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28th February 2011 Archive

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  • SeaMicro drops 64-bit Atom bomb server

    'This is Intel's mantle to lose'

    If SeaMicro has been "awash in business" as company founder, Andrew Feldman, tells El Reg it has been in the wake of last June's launch of the 512-core, 10U Atom-based SM10000 server, then the company had better batten down the hatches and prepare for the deluge. Because today SeaMicro is shipping the second generation of its …

    Servers 28 Feb 05:00

  • Cabinet Office pushes suppliers on open source

    Govt wants to create a 'level playing field' for OS in its ICT policy

    The government's deputy chief information officer has told suppliers that it wants to open source technology to feature in its ICT strategy. Bill McCluggage met with suppliers last week to make clear that the Cabinet Office, which leads on ICT policy, wishes to increase the deployment of open source across government. He …

    Operating Systems 28 Feb 07:07

  • German data regulators move to tighten IP address laws

    Marketers shouldn't pass on your IP without your OK

    Passing along IP addresses of web visitors to a third party without their permission could become illegal in Germany. According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, data protection authorities in Lower Saxony have already targeted sites who depend on IP addresses for online advertising. The Lower Saxony authorities recently …

    Law 28 Feb 08:15

  • Facebook flick wins three Oscars

    Leo drops the F-bomb as The King's Speech picks up best movie gong

    The King's Speech beat Facebook flick The Social Network to grab the best picture prize at the Oscars on Sunday night. The tale of the reluctant king overcoming his stutter also earned Colin Firth a best actor award, making him the first Brit since Anthony Hopkins in 1992 to pick up the coveted gong. The King's Speech also …

    Entertainment 28 Feb 09:20

  • Vodafone's network knackered by thieves

    Silicon Corridor loses mobile coverage

    Millions of Vodafone customers were disconnected this morning after an overnight break-in. Calls, text and data are intermittent west of London with a fix in progress. The failures seem only to be affecting areas just west of London, in the so-called Silicon Corridor. Wales seems fine and the rest of the country is OK, but …

    Mobile 28 Feb 10:03

  • Iron Mountain's eDiscovery made 2010 a rusty mess

    Services priced too high

    Iron Mountain's 2010 business was badly affected by mismanagement of its eDiscovery business, which lead to a $284m impairment charge. Iron Mountain's revenues for the fourth quarter of its 2010 financial year were flat at $789m, just 1.2 per cent up on the year-ago quarter's $779m. Net income was $33m, down almost a half on …

    Financial News 28 Feb 10:19

  • Asian soup peril menaces bionic shark

    Augmented hammerhead study predicts maneater scarcity

    Worrying news for evil billionaires today, as pioneering research by top boffins – in which a large hammerhead shark was augmented with high technology – reveals that large, endangered elasmobranches suitable for the in-lair pool disposal of troublesome government operatives may soon be even harder to get hold of. The new …

    Biology 28 Feb 10:51

  • Toshiba sells Cell chip plant to Sony

    Sold to Sir Howard for 400 million quid

    Toshiba has effectively sold its Cell processor factory to the CPU's co-developer. A snip at ¥53bn (£400m/$648m), the plant, located conveniently in Sony's Nagasaki Technology Center, will belong to Sony on 1 April, provided the Japanese government is happy with the arrangement. The plant is currently run by Nagasaki …

    reghardware 28 Feb 11:09

  • Mac Trojan uses Windows backdoor code

    Ha! Yeah! See? etc

    Miscreants have adapted a Windows Trojan in an attempt to create malware that established a backdoor on Macs, as part of an apparent bid to drum up commercial interest for their dastardly wares. MusMinim (dubbed BlackHole RAT by its nefarious author) is a variant of a strain of Windows Trojan called darkComet. Net security …

    Malware 28 Feb 11:11

  • GM declares Ampera e-car 'production ready'

    But still not out until 2012

    General Motors will show off what it calls the "production ready" Vauxhall Ampera at the Geneva Motor Show this week - even though the e-car won't actually go on sale here for another ten months. GM will price the Ampera at a whopping £33,995, though Brits will get £5000 of that paid by the government. And buyers won't have to …

    reghardware 28 Feb 11:29

  • Protecting users from themselves

    Webcast Because yesterday's security doesn’t work

    “The problem with making things foolproof is that we keep evolving a better class of fool”, as the old saying goes. And nowhere is this more true than in security where breaches remain regular and commonplace despite all the investment that has gone into it. Part of the problem is that we expect users to be experts in security …

