Jobs garage tech can be yours

An original Apple 1 made by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in Jobs parent's garage goes on the auction block in London this month. The Apple 1 was designed by Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976. Just 200 were made, according to the website Old Computers, and up to 50 are thought to survive. At the time they cost $666.66, but Lot 65 …

reghardware 12 Nov 2010, 01:16
Memo to Microsoft: don't bet against Amazon

Open...and Shut Private clouds will roll over

The technology world used to be fairly easy to understand. For a time, IBM dominated the back office while Microsoft monopolized the desktop. More recently, Microsoft and Linux split the difference on servers while Oracle bought the known universe to dominate enterprise middleware and applications. But along comes the cloud, …

Software 12 Nov 2010, 04:00
RHEL 6: how much for your package?

Red Hat price bulge

You know how you can tell that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is a real enterprise-class operating system? No, it's not because the word "enterprise" is in its name. What makes RHEL 6 an enterprise OS is that it now has so many features and add ons - and prices for each - that it is no longer easy to describe it in one sentence. But …

Operating Systems 12 Nov 2010, 05:00
Fanbois howl as OS X update bricks PGPed Macs

Disaster averted

Users of PGP's Whole Disk Encryption for Macs got a nasty surprise when they upgraded to the latest OS X update once they discovered their systems were no longer able to reboot. It seems that Apple and the Symantec-owned PGP suffered a near-fatal failure to communicate that 10.6.5 ships with a new EFI booter that was …

Security 12 Nov 2010, 06:00
Google: Oracle doctored that 'copied Java code'

'And, by the by, Android wasn't built by Google'

Google has accused Oracle of doctoring the code samples that allegedly prove Mountain View pilfered Oracle's copyrighted Java code in building its Android mobile operating system. Late last month, as part of its ongoing lawsuit over the use of Java in Android, Oracle waved six pages of Android code at a federal court (see …

Developer 12 Nov 2010, 07:03
Pioneer XW-NAV1 iPod dock and AV centre

Review Media frenzy

Pioneer's XW-NAV1 iPod dock-cum-entertainment system is an unusual box of tricks. As well as an iPhone compliant dock, it's also a CD/DVD player with 1080p upscale output, a CD ripper, FM radio and a USB media player. There may be other devices out there that do all those things, but I've never come across this exact combination …

reghardware 12 Nov 2010, 08:00
Panasonic Pure Line TX-L37D28 37in LCD TV

Review Looks a picture

Panasonic has been banging on about 3D TV for most of the last year, but has turned its attention to old good old-fashioned 2D telly once more with the Pure Line range. The company describes these models as ‘designer TVs’, which suggests they’ll be rather expensive. In fact, it seems more like an attempt to inject a little bit …

reghardware 12 Nov 2010, 08:00
ICO insists on scrutiny for laws invading privacy

Er, isn't that the ICO's job?

ICO boss Christopher Graham has rejected the accusation that he sent "Keystone Kops" to investigate Google and has called for more scrutiny of laws which infringe on privacy. Despite having his investigators labelled "Keystone Kops" by a Tory MP for clearing Google's Street View data snoop, then changing their minds, Graham …

Law 12 Nov 2010, 10:08
Location, location: Storage controller functions get moving

Opinion Shove it in the server, or bung it in the array?

Server virtualisation luvvies are looking askance at expensive storage arrays and saying: "Pah! Run the storage controller functions as a system app in a virtual server and use JBODs. That's the way to use commodity hardware." This is the approach of stealthy startup ZeRTO and also Xiotech. Move the array controller functions …

Storage 12 Nov 2010, 10:28
Plods scrap crap stealth spy blimp

It kept falling down ~~the stairs~~ in bad weather, guv

Disappointed plods in Manchester have scrapped a cunning surveillance balloon intended to provide "eye in the sky" capability at less cost than police helicopters. The aerostat apparently could not cope with bad weather. "It's become something of a joke," a police source told the Manchester Evening News, which broke the story …

