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27th January 2011 Archive

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  • NYT casts Assange as 'arrogant' (with a little 'Peter Pan')

    My time with Julian

    WikiLeaks is hardly the journalistic enterprise many of its supporters claim, but it will be a sad day for American jurisprudence if the website is prosecuted for spilling government secrets, the top editor of The New York Times says. In a lengthy behind-the-scenes account of his dealings with Julian Assange, NYT Executive …

    Music and Media 27 Jan 01:25

  • Xen sends Citrix Q4 into the clouds

    Skywrites Amazon interop deal

    Citrix Systems shelled out $500m in 2007 to acquire XenSource, the company behind the open source Xen hypervisor, and in 2010, that bet paid off bigtime. The big bet that Citrix made that summer more than three years ago was that server virtualization would trump the application virtualization that made Citrix a name in the …

    Financial News 27 Jan 01:29

  • Mac daddy predicts all-knowing, all-seeing UI

    Macworld 'I have seen the future, and it's in your ear'

    In the future, you'll use a speech-based interface to access all the world's knowledge – including your own personal memories – stored in the cloud, according to a legendary engineer who was a member of the team that designed Apple's original Macintosh user interface. "More and more people have smartphones in their pockets …

    Software 27 Jan 05:03

  • Samsung N350 dual-core netbook

    Review Slimmer, faster and - ahem - pricier...

    The debate as to whether netbooks are evolving fast enough rages on. Some say manufacturers are guilty of laziness by continuing to churn out similar models, while others argue that there’s simply no need for netbooks to evolve like standard laptops and that more attention should be put into making them cheaper. Samsung’s …

    reghardware 27 Jan 07:00

  • Change to sustain public sector ICT spend

    Spending to support cost cuts offsets cuts

    Public sector investment on ICT is set to remain steady over the next five years in the face of the government's spending cuts. New research by Kable shows that efforts to save costs in other areas and a redesign of many services will ensure that spending to support these will offset cuts in other areas. UK public sector ICT …

    Channel Register 27 Jan 07:30

  • Mac Tel sends in the clouds

    An architect all your very own

    Australia’s emerging cloud computing market for the enterprise set is getting competitive with the entry of tier-two carrier Macquarie Telecom. The telco has launched a managed service - the Macquarie Telecom Enterprise Cloud - up against carriers Telstra and Optus and global managed services operators such as Orange Business …

    Cloud 27 Jan 08:32

  • BPM beyond automation

    Broadcast Learning from experience

    Today at 11am, we'll be beaming live from our central London studios when The Register's own Tim Phillips will be joined by a couple of experts to talk about Business Process Automation. BPM has traditionally been associated with hard-core process automation, and has also often involved the use of similarly hard-core …

    Tech Panel 27 Jan 09:02

  • Intel's biggest ever buy is going ahead

    EC approves $7.7bn deal, but with conditions

    The European Commission has approved Intel's buyout of McAfee – as long as the chip giant allows other companies access to its technology. One of the Commission's concerns was that Intel, by embedding security on its chips, would effectively exclude competitors' products from the market. Intel has promised to make …

    PCs & Chips 27 Jan 09:34

  • State of the Internet Down Under?

    Life in the slowish lane

    A quiet suburban town 18km away from Sydney with no CBD to speak of called Riverwood boasts Australia’s fastest average broadband speeds at 5.8Mbps, but according to Akamai’s latest ‘State of the Internet’ report this is a rare treat. With only 12 per cent of its internet users enjoying speeds higher than 5Mbps, Australia has …

    Networks 27 Jan 10:01

  • Met re-opens NoTW phone hack probe

    'Significant new information' prompts reinvestigation

    Scotland Yard has re-opened an investigation into phone hacking at News of the World – more than four years after closing the book of the case. The Met, which previously refused to reinvestigate the case, said that the move came in response to the receipt of "significant new information". This investigation will be led by …

    Law 27 Jan 10:07

  • UK proximity payments by phone this summer

    Everything Everywhere goes NFC

    Everything Everywhere is launching proximity payments in the UK this summer in collaboration with Barclaycard. The service, which will come with a flagship handset supporting Near Field Communications, and a new pre-paid account, will be compatible with Barclaycard's existing payment infrastructure. So by this summer more than …

    Mobile 27 Jan 10:25

  • Sony preps PlayStation gaming for Android

    Not one PlayStation Phone but many?