    Tech Panel 28 Feb 11:34

  • Anon Mail commenters to stay anon

    High Court rules they have right to privacy

    The Daily Mail does not have to identify the people behind two anonymously posted comments on its website because to do so would breach their rights to privacy, the High Court has said. The subject of a news story had demanded information from the Daily Mail that would help her to identify the two commenters so that she could …

    Law 28 Feb 11:34

  • Ads overseer told to bring down 'up to' broadband speeds

    Punters don't believe them

    UK watchdog the Advertising Standards Authority has been advised to ban the advertising of broadband speeds prefixed with the phrase 'up to'. The Communications Consumer Panel (CCP), a body formed by comms watchdog Ofcom to be its independent ear on the street, warned the advertising regulator last week that "the current …

    reghardware 28 Feb 11:53

  • Nokia DC-14 bike charger

    Review Pedal power

    Most of us are happy to be green so long as it doesn’t put us too far out of our way. With this in mind, Nokia has released a gizmo for turning your pedal power into battery power with a bike charger for its phones. Charging bars with a difference: Nokia's DC-14 You might think that Nokia’s take on green power for its …

    reghardware 28 Feb 12:00

  • Kinect blesses rescue robot with 3D sight

    Peripheral vision

    Microsoft's Kinect sensor can be used for much more than just entertainment. In fact, it's already being utilised in a device that could save lives. A team from the University of Warwick has used Kinect to develop a rescue robot that navigates dangerous places in search of survivors, BBC News reports. This would be ideal for …

    reghardware 28 Feb 12:04

  • Digital TV group sets 3D standard

    DVB-3DTV approved

    The overseers of the DVB digital TV specification have given the thumbs up to a proposed standard for broadcasting 3D footage. DVB-3DTV was mapped out last year, but only completed a month ago. Now the proposal has the backing of the DVB organisation, it can be formally added to the DVB standard to join the likes of DVB-S for …

    reghardware 28 Feb 12:19

  • Gmail users howl in anguish at 'disappeared' accounts

    Cloud dispersal

    Tens of thousands of Gmail users have at least temporarily lost months or years of messages and chat dialogues after Google accidentally reset their accounts on Sunday. The bug left affected an estimated 150,000 users with blank slates. Surfers who re-established accounts were confronted only by welcome to Gmail messages. Any …

    Cloud 28 Feb 12:36

  • Bank of America retrofits BlackBerrys with NFC

    Is that a battery, or a wireless payment wallet?

    Bank of America is bringing pay-by-tap to the masses, or at least a small trial group of BlackBerry users, by using a removable card and a replacement battery. That's significant as it means that the latest trials, spotted by Boy Genius Report (which has provided screen shots of the offer), will be using a secure element owned …

    Telecoms 28 Feb 12:37

  • Midnight theft left Vodafone users bereft

    Switch-lifters fingered for phone co fubar

    Vodafone's Monday morning outage was caused by thieves who broke into the operator's Basingstoke exchange and lifted a load of switches. The break-in happened around 00.30 this morning, and the police were quickly notified. Vodafone noticed its own network collapsing and assembled its "War Room" which is supposed to deal with …

    Mobile 28 Feb 13:51

  • Traffic-light plague sweeps UK: Safety culture strangles Blighty

    Analysis Stealthy 2005 gov rule favoured feet over wheels

    A massive increase in the number of traffic lights – and an un-discussed 2005 increase in the priority given to pedestrians – is gradually causing the roads to grind to a halt, according to a new report. In London for instance, despite a large number of motorists having been permanently deterred from driving by congestion …

    Government 28 Feb 14:10

  • Faces of the iPad 2 and iPhone 5 revealed

    All white on the night?

    Images of the iPad 2 and iPhone 5 faceplates have surfaced online, giving credence to rumours of a front-facing camera and a larger screen, respectively. First off, this image of the iPad 2 case, courtesy of a Chinese iPhone repair shop, appears to reveal the hole for a front-facing camera - one of the many iPad 2 additions …

    reghardware 28 Feb 14:48

  • Cloud gaming storms into the UK

    Try EA games in your browser for free

    Cloud-based gaming is again in the limelight today with the announcement that game service Gaikai has gone live in the UK for all to trial. Gaikai - which today came out of its closed beta stage - allows users to demo games in their browser without the need for a download. Just like cloud-based gaming platform OnLive, this …

    reghardware 28 Feb 15:51

  • Tainted ads punt scareware to surfers on LSE and Myvue sites

    Autotrader.co.uk, and possibly eBay.co.uk, also hit by malvertising attack

    Several highly trafficked UK sites – including the website of the London Stock Exchange – served malware-tainted ads as the result of a breach of security by a third-party firm they shared in common. Surfers visiting auto-trading site Autotrader.co.uk and the cinema site Myvue.com were also exposed to the attack, which stemmed …

