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20th December 2010 Archive

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  • Apple iPad vs... the rest

    2010: it's a wrap Duking it out with the Galaxy Tab et al

    There's no doubt about it, Apple's iPad was the defining product of 2010. No other offering came out of nowhere not only to establish a new category of kit, but to kick an existing one - the netbook - up the proverbial and, into the bargain, scupper another - the smartbook - before it had even established itself in the market …

    reghardware 20 Dec 07:00

  • This year's classy compact cameras

    2010: it's a wrap EVIL winners

    Arguably, migrating from a compact to a DSLR is the assumed route for those harbouring a serious passion for photography. However, this past year the path to DSLR enlightenment had plenty of appealing diversions. EVIL (electronic viewfinder interchangeable lens) cameras were in abundance and becoming more affordable too. The …

    reghardware 20 Dec 07:00

  • Cabinet Office claims major savings on ICT

    Half a billion pounds saved after spending freeze, says Cabinet

    The Cabinet Office has said that freezes on ICT and other spending have saved £500m since May. The department said it saved altogether £1bn through "efficiency and reform measures", with half the sum saved through moratoria on ICT, consulting, recruitment, marketing and property spending. In the 12 months from May 2010 it …

    Channel Register 20 Dec 10:14

  • Magnetic vortices research uncovers a cool place to put data

    A lattice effect in manganese silicon at -245° Celsius

    German scientists in Munich and Cologne have discovered that stable magnetic vortices in manganese silicon crystals could be used to store data because of quantum mechanical effects. In February 2009, physicists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the University of Cologne, led by Professor Christian Pfleider and …

    Storage 20 Dec 10:28

  • Bummed-out users give anti-virus bloatware the boot

    One in four switch off resource hogs

    One in four users turned off their anti-virus protection in response to performance problems after they installed security software, according to a survey by security software firm Avira. The poll of users of the German anti-virus outfit, which like AVG and Avast offers free security software to consumers, also found that more …

    Malware 20 Dec 10:32

  • Nvidia Tegra 2 hailed as Honeycomb CPU of choice

    Google OS tablet reference design?

    Samsung's Galaxy Tab 2 will run on Nvidia's Tegra 2. So says Citigroup analyst Glen Yeung, by way of Barron's, who last week told investors that Samsung has “placed a sizeable order with Nvidia for Tegra 2 chips in the first half of 2011, geared for both tablets and smartphones”. Yeung went on to claim that the Nvidia ARM- …

    reghardware 20 Dec 10:39

  • Jamie Oliver website offers graphic recipe for 'Pussy'

    NSFW User-generated beaver pie still on menu

    Tousle-haired mockney belly-robber Jamie Oliver has been let down by his website's IT staff today, after they failed to effectively remove a distinctly NSFW web-2.0 user uploaded recipe for "Pussy". Tasty The offending recipe's page has been removed from Oliver's site, but as the screengrab makes clear as of this article's …

    Bootnotes 20 Dec 10:41

  • Jamie Oliver website offers graphic recipe for 'Pussy'

    NSFW User-generated beaver pie still on menu

    Tousle-haired mockney belly-robber Jamie Oliver has been let down by his website's IT staff today, after they failed to effectively remove a distinctly NSFW web-2.0 user uploaded recipe for "Pussy". Tasty The offending recipe's page has been removed from Oliver's site, but as the screengrab makes clear as of this article's …

    Bootnotes 20 Dec 10:54

  • English Defence League membership list stolen

    Hackers pwn hooligans

    The personal details of English Defence League supporters have been stolen in a hacking attack on its website, it was reported today. The far-right group's leadership emailed members in recent days to warn them of the breach, the Daily Telegraph reports. "As you may have become aware the English Defence League clothing site …

    Enterprise Security 20 Dec 11:03

  • Mexico mounts ROBOTIC ALIEN INVASION of US back yard

    Illegal alien, that is

    In what might be - but one has to say almost certainly isn't - the opening move of a gutsy yet doomed invasion campaign, a Mexican robotic surveillance drone has crashlanded in an American back yard. According to the El Paso Times, the rogue machine came down "from a third of a mile to a half-mile inside the United States": …

    Science 20 Dec 11:34

  • MSE releases revamped freebie malware scanner

    Lock and load

    Microsoft has released a new version of its freebie security scanner tool last week, following the conclusion of a five-month beta testing program. Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) 2.0 features a revamped heuristic (automatic malware detection) engine as well as the addition of network intrusion detection technology. Less …

