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23rd May 2011 Archive

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  • SingTel blasts off second satellite

    Optus set to launch tenth

    SingTel has launched its second satellite, ST-2, to meet increasing customer demand for fixed and mobile services across the Middle East, Central Asia, Indian sub-continent and South East Asia. The regional carrier says marine, finance, oil, gas, media, broadcast and logistics users will create a S$620 million market for the …

    Broadband 23 May 2011, 02:00

  • Apple seeks anti-snoop display patent

    User selectable buttinsky barrier

    Apple has filed a patent application for a way to vary the viewing angle of a display, and thus allow you to better protect your viewing privacy. The system in patent application number 20110116017, "Systems and methods for electronically controlling the viewing angle of a display", offers a number of examples – or, in …

    Laptops 23 May 2011, 03:00

  • Big Blue ponies up $100m for Big Data R&D

    Sends Watson to biz school

    IBM has taken out the corporate checkbook and instead of using $100m to buy back a chunk of its shares back from Wall Street has decided to allocate the funds to new research and development efforts to help customers chew through big data. The $100m, an IBM spokeswoman confirmed to El Reg, is incremental funds, not just …

    Financial News 23 May 2011, 04:00

  • Why Cisco should merge with Dell

    Comment Disco – A real data center powerhouse

    Cisco Systems has unleashed a world of hurt on its shareholders, masquerading as a consumer company that sells Flip phones, Umi telepresence, and Linksys routers. There's nothing wrong with selling gadgets to consumers. Apple does it brilliantly, and profitably. But Cisco isn't Apple. In a sense, Apple might be a place where …

    Data Networking 23 May 2011, 05:00

  • Out of this World science fiction exhibition

    Review Sci-Fi at the Brit Li

    Christmas 1977, my parents bought me a copy of Pan Books' The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. The progenitor? I'd been reading 2000AD since April - from issue eight, since you ask - and was soon devouring secondhand paperbacks by John Christopher, John Wyndham, Arthur C Clarke and such, and eagerly devouring …

    Hardware 23 May 2011, 06:00

  • Journos 'risk charges' for covering Parliamentary debates

    Senior judge warns on gag-blabbing

    Journalists who report on Parliamentary debates on subjects covered by court gagging orders could be in contempt of court, a committee of judges and legal experts has said. Master of the Rolls Lord Neuberger headed the committee, which today published a report into the increasing use of injunctions and super-injunctions to …

    Law 23 May 2011, 07:57

  • Deduper Sepaton edges out from data centre

    ROBO DS3: Chunky unit

    High-end deduper Sepaton has refreshed its edge deduplication array, giving it more capacity and performance. The S2100-DS3 supersedes the DS2 and is a remote office/branch office system, positioned by Sepaton as a spoke to its data centre hub machines, the S2100-ES2, to which it can replicate data and so provide business …

    Storage 23 May 2011, 08:22

  • Apple iPhone 5 to sport CRT-style screen

    Curvature a pain in the glass?

    Take with an appropriate quantity of sodium chloride: the iPhone 5 will sport a curved display. So say unnamed industry sources cited by DigiTimes, which also claims that, because makers of screen-covering glass are concerned about the high cost of kit capable of cutting curved glass, Apple has been buying such machines on …

    Phones 23 May 2011, 08:53

  • Sony evolves card-less Augmented Reality tech

    Right on track?

    Sony has claimed it has revolutionised Augmented Reality (AR) by eliminating the need for markers in the real world on which to key virtual graphics. According to Sony, its SmartAR technology uses "object recognition technology" to spot real objects, such as photographs and posters, plus Sony's proprietary "'3D space …

    Hardware 23 May 2011, 09:30

  • Sony BMG Greece hacked

    Updated Hackers 7, Sony 0. Game over

    Sony BMG Greece has became the latest property of the entertainment giant to be hacked. The miscreants attacked over the weekend. The Hackers News uploaded sample extracts from a database of users' names and email addresses onto pastebin after hackers who broke into SonyMusic.gr sent them a dump from their hack. The data as …

    Management 23 May 2011, 09:47

  • Apple nears online streaming deal with Big Four, says report

    Still waiting for Universal to sign on dotted line...

