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25th February 2011 Archive

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  • Turing Collection saved for the nation

    Bletchley Park to house codebreaker's papers

    The Turing Collection - the set of offprints of Alan Turing's work collected by his friend Professor Max Newman - has been saved for the nation after the last minute arrival of money from the National Heritage Memorial Fund. Earlier fundraising failed, despite help from Google and private donations, and the collection was put …

    Physics 25 Feb 00:01

  • Australians safe from Mortal Kombat

    “RC” means “no sale”

    The Australian federal government’s Classification Board has given a “refused classification” (RC) rating to the upcoming Mortal Kombat game, meaning it will not go on the shelves. The decision has taken publisher Warners from villain to martyr in just 24 hours. Yesterday, the company was one of the plaintiffs being reviled …

    Music and Media 25 Feb 04:58

  • Exxon, Shell, BP outed as mystery hack attack victims

    'Millions of dollars' in data targeted

    Bloomberg News has identified six of the energy companies targeted in recent series of “coordinated covert and targeted cyberattacks” and says the victims could face legal liability for choosing not to disclose them to shareholders. The roster includes Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Marathon Oil, ConocoPhillips, and Baker …

    Security 25 Feb 06:16

  • RIM BlackBerry Bold 9780 smartphone

    Review Cosmetic treatment?

    If you’ve seen one BlackBerry, you’ve sort of seen them all: the latest models nearly all talk the same design language of smallish screen and biggish keyboard, the unchanging row of buttons and, generally a chrome frame. Refashioned but still unmistakable: Rim's BlackBerry Bold 9780 And despite the fact that everybody who …

    reghardware 25 Feb 07:00

  • IBM's knockout single file system benchmark

    Comment Single file system SONAS blows the rest away

    In a week that saw EMC announce its record NFS benchmark with a virtually all-flash VNX, IBM has blown everyone else away with an astounding single file system SONAS result. SONAS is IBM's Scale-Out NAS product, based on its GPFS (General Parallel File System) and it achieved 403,326 SPECsfs2008 ops/sec with a system …

    Storage 25 Feb 09:49

  • Fairness FAIL: When small print contradicts the big print

    OFT probes contracts whose small print is contrary to consumer expectations

    Companies whose small print changes the basis of consumer deals will face investigation by consumer regulator the Office of Fair Trading (OFT), it has said. According to the OFT, one in five consumers had experienced a contract problem in the last year. The OFT has set out the criteria it will use to judge whether or not …

    Small Biz 25 Feb 09:59

  • United Nations undermines Internet Governance Forum

    Ah, Global Bureaucracy!

    The first preparatory meeting for the 2011 Internet Governance Forum has ended with a significant degree of uncertainty thanks to ongoing bureaucratic delays. Over two days, representatives from business, government, civil society, and the technical community met in Geneva in order to decide the path forward for the sixth …

    Networks 25 Feb 10:00

  • Government seeks chief procurement officer

    Two (jobs) become one ...

    The Cabinet Office has confirmed that it will fold the job of running Buying Solutions into its new post of chief procurement officer. The chief procurement officer role will combine the posts of chief executive of the government's procurement agency, Buying Solutions, and head of procurement in the Cabinet Office's Efficiency …

    Channel Register 25 Feb 10:02

  • Google whacks link farms

    Less crud with your search

    Google has made a major change to its search algorithms in order to try to scrub more link farm results from appearing near the top of search results. The search and advertising giant tweaks results all the time, but said these changes would hit 11.8 per cent of results, and so it wanted people to know what is going on. The …

    Applications 25 Feb 10:25

  • MySpace sale or spin-off process begins, says report

    Head of music shifts to strategic role ahead of buyout

    MySpace talks are reportedly set to take place between News Corp and around 20 potential suitors next month, as the struggling entertainment portal's parent company looks to sell or spin-off the business it acquired in 2005 for $580m. According to Reuters, which cites a person familiar with the discussions, News Corp expects …

    Music and Media 25 Feb 10:51

  • Anonymous hacks Westboro Baptists during live interview

    LOLZcats

    Denizens of Anonymous defaced a website run by the Westboro Baptist Church on Thursday during a live radio interview. An ongoing spat between the controversial church of GodHatesFags fame and the loosely knit hacking collective began last weekend with a message threatening hacks against websites that, depending on who you …

    Crime 25 Feb 10:55

  • Intel outs future Xeon chip porn

    ISSCC Get a load of them cores!

