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21st January 2011 Archive

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  • Texter who fell in fountain threatens to sue

    Overnight YouTube phenom speaks out

    The woman who became an overnight YouTube sensation says she may sue the shopping mall where she was videotaped falling into a fountain while texting. Cathy Cruz Marrero said in an article on readingeagle.com that she's “mortified” by the incident, which appears to have been captured on video by security team at the Berkshire …

    Mobile 21 Jan 2011, 00:07

  • WiFi comes to Sydney buses

    Do it standing up

    A commuter taking a two-hour intercity train trip to Sydney has both the space and the time to make serious use of a WiFi network but, alas, doesn’t have the WiFi network. However, in an almost unheralded trial announced during the silly season and switched on last week, commuters between the eastern suburb of Maroubra and the …

    Broadband 21 Jan 2011, 00:33

  • Ex-eBay CEO lands post-purge HP board seat

    Rejected by the populace, selected by Lane

    Hewlett-Packard's non-executive chairman Ray Lane, who took over the board of directors following the departure of chief executive Mark Hurd, is cleaning house. Effective January 21, HP is adding five new people to the board and is showing four others to the door. The changes announced by Lane Thursday will eventually shrink …

    Hardware 21 Jan 2011, 01:04

  • AMD to Intel: 'Thanks for the marketing boost'

    Summertime showdown looms

    When Intel unveiled its new line of 2nd Generation Intel Core processors (née Sandy Bridge) at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month, Chipzilla's prime rival AMD felt a level of happiness akin to that of a certain tasty bivalve. "We were pleasantly surprised at CES," the general manager of AMD's product group Rick …

    Hardware 21 Jan 2011, 01:09

  • Website with 10 million users warns of password theft

    Trapster hack

    A website that helps drivers avoid speeding tickets is warning its 10 million registered users that their email addresses and passwords may be in the hands of hackers who breached the site's security. The advisory was issued on Thursday by Trapster, which boasts more than 10 million users on its front page. The site uses crowd- …

    Security 21 Jan 2011, 01:18

  • Cisco-EMC Arcadia experiences integrator-friendly re-birth

    Real products, no services

    It's official. The Acadia partnership formed by server wannabe and networking giant Cisco Systems and storage array maker EMC and its virtualization minion, VMware, is now known as the Virtual Computing Environment Company - VCE for short. And it is getting out of the services business and sticking to certification and support …

    Servers 21 Jan 2011, 06:00

  • Aavara PCE122 HDMI extender

    Review The long run

    Ever fancied watching a Blu-ray movie in the garden? Always wondered what it would be like to isolate your Xbox 360 so you could hear the gameplay over the sound of the jet engine Microsoft calls a DVD drive? Many of us would probably like to, but 50 metre HDMI cables tend to go for £300 apiece – not exactly what you'd describe …

    Hardware 21 Jan 2011, 07:00

  • AMD CEO downed by lost server-chip business

    Kindness of HP, Dell and Intel not enough

    There's a lot of speculation about why Dirk Meyer, chief executive for more than two of the most tumultuous years in AMD's turbulent history, was shown the door last week. Everyone is speculating that it was about AMD not fielding a proper processor to ride the tablet wave like a stoned-out surfer dude. But if you read between …

    Servers 21 Jan 2011, 07:00

  • EMEA computer shipments flat in final quarter of 2010, says IDC

    It's the iPad and the economy, stupid

    The PC market in Europe, the Middle East and Africa in the final quarter of last year was flat, according to research outfit IDC. In a report published this week, it found that big corporate firms were slowly starting to spend on IT and replace old kit, but added that SMEs continued to struggle with very tight budgets in Q4 …

    The Channel 21 Jan 2011, 08:30

  • NEC, Lenovo deny PC merger deal done

    But they do seem to be talking about it

    NEC and Lenovo have both attempted to pour cold water on Japanese media claims that they are to merge their respective PC businesses in what would essentially be a Lenovo acquisition of NEC's operation. Neither firm's terse, hastily released statements said the claim was incorrect, merely that no decision on the matter has yet …

    Hardware 21 Jan 2011, 10:04

  • Alleged Renault spies fight back

    Name clearing legal battle begins

    Two of the three senior Renault executives accused of industrial espionage have started legal action to clear their names. The three were suspended without pay by Renault earlier this month. All three have now been dismissed by Renault. The car giant accused them of spying on development of its electric vehicles, with some …

