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3rd June 2011 Archive

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  • AMD: Companies warming to clouds

    Hardware still matters

    Despite crashes and worries of security breaches, a recent poll by chip-designer AMD suggests that IT decision-makers are getting more comfortable with cloud computing. And – undoubtedly with a sign of relief – AMD discovered that despite the fluffy and virtual nature of cloudy server and storage capacity, those using clouds are …

    Cloud Business 3 Jun 00:14

  • Google network and data center chief departs

    To interweb place unknown

    Vijay Gill – who spent three years overseeing Google's famously distributed backend infrastructure – has left the company, according to his LinkedIn profile. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But Gill's LinkedIn profile indicates he left Google last month, and his current job is listed as " …

    Cloud Business 3 Jun 00:18

  • Admin: Gmail phishers stalked victims for months

    Senior gov officials data mined for future attacks

    Spear phishers who targeted the personal Gmail accounts of senior government officials painstakingly monitored incoming and outgoing email for almost a year, a researcher who helped uncover the campaign said. In some cases, the attackers sent the victims emails designed to originate from friends or colleagues in hopes of …

    Security 3 Jun 00:20

  • Univa skyhooks grids to clouds

    Cloud control freak meets Grid Engine

    Univa, the upstart HPC software company that forked Oracle's Grid Engine this January, has grafted it onto both the public Amazon EC2 cloud and onto private clouds based on the open source Eucalyptus framework that clones EC2. Why on earth would you need to mix grid software, which harvests compute cycles from clusters of …

    Infrastructure 3 Jun 00:39

  • VMware invites Scala onto open source dev cloud

    Cloud Foundry gets a Lift

    VMware has invited Scala programmers onto Cloud Foundry, its open source "platform cloud," an online service for building and readily scaling applications. When it first launched in April, the service let you build with Java, Ruby on Rails, the Ruby framework Sinatra, and Node.js, the current It Platform of the Silicon Valley …

    Platform 3 Jun 00:45

  • Student geeks build Rubik’s cube solving bot

    Aussie Ruby breaks world record Cubinator

    A cluster of Australian engineering students at Swinburne University of Technology have invented a robot, named Ruby, that can solve a Rubik’s Cube in the world record time of 10 seconds. Getting the puzzle solved in a robot poses two difficult problems: working out the solution really quickly, and having the robot move the …

    Rise of the Machines 3 Jun 01:00

  • Canberra crawls towards national cyber-security approach

    We’ll have a white paper in 2012

    Australia’s federal government is about to announce its first tottering steps towards a national strategy on cyber-security. However, unlike the USA, Australia is unlikely to treat Internet-borne attacks as something demanding gunships and bombing raids as a response. According to reports on Friday morning, government networks …

    Software 3 Jun 01:00

  • RedBubble’s Nazi trouble

    Arty Hitler humour draws fire

    Online arts community and digital darling, RedBubble, has attracted the ire of the Australian Jewish community and is suffering a membership backlash over its affiliation with New York based T-shirt and merchandiser designers Hipster Hitler. The fuhrer furore has spilled overseas, sparking a PayPal investigation and prompting …

    Music and Media 3 Jun 03:14

  • New Sony hack exposes more consumer passwords

    The 'sownage' continues

    Hackers who last week broke into the website of television network PBS have turned their attention to Sony's movie division, publishing what appeared to be the email addresses and passwords belonging to at least 50,000 consumers who registered for online promotions. A group called LulzSec claimed responsibility for the attack …

    ID 3 Jun 03:15

  • Google hands millions to 'independent' watchdogs

    Licking the hand that feeds it

    What do you do when a global corporation pays out millions to the watchdogs that we expect to protect us against it? It's a fair question to ask in light of the Chocolate Factory's legal settlement this week, over Google Buzz. The privacy class action suit has landed a windfall of millions of dollars to "privacy" groups - but …

    ID 3 Jun 03:37

  • Skype reverse-engineered and open sourced

    How soon will Microsoft blow?

