3rd February 2011 Archive

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Documents in Assange rape probe leak onto the net

He who lives by the sword, and all of that ...

It has to be the most ironic twist ever to befall Julian Assange, crusader for a cause he calls “radical transparency.” A hundred pages of official documents in an investigation that the WikiLeaks founder sexually molested two Swedish women have been leaked onto the net. According to Wired.com, which broke the story, the …

Music and Media 3 Feb 01:28
HTC Mozart WinPho 7 smartphone

Review Fugal offering

Of the three models from HTC for the launch of Windows Phone 7, the Mozart is the one with the 8Mp camera – a step up from the 5Mp snappers embedded in its brethren. Smartphone sonata: HTC's Mozart The casing is largely aluminium, with a couple of matt plastic sections on the back for receivers/transmitters, so you don’t …

reghardware 3 Feb 07:00
Paxo in second c-word shocker

Kills off crap email

Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman was in trouble for adding a consonant to "cuts" during Monday's show, now he's used another c-word to describe the programme's daily email. With the subject line "This is an ex-email", Paxman said he was writing "positively the last Newsnight daily email. The time has come to put this exercise …

Music and Media 3 Feb 09:44
Hack spies 'iPad 2' at mag launch

Debut imminent?

A gadget that may be the next iPad was seen at the launch of decorative, coffee table-friendly newsmagazine The Daily yesterday. According to the Reuters reporter who spotted the tablet, the only thing he or she could say that was different from the current model was "a front-facing camera at the top edge of the glass screen …

reghardware 3 Feb 09:55
BT profits from services

Turnaround ahoy

BT almost doubled profits in the last quarter of 2010, even though total turnover was slightly down. In the three months ended 31 December 2010 the telco made revenues of £5.038bn, down three per cent. But profit before tax was up 30 per cent to £531m. BT added 188,000 DSL customers, a 53 per cent market share. Global …

Channel Register 3 Feb 09:59
Freeview HD audience up 179% in four months

Christmas boost

Nine months after launch, Freeview HD is being watched by some 642,000 homes, the terrestrially broadcast digital TV brand said yesterday. In October 2010, Freeview put the figures at 230,000, so that's a near tripling of the audience in just four months. Christmas undoubtedly played a big part in that jump, but so will the …

reghardware 3 Feb 10:22
MySpace seeks music-loving buyer with GSOH

Sugar daddy News Corp readies divorce papers

Recent lay-offs at MySpace were costly for its disgruntled parent News Corp, which said in its Q2 earnings that it was officially seeking a buyer to offload the failing social network entertainment portal. The company swallowed a $275m charge in its latest quarterly results, and admitted for the first time publicly that it was …

Financial News 3 Feb 10:28
Vodafone txt loses revenue crown to data

winds up 2010 on a high

Vodafone ended 2010 on a high note, with an end-of-year profit prediction pushed to £12bn by growth in India and Turkey. This is only an interim statement, covering the last three months of 2010, but shows that Vodafone is holding its own in Europe (where revenues dropped very slightly, though the company blames exchange rates …

Mobile 3 Feb 10:29
Flickr thinks again about 4,000 pix loss

25 years free membership? You're f*cking kidding?

Flickr has managed to retrieve the 4,000 pix it deleted yesterday and given the aggrieved photoblogger 25 years of free Flickr membership. Here's the statement: Yahoo! is pleased to share that the Flickr team has fully restored a member’s account that was mistakenly deleted yesterday. We regret the human error that led to the …