    Enterprise Security 28 Feb 15:54

  • Android phone to replace shop till

    Google phone rings up the bill

    Alcatel-Lucent has demonstrated Google's Nexus S being used to accept a Near Field Communications (NFC) payment, showing that NFC can do more than replace a customer's wallet. Mobile phones are going to replace physical wallets, but for taking payments, merchants still use expensive readers bought (or hired) from the banks. …

    Wireless 28 Feb 16:21

  • Julian Assange™ applies to trademark himself

    Also time-travels to 1970s, stars in politically-incorrect sitcom

    Cross-dressing, occasionally smelly man-child webmaster Julian Assange - catapulted to global fame after publishing colossal amounts of classified-yet-humdrum US government data - has applied for a UK trademark on his own name. The filing, submitted two weeks ago by Assange's London lawyers, can be viewed at the UK …

    Bootnotes 28 Feb 16:30

  • Nvidia revs up CUDA GPU coder toolkit

    Unified CPU and GPU memories

    Nvidia has staked a large part of its future on the idea that GPUs and their massively parallel architectures can replace CPUs for a big chunk of computational jobs. But parallel programming on one device is tough, across two incompatible devices is very difficult, and across clusters of hybrid machines can be very tricky indeed …

    PCs & Chips 28 Feb 17:48

  • Buzzmeisters value Twitter at $4.5bn

    JP Morgan money toss explained

    Over the weekend, the interwebs were a-twitter about JPMorgan Chase dumping a load o' cash into Twitter – $450m for a 10 per cent stake, said the Financial Times, which as you math whizes out there have surmised, would value the micro-messaging service at $4.5bn. There's one wrinkle to this rumor, however. As pointed out by …

    Business 28 Feb 17:55

  • British Airways IT worker found guilty of plotting terror attack

    Encrypted emails aired after 9 month brute force crack

    An IT expert for British Airways has been found guilty of using his position to plan a terrorist attack on behalf of the Yemen-based radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, according to news reports. Rajib Karim, 31, of Newcastle, used his job as a software engineer for the UK airline to aid attacks being planned by Awlaki, who is …

    Security 28 Feb 19:20

  • Microsoft inflating cloud PC-management option

    Win 7 Enterprise Edition upgrades welcomed

    Next month, Microsoft will release PC management software anchored in the cloud. The company said on Monday that it will officially release Windows Intune, currently in beta, at the Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas, Nevada. Microsoft describes Intune as a way to "integrate and deliver similarly rich functionality as …

    Cloud 28 Feb 19:57

  • PlayStation hacker defiantly posts 'bible' following police raid

    'Cannot live without programming, HV, and Linux kernel hacking'

    A German PlayStation 3 hacker has escalated his battle with Sony almost a week after the maker of the popular game console sued him for copyright infringement and had police seize his computer gear during a raid on his home. Statements made online on Monday by Alexander Egorenkov, who goes by the hacking moniker graf_chokolo, …

    Security 28 Feb 22:32

  • Apple fanbois leak secrets of Mac OS X Lion

    Internet defies Jobsian police

    Details about Apple's upcoming Mac OS X version 10.7, code-named Lion, are flooding the web despite Cupertino's ban on such information being released by developers toying with the beta that was made available to them last Thursday. Steve Jobs revealed few details about the OS when he announced it at a "Back to the Mac" …

    Operating Systems 28 Feb 22:47

  • The Register and Australia-New Zealand

    A brief word about what we're up to

    As some of you have already noticed, in the last few weeks The Reg has been running more locally-sourced stories in Australia-New Zealand. Our plans here are still in soft launch mode, but we think it's appropriate (possibly even overdue) that we give local readers a head up about them now. For quite a few years now The …

    Site News 28 Feb 23:30

  • VMware goes back for seconds on stock buybacks

    Virtual desktop wares tweaked

    Virtualization juggernaut VMware was told by its board of directors last March that it could eat $400m of its own stock last year and through the end of 2011, but the company is still hungry for its shares. Today, the board authorized the second stock repurchase program that VMware has ever done, and this time said it was …

    Business 28 Feb 23:51