3rd May 2011 Archive

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Microsoft drafts .NET chief to lead Azure cloud war

Can red polo shirted strongman woo developers?

.NET fan favorite Scott Guthrie has been elevated in a Microsoft reorg intended to "sharpen its focus" and win greater support among developers for the company's push into the cloud. .NET developer platform corporate vice president Guthrie has been chosen to drive development of the Windows Azure Application Platform, and to …

Developer 3 May 2011, 00:39
DIY crimekit brings advanced malware to Mac OSX

Next stop: iPad and Linux users

A crimeware kit discovered over the weekend promises to bring a flood of advanced malware that steals passwords and other sensitive data from computers running Mac OS X. The kit is being advertised as the Weyland-Yutani Bot in underground crime websites, where it's being sold for $1,000. The first ever crimeware kit for the Mac …

Security 3 May 2011, 00:43
Assange: Facebook a ‘spying machine’

And media starts wars, says WikiLeaks founder

Julian Assange, Wikileaks founder, media tart and controversialist, has leveled his hyperbole gun at Facebook, calling it “the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented.” In an interview with Russia Today that’s bound to provide aid and comfort to tinfoil-hatters around the world, he complained that the …

Music and Media 3 May 2011, 01:00
Russian search giant Yandex blows whistle on whistle-blower

You don’t say 'no' to the ~~KGB~~ FSB

Yandex, which last week announced its intention to list on NASDAQ, says it has been forced by Russian authorities to hand over financial information about an anti-corruption blogger to Russia’s domestic security agency, the FSB. Alexei Navalny, who operates the http://rospil.info RosPil whistle-blower Website in Russia, had …

Music and Media 3 May 2011, 02:00
Nirvanix storage cloud spills executive blood

Comment Vice presidential putsch push

Nirvanix lost a few executives when its incoming CEO stripped out unwanted VPs and SVPs, and brought in his own team. What appears to have happened is that Scott Genereux became Nirvanix' CEO in November of last year, coming in from QLogic. Some $10m of C-round funding came in at the same time – which, with a B-round in 2009, …

Storage 3 May 2011, 03:00
Telstra cozies up to small end of town

Invests $600m prepping SMB services

Telstra is investing AUD$600 million over the next five years to upgrade its network for the delivery of advanced business services. The carrier commissioned a study by IDC into the small business sector which found that the move to digital services in the sector was being held back by outdated technology. Telstra CEO David …

Telecoms 3 May 2011, 03:53
Fujitsu A/NZ tosses dollars at clouds

New CEO confirms new DCs in Sydney, Melbourne

Fujitsu has reaffirmed its commitment to the Australian data center sector despite growing competition among providers. The company, which currently has 10 data centres in Australia, will commission one new facilities in Sydney and another in Melbourne later this year as part of a AUD$100 million investment announced first last …

Infrastructure 3 May 2011, 03:54
Japanese boffins build internet kissing machine

Tongue twisting lip locks over IP

Researches in Japan are hard at work developing an internet-enabled kissing simulator that will allow lovers – or perfect strangers – to reach out and buss someone. "This device is for communications within the mouth," researcher Nobuhiro Takahashi of the Kajimoto Laboratory at The University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo …

Music and Media 3 May 2011, 04:00
Storage duopoly to transform industry?

Comment Hybridisation could goose I/O density

The after-effects of the Western Digital and Seagate embiggening could be to slow down technology development in the hard-disk drive industry. Why spend development money when you don't need to? With WD buying Hitachi GST, and Seagate buying Samsung's HDD operation, the two big disk-drive beasts will control around 90 per cent …

Storage 3 May 2011, 05:00
Go SMS Pro

Android App of the Week Spice up your text life

A giant leap forward from the stock Android SMS client, Go SMS Pro is the latest offering from the Go development team, the folk behind Go Launcher EX and Go Weather. Go SMS Pro: the inevitable conversation view (left) can be tweaked and tweaked (right) Apart from looking good, running smoothly, having numerous wallpaper …

reghardware 3 May 2011, 06:00
Hacker pwns police cruiser and lives to tell tale

The dark side of 'situational awareness'