    Malware 20 Dec 11:45

  • Microsoft's Office nagware dead in icy water

    Software giant quietly retires OGA program

    Microsoft quietly yanked its Office nagware program off the interwebs last week. The company’s Office Genuine Advantage notifications program, which Microsoft only expanded to be used in 41 countries across the globe in August 2009, was killed on 16 December. ZDNet’s Ed Bott received word that it had been axed, after a …

    Channel Register 20 Dec 11:46

  • EU expresses 'private concerns' about Intel buyout of McAfee

    Multi-billion dollar takeover could be probed by watchdog

    Brussels could kick-start an anti-trust investigation into Intel’s planned $7.68bn buyout of anti-virus software maker McAfee Inc. European Union watchdogs have privately expressed concerns when undertaking an initial review of the agreement, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. The newspaper cited sources familiar …

    Channel Register 20 Dec 12:33

  • BA flights website grounded by snow

    Looking for a seat? Flight information? Ask Santa

    British Airways' website was up and down this morning, which is still more than can be said for its aircraft. The UK's flag carrier's terrible weekend carried on right into Monday, as its shiny new base at Heathrow was snowbound with few flights taking off, and fewer still arriving – in common with the rest of the airport it …

    IT Director 20 Dec 12:35

  • No more books on Ireland's banned book list

    Censorship Board bored as no one submits smut for review

    It’s the end of the world as we know it! Or at least, the end of book-banning craic in Ireland, which for some of the god-fearing citizens of that country possibly amounts to much the same thing. Our story, reported in full in the Saturday’s Irish Times, begins back in 1930 when the newly-formed Irish State, reeling in shock …

    Government 20 Dec 12:43

  • Missile defence FAIL: US 'kill vehicle' space weapon flunks test

    Fails to get in way of hurtling simulated nuke

    The US Missile Defence Agency has suffered another embarrassing failure in a live test conducted last week over the Pacific. What a space-combat weapon actually looks like. The trial saw a medium-range ballistic missile target lift off from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall islands, simulating an attack on the United States. …

    Science 20 Dec 12:48

  • New UN committee could hand governments internet control

    Bottoms-up is best, quoth Google

    The endgame in the long-running battle over who is to control the internet may be upon us, with the appointment of a little-reported but highly significant new UN committee to look into initiatives for policing the internet. This follows the decision at the UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD) 2010- …

    Government 20 Dec 13:24

  • Pirate Bay backer takes case to Supreme Court

    Carl Lundström disputes appeals verdict

    Crispbread heir and erstwhile neo-Nazi Carl Lundström is heading to the Supreme Court in Sweden to dispute the sentence and damages award meted out to him in The Pirate Bay appeals verdict last month. Lundström, who is one of the four defendants in The Pirate Bay trial, had his lawyer Per E Samuelsson confirm, on Sveriges …

    Music and Media 20 Dec 13:52

  • Car immobilisers easily circumvented by crafty carjackers

    Crap crypto to blame

    Weak cryptography means that car engine immobiliser technology has become easy for crooks to circumvent. Nothing weaker than 128-bit AES is considered sufficient protection for e-commerce transactions, but car manufacturers are still using proprietary 40-bit and 48-bit encryptions protocols that are vulnerable to brute force …

    Enterprise Security 20 Dec 13:54

  • Use eGovernment to lower costs, says EU Commission

    Don't risk alienating the 'digital natives', says Neelie

    European governments must make greater use of the internet in the way they work or risk increasing the cost of doing business and alienating the young, the European Commission has said. The Commission has launched a plan and some pilot projects aimed at encouraging governments across the trading bloc to make more use of …

    Channel Register 20 Dec 14:19

  • 'Porn lock' heralds death of WikiLeaks, internet, democracy, universe

    Analysis Calm down, dears

    The British government wants to gag WikiLeaks, and is drawing up Orwellian plans to exploit fears over the effect of online smut on children to achieve that aim. That was the snap conclusion drawn yesterday in fruitcake-friendly corners of the web in response to a Sunday Times front page splash, which reported that the …

    Government 20 Dec 14:19

  • eBay buys into German fashion club

    Buy it now without trying it on

    eBay has lashed out $200m for a German online "fashion club" as the international tat bazaar looks to consolidate its position as the top destination for fashion fans who don't feel the need to actually try on clothes before they buy them. brands4friends is described as "Germany’s largest online shopping club for fashion and …