    Sony will bring PlayStation gaming to Android, the company announced this morning, firming up rumours and leaks that a future Sony Ericsson mobile will include gaming. But its PlayStation Suite app is a long way from the all-in-one PlayStation Phone of rumour. Indeed, it's 'one app, many phones' emphasis counts against the …

    reghardware 27 Jan 10:26

  • Anon hackers join Egyptian protests

    Scientology-baiting less pressing just now

    Hackers affiliated with Anonymous have begun bombarding Egyptian government websites with junk traffic as part of a protest against net censorship that has accompanied recent civil unrest in the Arab country. The DDoS attacks follow recent similarly motivated attacks against state websites in Tunisia and Zimbabwe. The latest …

    Government 27 Jan 10:28

  • HP makes flash music with Violin

    You wanna play, Larry?

    HP is working with flash supplier Violin Memory to make accelerated database systems competing with Oracle's Exadata go-fast boxes. If you go down to the HP woods (pdf) today you're sure of a big surprise. You will find HP's recommended configurations for online transaction processing (OLTP) based on ProLiant DL980 G7 servers …

    Storage 27 Jan 10:37

  • Lenovo and NEC to combine PC ops

    JV established in Japan and... er... Holland

    It's official: after past denials, Lenovo and NEC are combining their PC operations - in Japan for now, but possibly further afield in due course. The two companies will merge their Japanese operations into a joint-venture company, NEC Lenovo Japan Group. The announcement doesn't contain the T word, but we have to assume …

    reghardware 27 Jan 10:38

  • Microsoft sues ex-general manager over Salesforce.com exodus

    How very dare you...

    Microsoft is suing its erstwhile general manager Matt Miszewski, after he took a job with cloud computing rival Salesforce.com. The company has won a restraining order from a Washington state court, which temporarily halts Miszewski from working at Salesforce in his new position of senior vice president of global public sector …

    Channel Register 27 Jan 10:40

  • Forget Flash – content is king

    A bit of web wisdom too often forgotten...

    My story begins with a blizzard. This blizzard dumped over a metre-and-a-half of snow on my hometown. This being Edmonton in the winter, we’re fairly used to this sort of thing. Those with big, heavy cars drive them into a road-shoulder snowbank and make their own parking spots. Those with smaller cars park behind them. My …

    Sysadmin blog 27 Jan 10:46

  • Theresa May announces new counter-terrorism package

    Stop-and-search, RIPA sort of limited

    Home Secretary, Theresa May, yesterday announced radical government action to end the creeping threat to civil liberties in the UK brought about by counter-terrorism legislation and increased powers for the security forces – by replacing her existing powers with even better counter-terror legislation and new powers for the …

    Government 27 Jan 11:06

  • China Mobile asks Apple for LTE iPhone...

    ...and Apple seems willing

    Apple seems set to produce an LTE - Long Term Evolution - 4G iPhone, for network operator China Mobile if for no one else. China Mobile's chairman, Wang Jianzhou, was yesterday quoted as saying the Apple "has made it clear they will support TD-LTE", Reuters reports. By TD-LTE, he means the 4G successor to TD-SCDMA - Time …

    reghardware 27 Jan 11:07

  • MP: Googlepoly hurts British business

    You are in a twisty world of Google sites, all alike

    The UK is heading for a "bleakly uniform world of Google everything" unless the company is constrained, Parliament heard yesterday in a special debate on the power of search engines. Government should protect and foster competition in e-commerce argued Labour MP for Hyndburn, said Graham Jones, who called the debate. "British …

    Government 27 Jan 11:08

  • Middlesbrough cabbie relieves lad of iPhone

    No cash on you? Just leave the mobe on the dash...

    A Middlesbrough teen has been left "devastated" after a cabbie made off with the iPhone he'd demanded as guarantee the lad would pay the fare. Shaken 16-year-old Ryan Horkan explained to the local Evening Gazette: “I had been out with my friends and flagged down a taxi to go home. I explained to the driver I didn’t have money …

    Bootnotes 27 Jan 11:24

  • Blackadder style chemists transform gold into purest ... purple

    Descendant of James Watt in fruity feat

    Boffins in Utah have achieved a Blackadder-esque scientific feat by turning gold into purest purple. It's hoped that this will lead to a novel means of harvesting solar power. According to a statement issued yesterday by Utah uni Brigham Young, local chemistry prof Richard Watt and students working in his lab came to suspect …