As a penetration tester hired to pierce the digital fortresses of Fortune 1000 casinos, banks and energy companies, Kevin Finisterre has hacked electronic cash boxes, geologic-survey equipment, and on more than one occasion, a client's heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning system. But one of his most unusual hacks came …

Security 3 May 2011, 06:00
OCZ joins PCIe flash fray

Compression boosts I/O numbers

OCZ has joined in the PCIe flash market, the one led by Fusion-io, with card controllers that compress data and boost I/O to 1GB/sec speeds. The VeloDrive PCI-Express SSD uses 2-bit MLC flash with four Sandforce SF-1565 controllers, has four channels, comes in half-height or full-height form, and has on-board hardware RAID or …

Storage 3 May 2011, 09:06
Google faces another privacy probe

South Korean cops raid offices looking for mobile advertising wrongness

South Korean investigators raided Google's Seoul offices this morning as part of a probe into the search and advertising giant's privacy policies. Police were looking for evidence of illegal data collection by AdMob – Google's mobile advertising service. A South Korean police official told the BBC: "We suspect AdMob collected …

Mobile 3 May 2011, 09:13
4oD plods onto iPad

Xbox Live too?

If you're an iPad owner that uses on-demand video services, then you'll be pleased to know Channel 4 has launched a 4oD iPad app. There is also talk of the service coming to Xbox Live. Following the success of the BBC iPlayer for iPad, it should be unsurprising that Channel 4 would be after a piece of the same cake. The free …

reghardware 3 May 2011, 09:51
Archos 32 Android media player

Review Pint-sized PMP with potential

Archos is calling the 32 an Android tablet, but I have trouble convincing myself that anything with a 3.2in screen is really a tablet so it makes far more sense to review it as a touchscreen media player. Archos may call the 32 a tablet, but it's really a PMP Slim, sleek and light as a good PMP should be, the 32 is a well …

reghardware 3 May 2011, 10:00
Google taps Ingenico for retail terminal expansion

'Google? That'll do nicely sir'

NFC kit manufacturer Ingenico has confirmed it is developing retail terminals for Google, but the search giant won't be running its own banking service just yet. Ingenico told French journalists that Google wants (US) customers to be able to redeem coupons and discounts using an NFC-enabled phone, tapping it against the till …

Mobile 3 May 2011, 10:02
Sikorsky, US Army claim whisper-flapcopter test success

A chopper in every garage at last?

A wind-tunnel test programme aimed at producing new, hi-tech rotor blades for helicopters has finished. The trials, which used blades fitted with trailing-edge flaps like those seen on aeroplane wings, reportedly offer the prospect of much-enhanced copters in future – in particular, the long-heralded "whisper mode" for covert ( …

Science 3 May 2011, 10:21
US acts on telco 'Ponzi scheme'

Chinese whispers at China Voice

The Securities and Exchange Commission has frozen the assets of China Voice Holding Corp on suspicion that it is no more than a Ponzi scheme. The SEC alleges that China Voice, which said it has a "portfolio" of telecoms products and services in the US and China, is using new investments to pay off previous investors. …

Government 3 May 2011, 10:38
CEOP accused of misleading public over site security fail

User who discovered the flaw says agency 'whitewashed' insecurity incident

The person who discovered that the child abuse reporting mechanism on the website of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre was insecure has reacted with anger to suggestions from the agency that the flaw had only affected surfers visiting the site from either Facebook or Google. He says that contrary to CEOP's …

Enterprise Security 3 May 2011, 10:39
RIM makes Bold move with OS 7

Updated smartphone, operating system

Research in Motion has unveiled two additions to its range of Blackberry Bold smartphones, the 9900 and 9930. Both handsets run the new BlackBerry 7 OS, which provides support for 4G networks, HSPA+ connectivity, faster JavaScript, HTML 5 and voice-activated searches. Spec-wise, the latest BlackBerrys pack a 1.2GHz processor …

reghardware 3 May 2011, 10:46
Apple shuts online Apple Store

iMac refresh imminent?

