16th November 2010 Archive

Browse by publication date, or search the site.

Schmidt: Google Chrome OS 'a few months away'

Android Gingerbread 'weeks away'

Google boss Eric Schmidt has said that Chrome OS will be available "in the next few months" — which may be an indication that the company's browser-based operating system has been delayed. Since unveiling the Chrome OS project last year, Google has said that systems using the operating system would be available by the end of …

Operating Systems 16 Nov 00:22
Stony Brook in action at the Student Cluster Competition

SC10 Why 'Bear-O-Dactyl'? Because it sounds scary

Sunday at the Student Cluster Competition (SCC) at SC10 in New Orleans. We stop in at the Stony Brook booth to meet the team and see what they've brought with them. In this SCC video, they introduce us to their cluster, dubbed the "Bear-O-Dactyl". It's a combination of bear and pterodactyl - but I'll let them explain the …

HPC Blog 16 Nov 03:00
Florida A & M show up. Their hardware doesn't

SC10 SCC update

This is the first Student Cluster Competition for the Florida A & M (FAMU) team and it couldn't have started much worse. Due to a delivery snafu, their system failed to turn up in time for them to participate in the competition. Many teams would have called it a day: it's not like you can run over to Staples and buy another …

HPC Blog 16 Nov 03:00
Colorado: Is the fourth time the charm?

SC10 SCC update

On the Sunday before the Student Cluster Competition kicks off, we went around and visited the various teams. The Colorado team (SCC video) is no stranger to these competitions, they've been here before - four times before. While they've seen some success, winning the LINPACK crown (no actual crown), they've never won the big …

HPC Blog 16 Nov 03:02
LSU Tigers defend home bayou

SC10 SCC Update

Louisiana State University (LSU) is another first time competitor in the SC10 Student Cluster Competition. They are located about 80 miles in New Orleans, so it's close enough to say that they have a definite home team feel. They're also close enough that it didn't make a lot of sense to use a shipping company to move the …

HPC Blog 16 Nov 03:03
Purdue Shhh....Boilermakers coding

SC10 SCC update

The quiet was the first thing that struck me when I came upon the Purdue booth at the Student Cluster Competition. In the other booths, students were talking, tweaking systems, eating and doing the typical stuff you'd associate with this kind of event. Not the same picture at the Purdue booth. I've spent considerable time …

HPC Blog 16 Nov 03:04
Meet NTHU

SC10 The pride of Taiwan clusters in the bayou

Polite, subdued, with an air of confidence and competence, the NTHU (National Tsing Hua University) team from Taiwan quietly went about their business during the Student Cluster Competition prep time on Sunday. They were all smiles to the people passing by, but all business in terms of HPC clustering. It's an experienced …

HPC Blog 16 Nov 03:08
HPC clustering: A new spectator sport in Lone Star state?

SC10 Umm... Texas Longhorns SCC update

Texas is at SCC with the most elaborate booth of the competition - certainly in terms of artwork and theme. Their booth is festooned (or half festooned) with "TACC to the Future" posters that play off the "Back to the Future" movies from the 1980s. TACC (Texas Advanced Computing Center) is the lead technical and probably …

HPC Blog 16 Nov 03:09
GPUs go crazy at SCC

SC10 Quiet confidence on the Russian front

The Russian team from the Nizhni Novgorod National State University (NNSU) exuded a quiet confidence as they prepared for the Student Cluster Competition at SC10 in New Orleans, on Sunday. Despite the challenges of traveling great distances, the language and cultural differences and last-minute hardware tweaking, they are …

SC 2011 16 Nov 03:12
World's most advanced rootkit penetrates 64-bit Windows

Windows driver signing mincemeat

A notorious rootkit that for years has ravaged 32-bit versions of Windows has begun claiming 64-bit versions of the Microsoft operating system as well. The ability of TDL, aka Alureon, to infect 64-bit versions of Windows 7 is something of a coup for its creators, because Microsoft endowed the OS with enhanced security …