    Universal Music Group is understood to be the only holdout for Apple's widely reported new online music storage and streaming service. According to Reuters, the Vivendi SA-owned company is the only one of the Big Four record labels not to have inked a deal with Apple – yet. Warner Music Group, EMI Group and Sony Music …

    Cloud 23 May 2011, 09:54

  • Extragalactic black hole particle fountain awesomeness

    Pic Boffins use scope as big as Earth to craft stunning snap

    International boffins, by cunningly melding together images from mighty radio telescopes situated across the southern hemisphere, have produced this excellent pic of stupendous particle jets belching from a huge "supermassive" black hole 12 million light years away in the far-off galaxy Centaurus A. Matter-rending, space- …

    Science 23 May 2011, 09:58

  • Rapture postponed as world inexplicably fails to end

    Judgment Day prophet 'somewhat bewildered'

    Judgment Day prophet Harold Camping has some serious explaining to do after his prediction that the world would end on Saturday proved less than accurate. The 89-year-old founder of Family Radio nailed 6pm EST as the moment at which millions of true believers would be raptured heavenwards, while cataclysmic earthquakes rocked …

    Bootnotes 23 May 2011, 10:00

  • Heads roll at HP as Apotheker swings new broom

    CEO's arrival sparks exec exodus

    The word on the street is that more executives at struggling IT giant Hewlett-Packard are being shown the door by new CEO Leo Apotheker. Apotheker: 'Ladies and Gents, let's have a look at your closest exits' A report in Bloomberg says three more top executives are leaving HP as the company shakes up its services business to …

    Management 23 May 2011, 10:14

  • Herding cats: mobile device management for sales teams

    Desktop Using every device and always looking for shortcuts

    Connectivity and security are the keys to maintaining an efficient mobile sales force - while managing an explosion in the diversity of devices in use. The biggest productivity killer is when the sales person needs access - only to find that the link is broken somewhere along the line. Yet connectivity is not entirely in the …

    Desktop Strategy 23 May 2011, 11:01

  • Super-injunctions 'unfair' cos of Twitter gossip, says Cameron

    PM, 'like everyone else', knows identity of footballer

    Current privacy laws, which gag newspaper editors from reporting stories that are widely in the public domain courtesy of online tools such as Twitter, were "unsustainable" and "unfair", the Prime Minister said this morning. David Cameron, speaking on ITV's Daybreak show, said that "like everyone else" he knew the identity of …

    Law 23 May 2011, 11:06

  • Intel drives up flash drive warranty

    SSD 320 gets longer life assurance – increased to five years

    Intel has put another brick in the wall of its enterprise SSD supply house and boosted the SSD 320's warranty from three to five years. The SSD 320 was only introduced in March, so Intel's experience with shipped 320s must have been good enough to justify the warranty extension. Existing SSD owners as well as new buyers of the …

    Storage 23 May 2011, 11:08

  • Huawei snaps up former Mandarin for UK advisory board

    Wants to know what's what in Blighty

    The makeover of Chinese telecom-kit manufacturer Huawei continues apace, with the company appointing ex-UK Trade and Investment mandarin Sir Andrew Cahn to its latest wheeze: a UK Advisory Board. Sir Andrew will head up the new board, which will recruit additional figures over the next few months. The plan is part of the …

    Data Networking 23 May 2011, 11:15

  • Radio 4 bumped off Freeview by Gaelic TV

    Scots lose Voice of Middle England, gain Urban beats

    Radio 4 and Radio Scotland will get bumped off Freeview North of the border when BBC Alba arrives in digital later this year, though the BBC has found space for 1 Extra and 6 Music. It was feared that as many as 13 radio stations would have to be switched off in the afternoons to make space for BBC Alba, which broadcasts …

    Media 23 May 2011, 11:21

  • Office 15 steals OVERLARGE font, design vision from Windows PHO

    NE

    Large corporations which find themselves with an unexpectedly popular feature tend to go overboard with it. So it was with Java, which in the mid-1990s rapidly evolved from a programming language into an environment, then a platform, and then an embedded OS – so we got "Java for lightbulbs" - and finally a corporate philosophy …

    Applications 23 May 2011, 11:25

  • BBC shifts some HD transmissions to 1080p...

    Updated ...troubling some Sony TVs in the process

    The BBC has quietly begun broadcasting HD content in 1080p, sort of. Since April, some BBC HD transmissions over Freeview HD have combined 1080i and 1080p material, switching between the two on a GOP (Group of Pictures) by GOP basis. A GOP is a batch of H.264 encoded frames combining an initial, reference picture followed by …

    Hardware 23 May 2011, 11:33

  • Huge fat pipe squirts mighty streams

    Magnificent 35-kilowrist performance

    An allied team of boffins based in Blighty, Germany, Switzerland and Israel say they have broken the record for data transmission rate from a single light source, using just one laser to send info at a blistering 26 terabits per second. "To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest line rate ever encoded onto a single …

    Data Networking 23 May 2011, 11:41

  • Archos 70 Android 7in tablet

    Review Affordable fondleslab worth touching?