Apple's online store is currently down awaiting an update which, it's widely believed, will centre on new iMacs based on Intel's second-generation Core i processor platform, aka Sandy Bridge. Rumours to that effect hit the net last week, but with Sandy Bridge-based MacBook Pro notebooks out since March - check out our reviews …

reghardware 3 May 2011, 10:57
Hybrid clouds: You know they make sense

Cloud Let's embrace diversity

If you are wondering why hybrid clouds are the future, look no further than last week's massive crash in Amazon’s Virginia data centre, where its EC2 cloud and related storage clouds are hosted. Despite the fact that Amazon creates supposedly independent “availability zones” within its data centres to ensure that outages are …

Enterprise Tech 3 May 2011, 11:00
RIM warns investors, greets developers

Blames slowed development cycle

Last week RIM slipped out a profit warning to investors, letting them know that its previous forecasts were on the optimistic side and delays in device launches were hurting. RIM has told its investors that sales for the last quarter will be "slightly below" the $5.2bn it had predicted, and that profits will drop more than 11 …

Mobile 3 May 2011, 11:08
Microsoft to release Windows thin PC in late June

Final test build lands

Microsoft has pushed out a final test build of its Windows Thin PC (WinTPC). The company dished out the Release Candidate yesterday, but the final version of WinTPC won't arrive until 30 June, said Microsoft. "Customers like the reduced footprint of WinTPC – the machines they will likely use it on often have less disk space …

Infrastructure 3 May 2011, 11:09
North Korea blamed for bank hack

Hackers not so lonely

South Korean prosecutors have accused North Korea of a recent hack attack on a bank which caused a three-day systems outage and deleted details of some customers' credit cards. The attack apparently came from the same IP address as that was used to launch a distributed denial of service against the south earlier this year. …

Enterprise Security 3 May 2011, 11:11
Ohio cops taze naked marathoneer

'It was cold... I wasn't exactly proud of what I was showing'

A 35-year-old Ohio man pleaded not guilty to "public indecency and obstructing official business" yesterday, after being tazed over the weekend after attempting to run a marathon while naked. Brett Henderson was collared during Cincinnati's Flying Pig marathon on Sunday, after a wardrobe malfunction left him pounding the …

Bootnotes 3 May 2011, 11:28
Private investors pile into data centres

There goes the neighbourhood

Private investment firm Matterhorn Capital is spending £250m to build two new data centres in the south-east of England. Matterhorn Capital Data Centres, part of Matterhorn Capital, is spending the money in Bury Green, Hertfordshire and Chesham, Buckinghamshire. The Chesham site has on-site power – which Matterhorn claims …

Infrastructure 3 May 2011, 11:43
Intel leaks show a flashy future

Six of the best – plus an extra two for good measure

Here's a lovely leaked Intel SSD roadmap – thank you engadget – showing six 25nm products coming plus two more 34nm single-level cell speedsters by the end of the year. Intel's SSD range is moving from 34nm process geometry to 25nm geometry. The previous X25 and X18 branding has changed to 300, 500 and 700 brands and the most …

Storage 3 May 2011, 11:49
Honda Jazz Hybrid

Review Third time a charm for Honda hybrid?

In the last 10 years, Honda has shifted over 3.5m examples of its Jazz hatchback, and now the evergreen runabout so beloved by the over-60s is getting hybrid power. Presumably, Honda, like Toyota with its Auris Hybrid, thinks a familiar exterior will prevent hybrid-fright among it’s more conservative customers. Honda's Jazz …

reghardware 3 May 2011, 12:00
DARPA says surveillance vid-search tool is ready for use

To roll out across 'multiple military programmes'

US military warboffins claim that they have found one of the internet's holiest grails – that of true, tagless searchable-video technology. For most of us, searching a video archive is a chancy matter. The perfect piece of footage we want to see may well be in there, but the only chance of finding it is usually that a person …

Applications 3 May 2011, 12:01
Osama malware scams spread to Facebook

Twitter news breaker hacked

News of Osama bin Laden's assassination may have appeared on Twitter before the official confirmation but surfers following up supposed offers of live kill footage from Facebook or email will almost certainly end up hitting malware. Breaking news items are often taken as the theme for search engine manipulation designed to …

Malware 3 May 2011, 12:29
Robot pirate invented in USA: 'Yarr-2 D-2'?