    Intel was not about to pre-announce all the feeds and speeds of its future Xeon and Itanium processors at the IEEE's International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco this week. But its chip engineers are just like all the others attending the event. They want to show off the electrical engineering marvels they have …

    Servers 25 Feb 11:00

  • Customs officers get X-ray machines for down under searches

    Aussie Doctors relieved of drug-sniffing duties

    Aussie customs officers are to get right under the skin of visitors to the Lucky Country with body scanners that will allow them to peruse suspected smugglers' internals without the need for a doctor's expertise. Ingesting drug-filled condoms and the like has become a favourite quick and dirty method for smugglers to evade …

    Policing 25 Feb 11:00

  • London Stock Exchange floored, again

    Up and down like a ...

    The London Stock Exchange is currently closed thanks to the failure of its trading platform. Technically it's in a "halt phase" meaning orders can be cancelled but new orders cannot be made, nor can automatic trading happen. At 8.03 this morning the market was paused as technical problems became clear, by 8.33am trading was …

    CIO 25 Feb 11:01

  • Credit cards at the turnstile across London by 2013

    We don't need no stinkin' Oyster

    Transport for London has confirmed that by the end of 2012 it will accept contactless credit and debit cards at the tube turnstiles, just after the Olympic tourists leave. Those tourists will be able to pay for bus journeys, as London's 8,000 buses will be equipped to accept PayWave, PayPass and ExpressPay before the July kick …

    Mobile 25 Feb 11:13

  • Elder Scrolls V goes dragon mad

    First glimpse at new engine

    The first trailer for the fifth major instalment in the Elder Scrolls series was released yesterday, giving us a glimpse at the new engine, and whetting appetites for the dragon-filled land of Skyrim. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, set 200 years after the events of Oblivion, takes a new direction in the series and centres …

    reghardware 25 Feb 11:17

  • MS tacks Mozilla 'Do Not Track' header onto W3C submission

    Before you can say 'embrace and extend' ...

    In a move that melds sneaky with shrewd, Microsoft has added Mozilla's Do Not Track browser header to the submission of its Tracking Protection proposal to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This potentially leaves Google – the third of the three contenders for privacy-enhanced browsing – isolated in a self-regulatory alliance …

    ID 25 Feb 11:29

  • Lloyds, First Direct websites hit by payday outages

    Wanna check you've been paid? Tough

    Customers of two of the UK's biggest banks were locked out of their online accounts this morning, as payday collided with an outbreak of server sleeping sickness. The problems came on the last Friday of the month, when many of the nation's workers pile online to check their salaries have hit their bank accounts and start …

    Cloud 25 Feb 11:33

  • LaCie and Promise Thunderbolt their desktop storage

    Storage companies promise fast transfers

    LaCie and Promise have announced desktop storage products using Intel's Thunderbolt 10Gbit/s interface. LaCie has a Thunderbolt version of its Little Big Disk, saying it is designed to store large audio and video files "with ultra-fast data transfer, complete system backup in minutes, and faster content editing than ever …

    Storage 25 Feb 11:47

  • Mozilla confirms Firefox 4 beta 12 is FINAL test build

    Thanks for clearing that up, but what about the blasted Hotmail bug?

    Mozilla release manager Christian Legnitto confirmed in the early hours of this morning that there will be just one more beta of Firefox 4 before the upcoming but oft-delayed browser hits Release Candidate status. "I just wanted to send a quick note clarifying again that Firefox 4 beta 12 is the last planned beta," he said. " …

    Applications 25 Feb 11:55

  • Energy MPs foresee terrible future of clean, cheap energy

    Comment Shale – don't know what it is, we'd better stop it

    MPs will take another look at shale gas next Tuesday. It's about time. New techniques of unlocking gas from rock thousands of feet beneath the earth's surface have potentially opened up huge amounts of cheap energy; the International Energy Authority recently ripped up its previous estimates of global gas reserves to predict …

    Environment 25 Feb 11:59

  • IBM reclaims server crown from HP

    Mainframe resurgent

    IBM has stolen the server crown back from rival Hewlett-Packard. For the past five decades, Big Blue was the top systems seller based on revenues. But then along came the Great Recession, hitting at the same time as transitions in the Power Systems and System z product lines, allowing HP to reach down and steal the crown away. …

    Servers 25 Feb 12:00

  • Flaw in MS anti-malware engine poses command override risk

    Gaskets blown

    Microsoft has updated its malware protection technology following the discovery of a bug which might, given a plausible but unlikely set of circumstances, allow a hacker to gain root access to vulnerable systems. Would-be hackers would already need to have access to targeted systems in order to exploit the privilege escalation …

    Enterprise Security 25 Feb 12:01

  • Park the Mario Kart, and throw your keys in the bowl

    NSFW(ish) Ubisoft puts the swing into Wii console gaming

    We Dare is a new game, for the Wii and PS2 and out later this year, that invites players to use motion-sensing consoles in a rather more adult way than previous titles. Gaming blog Kotaku, who spotted the forthcoming release, reckons it's a sex party in a box, which isn't as far from the truth as one might hope. We Dare …

    Bootnotes 25 Feb 12:05

  • Apple under siege: Antitrust probes and product delays ...