Law 12 Nov 2010, 10:35
The cunning PM communications plan

Project management Yes to Twitter, no to jargon

Every new project begins as an idea in someone's head and pretty soon it becomes a conversation, a series of meetings and, if approved, a fully scoped project. The conversations continue throughout the project as part of the process. Experts say a communications plan should be formulated within the overall project. Such a plan …

Project Management 12 Nov 2010, 10:55
Apple plugs iTunes Ping into Twitter

Ah go on go on go on

Twitter has inked a deal with Apple to allow its service to link up to the Jobsian outfit’s Ping in iTunes. Apple, meanwhile, is still bereft of such an agreement with Facebook, which is the more natural partner for its Ping product. Ping has been greeted with indifference from its users since Apple bolted the social network …

Media 12 Nov 2010, 10:58
Sky confirms UK Online closure

UK Offline

Sky has confirmed it will completely shut down UK Online, its second string ISP brand, in January. The expected move follows the sale of Easynet, which originally bought UK Online to sell consumer access via its well-regarded network. A Sky spokesman said: "Since 2005 Sky has operated two residential broadband services, Sky …

Broadband 12 Nov 2010, 10:59
Kinect hacked for OS X

Irony value high: motion tech first offered to Mac maker

The open source driver for Microsoft's Xbxo 360 Kinect add-on has been ported to Mac OS X - an irony given that Kinect developer PrimeSense originally punted the motion detection tech at Apple. Kinect was released in the UK this week, but debuted in the US a little sooner than that, giving coder AlexP the chance to run Kinect …

reghardware 12 Nov 2010, 11:16
MS hits back in Security Essentials row

It's all opt-in, so what's the beef?

Microsoft has said its rivals and the media have misunderstood its plans to offer its freebie anti-virus scanner to Windows users without security protection via its Microsoft Update service. Earlier this week we reported how Panda Security and Trend Micro both viewed the offer of Security Essentials via "automatic downloads" …

Security 12 Nov 2010, 11:17
Microsoft looks to KIN for support

Desperation or shelf-clearing?

A leaked Verizon product list shows Microsoft's Kin isn't dead, it's just been sleeping a while and will return as a cheapy feature-phone later this year – only without the good bits. That means none of the cloud services that were supposed to justify the huge monthly contract Kin users were expected to pay (put at $70 a month …

Mobile 12 Nov 2010, 11:20
Dell 'Streak 2' to get 5in HD display, dual-core CPU

Mole spills beans

Dell is to up the screen resolution of its 5in Streak phone-cum-tablet to 1280 x 800, it has been claimed. It'll get a dual-core, 1.2GHz processor too. So says an unnamed mole who claims to have been at a private presentation made by Dell. The source subsequently tipped off website StreakSmart. According to dell - according …

reghardware 12 Nov 2010, 11:33
Gov and telcos in Aussie wiretap death match

'Wiretaps are fine. You are wrong, wrong, wrong!'

When it comes to telecomms technology, who are you going to trust? Senior executives in some of Australia’s largest telcos? Or a high-ranking bureaucrat from the Federal Attorney-General’s Department? It’s a close call, but lines were drawn and disagreements laid out in the open yesterday as the Senate's Legal ad …

Broadband 12 Nov 2010, 11:45
Global warming is actually good for rainforests, say boffins

+3°C, 1000ppm CO₂ did jungles a world of good last time

OK, so let's take it that global warming is coming: that temperatures are set to rise by easily 3°C by the end of the century. Disaster, right? The tropical rainforests - lungs of the planet - will die, CO2 levels will thus rise even faster, a runaway process will set in and planet Earth will be transformed into a baking …

Science 12 Nov 2010, 11:48
BOFH: BOFH vs Bot: Ultimate Smackdown

Episode 16 Sacrifice is nice

I love these quiet moments before the storm. Well, technically speaking, it’s between storms, but the fact remains that there’s a certain amount of solace in not actually being in a storm at this point in time. In these calm periods my mind enters a peaceful, dreamlike state where I find my thoughts drifting in anticipation …