Security 16 Nov 04:00
Calxeda gears up for server ARM race

SC10 'We need a new clock'

The secretive ARM server startup formerly known as Smooth-Stone and now called Calxeda is coming out a bit today at the SC10 supercomputer trade show in New Orleans. But don't get too excited. The company is not talking about specific chip or server designs based on the ARM RISC architecture, but rather giving potential …

Servers 16 Nov 05:00
Apache strikes back in Oracle Java standoff

Ball's in your court, Larry, not ours

Positions are hardening between Oracle or Apache in a battle over licenses and the future of Java. On Monday, Oracle called on the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) to “reconsider” its call for fellow Java Community Process (JCP) members to vote against Oracle's roadmap for Java with Standard Edition (SE) 7 – outlined in …

Developer 16 Nov 06:00
Baidu boss: Google don't know China

Native search giant nabs 99% of Chinese netizens

Robin Li — the chairman and CEO of China's mega–search engine Baidu — says his service is now used by 99 per cent of his country's internet users. That's nearly 420 million people, or about one third of the country's population. "We have very high coverage," Li said this afternoon during an appearance at the Web 2.0 Summit in …

Music and Media 16 Nov 06:30
Ten... budget Android smartphones

Product Round-up Low-cost handsets for the hard up

In barely two years, Google's Android operating system has established itself as a serious contender in the smartphone biz. It's different from Apple's iOS not just in its open source nature, but also in its use for both high-end premium handsets like Samsung’s Galaxy S and HTC’s Desire HD, but also in a raft of budget devices, …

reghardware 16 Nov 07:00
Farming subsidy database 'breaches privacy rights'

ECJ frowns on agricultural exposure

European rules forcing the publication of details of the people who received farming subsidies and how much they received breached those people's rights to privacy, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled. The Court found that when it came to 'natural persons', meaning named individuals, the publication of all of those …

Law 16 Nov 07:00
Hitachi GST ends STEC's monopoly

Fibre Channel SSDs here at last

Hitachi GST flash drives are hitting the streets and, at last, ending STEC's monopoly in the supply of Fibre Channel interface SSDs. EMC startled the enterprise storage array world by embracing STEC SSDs (solid state drives) in its arrays last year as a way of dramatically lowering the latency for access to the most important …

Storage 16 Nov 08:00
How to improve your organisation's productivity

On Demand Video In your spare time!

Last week we had a panel of experts in our studio to talk about the 'P' word - Productivity - and the whole shebang is now available for your viewing pleasure. The Panel itself consists of El Reg's own Tim Phillip, along with Peter King from Microsoft and Dale Vile from Freeform Dynamics. Together the three of them dissect the …

Tech Panel 16 Nov 08:30
Cyber cops crush plod-snapper site following Millbank riot

Offending page now much more popular

The Metropolitan Police have tried to ban an anti-police website in the wake of the student protests against spending cuts last week. The Met's public order branch, CO11, contacted web host Just Host.com to request the site be removed because it was: "being used to undertake criminal activities". The host was then contacted …

Policing 16 Nov 09:46
Coraid lands $25m funding whopper

Underdog manufacturer can bark louder

Venture capital funds have bet big on storage underdog Coraid, gambling – to the tune of $25,000,000 – that its new management can build a successful business out of its low-cost and simple Ethernet access storage. That is a huge bet. It received a $10m A-round investment in February this year. The firm's management has done …

Storage 16 Nov 09:59
Acoustic gunshot locators get UK military field trials

Bullet-crack backtrack attack-smack

The UK Ministry of Defence has turned to famed techsploration firm BBN - which among other things gave the world the "@" symbol in email - to provide a shoulder-mounted gunshot detector able to backtrack bullets in flight and locate enemy gunmen firing at British troops. Most users will probably not remain this calm in field …