    Will developer backlash be too powerful for Apple this time?

    Apple is accustomed to a few months of over-excited headlines at this time of year, in the build-up to the refresh of its mobile product line, and its iPad 2 should, indeed, turn up next week. But this week the company is under huge pressure, and negative comments are flying, indicating the new environment in which it will have …

    Mobile 25 Feb 12:23

  • Western Dig opens new R&D centre

    Putting the HAMR down

    Western Digital has opened a new research and development centre in Singapore and we detect some interesting bits of of HAMR disk drive technology coming out of it. Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) is one suggested future technology for increasing disk drive capacity through having higher area densities. It depends upon …

    Storage 25 Feb 12:26

  • Turn your mobile phones in to a live gig speaker

    Clear things up a bit

    Do you experience muffled audio at festivals because you're surrounded by taller people or the speakers are too far away? There's an app for that. Jakob Eg Larsen and a team from the Technical University of Denmark have created a tool that allows sound from live shows to be transmitted into the mobile handsets of those …

    reghardware 25 Feb 12:31

  • Make vision elementary

    Workshop Sleuths and other BI data visualisation data apps

    “Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.” Jonathan Swift’s observation applies perfectly to crime detection. Thanks to data visualisation, the toil of thumbing through card index boxes to trace the links between people and find connections in large amounts of data is fast being replaced by visual maps of …

    Data Visualisation 25 Feb 12:37

  • All hail our cloud computing overlords

    Comment Pray that the IT priests beat the beancounters

    We all know what's going to be so frabjous about cloud computing: it's going to make the damn stuff work. Yes, yes, we have computing systems that work now, but they need that priestly caste made up of Reg readers sitting in front of them, in charge. Think of it this way: a coach and horses and a car both manage to get you …

    Cloud 25 Feb 12:49

  • Killzone 3

    Review Bangin'?

    Killzone 3's Infiltrators are a class apart. Camouflaging themselves, they mimic their opponents' identity to move unmolested through hostile territory. Then, when the pivotal moment presents itself, they break cover and wreak havoc on an unsuspecting enemy. Smoke on the war ground, fire in his eyes Infiltrators aren't just …

    reghardware 25 Feb 13:00

  • Moving to a service delivery model

    On Demand How and why

    Earlier this week we had a studio full of experts talking about how businesses can gain benefits from a shift to a service delivery model for the their IT function. The Register's Manek Dubash hosted the gig and he was joined by Andrew Buss from Freeform Dynamics, Gordon McKenna from Inframon and Ellis Paul from Microsoft. …

    Data Centre 25 Feb 13:15

  • Man found guilty of battery after ejaculating in co-worker's drink

    'For me it's a release. I think about my wife'

    A California man faces up to a year inside after being found guilty of two counts of misdemeanor battery for ejaculating into a colleague's water bottle. Michael Kevin Lallana faces additional aggro after the jury backed a "sentencing enhancement allegation" that he committed said misdemeanours for "sexual gratification". …

    Bootnotes 25 Feb 13:18

  • It’s not just the technology

    Workshop Involve the business in your IT revamp

    Anyone who has been around the IT block a few times will have seen application deployments that didn’t quite match up to expectations. But as people frequently point out, it’s not just about the technology. While nobody sets out to deliver an implementation that displays the same discrepancies as the one it replaces, it remains …

    Doing Better Business 25 Feb 13:47

  • Google preps YouTube movie service 'for UK'

    Video-sharing site cast in Hollywood role

    Google is reportedly planning to launch an unlimited movie subscription service in the UK. The company is still searching for ways to make money out of its online video-sharing website YouTube, which – despite various content deals with big name record companies – remains something of a pet project at Mountain View. According …

    Music and Media 25 Feb 13:50

  • Stock Exchange says soz for downtime

    Back in time for lunch

    Trading has restarted on the London Stock Exchange this afternoon after a systems failure closed it for business this morning. At 8.03am the market was paused as technical problems became clear, by 8.33am trading was halted - see our story here. Continuous trading restarted at 12.15pm this afternoon. The LSE said it had …

    CIO 25 Feb 13:56

  • MobileMe packages disappear from Apple's shelves

    You can have it, but you can't pay for it

    Apple's MobileMe service is running fine, but the $99 annual package has disappeared from both virtual and physical shelves in what some reckon is a prelude to the service going free. The package disappeared from the online store, and Apple Insider has apparently been taking to Apple retailers who report that both the single …