    Law 21 Jan 2011, 10:10

  • Samsung finds focus with 16Mp skinny shooter

    Oh snappy days

    Samsung has snapped into action with a raft of new lightweight point and shoot cameras, including one with a 16Mp sensor set to hit the shelves in the next few weeks. The ST95, ST90 and ST65 are all less than 20mm thick, shoot 720p HD video and come with a 5x optical zoom. The ST95 leads the way with its 16Mp sensor, a 3in …

    Hardware 21 Jan 2011, 10:15

  • Councils look for 'good enough' IT solutions

    That'll do, pig

    IT departments in local government are moving towards minimising their costs in response to the spending cuts, according to a new report from Socitm. The annual IT Trends in Local Public Services report from the public sector IT organisation, published on 20 January, says that IT teams are having to cope with further …

    The Channel 21 Jan 2011, 10:25

  • Open sourcerers port media centre to iOS

    XBMC on Apple TV 2, iPad, iPhone

    Open source media centre front end XBMC will now run on the iOS-based second-generation Apple TV. And the iPad. And the iPhone 4. Installing XBMC on any of these gadgets requires them to be jailbroken, of course - as the XBMC team notes, "you won’t be seeing XBMC in the app store any time soon, since it directly competes with …

    Hardware 21 Jan 2011, 10:48

  • Lush website hack 'exposes credit card details'

    Updated Cosmetics co throws out baby with bubbly bathwater

    Luxury cosmetics firm Lush has ditched its UK website in response to a sustained hacking attack which left users vulnerable to credit card fraud. The firm warns that credit card details submitted to the Lush.co.uk site between 4 October and 20 January may have been compromised by the assault by unknown hackers. Customers are …

    Security 21 Jan 2011, 10:58

  • NASA still dreaming of last Atlantis launch

    Pencils STS-135 mission for 28 June

    NASA is still hopeful it can extend the space shuttle programme to one last launch, and has "baselined" Atlantis's STS-135 mission for a 28 June lift-off. The agency explains: In late December, the agency’s Space Operations Mission Directorate requested the shuttle and International Space Station programs take the necessary …

    Science 21 Jan 2011, 11:00

  • Blizzard green-lights fan-made StarCraft mod

    WoS gets official sanction despite YouTube takedown

    Blizzard has claimed it never intended to hinder development of the World of Starcraft massive multiplayer online (MMO) mod being developed by Ryan Winzen, even though removed a preview video from YouTube yesterday. The company insisted that the removal of the video was simply a routine procedure while it discussed with the …

    Games 21 Jan 2011, 11:03

  • Police DNA retention ruled lawful by NI High Court

    Human rights court ruling trumped

    Northern Ireland's High Court of Justice has ruled that police retention of a 14-year-old boy's DNA was not illegal, despite a European Court of Human Rights ruling that the blanket data retention policy conflicts with human rights law. The Court said that it could not follow the ruling from the European Court of Human Rights …

    Law 21 Jan 2011, 11:08

  • Boffins sex pterodactyls at last

    'Mrs T' gives up secrets of ambiguous sky lizards

    Bone-furtling boffins say they have cracked one of the most difficult tasks known among dinosaur aficionados - namely, that of sexing pterodactyls. Have you got a canoe on your head or are you just pleased to see me? According to a statement issued yesterday by Leicester uni: The discovery of an ancient fossil, nicknamed " …

    Science 21 Jan 2011, 11:30

  • Tech salaries up five per cent in 2010

    Six quarters of growth

    Last year saw continued growth in demand for IT staff, and a five per cent increase in salaries. Finance positions were down six per cent, but demand for both permanent and contract staff working in retail increased. The most sought-after skills by employers were SQL, C and C#, although C saw a four per cent drop in demand. …

    Management 21 Jan 2011, 11:42

  • Man killed by own cock

    Blade-enhanced battle-beast missing, presumed stolen

    A Bengali man has reportedly suffered a gruesome demise after he pushed his metal-enhanced cock that bit too far. Singrai Soren, a trainer of fighting roosters, was killed in Mohanpur in West Bengal after one of his birds apparently turned on him, the Daily Mail soberly relates. According to a friend, Soren forced the …

    Bootnotes 21 Jan 2011, 12:07

  • Apple's publishing tax provokes Poirot

    Belgium sniffs antitrust trouble with subscription tax

    Apple's desire to capture a slice of publishers' subscription revenues has prompted concern from the authorities. Since last year, when a reader downloads a magazine or newspaper app they can operate their own subscriptions from within the app. This makes the subscription a private transaction between publisher and reader. But …

