7th April 2011 Archive

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Popular open source DHCP program open to hack attacks

Beware of rogue meta-characters

The makers of the internet's most popular open source DHCP program have warned that it's vulnerable to hacks that allow attackers to remotely execute malicious code on underlying machines. The flaw, which is present in Internet Systems Consortium's DHCP versions prior to 3.1-ESV-R1, 4.1-ESV-R2, and 4.2.1-P1, stems from the …

Security 7 Apr 2011, 00:21
Dell samples shrooms for server shipping

Magic mushroom packaging

Dell will begin shipping its PowerEdge R710 rack server in übergreen packaging made from – wait for it – mushrooms. "While it sounds unusual, this is an advanced biotechnology," writes Dell procurement director Oliver Campbell on the Direct2Dell blog, calling mushroom packaging "a way to utilize common agricultural waste …

Hardware 7 Apr 2011, 04:19
Air Video 2.4.6

iOS App of the Week Play DivX and other video formats on your iOS device

My continuing quest for an app that will allow me to play Flash video content from UK-based sites such as LoveFilm has proved fruitless thus far, so I’ve recently found myself playing with Air Video once more. MKV playback: Air Video enables viewing of unsupported video formats on iOS devices This wireless video-streaming …

Phones 7 Apr 2011, 06:00
Penguin chief: Linux patent and copyright FUD 'not relevant'

Open source angels with dirty faces

Fear ye not, Linux faithful. Thy software is no more susceptible to patent or copyright attack than any other piece of closed source software. That's according to Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin, who told penguins gathered as his group's annual Collaboration Summit on Wednesday not to believe the FUD - fear, …

Operating Systems 7 Apr 2011, 06:05
How to manage server workloads

Broadcast 11am Where to put them?

In our broadcast today, at 11:00BST, The Register's Tim Phillips is joined by Tony Lock, from Freeform Dynamics, and Ray Jones from IBM's mainframe division to discuss modern server workloads. You can join us here. They'll be looking at how much of the early promise of virtualisation is being held back by operational …

HPC 7 Apr 2011, 07:32
My desktop is always there for me

High availability loveliness

Desktop virtualisation can be an asset to an organisation, but what happens when something goes wrong? In a conventional non-virtualised desktop system, users with a downed network or crippled server could perhaps still work on something locally. But when that same downtime means that your whole desktop vanishes, high …

Desktop Virtualisation 7 Apr 2011, 07:43
Europe adopts RFID privacy framework

For those who volunteer to use it

Europe has adopted a new radio-frequency identification (RFID) privacy framework. It won't come into effect for six months, and even then will be voluntary, but it does attempt to put the European citizens' privacy onto the RFID agenda. The "Privacy and Data Protection Impact Assessment Framework for RFID Applications" was …

Government 7 Apr 2011, 08:00
Carphone Warehouse makes Motorola Xoom cheaper

Attractive, truly unlimited data package on offer

Carphone Warehouse has reduced the price of the upcoming Motorola Xoom 3G: it now wants a colossal 20 quid less for the 10in Android 3.0 Honeycomb tablet than it did yesterday. When CW first posted a price for the Xoom - due to arrive around the middle of the month - it was charging a penny less than £600 for the tablet. Now …

Tablets 7 Apr 2011, 08:59
HP suing ex-exec over secrets

No blabbing to new boss Oracle

Reuters reports HP is suing its ex-Asia enterprise sales head to stop him revealing allegedly stolen secrets after joining Oracle. The lawsuit, filed in Santa Clara, alleges that Adrian Jones was about to be fired last February over invalid expense claims and an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate. Jones jumped ship …

The Channel 7 Apr 2011, 09:26
BBC iPlayer coming to Panasonic tellies

Only new ones, though

Panasonic has confirmed that BBC iPlayer is coming to some of its internet-connected HD TVs. iPlayer will be integrated into Viera Connect, Panasonic's UI for IPTV services, but tough luck if you have an older set: iPlayer appears to be destined for 2011-released models only. These include plasma and LCD models ranging from …