Government 16 Nov 10:00
Hitachi quietly slips in new, big hardness

And Hitachi makes three, so it's over to you, Samsung

Has the 3TB drive cookie crumbled with Hitachi GST's stealthy product, or will Samsung bring out its own 3TB EcoGreen drive? Hitachi GST has revealed the 3TB Deskstar 7K300 on its website, but with no PR fanfare. It's a 7,200rpm, 3.5-inch drive with a 6Gbit/s SATA interface, a first for Hitachi GST, and comes in 1TB, 2TB and …

Servers 16 Nov 10:29
TalkTalk posts jolly six months

It's good to (be) TalkTalk

Carphone Warehouse spin-off TalkTalk is reporting a profitable six months, with more unbundled exchanges in preparation for its planned assault on TV next year. The company increased revenue by more than 10 per cent compared to last year, with a pre-tax income of £887m in the last six months, resulting in an EBITDA of £121m …

Telecoms 16 Nov 11:00
Dell tablet-netbook combo PC out next week

Duo in-bound

Dell will begin selling its Inspiron Duo laptop-cum-tablet next week, it has been claimed. The gadget, which was first shown off in September at the Intel Developer Forum, is a 10in netbook with a screen that pivots within the lid's bezel so the machine can be used in the usual way or as a tablet. Moles cited by Cnet say …

reghardware 16 Nov 11:27
Spy app firm charges £1.86 to remove its software

App developer targets the deeply paranoid

Google may have "Don't be evil" as its motto, but DLP Mobile seems to be embracing the dark side in charging £1.86 for an app to remove its own spyware. Companies that sell software for spying on partners are already on highly-dubious moral ground, but selling an application to remove your own spyware would be a step too far …

Mobile 16 Nov 11:31
IRC botnets dying off

Web-based zombies dominate

Web-controlled botnets now outnumber those controlled by the traditional method of IRC channel by a factor of five, according to the latest research from Team Cymru. IRC channels used to be the only way to control networks of compromised PCs back in the day but the approach has fallen out of favour over the years as more …

Crime 16 Nov 11:40
Samsung readies Google TV tellies

Takes aim at Sony

Samsung will take the wraps of Google TV-equipped televisions next year, almost certainly at January's Consumer Electronics Shows (CES). So says the head of the South Korean giant's TV business, so who are we to argue? That said, we'd question Yoon Boo Keun's claim that the details have yet to be decided - the launch is only …

reghardware 16 Nov 11:44
'Spacetime cloak' could act as 'Star Trek transporter'

Hey boffins: You do the science, we write the headlines, OK?

Top boffins at Imperial College in London, an institution famed for its pioneering research into invisible sheds, have outdone themselves this time. They say they have applied the undetectable garden sanctum theory of metamaterials to produce a still cunninger concept - a type of "space-time cloak" which would produce the " …

Physics 16 Nov 11:48
LightSquared lights up first bird

Building a national mobile network, instantly

LightSquared has its first satellite in the air, SkyTerra 1, enabling national coverage almost instantly - though it will need a ground component before it can make any money. SkyTerra 1 was launched yesterday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, packed with a Breeze M motor atop a ILS Proton rocket. The Proton delivered …

Mobile 16 Nov 11:50
How to design and build a supercomputer

SC10 Webcast Ever wondered what it takes?

What does it take to design and build a supercomputer big enough to enter the Top500list? We're beaming live from the SC10 show today, the 16th of November, at 9:30 PST / 12:30 EST / 17:30 GMT, with some people that will tell you exactly what it takes. Supercomputers don't come off the peg, not when you're gunning for the …

HPC 16 Nov 12:00
Apple readies iTunes for Beatles juice, says report

Didn't notice that the lights had changed

Apple is making an announcement about its iTunes music service later today, which has led to frenzied speculation about what fanbois can expect to hear from the Jobsian outfit. Chief among the rumours is that the company will finally be releasing the Beatles’ back catalogue via its iTunes store, which we are quite sure we …

Music and Media 16 Nov 12:14
It's Tier 1 vs Tier 2 in the HPC slugfest

SC10 Appro plays to niches

When I first started attending industry trade shows, I was always surprised by the range and number of smallish players competing head-on against much larger industry leading companies. (Incidentally, at the first trade show I attended, the wheel edged out fire as the most disruptive technology on the floor.) I used to wonder …