    There have been many analyses of Skype’s behaviour over the years (the most famous perhaps is from Baset and Schultzrinne), but as far as Vulture Central is aware, nobody has yet gone so far as to reverse-engineer the whole kit-and-caboodle. That’s the claim being made by Efim Bushmanov on this blog, where he offers his …

    VoIP 3 Jun 04:00

  • HDS drops the Ball at Arsenal's Emirates Stadium

    Unveils UK head honcho at partner event

    Hitachi Data Systems' CEO Jack Domme kicked off yesterday's Information Forum for partners by inviting on stage UK managing director Stephen Ball just 24 hours after his appointment. This ends the near five-month search for a successor to previous incumbent Steve Murphy, poached by HP in January to become UK sales director, …

    Channel Register 3 Jun 06:00

  • FCO to cut one-third from IT and telecoms spending

    Foreign and Commonwealth Office's 4-year plan for ICT cash-slash

    The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) plans to cut its IT and telecommunications running costs by 30 per cent to 40 per cent – all the while reducing their environmental impact and providing "better services" to staff, according to a new strategy. It is aiming to modernise the infrastructure, improve training and awareness …

    Government 3 Jun 07:00

  • Panasonic SC-BTT775 Blu-ray 5.1 home theatre

    Review Let me entertain you

    A Blu-ray-in-a-box surround sound system is always going to be a bit of a compromise – you shouldn't expect the ultimate in audio quality, but you do get the convenience of having the whole kit and caboodle configuration. In the case of Panasonic’s SC-BTT775, you get a good range of features too, with 5.1 sound backed by a built …

    reghardware 3 Jun 07:00

  • Gordon Ramsay menaced by enormous TURKEY

    'Oh my word what an absolute stinker'

    Gobby food-botherer Gordon Ramsay is facing what the Sun describes as his "biggest ever TURKEY", as he makes his movie debut in forthcoming "romcom" Love's Kitchen. The film won't be released in the UK until 24 June, but it's already been sliced, diced and roasted by internet customers after the makers ill-advisedly decided to …

    Entertainment 3 Jun 08:33

  • Dell rumoured to be looking at Brocade

    Is a buy on the books?

    Could Dell be readying a bid for Brocade and its networking business? US media outlets such as Barrons are reporting a Canaccord Genuity analyst's note saying Dell could and should buy Brocade. Brocade dominates the Fibre Channel storage networking business and has an Ethernet business courtesy of its Foundry acquisition. …

    Storage 3 Jun 09:04

  • German cops unleash corpse-hunting vultures

    Crime-busting flying Sherlocks

    German cops have recruited three vultures which they reckon could prove handy in locating corpses, the BBC reports. The trio of airborne detectives – dubbed Columbo, Miss Marple and Sherlock – have just completed a training exercise at the Weltvogelpark (World Bird Park) Walsrode in Lower Saxony, in which a delicious "piece of …

    Bootnotes 3 Jun 09:05

  • Kingston readies wireless portable storage

    Wi-Drive takes the air

    Kingston has launched a storage expansion option for iOS, giving customers the chance to extend their HDD limits and share files with other Apple users. Wi-Drive is a portable device that allows users to stream video, access music and share files with other Apple owners over Wi-Fi. To use the Wi-Drive, simply drag and drop …

    reghardware 3 Jun 09:32

  • Chinese army: We really need to get into cyber warfare

    Completely straight face

    Senior Chinese officers think that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) needs to make more of an effort on cyber warfare. Reuters reports on an essay written by PLA colonels Ye Zheng and Zhao Baoxian in the Party-run China Youth Daily. The two officers, who are strategists at the PLA's Academy of Military Sciences, argue that …

    Enterprise Security 3 Jun 09:44

  • Survey scammers target Doctor Who fans

    Fake video clip shenanigans

    Surfers following up supposed online excerpts from the eagerly-awaited mid-season finale of Doctor Who will only find themselves stuck in the middle of survey scams, security researchers warn. Searching from the upcoming episode A good man goes to war on YouTube leads to numerous results but all lead to third party websites, …

    ID 3 Jun 10:08

  • HPC: Ready for the masses at last?

    Broadcast Complexity commoditised

    It's time to start thinking creatively about HPC: can it be standardised and commoditised? Can it be applied to more of your compute-intensive problems? Can virtualisation and the cloud create a flexible, scalable HPC environment that we can all use? We've got three people who will argue the answer to all three questions is a …

    HPC 3 Jun 10:13

  • PCM prototype beats PCIe flash

    Student boffins' box slower at large writes though

    A first-generation Phase Change Memory device has been built, faster than OCZ's VeloDrive PCIe flash card with random blockI/O but slower with sequential writes. University of California, San Diego (UCSD) student boffins in the Computer Science and Engineering department at the Jacobs School of Engineering built their Moneta …

    Storage 3 Jun 10:58

  • Belkin eBook Light

    Txt Take Illumination for illuminations

    Daily Product reviews in 140 characters... Belkin Kindle Light Pictures Want our Txt Take on your gadget? Just send it in to Reg Hardware - details here.

    reghardware 3 Jun 11:00

  • BOFH: Ready for the Judgment Day

    Episode 7 You're wrong, proton breath. I'll be done with you in time to watch Oprah!