    Whenever I ask people what they want in a tablet, I usually get the following answers in descending order of importance: a price tag south of £200, a 7in screen to keep things compact and the ability to play any video or music files you care to mention out of the box plus the option to play them out from HDMI. The Archos 70 fits …

    Tablets 23 May 2011, 11:47

  • Coders run Android 3.0 on Honeycomb-less tablets

    Unofficial upgrades available

    Owners of Toshiba's Folio 100, a tablet that shipped with Android 2.2, can now upgrade to Honeycomb - unofficially, at least. The Folio 100 is unlikely ever to gain such an upgrade formally - its spec isn't up to snuff, as far as Google is concerned. But enterprising coders have succeeded in porting over Android 3.0 to the …

    Tablets 23 May 2011, 11:55

  • How to plan a Windows 7 roll-out

    Broadcast Tips from battle-hardened IT pro

    Windows 7 may be Microsoft's fastest selling OS, but some of the larger scale roll outs have started only recently. Rev 1 teething problems, combined with the effects of a slump, fuelled the initial caution. But with many of you set to cut your teeth on this OS refresh, we have pulled some experts into our studio to give you a …

    Desktop Strategy 23 May 2011, 12:00

  • Firefox 5 beta slapped on Mozilla conveyer belt

    I am not a number, I am a free browser

    Mozilla has released a public beta of Firefox 5, ahead of its planned final release in late June. The test build comes a month after Mozilla rejigged its browser release schedule in a clear nod to Google's Chrome. CSS animation is the big advancement in the next, lightly-developed iteration of Firefox. Additionally, the do- …

    Applications 23 May 2011, 12:03

  • Hargreaves' Digital Copyright Exchange will never happen

    Here's why...

    Governments have a long tradition of commissioning copyright overhauls and then throwing them in the bin. Will Ian Hargreaves' IP review suffer the same fate? I suspect most of it will, and here's why. IP is a layer cake of complex international treaties that limit the scope of what national governments may actually do. Europe …

    Media 23 May 2011, 12:21

  • Adam Curtis: The Rise of the Machines

    Interview Cybernetics, ecosystems and pop

    Adam Curtis' new series begins tonight on BBC TV, and I've had a unique insight into its creation. Like all Curtis work it continues some of his long-standing fascinations - and adds some new ones. As Associate Producer I helped explore these ideas with Curtis over the past three years, particularly the ideas of web utopianism …

    Media 23 May 2011, 12:36

  • Cybercrooks turn Eve Online into botnet battlefield

    Fun-spoiling, DDoSing thieves farm virtual gold to sell for cold hard cash

    Crooks using online games to farm virtual currencies that they can sell for real money have turned internet spaceship game Eve Online into a battlefield for botnets. Eve Online is home to various rival groups who generate in-game currency for gamers who want to join in without spending their time acquiring experience and …

    Games 23 May 2011, 13:08

  • Contract can be formed by company's actions, High Court rules

    Bad news for oil company fighting over typo in written freighting contract

    The actions of two companies can lead to a binding contract being formed even if there is a mistake in the terms of the contract itself, the High Court has ruled. The High Court determined that a contract had existed between Statoil ASA and TTMI Sari because Statoil had paid TTMI for delivering its freight – even though there …

    Management 23 May 2011, 13:28

  • Star probe Kepler finds many multi-world alien suns

    Boffins chuffed at extra chance to do v hard sums

    Boffins analysing early data from NASA's exoplanet-hunting Kepler space telescope say they've been surprised to detect an unexpectedly large number of star systems with multiple planets. Kepler spots planets orbiting other suns by noting the changes in the light emitted by the star when a planet transits in front of it. The …

    Science 23 May 2011, 14:15

  • Lock up your lungs, here comes Grimsvotn

    Asthmatics on Defcon 4 as Icelandic volcano spews forth

    Experts are warning those of a delicate pulmonary disposition to brace for the fallout from Icelandic volcano Grimsvotn, due to descend on Blighty tomorrow. The BBC says the British Lung Foundation and Asthma UK have issued a lung Defcon 4, or thereabouts, ahead of the anticipated alien ash invasion. The British Lung …