HPC Blog 16 Nov 12:16
Head of UK.gov IT quits

Reforms himself out of a job

John Suffolk, the official in charge of the government's overall IT strategy, has resigned. He will leave the £207,000 post at the end of the year, after just under five years as Whitehall's Chief Information Officer, based at the Cabinet Office. He has campaigned for radical reform of government IT, including slashing the …

Government 16 Nov 12:18
Royal Family engagement creates scareware opportunity

Wedding news searchers should stay away from portals of doom

The British Royal Family launched the biggest scareware marketing opportunity for months on Tuesday when Prince William announced plans to marry his long-term girlfriend Kate Middleton next year. Cybercrooks commonly manipulate search results for newsworthy items to point surfers towards scareware portals that warn of non- …

Malware 16 Nov 12:20
ACTA draft falls from skies

This one looks final

The EU has published a final draft of the international counterfeiting treaty on behalf of the WTO. The process has been underway since 2007, and this version will become final, pending legal review. It's principally aimed at commercial pirates and traders who counterfeit fashion goods and DVDs on an industrial scale - a …

Music and Media 16 Nov 12:21
Giffgaff says some subscribers yakked for 9 days a month

Financial reality hits Web 2 network

It was harsh economics, not popularity, that put the kibosh on the unlimited tariff from giffgaff, as some customers were costing the company £500 a month. Not that giffgaff was keen to admit the obvious motivation behind the shelving of its £30 "goody bag" which allowed unlimited calls and text messages as well as the …

Mobile 16 Nov 12:50
Second arrest for Phones4U robbery

Merseyside man nabbed following raids around Wigan

Staffordshire Police have arrested a second man in connection with the aggravated burglary at Broughton Hall - home to Phones4U millionaire John Caudwell. Over the weekend, Staffordshire Police searched several addresses in the Wigan area, and on Monday a 33-year-old man from Merseyside was arrested and questioned. Detective …

Channel Register 16 Nov 13:00
Aussie outfit offers Brits rock-bottom price tellies

Kogan's Run

All hail the People's Republic of China! Without the PRC churning out electronic goods for next to nowt, how could operations like Australian business Kogan, newly set up in the UK, pledge to "end 'rip-off Britain' prices"? Selling direct over the web helps too, as does importing directly from the manufacturer. The company, …

reghardware 16 Nov 13:01
Those govt cuts - slasher horror or history-changing brilliance?

Opinion Computers, menus and ideologies: take your pick

So, these Tories and Lib Dems, eh? Baby-eating bastards or careful correctors of a drunken sailor's spending spree? The most painful cuts since Abraham's circumcision or a mild trimming of the fiscal sails? You can read it all either way and depending upon your pre-existent political prejudices you probably have done. The …

Government 16 Nov 13:10
Europe questions move to block child sex abuse images

Probably not effective, or legally possible across the EU

Members of the European Parliament have cast doubt on plans to move to community-wide blocking of child sexual abuse images. The Civil Liberties Committee questioned whether such blocking would be effective and whether different legal traditions across Europe would make such blocking impossible. Alexander Alvaro (Alliance of …

Government 16 Nov 13:16
Intel to unveil Sandy Bridge CPU line-up at CES

From vague to Vegas

Intel took the wraps off its next-gen 32nm CPU architecture, 'Sandy Bridge', at last September's Intel Developer Forum (IDF), but it will spec up the first Sandy Bridge chips themselves in January at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The chip giant has begun emailing hacks, inviting them to attend the company's CES keynote …

reghardware 16 Nov 13:17
50m-year-old mystery space object doesn't look a day over 30

Explosive extragalactic birth: Crab-type windy pulsar?