Media 7 Apr 2011, 09:27
Tosh intros small but SmartNAND chips

24nm and error correction

Toshiba is replacing its current 32nm process flash chips with 24nm SmartNAND: flash with on-chip error correction. The new chips will have faster controllers and deliver faster read and write speeds, although no numbers have been supplied. They will come in five capacity points, doubling up from 4GB to reach 64GB, and feature …

Storage 7 Apr 2011, 09:28
Wii gets customised with water coolers

Mod madness

We've seen all sorts of console customisation over the years but this Wii mod is certainly up there as one of the coolest. Mod magician Angel OD has been busy working on The Wii WNLimited Edition since December 2009. His creation features a completely unnecessary but über awesome water cooling system. The whole piece is wall- …

Games 7 Apr 2011, 09:35
Wind power: Even worse than you thought

But your 'leccy bill will keep going up to buy more of it

A new analysis of wind energy supplied to the UK National Grid in recent years has shown that wind farms produce significantly less electricity than had been thought, and that they cause more problems for the Grid than had been believed. The report (28-page PDF/944 KB) was commissioned by conservation charity the John Muir …

Science 7 Apr 2011, 09:36
Soyuz hooks up with ISS

Three new crew members arrive at orbiting outpost

The International Space Station's Expedition 27 crew was brought up to full strength last night when Andrey Borisenko, Ron Garan and Alexander Samokutyaev were welcomed aboard the orbiting outpost. The trio's Soyuz TMA-21 departed Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome on Monday night, decorated with the name of Yuri Gagarin to …

Science 7 Apr 2011, 09:38
HP and Violin build Oracle Exadata killer

Can flash save the world?

HP is using flash from Violin Memory to create Oracle Exadata-killing high-performance data base systems. This follows on from the fiasco of Oracle allegedly preventing HP from submitting a good TPC-C benchmark based on an HP DL980 server enhanced with Violin Memory's flash storage. As you can see in the 62-slide deck1 HP's …

Storage 7 Apr 2011, 10:11
UK.gov opens Red Tape Challenge regulation-slash website

Cameron demands deregulated ice-cream van jingles

The Coalition government has decided that a website can make us free – free, that is, of foolish red tape stifling British biz and productivity. Prime Minister David Cameron says: "Where regulation is well-designed and proportionate, it should stay. But it is hard to believe that we need government regulations on issues such …

Government 7 Apr 2011, 10:15
Microsoft ~~warns~~ asks WP7 users to wait for the real thing

Hacked update disappears in flurry of threats

Hacking the NoDo update onto your Windows Phone 7 handset could prevent you getting later updates, and even brick the handset, but that's OK, 'cos the files have vanished anyway. On Monday, one of the hackers responsible for the Windows Phone 7 jailbreaking application, Chris Walsh, posted a hack allowing anyone to install the …

Mobile 7 Apr 2011, 10:19
Assange gets appeal date

Last chance but one

Wikileaks spokesman Julian Assange has been granted an appeal hearing against his extradition to Sweden. Assange is accused of sexual offences against two Wikileaks volunteers. He will return to court 12 July for a two day hearing, PA reports. Should this appeal fail Assange could go to the Supreme Court, the newswire said. …

Government 7 Apr 2011, 10:20
Office for Mac 2011 SP1 calendar won't sync with Apple MobileMe

Microsoft gripes at Cupertino

Microsoft has taken a swipe at Apple for making changes to its MobileMe service, which effectively blocks Office for Mac 2011 users from synchronising their Outlook calendars with their iPhones and iPads. "I want to share more detail on a particular limitation that Apple is introducing with their new version of MobileMe," …