BOFH 12 Nov 2010, 12:00
Google's social 'problem' doesn't involve building Facebook rival

Dead leaves on the dirty ground

Google has once again gone on record to deny suggestions that the company is in the process of building its own social network to rival Facebook. Mountain View’s mobile product development boss Hugo Barra made the comment in response to a question at the Monaco Media Forum yesterday. "We're not working on a social network …

Applications 12 Nov 2010, 12:18
Beeb to show unseen interview with Dr Who theme creator

Delia Derbyshire remembered

The BBC will next week air a previously unbroadcast interview with the late Delia Derbyshire, the synthesised music whiz who first realised composer Ron Grainer's famous Doctor Who score. The interview, originally recorded by a BBC Scotland reporter in the late 1990s, was made after Derbyshire's pioneering work - no synths in …

reghardware 12 Nov 2010, 12:21
IBM's cloudy object vision stoked by EU

Eurocrats fund IBM-led development

Fancy that: European tax-payers are coughing up for a €15.7m IBM research project about storing objects in the cloud with metadata. The EU-funded VISION Cloud (Virtualized Storage Services for the Future Internet) project will run for three years and is led by IBM Research in Israel, with 14 partners in a consortium. The aim …

Storage 12 Nov 2010, 12:38
Elgato gadget to stream Freeview direct to iPad

Just awaiting iOS 4.2

TV tuner maker Elgato is to release a version of its EyeTV app for the iPhone and iPad that will allows is Netstream tuner to beam Freeview content direct to those mobile devices. The dual-tuner Netstream DTT - reviewed here - was released back in April. Then and now, it is able to stream digital TV transmissions to version of …

reghardware 12 Nov 2010, 12:46
iPhone users are sad and mentally unfocused

Many fondle-slabbers doleful even during jig-jig

A shock study of iPhone users has found that they spend 46.9 per cent of their time thinking about something other than what they're doing - and this febrile absentmindedness makes them deeply unhappy. "A wandering mind is an unhappy mind," say trick-cyclists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert of Harvard uni. "The …

Mobile 12 Nov 2010, 12:50
Robot wars break out on poker sites

Poachers, gamekeepers and game theory

The world's two largest poker sites, PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, are battling to keep poker bots off their sites. In October, Full Tilt removed an unstated number of players, confiscated the funds in their accounts, and pledged to redistribute this money to players who'd lost to the bots. PokerStars took similar action …

Applications 12 Nov 2010, 13:13
Airport security boss calls time on tech

Old school intelligence, not new school stupidity

The security boss of Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport is calling for an end to endless investment in new technology to improve airline security. Marijn Ornstein Marijn Ornstein said: "If you look at all the recent terrorist incidents, the bombs were detected because of human intelligence not because of screening ... If even a …

Government 12 Nov 2010, 13:28
China faces million-strong zombie phone horde

Leading the world in mobile malware

More than a million mobile phones in China have been infected with the AVK.Dumx.A Trojan. According to local reports in the Shanghai Daily, the infection is costing users more than two million yuan (just shy of £200,000) in text messaging as it attempts to spread. The disguise the Trojan wears is unclear, though it does …

Mobile 12 Nov 2010, 13:32
Reduced growth forces Sophos to shed 80 jobs

Second round of job losses after a weak first half

Tough times in the information security market have obliged UK-based information security firm Sophos to draw up plans to reduce its workforce by around 7 per cent. A decline in its rate of growth in the first half of this year prompted Sophos to make the tough decision to shed around 80 jobs. The job reductions will be …

Security 12 Nov 2010, 13:53
Xbox Kinect costs just £35 to build

Cheap as chips

After receiving positive reviews upon its release this week, Microsoft's Xbox 360 Kinect has been stripped naked and assessed for manufacture costs. It turns out that the materials that make up the motion-powered peripheral amount to just £35 - considerably less than its £130 RRP. Although this figure doesn't reflect other …

reghardware 12 Nov 2010, 13:54
Chicago officer beats off dildo-wielding bill-skipper