NASA and a crew of international boffins have electrified the world of astronomy by announcing that they have discovered a '30 year old' black hole, the youngest known. The black hole actually came into existence around 50 million years ago, but as it is located in the galaxy M100 we are currently seeing events just decades …

Space 16 Nov 13:29
Fox News outs Beatles as 'Manchester's favorite mopheads'

It's a lorra, lorra larfs

FoxNews.com has got its knickers in a twist about the birthplace of some pop band called the Beatles. As illustrated below, the US news outfit is quite certain in a news article curiously carrying a Wall Street Journal byline that the Fab Four are from Manchester and not Liverpool. Beatlemania Madchester The mistake will …

Bootnotes 16 Nov 13:36
Data Robotics SuperSpeeds storage appliance

USB 3.0 joins eSata, Firewire 800

Data Robotics has added SuperSpeed USB 3.0 to its line up of expandable storage boxes, courtesy of a new model, the Drobo S. Said unit has room for five 3.5in Sata hard drives, which are auto-partitioned in such a way as to allow you to keep adding fresh, larger-capacity disks on the fly and to protect your data from duff …

reghardware 16 Nov 14:03
Student Cluster Competition: And they're off!

SC10 One team nearly doesn't make it

Here I am in rainy New Orleans covering the Student Cluster Competition at SC10. The students bring their own self-designed and built clusters to the show, re-assemble them, and race to complete a set of benchmarks and workloads in the quickest time. The competition will test their system design skills, their aptitude for …

HPC Blog 16 Nov 14:22
DNS provider decked by DDoS dastards

sitelutions pulls itself off the canvas

DNS provider sitelutions was floored by a particularly severe denial of service on Tuesday. The Virginia-based internet services firm confirmed its site was offline as the result of a "multi-gigabit" denial of service attack via an update to its Twitter feed. "Websites and data still safe, though there are still occasional …

Enterprise Security 16 Nov 14:49
Facebook: Privatising the internet, one Poke at a time

Comment Embrace'n'extend, bitch

The world has been pretty slow to wake up to the power of Facebook and Google, web services with the power to make internet standards disappear faster than a Poke. But maybe people will sit up now. Mark Zuckerberg's embrace and extend attitude doesn't just encompass your data - but email protocols too. And there's very little …

Applications 16 Nov 15:24
NFS smackdown: NetApp knocks EMC out

Flash Cache as good as SSD tier

EMC blew NetApp and others away with a CIFS benchmark in January. Now NetApp has returned that favour with interest, blowing EMC away in an NFS benchmark. The two benchmarks are the CFS and NFS versions of the SPECsfs2008 file access benchmarks. What gives them special piquancy is that this is the first public performance …

Storage 16 Nov 15:32
Steve Jobs no longer Eggman as Beatles hits iTunes

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together

It's official: Apple has finally added the Beatles' back catalogue to its iTunes music service. Cupertino said that from today the band's 13 studio albums including Please Please Me, White Album and Rubber Soul are now available via iTunes. Additionally, Apple fans can also buy the Beatles' two-volume Past Masters and Red and …

Music and Media 16 Nov 15:40
Alleged bad Appler should pay back $1m

Industrial espionage claims for iPhone man

The Apple supply manager accused of taking bribes in exchange for approving suppliers for iPhone and iPod headphone parts should pay back the $1m he is alleged to have pocketed for dodgy dealing. This is according to the prosecution, which asked the court to seize $950,000 from Paul Devine. Apple lawyers even want to take away …

Financial News 16 Nov 15:57
Juniper blows small wad on Trapeze

$152m for 'seamless, high-quality experience'

Switch colossus Juniper will acquire enterprise wireless networking specialist Trapeze Networks for $152m cash, it announced today. It plans to integrate the buy into its corporate networking business, to allow clients to provide "a seamless, high-quality, secure experience to their users regardless of where and how they …

Business 16 Nov 16:26
Yahoo! hooks self into Twitter

Tests 'local' ecoupons

Yahoo! has unveiled a wide range of new additions to its sweeping online portal, including a handful of search tools, hooks into the micro-blogging service known as Twitter, and games from the "social" gaming giant Zynga. Today, during a press event alongside the Web 2.0 Summit in downtown San Francisco, the company also …