    Science 27 Jan 11:29

  • BSkyB reels in Wi-Fi network operator The Cloud

    Buys hotspot specialist, bigs up growing broadband customer base

    BSkyB confirmed this morning that it bought Wi-Fi hotspot provider The Cloud Networks Ltd earlier this month for an undisclosed sum. It said the deal was subject to regulatory clearance in Jersey, where The Cloud recently inked a partnership with Jersey Telecom. Sky said it has bought The Cloud to beef up its mobile content …

    Wireless 27 Jan 11:50

  • Man demands police protection from sex-mad missus

    I need sleep, begs exhausted hubby

    An exhausted Turkish man living in Germany has asked cops to protect him from his sex-mad missus, Bild reports. The bleary-eyed victim of his wife's "voracious embraces" walked into a police station in the southwestern city of Waiblingen on Tuesday to explain he'd spent four years kipping on the sofa in a vain attempt to get …

    Bootnotes 27 Jan 11:53

  • LightSquared gets satellite waiver

    A bird in the air is worth ignoring

    The marginally insane plan for a US-spanning mobile network using frequencies reserved for satellite is looking more likely, thanks to an FCC decision that handsets won't have to be satellite-capable. Earlier this month the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) requested clarification in the rules, …

    Mobile 27 Jan 12:01

  • PSP 2 'as powerful as PS3'

    Sony specs up next-gen portable console

    The PSP 2 - or "Next Generation Portable", as Sony has codenamed it for now - has officially been revealed in Tokyo today, and the company claims it's as powerful as the PS3. As rumoured, the PSP 2 - sorry, NGP - has a high-res OLED touchscreen as well as a touch-sensitive back panel. It features front- and rear-facing cameras …

    reghardware 27 Jan 12:06

  • Xiotech's go-much-faster storage brick

    Adds SSD speed

    Xiotech has announced its go-faster hybrid ISE storage brick containing a mix of solid state drives and spinning disk drives. Xiotech's storage brick, the ISE (Intelligent Storage Element), is a single super disk drive, a sealed enclosure of 2.5-inch drives that are virtualised as a single disk, with drive manufacturer …

    Storage 27 Jan 12:40

  • Pothole-spotter app aims to stop arse ache

    Names and shames councils along the way

    A simple way to report potholes which need repairing means you can now see how well, or badly, your local council is doing keeping the roads safe. FillThatHole.org.uk has been running for a few years and allows cyclists, or anyone else, to report potholes. The site sends your message on to the relevant local authority which …

    Mobile 27 Jan 12:44

  • HTC DG H100 Media Link DLNA adapter

    Review Phone and PC to TV streamer, anyone?

    HTC’s DG H100 Media Link is handy little gadget that can connect any HDMI-equipped TV to a DLNA-enabled wireless home network, so you can stream audio and video content direct from your phone or PC to the big screen. Mobile viewing: HTC's DG H100 Media Link The Media Link is a very neat and sleek looking little rectangular …

    reghardware 27 Jan 13:00

  • Data retention 'ineffective' in fighting serious crime

    Lift the blanket, urges German privacy group

    Comms data retention is ineffective for the prosecution of serious crime, according to a study of German police statistics by local privacy activists. Germany implemented a European Union directive in 2008 requiring telecoms operators and ISPs to retain data about customers' communications, including numbers called or email …

    Policing 27 Jan 13:04

  • UK cops arrest five in Anonymous attacks probe

    Suspects aged 15 to 26 cuffed in raids

    Scotland Yard has arrested five people under the Computer Misuse Act as part of its investigation into alleged attacks by the Anonymous hacking collective. The five males - aged, 15, 16, 19, 20 and 26 - were arrested in a series of co-ordinated raids on Thursday morning by detectives from Scotland Yard's Police Central e-Crime …

    Policing 27 Jan 13:24

  • Cameroonians cleared in 'surreal' dyed banknote scam

    Victim of €200k hit to blame for own misfortune, says court

    Two Cameroonian cousins of the Lads from Lagos, who took a Spanish property developer for €200k in a classic "black money" ploy, have been cleared of any wrongdoing on the grounds that "not even the naïvest person would have believed" the "surreal and incredible" dyed banknotes scam. A court in Valencia heard this week how …

    Bootnotes 27 Jan 13:26

  • Antique Nimrod subhunters scrapped – THANK GOODNESS!