Applications 7 Apr 2011, 10:24
Commodore USA prices up revived C64, VICs

Not the games machine its father was

It's official: the new Commodore 64 - well, new innards, old casing - is a nettop. Commodore USA, the latest in a long line of CBM revialist movements over the years since the original company went bust, has revealed the machine will be based around a 1.83GHz Intel Atom D525 with 2-4GB of 800MHz DDR 2 memory. Yes, the D525 …

Hardware 7 Apr 2011, 10:32
Nintendo game roll-out pace plunges

Wii 2 imminent as history repeats itself

A famine of first-party Nintendo Wii titles over the coming months means the Wii 2 release is imminent, it has been suggested. The shortage of forthcoming Wii titles is history repeating itself, according to Kotaku, which has looked into patterns of Nintendo's game releases over the last decade to see if there is a precedent. …

Games 7 Apr 2011, 10:40
Toyota and Microsoft ink e-car deal in a cloud of telematics

Any colour you want, as long as it's Azure

Toyota and Microsoft have announced a $12m joint investment on including Microsoft's Azure cloud platform in upcoming Toyota vehicles for better telematics. The two companies have been working together since 1998 on in-car mapping, entertainment and information services for cars. Ideas include switching on heating while the …

Business 7 Apr 2011, 10:56
Named: Ten towns with slowest mobile broadband

Not that the fastest speed is much better...

Want to avoid snail pace 3G downloads? Steer clear of Milton Keynes and nine other UK towns named as Britain's mobile broadband blackspots. Travel instead to Peterborough, which boasts the fastest speed: an average of 3.86Mb/s. Poor old Milton Keynes managed just 1.73Mb/s. The numbers come from broadband price comparison site …

Broadband 7 Apr 2011, 11:08
MPs criticise banks on online fraud despite declining losses

Official figures put fraud bill at £46.7m for 2010

A House of Commons Treasury Select Committee report has criticised banks for failing their customers in the fight against online fraud. Members of the influential committee criticised banks as being "unprepared" to deal with internet fraud as part of a wider study into retail banking, whose main conclusions called for greater …

Security 7 Apr 2011, 11:10
Ofcom up for freeing more frequencies

Licencelessness spreading

Ofcom has proposed removing licence requirements from a range of radio frequencies, permitting some innovative spectrum use and perhaps saving a few lives too. Personal Locator Beacons will be permitted for land use, enabling satellite reporting of an emergency as well as radio location, all without needing a licence. …

Mobile 7 Apr 2011, 11:43
BBC IT project to save £17.9m cost it £38.2m net

Slow handclaps for Siemens shambles

MPs have given the BBC a kicking over its Digital Media Initiative, a technology development programme that was meant to deliver a "benefit" of £17.9m but ended up costing it a net £38.2m. The Public Accounts Committee hauled the Beeb over the coals, questioning why the project was handed to Siemens in 2008 without tendering, …

Management 7 Apr 2011, 11:44
Welsh scientists 'barcode' native flora

DNA ID card for 1,143 species

Welsh scientists are working towards a complete DNA "barcode" record of the country's 1,143 flowering plants. The Barcode Wales initiative forms part of the Barcode of Life plan to establish a database of standardised IDs for all the world's species, comprising a "very short genetic sequence from a standard part of the genome …

Science 7 Apr 2011, 11:52
BT reveals fibre-to-the-cabinet plans for 156 exchanges

Not so superfast, laddy

BT has earmarked 156 more exchanges for its ongoing rollout of faster broadband, none of which will benefit from the company's 100Mbit/s downstream service. The fibre upgrade, which this time mainly targets areas in Yorkshire, the Midlands and Greater Manchester, will be carried out by the telecom giant's Openreach division …

Broadband 7 Apr 2011, 12:23
Trusteer vows to fight 'baseless' code-theft lawsuit

Keystroke cops in legal bunfight

Transaction security firm Trusteer has vowed to fight a US lawsuit filed by rival developer Blue Gem Security which alleges code theft. Blue Gem is seeking unspecified damages, costs and an injunction over allegations that Trusteer plagiarised code to maintain compatibility between anti-keystroke logging software types of …