    Media 21 Jan 2011, 12:11

  • Beeb gets the measure of the London Eye

    Equals 1,190.48 KiloJubs of phone directories

    Regular readers will know that the Vulture Central Weights and Measures Soviet, which a few years back set the maximum velocity of a sheep in a vacuum and quantified a raft of new benchmarks including the jub and the linguine, has been keeping a close eye on the BBC's own efforts to measure our world. In August last year, we …

    Bootnotes 21 Jan 2011, 12:12

  • Google clones Groupon to rival e-coupon site

    Imitation is the best form of flattery, or something

    Google is prepping its very own Groupon-like offering, after failing to grab the voucher site for itself. In December the Chicago-based e-commerce coupon website snubbed Google's massive $6bn buyout approach, preferring instead to raise equity and eventually take the fast-growing company public. According to Mashable, …

    Media 21 Jan 2011, 12:21

  • Yes! It's the iDevice-driven desktop droid

    Toy robot trundles as iPhone tilts

    This little bad boy is the TankBot, an inexpensive micro-robotic toy controllable by iOS. Manufacturer Desk Pets has developed a program that, using Apple's accelerometer tech, allows the TankBot to be controlled by tilting your iPhone. A forward tilt rolls him forward, a right tilt turns him right. Well, you get the idea. …

    Hardware 21 Jan 2011, 12:31

  • ZeuS blackhats target online payment providers

    More dosh for the evildoers

    Baddies behind the infamous ZeuS Trojan are diversifying their business by targeting online payment providers as well as online banking accounts. Transaction security firm Trusteer, which warned of the move on Thursday, compares the development to the evolution of card fraud in the 1990s when fraudsters moved from trying to …

    Security 21 Jan 2011, 12:32

  • Mozilla blocks Firefox-breaking Skype toolbar

    Given 'soft' barred treatment after calamitous crashes

    Mozilla has blocked a Skype toolbar add-on for its Firefox browser, after blaming the extension for causing 40,000 crashes last week. The open source outfit said it vastly slowed down webpage-loading times. The crash-prone add-on downed Firefox 3.6.13 - which is the current stable version of the browser - far too much, …

    Applications 21 Jan 2011, 12:36

  • India's cheap-as-chips delayed by cash spat

    £20 netbook will take even longer to appear

    Will Indians ever be able to buy a netbook for 20 quid? The nation's government still hopes so, despite binning its original offer to manufacturers to come up with one. The Indian government pitched the ultra-low cost laptop notion last year, and put the project out to tender with a view to having product ready to release by …

    Laptops 21 Jan 2011, 13:01

  • Top Indian space boffin beams down climate shocker

    Cherche les cosmic rays

    India's leading space physicist believes cosmic rays affect the Earth's climate far more than previously thought. U R Rao has analysed 45 years of data and declared that the forcing from charged particles is higher than previously thought, at 1.1Wm-2, and human-forcing lower than the IPCC "consensus" of 1.6Wm-2. Rao should …

    Science 21 Jan 2011, 13:09

  • Leica S2 professional medium format DSLR

    Review The 37.5Mp game-changer tested with its new 120mm lens

    Historically, commercial photographers have always relied on medium-format systems for their photo shoots and happily traded off manoeuvrability for image quality. Yet, when the Leica S2 became available to buy towards the end of 2009, things changed. The S2 pushes the boundaries of all flagship DSLRs, giving Nikon, Canon and …

    Hardware 21 Jan 2011, 13:18

  • Massive US rocket sends top-secret cargo into space

    Final 'Misty' stealth spysat placed in covert orbit?

    The US intelligence services have launched a large secret payload into space using one of the most powerful rockets currently available, a mighty Delta IV Heavy, which took off for the first time from the west coast last night. Soon to be literally above Top Secrets. The launch, from the Vandenberg military space base in …

    Science 21 Jan 2011, 13:20

  • T-Mobile touts US teen tracker

    Parental paranoia palliative motion-monitoring app for less dicey driving

    T-Mobile USA is offering to prevent teens texting while driving for only $5 a month, and track their movements for free, as long as they have an Android handset. DriveSmart Plus comes from Location Labs, which also provides FamilyWhere for those who want their offspring's movements plotted on a convenient map. DriveSmart …

    Mobile 21 Jan 2011, 13:38

  • Pirates: Good for Microsoft, great for open sourcers

    Open...and Shut BSA marooned by shipmates

    Software used to be so easy. You built a product and sold it through a variety of channels. Prospective customers might wonder whether they should buy your product or someone else's, but there was no question that they'd have to buy something if they wanted it. Software was proprietary. You couldn't use it for free. Period. …

    Software 21 Jan 2011, 14:00

  • El Reg takes a spin round Team Lotus's F1 factory

    How do you create an F1 team from nothing in three months?