Bootnotes 3 Feb 10:30
AA rolls out pricey own-brand satnav app

The unbranded version is cheaper

The AA has launched its own satnav app. Well, sort of. The £27 download actually appears to be ALK CoPilot Live with a yellow skin. Separated at birth? AA Satnav (left) and CoPilot Live 8 The savvy buyer will opt for CoPilot - it's only £20. Or you could go for the AA's Route Planner app, which lacks guidance but will …

reghardware 3 Feb 10:52
Virgin pitches PAYG BlackBerry packs

Bold

If you're a pay-as-you-goer and you fancy a BlackBerry, you can now consider Virgin Media as a possible network. It's now offering five BlackBerrys - Curve 8520, Curve 3G, Pearl 3G, Bold 9780 and Torch 9800 - on PAYG. The Virgin website is currently only listing the 8520, for which it wants £170. Punters can buy either a £2 …

reghardware 3 Feb 11:13
Sony touts Cyber-shot snappers with saucy specs

Va-va... zoom

Sony has zoomed into focus, with two high-spec additions to its H series, as well as a fresh Cyber-shot to boost its collection of point and click snappers. The H series welcomes the HX100V, which features a flare-resistant 30x optical zoom lens, and the HX9V, with a wide-angle 16x optical zoom lens. Both cameras come with …

reghardware 3 Feb 11:19
IWF chief steps down

Robbins lays down his axe

Peter Robbins has stepped down as Chief Executive of the Internet Watch Foundation after almost nine years heading up the occasionally controversial organisation. An announcement slipped out quietly yesterday to the effect that after some eight years steering the IWF through some of its most challenging years in the public eye …

Government 3 Feb 11:35
Post-a-puppy woman hit with cruelty charges

Dogs can survive anything but the US Postal Service

A Minneapolis woman has been hit with animal cruelty charges after she tried to relocate a puppy to Atlanta, via airmail. Stacey Champion told post office workers in downtown Minneapolis to be particularly careful with the tightly sealed package she submitted for sending as a birthday gift to a relative in Georgia. Champion …

Bootnotes 3 Feb 11:37
Sky loses pub footy case

European court says oui to grey imports

Sky has no legal right to stop people using cheaper non-UK decoders, according to a European legal opinion. This is not a binding opinion, but it deals a blow to Sky's desire to license its content country-by-country within the EU. Karen Murphy, a pub landlady from Portsmouth, faced £8,000 in fines and costs for using a Greek …

Music and Media 3 Feb 11:52
Mobile spectrum gets more mobile

Baby steps towards mega-auction

Ofcom has detailed how existing mobile spectrum will be traded between companies, and how the 3G licences will be extended, both necessary precursors to its proposals for next year's mega-auction. The two new proposals from Ofcom contain no surprises, being descriptions of how to implement changes already proposed and largely …

Mobile 3 Feb 12:02
EU Commission proposes new directive on storing air passenger details

EU destination countries will get passenger lists, but can't keep them

Details of passengers on every flight within the European Union will be passed to destination countries under European Commission proposals published today. The Commission has proposed a Passenger Name Record (PNR) Directive ordering airlines to send the information it holds on its passengers to authorities in the destination …

Government 3 Feb 12:04
UK's Supreme Court greenlights Twitter usage

This new-fangled tech is quite something, what what

Text-based communications such as tweeting on micro-blogging service Twitter will be allowed in Blighty's Supreme Court for some cases. “The rapid development of communications technology brings with it both opportunities and challenges for the justice system," said Supreme Court President Lord Phillips. "An undoubted benefit …

Mobile 3 Feb 12:15
NASA hails 'amazing' exoplanetary system

Six bodies huddled around distant yellow dwarf

NASA's Kepler space observatory has spotted an "amazing" exoplanetary system - six planets orbiting a sun-like star some 2,000 light-years from Earth. Kepler-11 represents "the fullest, most compact planetary system yet discovered beyond our own", and only the second multi-planet system, after Kepler-9, to be identified by …

Space 3 Feb 12:18
New auto-crowd tech writes better articles than pro writers TRUE

Profs turk online neo-Grub-Street hack clusters

Crowdsourced teams can write informational articles better than what single individual journalist writers can, say scientists at Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science Human-Computer Interaction Institute (CMUSCSHCII) which is a top institution of human-computer interactions science. "This is exciting because …