Crab Shack mock cock cop attack shock

An Illinois woman allegedly launched an ill-considered assault on a cop with a “rigid female pleasure device” after an altercation over an unpaid Crab Shack bill. Carole Bildsten, a 56-year-old from the Chicago suburb of Gurnee, was accused of leaving an unpaid bill for dinner and wine at Joe's Crab Shack in the town earlier …

Bootnotes 12 Nov 2010, 14:06
MoD battles copycat hackers

Military targeted after TinKode gets in the news

The Ministry of Defence is battling a wave of copycat attacks after a hacker took down the Royal Navy's public website this week. Simon Kershaw, head of defence security and assurance services, said IT staff have been monitoring many more attempts to penetrate military sites than usual since the hack, which emerged on Monday …

Security 12 Nov 2010, 14:13
Nintendo readies 'limited edition' Mario Kart Wii pack

Celebrates 25-year-old game by bundling 18-year-old game

Nintendo is takling the threat from Microsoft's Xbox 360 Kinect and Sony's PlayStation Move with... a bundle. It's packaging the black Wii - complete with black Remote, black Nunchuk and the usual copy of Wii Sports - and a black Wii wheel plus Mario Kart Wii. This being the 25th anniversary year of Super Mario expect the …

reghardware 12 Nov 2010, 14:47
Apple, Oracle air-kiss their way to OpenJDK deal for Mac OS X

No tongues, please

Apple and Oracle signed a significant open-source deal today which welcomed the Mac OS X maker into the OpenJDK club, which IBM joined last month. Under the agreement, Apple said it would divvy up most of the key components, tools and tech needed for a Java SE 7 implementation on the firm's Mac OS X platform. In October, …

Developer 12 Nov 2010, 15:20
Black Ops sets record sales figures

Haul of duty

Call of Duty: Black Ops has set a new UK record after it sold 1.4m copies on its first day of release. This generated £58m in revenue, according to market watcher GfK/Chart-Track by way of trade paper MCV, and represents the most successful one-day performance of any game in the UK. Smashing achievement Last year's CoD …

reghardware 12 Nov 2010, 15:22
Hasty legislation will make a mess of Europe's 'right to be forgotten'

Opinion The ethics of online deletion

The European Commission proposal to include a 'right to be forgotten' in data protection laws risks causing legal, technical and ethical mayhem if it is not thought through more thoroughly. While it might seem like a good idea to give people the right to force organisations to delete their personal data, legislators should …

Law 12 Nov 2010, 15:27
Supercomputing: From idea to reality

Webcast An A to B of supercomputer development

What’s it like to design and build the biggest computers in the world? Join The Register on the 16th of November at 9:30am PST / 12:30pm EST / 5:30pm GMT to find out. We’re talking about system designs that depend on technology that often hasn’t even been invented yet – much less tested. Customers put forward ambitious …

HPC 12 Nov 2010, 15:31
Pussy-slurping: You think you understand it, BUT YOU DON'T

Videos Boffins in cataclysmic lingual robotics breakthrough

Time-rich boffins in the States, who have been analysing the mechanism by which cats lap up beverages for more than three years - research which included the construction of an articulated, robotic feline tongue simulator - say they have finally cracked the mysterious moggies' methods. Curiously, it seems that cats actually …

Science 12 Nov 2010, 16:14
Security pros fail to get a grip on meaty bot

Lethic spam package uses Stuxnet nuke nobbler cert ploy

A new variant of the Lethic botnet agent comes signed with a digital certificate from the same firm whose identity was abused by the infamous Stuxnet industrial control system worm. Lethic is a spam-spewing botnet that ranks relatively low in terms of compromised machines but bears a disproportionately high responsibility for …

Security 12 Nov 2010, 16:55
Facebook joins Apple and Google in data center wonderland