    Cloud 25 Feb 14:02

  • London man gets 5 years for YouTube terror videos

    First dissemination conviction

    A London man who created extremist videos and loaded them onto the internet was jailed for five years today. Mohammed Gul, a 23-year-old from Elm Park Avenue, Hornchurch, was found guilty of five counts of dissemination of terrorist publications contrary to section 2 of the the Terrorism Act 2006 after a trial at the Old …

    Policing 25 Feb 15:08

  • Mobile spyware tool helps paranoid spouses prove themselves right

    'Cellphones are primary communication tool for affairs' says vendor

    Paranoid spouses will find it even easier to track their partner with a new mobile spyware tool that delivers reports via email. ePhoneTracker from Retina Software secretly monitors "every cell phone activity" before sending reports via email. Comparable commercial mobile spyware products, such as FlexiSpy, work on mobile to …

    Mobile 25 Feb 15:31

  • Is Japan ready for Nintendo 3DS launch?

    Already on sale in China

    The Nintendo 3DS goes on sale in Japan tomorrow, where fans are patiently queuing, blissfully unaware the device is already available to their neighbours in China.. unofficially of course. The news surfaced after a CNN reporter bought a 3DS from a shop in Hong Kong. Yep, it appears Nintendo's handheld is already on sale in …

    reghardware 25 Feb 15:36

  • Huawei invites US gov to investigate links to Chinese military claims

    Turning over a new 3Leaf

    Chinese comms kit giant Huawei Technologies, which controversially withdrew from its bid to buy 3Leaf Systems earlier this week, is calling on the US government to investigate claims that it has links to the People's Liberation Army. The company's deputy chairman Ken Hu attacked what he described as "a number of misperceptions …

    Data Networking 25 Feb 15:44

  • Amazon automates AWS app deployment

    Shares internal CloudFormation tool

    Amazon wants to make it easier for you to use its EC2 compute cloud and related services to host complicated applications. Managing virtual server and storage slices is relatively easy, but real-world applications span multiple data center tiers, both horizontally across similar machines clustered for scalability, and …

    Cloud 25 Feb 15:51

  • Auction fraud complaints prop up declining US cybercrime reports

    Buyer beware

    US complaints about internet fraud dropped 10 per cent last year. The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) fielded 303,809 reports of cybercrime in 2010, down from 336,655. The agency – maintained by staff from by the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center – said the reduced figures were still the second highest in …

    Crime 25 Feb 16:01

  • Cyber cops and domain name registrars meet to tackle net crooks

    Tackling criminal activity on a borderless internet

    Cyber cops from both sides of the Atlantic are meeting with domain name registrars in Brussels today to try to figure out ways to crack down on internet crime. This second meeting of the "EU-US working group on cyber security and cybercrime" is dedicated to increasing cooperation between law enforcement agencies and the …

    Government 25 Feb 16:41

  • Oracle to float cloud-ready Java EE in 2013

    Exclusive Death for JavaOne?

    The flavor of Java used to build application servers like IBM's WebSphere, Oracle's WebLogic, and Red Hat's JBoss is getting a two-stage retooling designed to float app severs to the cloud. Oracle is thrashing out a roadmap for the next versions of Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) that will add new web technologies such as …

    Developer 25 Feb 17:53

  • Dear US gov: Stay the hell out of Silicon Valley

    Open...and Shut Leave the technology to technologists

    It will come as no surprise to the largely libertarian technology industry that big government has done little to advance the interests of Silicon Valley. But you might raise your eyebrows at the degree to which the US government is hurting the very people it tries to help. As a general rule, Silicon Valley has been happiest …

    Government 25 Feb 18:24

  • Godson: China shuns US silicon with faux x86 superchip

    ISSCC Who needs GPU co-processors?

    If the Chinese government is scaring the world with its hybrid CPU-GPU clusters, what do you think the reaction will be when Chinese supercomputers shun American-made x64 processors and GPU co-processors and start using their own energy-efficient, MIPS-derived, x86-emulating Godson line of 64-bit processors? Apoplexy? …

    HPC 25 Feb 21:07

  • Antennagate Redux: Consumer Reports condemns Verizon iPhone 4

    The Return of Death Grip

    The Verizon CDMA incarnation of Apple's iPhone 4 suffers from the same dropped-call syndrome as the existing GSM incarnation, according to the venerable American product tester Consumer Reports. As a consequence, Consumer Reports is not putting the Verizon iPhone 4 on its list of recommended smartphones – something that's sure …

    Music and Media 25 Feb 22:16