Science 3 Feb 12:19
Top Rated... Laptops

The best we've seen of late

Which netbooks and notebooks have we rated most highly over the past few months? The table below will tell you. Updated: 3 February 2011

reghardware
Top Rated... Smartphones

The best we've seen of late

Which smartphones - whether they run iOS, Android, Symbian or Windows Phone 7 - have we rated most highly over the past few months? The table below will tell you. Updated: February 2011

reghardware 3 Feb 12:55
Acer Revo RL100 media centre

Review The living room PC revisited

It’s been a long time since PC makers started trying to get PCs into people’s living rooms. Originally it was all about games, but consoles soon became a cheaper and better-supported option. Now, it’s about TV and disc playing, in particular 3D, HD viewing and Blu-ray too. Acer seems keen to revive the lounge PC and with the …

reghardware 3 Feb 13:00
Secret Service, NY DA bust Apple Store 'ID scam' ring

Gang 'stole IDs to buy Mac goodies'

Authorities in Manhattan have issued indictments against 27 alleged members of a gang which used filched credit card details to order piles of Apple kit. According to a statement from the New York County District Attorney's Office, the ring - self-dubbed S3 - bought the financial details and identities of ID theft victims, via …

Channel Register 3 Feb 13:04
Yet another delay hangs over release of Firefox 4

Microsoft's Hotmail among buggy culprits stalling showtime

Mozilla is bracing itself for yet more beta releases and possibly another delay of its Firefox 4 browser. The open-source web tool outfit pushed out a 10th test build of Firefox 4 last week. It has now confirmed that two more betas will definitely follow before a Release Candidate version of the browser lands. "The current …

Applications 3 Feb 13:21
Diary of a Not-spot – the final chapter

Scot not-spot no longer

Following seven years of dogged pursuit, the not-spot is now not-a-not-spot, sustaining connectivity a shade under 4Mb/sec: fast enough to finally join the 21st century. An improved antenna and radio, have tipped the balance to enable a microwave link at more than five times the previous best of 700Kb/sec, despite the …

Telecoms 3 Feb 13:40
Consumers urged to step up wireless security

Treat Wi-Fi like toothbrushes, urges alliance

Consumers are once again being urged to use the latest (WPA2) encryption technology and apply strong passwords to protect home networks from snooping and other attacks. The call comes in a survey by industry trade body the Wi-Fi Alliance, which warned on Wednesday that "borrowing" access to unprotected Wi-Fi access is still …

Enterprise Security 3 Feb 13:43
Big Biz keep Cloud thoughts private

Safer, easier

Tech client polls all point in the same direction: 2011 is the year that cloud computing goes mainstream. But what form will these clouds take? A survey of 1000 customers of the networking equipment vendor Ipswitch, released today, shows that two-thirds of companies are making cloud investments in 2011. For security reasons, …

Cloud 3 Feb 13:44
SAN vs NAS: Spelling out the differences

The order of the letters is important

The names almost give away the difference between network attached storage (NAS) and storage area networks (SANs): you would expect a NAS to consist just of storage and a SAN to be a network, and that is true – up to a point. Designed to be easy to manage, a NAS is fundamentally a bunch of disks, usually arranged in a Raid and …

Data Centre 3 Feb 13:59
Mexican woman gets litigious on Top Gear's ass

'Lazy, feckless and flatulent' jibe could cost Auntie dear

A Mexican woman has instructed lawyers to take action against the BBC's Top Gear over unflattering remarks made by the show's presenters about her native land. As we reported yesterday, the programme is already in hot water with the country's ambassador to Blighty after Richard Hammond likened a Mexican sports car to "a lazy, …