    Team Lotus started out with four people in late 2009, and has grown to 200 people and two Formula One cars today. It only got a guaranteed place on the starting grid in December 2009 - and then had to create a team, a car and an infrastructure in four months. Sorting out a normal office network and backup systems in that time …

    Servers 21 Jan 2011, 14:13

  • Duke Nukem Forever release date revealed

    Let's rock!

    The forthcoming Duke Nukem first-person shoot-'em-up may have been taking Forever to arrive - such is the irony of its title - but at long last, the game's publisher, 2k, has confirmed the release date. According to a report on Game Informer, the long-awaited title will be released in the US on 3 May. The rest of us will get …

    Games 21 Jan 2011, 14:16

  • Are disk drives beginning to spin down?

    There's a dark cloud over their heads

    Are flash and cloud storage starting to end the disk drive's spectacular run on the storage stage? Seagate has just announced its second quarter results for is fiscal 2011 year, with an abrupt drop in profits - $150m compared to $533m a year ago; and lower revenues too - $2.7bn compared to $3.03bn a year ago. Western Digital' …

    Storage 21 Jan 2011, 14:55

  • End of the line for ID cards

    And that's the end of that chapter

    Today is the last day that ID cards can be used for buying porn or booze, or indeed for travel to Europe. At a cost of just £400,000, contractors are busy deleting the data collected. Which sounds like a lot until you consider the £330m Labour spent developing the project without purpose. The cards are valid until midnight …

    Government 21 Jan 2011, 14:56

  • Big new wind turbines too close together, says top boffin

    Latest windfarms 'underperforming'

    A top American fluid-dynamics boffin says that new, larger wind turbines now going into service are going to have to be placed much further apart - which will have serious implications for the amount of energy produced by wind farms of the future. The latest wind farms now going into service use huge turbines with rotor …

    Science 21 Jan 2011, 14:58

  • IPTV UK: failure to launch?

    Rivals fear YouView. They may not need to

    Britain's broadcasters are struggling with the internet. Efforts to design a single, consistent IPTV platform have become mired by the need to accomodate participants' existing services - some with commercial agendas, others without - and mud slung by competitors is beginning to stick. At the centre of IPTV unification is …

    Hardware 21 Jan 2011, 15:48

  • Facebook defends security strategy

    Analysis Shy social network responds to criticism

    Facebook has defended its record in thwarting rogue applications and other security in the face of criticism from security firms that it ought to adopt tighter application controls. The dominant social network disputes findings from a threat report by UK-based net security firm Sophos, released earlier this week, that spam, …

    Security 21 Jan 2011, 16:01

  • McDonalds samples NFC swipe-tech in UK

    Calories with a wave, but Starbucks goes for virtual barcodes

    McDonalds will be accepting proximity payment cards in 1,200 UK branches from this summer, though Starbucks has almost 7,000 stores lined up to accept barcodes in the USA. Starbucks' national roll-out will see Americans paying for coffee with a wave of their phone using an old technology. Meanwhile, McDonalds UK is embracing …

    Mobile 21 Jan 2011, 16:17

  • 1kW of sexy GPU love

    Forget rolling your own - pre-canned is back in style

    When someone provides me the funding I request for a project without fighting me tooth and nail over every bent copper, I believe that I should return the courtesy by going above and beyond to earn the trust that has been placed in me. One result of this is that the bigger the budget of the project, the pickier I become about …

    Servers 21 Jan 2011, 18:00

  • Gates, Woz, and the last 2,000 years of computing

    If you program it, they will come

    It's weird to see something from your childhood displayed as an ancient cultural artifact. Here at the newly refurbished Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, I'm standing over a glass case that houses the Commodore 64, the same machine I begged my parents to buy me for Christmas in 1983. Compared to today's …

    Media 21 Jan 2011, 19:58

  • EU halts carbon trading after 'concerted' hack attacks

    €30m up in smoke

    The European Commission has temporarily halted trading of carbon emissions credits following revelations that some two-million allowances worth about €30m were stolen from insecure accounts in recent days. At least three of the “cyber attacks” have occurred since the beginning of the year, and other registries are known to be …

    Security 21 Jan 2011, 20:31

  • Lawyer wants WikiLeaker kept off suicide watch

    Abuse of discretion alleged

    The attorney for accused WikiLeaker Pfc. Bradley Manning has petitioned his client's living conditions, which require him to be watched around the clock and forbid him from exercising except for one 30-minute period each day. The complaint was filed on Wednesday with the commander at the Quantico base, where Manning has been …

    Law 21 Jan 2011, 22:46