    Comment World's biggest vintage aircraft club finally shut down

    The UK press is bursting with indignation today as the process of scrapping the Nimrod MRA4 submarine-hunting aircraft begins. But in fact the four planes now being broken up were a financial and engineering disaster. Had they gone into service they would have become a terrible, cripplingly expensive millstone around the neck of …

    Government 27 Jan 13:42

  • Mexican army interdicts dope-slinging catapult

    Smuggling marijuana into Arizona, medieval style

    The Mexican army has seized a dope-slinging catapult capable of projecting 4.4lb (2kg) bundles of marijuana into Arizona. US National Guard operatives at the Naco Border Patrol Station alerted the authorities south of the border last Friday after spotting "several people preparing a catapult and launching packages over the …

    Bootnotes 27 Jan 14:33

  • Heroic London carbon trading scheme fails

    Islington Greens snatch up homemade raffia crafts from table and flounce off

    "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons" - TS Eliot It is with dismay that we bring you sad news from one of Britain's most self-righteous boroughs. In Islington, the location for the Private Eye comic strip "It's Grim Up North London", the area's 'Carbon Rationing Action Group' has decided to call it a day. Group …

    Environment 27 Jan 14:49

  • Hubble squints at most distant galaxy

    Dim cluster spotted at 13.2bn light-years

    The Hubble Space Telescope has squinted at what's "likely to be the most distant object ever seen in the universe" – a galaxy some 13.2 billion light-years from Earth. The dim cluster of blue stars existed just 480 million years after the Big Bang, NASA explains, and is a significant find for scientists aiming to explain how …

    Space 27 Jan 15:32

  • Google disappears torrent terms from autocomplete search results

    But people able to type still get access to juicy stuff

    Google has been true to its pre-Christmas word about getting ever so slightly tougher on copyright infringement by killing some terms users look up via its ubiquitous search engine. The company said in December that it would play nice with the big name record labels, TV networks, and movie studios, by providing better …

    Music and Media 27 Jan 15:43

  • Distie PC sales swell in US

    Back from the brink...

    Sales of PCs to disties are up 38 points in the US over the last two years. The numbers are based on an index created from the first quarter of 2009 – considered to be the first "normal" quarter after the downturn and based on numbers from distributors. Notebook sales grew 31 points in revenue terms, or 40 points in units, …

    Channel Register 27 Jan 16:03

  • Chaps tolerant of girl-on-girl cheating by other halves

    Blokes hoping to join in, suspect shrewd profs

    Trick-cyclists in America have carried out groundbreaking research in which they find that men are much less likely to break up with a cheating girlfriend if she cheats on them with another woman, rather than with another chap. This, perhaps unsurprisingly, is because the blokes are hoping that they may be able to join their …

    Biology 27 Jan 16:21

  • Smartphone shipments surged in 2010

    Nokia vs Android, Apple vs RIM

    Apple and Android ate into the world smartphone market share of both Nokia and BlackBerry boys Research in Motion during 2010, though since everyone is selling more handsets than ever before, none of them should complain. The figures come from market watcher Strategy Analytics, and they see 2010 closing with Nokia taking 34.2 …

    reghardware 27 Jan 16:44

  • Microsoft insists autistic Xboxer is a cheat

    Mother furious

    Jennifer Zdenek, the mother of an 11-year-old autistic boy, is outraged at Microsoft's Xbox Live for labelling her son a cheat and taking back all his online achievements, which she claims were earned fairly. Zdenek said her son, Julias Jackson, only seems to have cheated because he's so good at playing Xbox games. She …

    reghardware 27 Jan 16:59

  • Your call is not important to us

    Customer service costs time and money, but it's worth doing

    Outside of California, how many of us order up something from our baker with an email? How many of us have the local café on MSN? Do we set up an appointment with the barber over Skype or order in office supplies using Facebook? Though these ideas may seem silly at first, the ease of “choose your own communications method” …

    Sysadmin blog 27 Jan 18:00

  • Fanboi king hails Apple 'love affair with open web'

    Macworld The high comedy of web hypocrisy

    When Google yanked the royalty-encumbered H.264 video codec from its Chrome browser, saying its goal was to "enable open innovation", John Gruber promptly convinced an army of tech pundits that Mountain View was guilty of an epic hypocrisy. "Chrome not only supports Flash, it ships with its own embedded copy of Flash. I don’t …

    Software 27 Jan 18:16

  • New Nokia boss drops grenade: hints at strategy shift

    Android in, Ovi out? He won't say...