Music and Media 16 Nov 17:15
OpenSSL updated to kill code-execution bug

Remotely exploitable

The OpenSSL server has been updated to fix a security bug that could be remotely exploited to potentially install malware on vulnerable systems. The race condition flaw in the OpenSSL TLS server extension code could be exploited in a buffer overrun attack, maintainers of the open-source SSL and TLS application warned on …

Enterprise Security 16 Nov 17:53
North Carolina to raise army of Microsofties

~~Microsoft~~ Career-ready training

Thousands of students in the state of North Carolina are set to get a skoolin' in Microsoft technologies thanks to a state-wide deal with the software giant. Microsoft said Tuesday that North Carolina has become the first US state to implement Redmond's Microsoft IT Academy Program for its public high schools — 628 in total. …

Software 16 Nov 18:29
Exposed: leaked body scans published online

Proves pervscan images can be saved

Casting doubt on government assurances that full-body scanners don't violate air travelers' privacy, Gizmodo has published 100 photographs saved in violation of stated policy, taken by one such machine deployed in a federal courthouse in Florida. Fortunately for the people photographed, the Gen 2 millimeter wave scanner used …

Government 16 Nov 19:37
Prof to drill camera into own skull

Al-Qaeda hacker set for third eye

An assistant professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts will embed a digicam into the back of his head as part of a year-long art piece — and some of his fellow faculty aren't too happy about it. The Iraqi-born American artist Wafaa Bilal has been commissioned by a new museum in Qatar to drill the camera into …

Rise of the Machines 16 Nov 19:41
Flashy Anobit is on fiscal fire

Intel heads $32m boost to flash controller wizards

Multi-level cell flash controller technology is hot, providing the keys to the kingdom of affordable and reliable flash storage that could start kicking serious storage butt. Israeli start-up Anobit is at the heart of this development, and Intel Capital has just led a group giving it a $32m slug of development money. Multi- …

Storage 16 Nov 20:41
Intel melds football helmets and supers

SC10 Crash test ~~dummies~~ linebackers

Chip maker Intel is working with American-football helmet maker Riddell and a number of universities around the United States to create a real-time telemetry and simulation system that will monitor collisions on the gridiron* to help coaches keep their players from doing serious, long-term damage to themselves. Riddell has …

HPC 16 Nov 21:13
Moshe Yanai: critic accused of 'sour grapes'

Not the man I knew

A few months ago Pete Gerr, a senior Hitachi Data Systems exec, launched an astonishing attack on the storage guru Moshe Yanai. He accused Yanai, the inventor of EMC's Symmetrix platform of being "greedy, arrogant and blinded by his egotism" during his time at EMC. I reported Gerr's comments at the time. So in the interest of …

Blocks and Files 16 Nov 21:34
Ex-Google duo open wallets of angels and Ashton Kutcher

$1.2m from 21 faces

A pair of ex-Googlers working to simplify rapid-fire testing of website design have secured some power funding from Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Their company, Optimizely, has attracted $1.2m in cash from 21 "angel investors", including Ron Conway, Steven Chen, Mitch Kapor, Joshua Schachter, and Steve Huffman. Conway …

Financial News 16 Nov 21:36
BlackBerry boss renews disdain for Steve Jobs

Baits world with tablet mystery, um, module cavity

Research in Motion co-CEO Jim Balsillie has renewed his attack on the Jobsian way, once again pitching the upcoming BlackBerry PlayBook tablet as a much-needed alternative to the Apple iPad. This morning at the Web 2.0 Summit in downtown San Francisco, Basillie was asked what he would say to Steve Jobs if the Apple CEO were in …

Mobile 16 Nov 21:49
Social levelling with the iPad

The class destroyer

People with Fords wish they had BMWs; people with BMWs wish they had Porsches, and people with Porsches wish they had Ferraris. Social class is alive, well and flourishing with cars, and also with clothes, with wrist watches, with holiday destinations, with all sorts of toys - but not with iPads. If you can afford the iPad …

Blocks and Files 16 Nov 23:38