'Marsupial' shot-bot has one eye, clambers up ships' sides

An American firm has developed a cunning, beercan-sized robot which can be shot out of a gun, stick to the side of a ship magnetically, and then climb up the ship's side in the fashion of a pirate with a knife or cutlass between his teeth. Developers Recon Robotics insist that the droid buccaneer is actually intended for …

Science 3 May 2011, 12:34
Gamer goes 3DS gaga with AR card tattoo

Indelible reality

Nintendo's AR cards, which trigger the augmented reality functions on the 3DS, have had their fare share of custom implementations. We've seen the design reprinted on t-shirts, drawn on blackboards, even scaled up to the size of a tennis court. Now, one shameless net-nerd has taken it a step further and made the AR card a …

reghardware 3 May 2011, 12:48
HP to show off next gen EVA on the Vegas Strip

Viva Las Vegas: Fifth generation becomes P6000

EVA lives on: fulfilling promises made at 3PAR acquisition time, HP has confirmed a next-generation EVA array is coming, with an early access program available and more details due at its Las Vegas HP Discover event in June. The EVA is HP's mainstream enterprise block access storage array, with around 100,000 deployed in …

Storage 3 May 2011, 13:05
Apple refreshes iMac with Thunderbolt, Sandy Bridge

AMD GPUs too

Apple has indeed taken the wraps off updated iMacs, as anticipated by rumour and a temporary Apple Store closure this morning. The new models - two 21.5in machines and a pair of 27-inchers - sport Intel Sandy Bridge chippery: 2.5, 2.7, 2.7 and 3.1GHz quad-core Core i5s, respectively. Build-to-order buyers can elect to have 2. …

reghardware 3 May 2011, 13:07
Seagate's terabyte platters make it the densest of the lot

Seagate has bust the terabyte platter barrier

It's done it; Seagate has achieved a 625Gbit/in2 areal density enabling it to produce 3TB Barracuda drives on just three platters instead of the current five. It says it is on track for the channel to receive product around the middle of the year with 1TB, 1.5TB, 2TB and 3TB capacity points. These are 3.5-inch form factor …

Storage 3 May 2011, 13:31
Insurance firm pushes out iPhone app that rates driving ability

No impact on premiums… yet

State Farm insurance has released an iPhone application to rate driving ability, using data from the phone's accelerometer and GPS, then spouting advice on how to be a better driver. Driver Feedback monitors motion and location using the iPhone's sensors, then rates the driver's acceleration, braking, and cornering ability …

Mobile 3 May 2011, 13:42
Government slashes consultancy spending

Consultants: Public sector gave us 15% less dosh in 2010, but we don't mind...

Public sector spending on consultants fell sharply last year, according to a report from the Management Consultancies Association (MCA). It says that in 2010 the public sector spent 15 per cent less on consultants than it had in the previous year – although the MCA declined to disclose the total, saying it was confidential to …

Channel Register 3 May 2011, 14:07
Ubisoft to turn games into movies, TV shows

Publisher to green light own adaptions

Videogames publisher Ubisoft is to launch a film company to adapt its games into motion pictures. The project, Ubisoft Motion Pictures, will help the French publisher's ambitions of knocking Activision and EA off the top perches of the gaming world, movie industry title Variety reports. The move follows Walt Disney's …

reghardware 3 May 2011, 15:08
Boffins develop liquid crystal solid-state raygun turret

Points laser beam with no need to shift laser

OK, so you've done it. You've finally built a high-energy laser which can put out a megawatt-range beam, and it doesn't emit toxic corrosive exhaust or melt itself in operation or weigh a prohibitive amount. Now to revolutionise warfare, right? Well, just hold on there my crazy boffin friend: it's no good trying to hold the …

Science 3 May 2011, 15:15
Vatican blogger meeting says no to copyright, yes to lifting content

Consider the lilies of the field...

Speakers at a bloggers conference at the Vatican this week gave themselves an indulgence, saying it is OK to lift content from "old media" and that copyright was old hat. The Vatican's Councils for Culture and Social Communications had invited 150 bloggers to a meeting in Rome yesterday. While many of the Catholic bloggers …

Music and Media 3 May 2011, 15:31
The Great Amazon Crash of 2011

Podcast So what has Infosmack got say about this?