    Financial News 20 Dec 15:09

  • MEGA DINO-WHALE from 'Valley of the Whales' exhibited

    Boffins unlock secrets of land-walking, legged proto-moby

    Bone-griffling boffins in the States are chuffed to announce their new and magnificent, fully assembled 50-foot-long prehistoric carnivorous dinomegawhale fossil. The mighty Basilosaurus isis was discovered along with more than a thousand other aeons-dead whale skeletons in an area of Egyptian desert known as the "Valley of the …

    Biology 20 Dec 16:02

  • UK domain registry breaks 9 million

    Flab-fighting site is nona-millionth active domain

    The .uk has just broken nine million active domain names, Nominet announced today. The nine millionth address, Active2011.co.uk, was registered by Nirvana Spa, which fortunately for Nominet is not the Tibetan-themed massage parlour its name might suggest, but a posh health spa in Berkshire. It registered the domain name with …

    Telecoms 20 Dec 16:17

  • 'Don't panic: We're still Delicious,' says Yahoo!-owned Web2.0 outfit

    Hopes social bookmarking service will turn page

    Social bookmarking service Delicious won't be shutdown by Yahoo! but is looking to sell its Web2.0 wares to a new suitor. "While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be …

    Applications 20 Dec 16:30

  • Google Nexus S out Wednesday

    Snow, stock supplies permitting

    Carphone Warehouse is knocking back the release of the Samsung-Google Nexus S a couple of days. You'll pay £430, if you buy it sans Sim when it arrives on Wednesday, 22 December. If you can get your mitts on it at all. Both CW and Best Buy, which is also selling the Nexus S in the UK, said onmly "key" stores will have stock. …

    reghardware 20 Dec 16:50

  • Nasuni grabs cloud development cash

    Following the money into the clouds

    Probably the last storage venture capital cash raising exercise of 2010 is following the dash to the cloud by pumping $15m into cloud filer startup Nasuni. Nasuni received $8m in a previous funding round in March 2009, so it has now received a total of $23m for the development of its business and software appliance: a lot of …

    Storage 20 Dec 16:57

  • Spamhaus DDoS blamed on shady Russian hosts, not Anonymous

    Da svidaniya, kamerad: Traditional enemies fingered in weekend packet flood

    Anti-spam organisation Spamhaus has recovered from a denial of service attack over the weekend. Initially though, Spamhaus may have been attacked in response to its warning that a WikiLeaks mirror called WikiLeaks.info was being hosted by a Russian bullet-proof hosting outfit, called Webalta, that also played home to phishing …

    Crime 20 Dec 17:06

  • Server workloads to go '70% virtual' by 2014

    Uh, that's it?

    By 2014, more than 70 per cent of all server workloads installed that year will be plunked down not on a bare metal piece of iron, but on a virtual or logical machine of some kind, according to the (virtual) box counters at IDC. But don't get the wrong idea. There are going to be plenty of old-fashioned physical boxes still …

    Servers 20 Dec 18:03

  • Assange lawyers fume over leaked rape case docs

    Ultimate WikiLeaks irony embraced

    Lawyers for Julian Assange are "angry" and "concerned" that someone leaked confidential Swedish police files detailing the rape allegations against the WikiLeaks founder, according to a report citing conversations with his legal team, and the team intends to launch a formal complaint with the Swedish authorities. It's unclear …

    Crime 20 Dec 19:22

  • Google open sources '$5m' in Java Eclipse tools

    Free code love Instantiated

    Google will open source two of the Java Eclipse coding tools it acquired with its purchase of Java-obsessed outfit Instantiations. Less than five months after paying an undisclosed sum for Instantiations, Mountain View has announced that it will donate the source code and IP for Instantiations' WindowBuilder and CodePro …

    Developer 20 Dec 21:08

  • Microsoft answers Google MapReduce with 'Dryad' beta

    It's like Hadoop. Without the open source bit

    Microsoft has released a beta version of its Dryad platform, a Windows-happy answer to Google's MapReduce distributed number crunching platform. Yes, there's already a burgeoning open source version of MapReduce: the Apache Hadoop project. And at least one Microsoft unit is both using Hadoop and actually contributing code to …

    Channel Register 20 Dec 23:21

  • IBM super cleared for trivia showdown with humanity

    'Do you want to play a game?'

    More than a decade ago, IBM challenged humanity to a chess match with its Deep Blue supercomputer. And the computer won. Now, the company has issued another challenge to humanity. This time, the game is trivia. And humanity has better odds. It is hard to guess who will win the grand challenge contest between humanity and …

    HPC 20 Dec 23:38