Security 7 Apr 2011, 12:24
FCC considers mandatory data roaming across the USA

Operators continue to filibuster implementations

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is voting today on extending its mandatory intracountry roaming to data services, but when operators can just extend negotiations forever it hardly seems worth it. Intracountry roaming – allowing a phone to connect to another network when out of the home network's coverage – has …

Mobile 7 Apr 2011, 12:26
Swedish newlyweds enjoy lively honeymoon

Cyclone, floods, bush fires and TWO earthquakes

A pair of Swedish newlyweds enjoyed what must rate as the liveliest honeymoon on record, in the process landing themselves firmly at the bottom of the list of travelling companions of choice. Stefan and Erika Svanstrom of Stockholm departed their native land on 6 December, with their baby daughter in tow. The pair, both in …

Bootnotes 7 Apr 2011, 12:39
Robo-warship sub hunter: Free DARPA crowdsauce game

Crewless Mary Celeste ghost-frigate sonar thrills

No doubt regular readers will recall the US military's cunning plan to develop unmanned submarine-hunting robotic frigates - warships which would prowl the oceans like automated Mary Celestes, remorselessly tracking enemy submarines regardless of how their pale, sweaty, malodorous captains* might twist and turn. What an …

Science 7 Apr 2011, 12:55
IBM paints the cloud-scape blue

Offers the works, including a standards body

IBM has backed the creation of a standards body that comprises 40 "leading cloud organisations" but none of its main rivals in the battle to dominate the next big thing in computing. The Cloud Standards Council was wafted into public view as Big Blue unveiled a slew of cloud products and services and reset its stall to grab [ …

Cloud 7 Apr 2011, 12:58
Seven... SSD sizzlers

Product Round-up Speed-boost upgrades for your laptop

While there’s no escaping the fact that solid-state drives are still expensive, they are steadily getting cheaper and the capacities are increasing. For the average PC user to be convinced that it is a must-have upgrade, the performance benefits would really need to be experienced. Costs aside, no doubt concerns as to whether …

Hardware 7 Apr 2011, 13:25
Fujifilm adds touch of flash to FinePix range

Crisp and compact

Snapper specialist Fujifilm has beefed up its FinePix range with the latest fashion-centric point and shoot, featuring an all-new sensor and touchscreen capabilities. Fujifilm's FinePix Z900EXR - the successor to the Z800EXR - has a 16Mp sensor, a 3.5in touchscreen LCD display and shoots 1080p video, which can be played back …

Hardware 7 Apr 2011, 13:27
Sony denies PSP 2 setback

NGP will roll out this year, firm insists

Sony's successor to the PSP, the "Next Generation Portable" (NGP), will not be delayed by the Japanese earthquake and should be rolled out in all regions by the end of the year. Earlier this week, we were told by Sony Computer Entertainment America head Jack Tretton that, due to the disaster in Japan, several manufacturing …

Games 7 Apr 2011, 13:31
Sex Party's down-under struggles with dominant Catholic priests

Electile dysfunction cannot stand!

The Australian Sex Party has called for state and federal electoral commissions to stop using church properties for electoral purposes, after apparently running into problems with the putting up of posters. Others are likely to join them, with the Greens also reportedly affected by what is seen as church bias in respect of …

Government 7 Apr 2011, 13:55
Dell offers prefabricated chunks-o-cloud

Coming soon: Unboxing vids for clusters. Apparently

Do you build your own PC from a box of parts when you order that PC from Dell? Of course not. So why should you have to build your own cluster when you want to do server virtualization on Dell PowerEdge servers? The payoffs for server virtualization are that it makes the management of servers easier and drives up the …

Cloud 7 Apr 2011, 14:03
Vatican hails hacking culture, Wikis

We're on a mission from God

A Vatican magazine argues hackers of the Linux coding and hardware modification type are on a mission from God. Father Antonio Spadaro, writing in the fortnightly magazine Civilta Cattolica, seeks to rehabilitate the term and divorce it from its more common association with cybercrime-related activities. Spadaro quotes …

Bootnotes 7 Apr 2011, 15:10
Energy crisis over - for 250 years?