And welcome to Infosmack 97, a lovely podcast show in which hosts Greg Knieriemen and Marc Farley with the Diva of Disruptive Technologies Christina Weil discuss that Amazon Outage, the first really big Cloud crash since ever. Special guests this week are Jason Hoffman, Founder and Chief Scientist of Joyent and Chris M. Evans …

Infrastructure 3 May 2011, 15:39
Skyhook routes around Google to MapQuest

Location pioneer finds Android way

Skyhook – the location services outfit that was booted from both Google's Android mobile OS and Apple's iOS – continues to work its way back onto phones through third-party applications. On Tuesday, the Boston-based company announced that MapQuest's free Android application has embedded the core Skyhook location service engine …

Mobile 3 May 2011, 17:47
Sony says data for 25 million more customers stolen

Bleeding continues with Sony Online Entertainment hack

Sony warned that personally identifiable information for an additional 25 million customers was exposed after discovering a massive security breach extended to its online computer games service. The intrusion on Sony Online Entertainment systems exposed data for 24.6 million users, including their name, address, email address, …

Security 3 May 2011, 18:41
RIM taps Microsoft Bing for phone and tablet search

IE10 in the wings?

Microsoft's Bing has been crowned the default search and maps provider for Research in Motion's smartphones as well as the Playbook, RIM's answer to the Jobsian iPad. Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer took the stage at RIM's BlackBerry World conference on Tuesday morning in Orlando, Florida to announce the partnership …

Mobile 3 May 2011, 20:07
HP engineering veep spills cloud plans onto LinkedIn

Ruby, Java, open source, ~~Microsoft Azure~~

HP is building a wide range of public cloud services, including Amazon-like "infrastructure clouds" offering instant access to readily scalable processing power, storage, and networking resources as well as a "development cloud" for building, hosting, and scaling applications based on Java, Ruby, and other open source languages …

Cloud Business 3 May 2011, 21:28
.NET Android and iOS clones stripped by Attachmate

Open source Mono suffers layoffs

The fate of an open-source version of Microsoft's .NET running on iOS and Android is unclear after Novell's new owner Attachmate laid off members of the project, according to reports. Attachmate has let go of US staff working on the Novell-sponsored Mono Project as part of a move centering on Novell's Linux-related efforts …

Financial News 3 May 2011, 22:34
SGI juices sales, narrows losses in Q3

'This year. It's all coming together. Promise'

Silicon Graphics is moving towards profitability after many years of struggle, and thinks that fiscal 2012, which starts in July, will be the year that it all finally comes together. In the third quarter of fiscal 2011 ended in March, there were definitely signs that the company was moving in the right direction with both its …

Financial News 3 May 2011, 22:52
Woz snubs Paul Allen, praises pea soup

Disses deep-pocket patent trolls

Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak has no love for the US patent system, and prefers split-pea soup to "that patent-troll thing" as practiced by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen in his current patent-infringment lawsuit against Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, and others. "A lot of patents are pretty much not worth that much," …

Software 3 May 2011, 22:57
Telecom NZ fibs to govt over network assets

Inflates value by over NZ$1b

The New Zealand government’s Commerce Commission has rejected Telecom New Zealand’s annual financial statements for the year to June 2010, dismissing them as “unreliable.” The Commission has found that the carrier has inflated the value of key assets, chiefly overvaluing Telecom NZ’s access network by more than a billion …

Telecoms 3 May 2011, 23:52
EchoStar, Dish Network cough up $500m in TiVo settlement

Patent suit ends, at last

The long-running patent lawsuit in which TiVo sued Dish Network and its former division, EchoStar, has been settled with the defendants agreeing to pay US$500 million to Tivo. The case was originally brought against the EchoStar subsidiary, which split from Dish Network in 2008. The dispute has been in the courts since 2004, …

Law 3 May 2011, 23:54
Oz minister ties privacy law review to PSN hack

Don’t just do something, sit there!

In the wake of the deepening crisis over Sony’s lax gaming network security, Australia’s Privacy Minister Brendan O’Connor has hopped on the bandwagon, tying disclosure laws to Sony’s incidents. Australia doesn’t actually have disclosure laws yet. Last year, the government launched the glacially-slow process of reviewing this …

Security 3 May 2011, 23:55