    Bootnotes 23 May 2011, 14:37

  • Architect of Great Firewall of China 'takes shoe to face'

    Anti-anti-democracy protestor just does it (allegedly)

    The creator of the Great Firewall of China was reportedly pelted with shoes and eggs during a visit to Wuhan University last week. Fang Binxing was hit by one of the Nike trainers flung by an anonymous protestor*, whose actions have been met with a groundswell of online support, The Guardian reports. Staff in the office of …

    Security 23 May 2011, 14:50

  • MP names Ryan Giggs as super-injunction football star

    From Twitter to House of Commons in 140 characters or less

    Ryan Giggs has been named by a LibDem MP as the footballer behind a super injunction issued to the press in England and Wales in an effort to suppress details about an alleged affair. John Hemming, MP, speaking in the House of Commons this afternoon, revealed the identity of Giggs. He had previously been known only as 'CTB' in …

    Law 23 May 2011, 15:55

  • Falun Gong lawsuit skewers Cisco's 'little red' sales book

    Cisco denies teaching Beijing 'to track subversives'

    Cisco used Maoist rhetoric to pitch its networking kit to the Chinese government and customised it to help Beijing crack down on the Falun Gong movement, a lawsuit claims. Falun Gong supporters in the US filed the suit in California last week, the New York Times reports. The suit claims that Cisco helped design China's Great …

    Data Networking 23 May 2011, 15:57

  • HP exec: WebOS tablet will trounce iPad

    TouchPad aims for 'Number One Plus'

    An HP exec says that his company's upcoming TouchPad will overtake the current tablet-market dominator, Apple's iPad. "In the tablet world we're going to become better than number one. We call it number one plus," HP's EMEA personal systems group headman Eric Cador told a press conference in Cannes, according to The Telegraph …

    Tablets 23 May 2011, 16:32

  • Software AG chomps Terracotta

    Private platform cloud fluff

    Terracotta, which has baked a Java application scaling and acceleration platform and which bought control of the Ehcache speed engine for Java applications, has a new owner: Software AG. The German software company, which sells the Adabas database for IBM mainframes, Tamino XML database and middleware for SOA-style …

    Business 23 May 2011, 17:11

  • Google slips open source JPEG killer into Gmail, Picasa

    Gets WebP happy

    Google has announced that Gmail and Picasa as well as its Chrome browser are now using WebP, the image compression format it open sourced last fall in an effort to replace the aging JPEG standard. With a Friday blog post, the company also said that it has made several improvements to the technology since it was first unveiled …

    Media 23 May 2011, 18:12

  • Credit processors targeted in fight against spam

    Follow the money

    Computer scientists are advocating the targeting of card-processing middlemen as a way of clamping down on spam. Improving spam filters and takedown efforts against botnets, the main source of the vast majority of junk mail, have been among the main focus of spam fighters of late. Computer researchers at the University of …

    Security 23 May 2011, 20:34

  • Researchers find irreparable flaw in popular CAPTCHAs

    Decaptcha pierces Live.com, Yahoo!, Digg

    Computer scientists have developed software that easily defeats audio CAPTCHAs offered on account registration pages of a half-dozen popular websites by exploiting inherent weaknesses in the automated tests designed to prevent fraud. Decaptcha is a two-phase audio-CAPTCHA solver that correctly breaks the puzzles with a 41- …

    Security 23 May 2011, 22:05

  • Apple defends iOS devs from patent holder

    Pulls out 'pixie dust' for in-app payments

    Apple has come to the defense of iPhone and iPad app developers under pressure to fork over a portion of their in-app purchase revenue to a US patent-holder known as Lodsys. Last week, Lodsys sent letters to iOS developers that use in-app purchasing, asking that they hand over about half a per cent of their US revenue as a …

    Mobile 23 May 2011, 22:11

  • Linux Foundation chief dubs MeeGo 'unstoppable force'

    Nokialess mobile Linux rages on

    MeeGo, the Linux-based open source operating system born from the February 2010 shotgun marriage of Nokia's Maemo and Intel's Moblin and left at the altar when Nokia hooked up with Windows Phone 7, is an "unstoppable force" that speeds device-developers' time-to-market, and it stands for "love, courage, and change." That was …

    Operating Systems 23 May 2011, 23:37