Lots more gas than we thought, say US scientists

The "Energy Crisis" is over, according to some analyses, with new gas discoveries securing supplies for as much as 250 years. Conventional gas reserves peaked in 1970, which made the "dash for gas" in the late 1980s, with gas replacing oil and coal for power generation, seem particularly short-sighted at the time. The UK led …

Science 7 Apr 2011, 15:35
Dell's vStart is only a start

Bigger, smaller, and app-specific models coming

Dell's pair of vStart converged IT stack products, announced Thursday, will be joined by larger and smaller configurations as well as application-specific ones. Praveen Asthana, Dell's head of enterprise solutions, said that Dell will deliver vStart configurations that offer fewer than 100 virtual machines (VMs) and more than …

Servers 7 Apr 2011, 17:36
Intel set to reveal Itanium's fate?

Stealing the spotlight from the Xeon E7

Intel should have made a stronger statement than it did about its Itanium processor at this week's launch of the "Westmere-EX" Xeon E7 high-end server processors, considering the bashing that Oracle has given the chip in recent weeks. However – for whatever reason – Kirk Skaugen, general manager of Intel's Data Center Group, …

Servers 7 Apr 2011, 18:14
Google plans cheapo YouTube programs

More OK Go, not so Mad Men

Google is planning a "major overhaul" of YouTube, with changes said to include professionally produced programming. The search giant is reported to be planning to spend up to $100m commissioning "low-cost" content designed exclusively for YouTube's web audience. Content is planned as part of a package of changes that is …

Media 7 Apr 2011, 19:07
Facebook 'open sources' custom server and data center designs

The last rule of Google 'Fight Club'

Facebook has "open sourced" the specifications and design documents for the custom-built servers, racks, and other equipment used in its new Prineville, Oregon data center, the first data center designed, built, and owned by the company itself. On Thursday morning, at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, California, the social- …

Cloud 7 Apr 2011, 21:29
Banana-bender beer boffins drop drops for science

In search of the space brew

No, it’s not April 1: according to wire service AFP, there really are beer researchers at the Queensland University of Technology, and they’re working on a project to brew a beer suitable for consumption in space. Lead researcher Martin Castillo told AFP the physiology of space flight – particularly swelling of the tongue – …

Science 7 Apr 2011, 21:45
BitTorrent plays nice with content

Data mining, live streaming in the pipe

BitTorrent is trying to get over its bad rep with the content industry by leveraging the vast audience of its downloaders for good instead of evil. Speaking at MipTV’s Connected Creativity forum BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker said “our big challenge is that our technology gets used for things that don’t make us many friends in …

Media 7 Apr 2011, 21:45
Australian senate slaps data retention proposals

Also proposes 'do not track' for Aussies online

An Australian Senate Committee has raised concerns about the government’s plans to implement a data retention regime (which would be required should this country endorse the European Convention on Cybercrime). The Environment and Communications and References Committee’s report, The adequacy of protections for the privacy of …

Government 7 Apr 2011, 22:11
Google juices Chrome OS with fondleslab smarts

Floor wax or dessert topping?

Google is plugging away at developing a tablet version of its browser-based Chrome OS it originally discussed in February 2010, but details remain scant despite recent changes in the Chrome OS source code. "We are engaging in early open-source work for the tablet form factor, but we have nothing new to announce at this time," …

Media 7 Apr 2011, 23:16
FCC forces data roaming on US wireless giants

Eat that plan

The US Federal Communications Commission has approved roles that would let smartphone users affordably access the internet using their rival provider's network. A vote along by party lines by the Federal Communications Commission has gone in favor of forcing US carriers to offer data access at "reasonable" roaming rates, …

Broadband 7 Apr 2011, 23:48