Bootnotes 3 Feb 14:13
Vodafone says sorry for pro-Mubarak messages

Emergency powers invoked in Egypt

As protests continue both for and against the continued rule of Hosni Mubarak, Vodafone Egypt has apologised to its subscribers who have received a stream of pro-government text messages. Vodafone, along with other networks, found its services blocked in Egypt as the government tried to stymie reform protests. But it has now …

Mobile 3 Feb 14:26
UK nobbles nukes with hefty clean-up bill

Pay for your mess

Energy and Climate Change minister Christopher Huhne last week made nuclear energy a whole lot less attractive. The liability for clean-up in case of a nuclear accident is currently limited to £140m. The EU has proposed increasing this to €600m (£507m). But Huhne wants to raise it to £1bn (€1.2bn). "We've already set out how …

Science 3 Feb 14:41
Native Union Moshi Moshi 03i

Txt Take The Bluetooth headset that thinks it's a telephone

Reviews in 140 characters... Native Union Moshi Moshi MM03i Pictures Want our Txt Take on your gadget or accessory? Just send it in to Reg Hardware. Details here. ®

reghardware 3 Feb 15:00
'You don't even know what change management is'

FoTW Shame on you, you alleged IT hack

A reader isn't impressed with El Reg making fun of the job that requires applicants to be "responsible for shaping and managing the execution of the change ambition". It surfaced in this story, about how the BBC's Digital Media Initiative cost £38.2m, instead of making savings, and how it managed to be 21 months behind schedule …

Bootnotes 3 Feb 15:04
Sepaton replaces marketing veep

Cloud-enabled data protection

Sepaton has appointed a new marketing boss after parting company with Jay Kramer, appointed just 18 months ago. Greg Mancusi-Ungaro joins the Enterprise deduplicating data protection array vendor after stints at Novell and Ximian, which was bought by Novell. Attachmate bought Novell in November last year. In a canned …

Blocks and Files 3 Feb 15:09
Twenty-tonne space truck poised for ISS trip

'Heaviest payload ever launched by Europe'

The European Space Agency's latest Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) is poised for lift-off at the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana, and if its 20-tonne bulk makes it off the pad on 15 February, it'll be "the heaviest payload ever launched by Europe". The Johannes Kepler, named in honour of the German astronomer and …

Space 3 Feb 15:21
Imation's new buying spree strategy

Changes direction, looks for growth

Okay, we've stopped draining cash and stabilised the business – now let's buy into growth storage markets. That is Imation's new strategy in a nutshell. CEO and president Mark Lucas fronts a statement issued by Imation, which says it will work its existing but declining businesses to wring more cash out of them while looking …

Storage 3 Feb 15:49
Liverpudlians headbutt Cameron's 'big society'

Now not quite as big, as council withdraws

Liverpool City Council has withdrawn from David Cameron's "big society" - the radical restructuring of the administrative paradigm which was meant to see real people running their own local services. The BBC explains that when he announced Liverpool would be a big society "vanguard" last year, the PM expressed the hope that " …

Government 3 Feb 15:51
Sony PS3 rootkit rumours rubbished

Uh, check the several-years-old small print yeah

Suggestions that Sony has added a rootkit with the latest firmware update to its PS3 console have been denounced as bunkum by a leading gaming security expert. Rumours began flying on the interwebs earlier this week that the official 3.56 firmware upgrade for Sony's consoles gave the consumer electronics giant the ability to …

PCs & Chips 3 Feb 16:34
ICO pays through the nose for 'website development'

60p a pixel? That'll do nicely!

Is £585 a reasonable amount to pay out for a favicon? Apparently so, if you are the Information Commissioner (ICO), whose office recently owned up to spending just this sum – mostly from data protection notification fees – on the design and creation of such a beast. A part of the cost may have arisen from the fact that unlike …

Government 3 Feb 16:50
Crocodile keyboard becomes top Android app

Tri-sided pads for tidy taps

The Crocodile Keyboard - an application for easier touchscreen typing - is now a successful app for Android. When we reported the keyboard back in 2009, British inventor David Baker was struggling to get Apple's assistance for iPhone integration. Without Apple's help, the patented design remained unusable. But six months …

reghardware 3 Feb 16:58
SGI plunks Windows on big Altix UV supers

To 16TB - and HP's Itanium customers - and beyond!