    Nokia's new CEO Stephen Elop dropped a grenade in his first full quarterly earnings conference today. Elop took charge in September. "We must build, catalyze or join a competitive ecosystem," he told analysts, leading to speculation Nokia will license a third party platform or downgrade its ill-fated Ovi services. The latter …

    Mobile 27 Jan 18:21

  • Deliveries for final Apple Xserves stalled to April

    Because 'hardly anyone was buying them'

    Apple is killing off its Xserve rack-mounted, Xeon-based servers on January 31, but if you thought you could go for one last rack refresh today and get a reasonable delivery, you're about to get your second Xserve-related unpleasant surprise. The first one, of course, came in early November last year, when Steve Jobs decided …

    Servers 27 Jan 19:21

  • Scareware mongers cough up $8m to settle fraud charges

    More than a million duped

    Federal authorities will collect $8 million from members of a scareware operation that duped more than a million people into installing bogus security software on their computers. Marc D'Souza and his father, Maurice D'Souza, agreed to pay $8.2 million in “ill-gotten gains” generated by the scam, which pimped software titles …

    Crime 27 Jan 19:40

  • Mellanox itching to close Voltaire, crank up InfiniBand

    Books loss on Q4 sales bump

    While many IT players are seeing revenue and profit flushes in the fourth quarter, the results were mixed at network adapter and InfiniBand chip and switch maker Mellanox Technologies. In the fourth quarter of 2010 ended in December, Mellanox booked $40.7m in sales, up 14.5 per cent, but the company posted a $517,000 loss, …

    Data Networking 27 Jan 19:45

  • Oracle spurns Ruby devs for Java love

    NetBeans is not your home

    Ruby-on-Rails, once an exciting Web 2.0 language flirted with by Sun Microsystems, has no future at Oracle. The database giant is ending all support for RoR in the NetBeans IDE it inherited from Sun through its acquisition. Support will cease as of January 27, with the RoR module removed from development builds of NetBeans IDE …

    Developer 27 Jan 20:16

  • Court orders seizure of PS3 hacker's computers

    Sony 1; Geohot 0

    A federal judge ordered prolific hacker Geohot to turn over his computers and hard drives and to stop publishing the tools used to root Sony's PlayStation 3 after finding his hack was likely a violation of US copyright law. The temporary restraining order was issued on Thursday by US District Judge Susan Illston of San …

    Security 27 Jan 21:44

  • RC flyer to watch over fires

    'Can I have a turn please, Captain?'

    Melbourne’s Metropolitan Fire Brigade is to deploy an Australian-developed “eye in the sky” remotely-controlled aerial camera from WA-based developer Cyber Technology. Two four-fan CyberQuad UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) will be used to hover above fires to identify hotspots and send realtime vision to a control centre. One …

    Rise of the Machines 27 Jan 21:49

  • AMD uncloaks Fusion dev kit

    Parallel processing programming push

    AMD has released the software development kit for its Fusion line of CPU/GPU mashups, an update and renaming of its ATI Stream SDK. "When developers harness the power of parallel processing within our APU designs, they can fundamentally change the PC experience to help not only make it faster, but also to create new …

    Hardware 27 Jan 22:09

  • Amazon boasts first $10 billion quarter

    Kindlebooks eclipse paperbacks

    Amazon's quarterly sales topped $10 billion for the first time in the fourth quarter of last year. For the quarter ending December 31, the mega-etailer pulled in net sales of $12.95 billion, up from $9.5 billion in Q3. That's a 37 per cent increase from the previous year, and it translated to profits of $416 million, an 8 per …

    Financial News 27 Jan 22:38

  • Happy New Year text prematurely blows up suicide bomber

    SMS of death

    A suicide bomber's plan to detonate explosives in Central Moscow on New Year's Eve was foiled when she received an unexpected text message that caused her deadly payload to blow up too early, according to news reports. The message wishing her a happy new year came hours before the unnamed woman was to set off her suicide belt …

    Crime 27 Jan 23:42

  • Intel gifts world open source FCoE

    Vows to save 400,000,000 feet of cable

    Intel has officially introduced its Open FCoE software stack, based on the native OS Fibre Channel Over Ethernet project it first open sourced in 2007. Intel Open FCoE is free for use with Intel's X520 family of 10 GbE (Gigabit Ethernet) server adaptors, and it has been qualified for Microsoft Windows, Red Hat and SUSE Linux, …

    Data Networking 27 Jan 23:42