29th December 2010 Archive

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Motorola Milestone 2 Android smartphone

Review Social climber

Following a period in the doldrums, Motorola has certainly turned a page coming up with a series of well-specified Android smartphones and its own innovative social networking tools. The Milestone 2 is not to be confused with the second Milestone phone, the Milestone XT720 – no, you're right, it is confusing. Featuring a slide- …

reghardware 29 Dec 07:00
Nortel patent sale fuels uncertainty over LTE intellectual property

Big guns scrap for IP stockpile

Apple, Nokia and Google are all expected to bid for Nortel’s huge patents hoard. The winner could help decide the licensing structures for LTE. LTE deployments and trials may be stacking up, but one significant aspect remains fraught with uncertainty – the patent position. In previous generations of mobile technology, …

Mobile 29 Dec 10:07
Paul Allen reloads patent attack against tech titans

Happy New Year to Apple, Google, Facebook, world...

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has hit refresh on his attempt to bring a patent infringement lawsuit against Apple, Google, Facebook and other tech outfits. Earlier this month a US District Court judge rejected a far-reaching complaint brought by Interval Licensing LLC – the patent arm of Interval Research – against Google’s …

Financial News 29 Dec 10:57
Cambridge boffins rebuff banking industry take down request

NO-PIN down

Computer scientists from Cambridge University have rebuffed attempts by a banking association to persuade them to take down a thesis covering the shortcomings of Chip-and-PIN as a payment verification method. Omar Choudary's masters thesis contains too much information about how it might be possible to fool a retailing …

Enterprise Security 29 Dec 11:21
Alcatel-Lucent pays to shut down US bribery probe

Admits dodgy 'consulting'

Alcatel-Lucent has agreed to pay the US government $137m to drop probes of illegal kickbacks it allegedly paid to win contracts in Latin America and Asia. The payout will close a regulatory investigation by the Securities Exchange Commission, and a criminal investigation by the Justice Department. "We take responsibility for …

Channel Register 29 Dec 11:37
How I watched a holographic storage company implode

InPhase techie talks smoke, mirrors and holograms

It was a stony and hard road that holographic storage start-up InPhase travelled, going from hope to long, drawn-out despair. Its ambitions were left in tatters after senior management mis-steps and funding difficulties, but now the firm is allowing itself a little hope again. This is an insider's story of what happened seen …

Storage 29 Dec 12:22
PC World website went titsup on Boxing Day

Apparently due to 'a long queue'. Shurely shome mistake?

Computer retail outfit PC World suffered an embarrassing website outage on Boxing Day, which is traditionally seen as one of the biggest online shopping days of the year. But customers hoping to hunt down computer sales’ bargains from the comfort of their armchair on Sunday were unable to access the PC World site. The …

Channel Register 29 Dec 12:37
4chan hit by DDoS assault

If a shock site got defaced would anyone notice?

Controversial image board 4chan came under a denial of service attack on Tuesday. A status message on 4chan's status boards (below) reported that the birthplace of anonymous and home of midget porn had joined the "ranks of MasterCard, Visa, PayPal" as victims of a denial of service attack. Site is down due to DDoS. We now …

Crime 29 Dec 12:45
HP lands $2.5bn NASA IT support deal

Bastard Operator From Space

NASA has outsourced its end-user computing services to HP, in an up to 10-year, $2.5bn deal. HP's Enterprise Services division - formerly known as EDS - will deliver most of the space agency's hardware and software requirements for desktop and mobile. The contract will be managed at the NASA Shared Services Center in …

Channel Register 29 Dec 12:51
Amazon slips out Microsoft's Windows 7 Family Pack kill date

Sales end 31 December

Sales of Microsoft’s Windows 7 Family Pack look set to expire on Friday 31 December, that is if Amazon’s kill date of the product is repeated elsewhere. The online retailer confirmed last Friday that it would stop selling the £149.99 ($149.99) Family Pack – which offers customers three upgrade licences from Windows XP and …

Channel Register 29 Dec 12:56
Cuckold computer tech faces ID theft charges over Gmail 'hack'

Soap opera

A husband accused of hacking into his wife's webmail account in order to discover evidence of an affair has been charged with identity theft. Leon Walker, 33, from Rochester Hills, Michigan, suspected his wife Clara was having an affair with her former husband. Consumed with jealousy after his wife failed to return home one …

ID 29 Dec 14:15
Standard smartphone charger to dominate in two years

Apple, Nokia and RIM signed up

A new generation of smartphones capable of using the same charger - from manufacturers including Apple, Nokia and RIM - will begin appearing in the new year, following the release of European technical standards. The standards, based on Micro-USB, have been welcomed today by the European Commission, which says they will be a …

Mobile 29 Dec 14:46
Groupon to raise $950m in massive funding round

Who needs Google, anyway?

Up and coming e-commerce coupon website Groupon has been given the go ahead to raise up to $950m in a massive equity financing round. The company, which recently turned its back on a stellar $6bn takeover offer from Google, said it planned to sell shares at $31.59 each, according to a state of Delaware filing cited by Reuters …

Financial News 29 Dec 15:18
Skype's mega-FAIL: exec cops to cause

Live by P2P, die by P2P

Chastened by its pre-Christmas mega-FAIL, Skype on Wednesday explained in detail why the titanic titsup takedown happened and how the company plans to ensure that the globe will never again go VoIP-less for an extended period of time. For those of you tuning in late, last Wednesday the online telephony service began to wobble …

Servers 29 Dec 19:10
Intel unveils itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny SSDs

Same performance, one-eighth the size.

Intel announced on Wednesday a new line of tiny solid-state drives, the SSD 310 series, that have performance specs comparable to those of their 2.5-inch X-25 and 1.8-inch X-18 SSD brethren – and at least one manufacturer is already on board to put the little fellows into dual-drive notebooks. "The Intel SSD 310 series will …

Storage 29 Dec 21:28