High-end cluster and shared-memory supercomputer maker Silicon Graphics radically and quietly expanded its addressable market on Wednesday, announcing that it has certified Microsoft's Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system on its line of Altix UV systems. The high-end Altix UV 1000 systems are based on Intel's Xeon 7500 …

Servers 3 Feb 18:42
Mac App Store: Developer godsend or Evil Empire?

OS X coders rate Jobsian alternate app universe

Ken Case, the CEO of longtime Mac app developer The Omni Group, loves the new Mac App Store. But not everyone agrees with him. "I think the Mac App Store is a huge improvement for the platform as a whole," Case says. "It solves a need that a lot of consumers have had, which is 'How do I find software for the Mac? Where do I …

Software 3 Feb 19:14
Microsoft lands big handbag on Google's copy kisser

Lady Redmond doth protest too much

Microsoft's swung its biggest handbag yet in denying that Bing copies Google results, while adding that Bing has the internet's number-one search engine wetting its algorithms. On Thursday, online services division senior vice president Yusuf Mehdi issued Microsoft's second executive denial to date of Google’s claim that Bing …

Music and Media 3 Feb 19:25
Canonical embraces LAMP stack of the heavens

Strata Con Ubuntu and OpenStack in open source 'Bexar' hug

OpenStack – the open source "infrastructure cloud" project founded by Rackspace and NASA – has released a second version of its platform codenamed Bexar. Bexar includes updates to both halves of the project: OpenStack Compute, for serving up on-demand access to readily scalable processing power, and OpenStack Storage, a …

Cloud 3 Feb 20:17
Data centre season down under

Next, get the data to fill them

As Asia Pacific data centres hit 90 per cent capacity, a new crop of data hubs is blooming across Australia. This week HP unveiled its ‘Next Generation Data Centre’ in western Sydney suburb Eastern Creek, better known as a motor racing hub. The Sydney data centre investment is part of HP’s US$1 billion “transformation” to …

Channel Register 3 Feb 20:47
Scanner snares senior servant

Don’t Google 'knockers' on the boss’s laptop (even at home)

A Federal public servant in Australia's Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism has learned the hard way that a policy against using departmental computers to access pornography goes home with the laptop. In a ruling handed down on Monday (January 31), the Federal Court of Australia has dismissed the 25-year public servant …

Law 3 Feb 20:49
SGI swings to a profit on sales jump

Fiscal Q2 beats expectations

Surprise, surprise. Supercomputer maker Silicon Graphics did more business than expected in its second quarter of fiscal 2011, which ended on December 24, 2010. And in an even bigger and more pleasant surprise, the company turned an honest-to-goodness profit. In Q2, SGI had $177.5m in revenues, up 88.6 per cent. With research …

Financial News 3 Feb 20:57
Newbie CEO Apotheker rakes in big HP bucks

Not like Hurd, though

As El Reg reported two weeks ago, Ray Lane, the non-executive chairman of IT giant HP, has shaken up the board of directors ahead of the company's annual shareholder meeting on March 23. And as part of the proxy filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission ahead of that meeting, HP has detailed how much it's paying Leo …

Business 3 Feb 23:36
OpenStack: 'There will be only one Ubuntu cloud'

Strata Con Will Shuttleworth boot Eucalyptus?

The next version of Ubuntu will offer not one but two open source build-your-own cloud platforms: Eucalyptus and OpenStack. On Thursday, Canonical – the commercial operation that backs the Ubuntu Linux distro – officially announced that it would include OpenStack after offering Eucalyptus for a little over a year. But Jim Curry …

Cloud 3 Feb 23:42