Follow the tax breaks

Facebook has announced plans for a second custom-built data center, saying it will build a $450 million facility in western North Carolina, which is suddenly a big-name data-center hot bed. Apple and Google have already built high-profile data centers in the Great North State, which isn't really in the North. It's in the South …

Servers 12 Nov 2010, 18:41
Palin email hacker gets 366 days in custody

Prison or halfway house

The former Tennessee college student convicted of hacking into Sarah Palin's Yahoo Mail account was sentenced on Friday to 366 days in either federal prison or a halfway house. David Kernell smiled as the sentence was delivered in US District Court in Knoxville, according to news reports. He faced a maximum of 20 years in …

Security 12 Nov 2010, 19:07
Samsung's Android tablet: split and eviscerated

Inside the wannabe 'iPad killer'

The race to dethrone Apple's iPad as top tablet has begun in earnest, with Samsung's Galaxy Tab now available, and others such as RIM's BlackBerry PlayBook waiting in the wings. To see how the Galaxy Tab's innards stack up to those in the Cupertinian "magical and revolutionary" device, the repairmen and vivisectionists at …

Media 12 Nov 2010, 19:35
3D printers, one-dimensional enemies

Copy cats

Public Knowledge has published a provocative paper on 3D printing, entitled: "It Will Be Awesome If They Don’t Screw It Up: 3D Printing, Intellectual Property, and the Fight Over the Next Great Disruptive Technology", The document summarises the battle lines around 3D printing, according to Public Knowledge, a Washington DC …

Law 12 Nov 2010, 20:51
Overland secures fresh funds

Signs of uptick as data protection vendor gets cash injection

Overland, the struggling data storage vendor, has secured $4.2m in fresh funds from institutional investors. The company will use the money "for general corporate purposes, which may include, among others, working capital needs, capital expenditures and acquisitions". It is not committed to any acquisitions right now though. …

Channel Register 12 Nov 2010, 20:52
Feds may tighten privacy protections

'Do-not-track' mulled

The Obama administration is reportedly considering a stepped-up approach to enforcing privacy on the internet that includes new laws and the creation of a new post to make sure they are enforced. According to an article published Friday in The Wall Street Journal, the strategy is expected to be unveiled in a report to be …

Security 12 Nov 2010, 20:53
Microsoft coaches NoSQL options for Azure cloud

MongoDB. Memcached. MariaDB?

Microsoft is working with NoSQL startups to simplify deployment of their databases on its Azure cloud. MongoDB-shop 10gen has told The Reg that it's close to announcing tighter integration between MongoDB and Azure. The news is expected next month. 10gen Roger Bodamer told The Reg that MongoDB will be integrated with Azure …

Applications 12 Nov 2010, 22:57
Woman charged with stealing nude pics of baseball star

...from Playboy Bunny's email account

A Minnesota woman has been charged with stealing racy photos of Cleveland Indians centerfielder Grady Sizemore from the email account of his Playboy bunny girlfriend. The 15-photo set, which Sizemore shot himself with his cellphone, were posted to the internet about a year ago, although most have since been removed, following …

Security 12 Nov 2010, 23:31
Facebook set to unveil 'Gmail killer'

'Zuckerbergian email with Microsoft hooks'

Facebook is hosting a press event in San Francisco on Monday, and the rumor is that the social networking giant will introduce its very own online email service. The invitation sent to The Reg indicates that Monday's event involves Facebook's on-site email-like "Inbox" tool — the invite includes the Inbox icon — and the word …

Applications 12 Nov 2010, 23:38
RHEL 6: serious Linux built for growth

Review Excitement? We've heard of it

Red Hat has released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, the first major update for RHEL in over three years. RHEL 5 debuted in March 2007 and used the Linux 2.6.18 kernel. Although incremental updates have added a number of kernel updates and new features, RHEL5 is starting to look aged. Of course much of the appeal of an enterprise …

Operating Systems 12 Nov 2010, 23:49