    "THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY DEGREE FEEDBACK!" the PFY gasps "SOUNDS FANTASTIC!!!" "Really?" the Boss says doubtfully... "Somehow I thought that you wouldn't be all that keen." "Au contraire," the PFY responds. "We here and Systems and Networks are only too keen to know the thoughts and feelings of our clientele. We hope to …

    BOFH 3 Jun 11:05

  • Toshiba reveals iPad 2 rival

    Thrive in business

    Toshiba has unveiled details of its forthcoming Android slate, previously known as the Toshiba Tablet. Officially dubbed the Thrive, the Tosh fondleslab is set to undercut the fruity market leader according to the US pricing it has announced. We had hoped Tosh delayed launch in order to wait for Nvidia's next gen quad-core …

    reghardware 3 Jun 11:05

  • Apple to open iCloud for 'free' before slapping $25 subs on service

    Wrapped in ads, too

    Apple is reportedly planning to shepherd its existing iTunes subscribers into the company's upcoming iCloud service, by initially offering them to make the online pilgrimage at nada cost. Down the line, however, the LA Times reports that users will be slapped with an annual subscription fee – said to be around $25 – to access …

    Music and Media 3 Jun 11:21

  • HTC exposes customers' privates

    Maybe someone else will ship them a phone?

    HTC might be very slowly improving the quality of its repair service, but for the last week it has also been revealing customer details with a flick of a URL. The URL concerned is emailed out by an HTC subcontractor to customers waiting for the return of their handsets. It links to details of their repair as identified by a …

    Mobile 3 Jun 11:23

  • Facebook under fire over Israel, transgender bullying

    Mod squad overlooks teen bullies' page, took peace activists' down

    Facebook was under fire again yesterday from various groups for alleged inconsistency in its moderation – too quick, it was claimed, to take down material supporting non-mainstream causes, too slow to react in other cases. First up, according to gay newspaper Pink News, was a homophobic Facebook group called The New Anti-Gay …

    Law 3 Jun 11:40

  • IAEA: Handling of Fukushima has been exemplary

    No one harmed, nothing suppressed, normal life to resume

    A preliminary report by the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency has stated that the response to the Fukushima nuclear incident was "exemplary" and that nobody has been harmed by radiation exposure resulting from it. The report was drafted by an IAEA fact-finding team which has just completed a visit to Japan. The team was …

    Science 3 Jun 11:43

  • OnLive cloud-gaming on UK horizon in Q3

    Follow the stream

    After a successful first year in the US, cloud-based game service OnLive is finally heading to the UK this autumn. Customers with fast internet connections will be able to stream games such as Borderlands and Prince of Persia straight to their computer or TV set, no download required. OnLive's UK page now shows a countdown …

    reghardware 3 Jun 11:48

  • Echostar HDS-600RS Freesat HD recorder

    Review DVR with Sling slung in

    Freesat, launched three years ago, hasn’t quite caught the imagination in the same way as Freeview HD, but if you don’t have terrestrial coverage, or you want more channels than Freeview provides, without having to go for pay TV, it’s a good option. Echostar's HDS-600RS includes Slingbox functionality for remote viewing …

    reghardware 3 Jun 12:00

  • Virgin Media frustrates customers with 'intermittent' routing blues

    Ongoing problem yet to be nailed

    Virgin Media is asking its broadband customers to be patient while the company attempts to fix what it has described as an "intermittent routing issue" on its network. The telco has had problems with its service since yesterday, according to various readers who have contacted The Register. However, Virgin Media has not been …

    Telecoms 3 Jun 12:11

  • Name that donkey: Barbarella battles Bathsheba

    Judge mulls reader names for Baby 'B'

    We at the El Reg Iberian bureau's Donkey Affairs Department are very much obliged for all your suggestions as to how we might name the latest member of our asinine fold – the splendid jenny seen here* yesterday challenging kittens in baskets for a slice of the 2012 cute creature calendar market: As I explained earlier this …

    Bootnotes 3 Jun 12:14

  • Souped-up Coraid aims to change its spots

    Comment From pussycat to panther?

    Coraid used to be a downmarket beast, selling its Ethernet storage wares off a barrow on the street - now it's got shiny new management and has new aspirations. Can it make the transition and become a creature to be reckoned with? Coraid sells storage using AoE, ATA-over-Ethernet, protocol which is very lightweight, making …

    Storage 3 Jun 12:26

  • Apple ignores dozens of iCloud domains

    Mr Bojangles takes $4.5m, keeps names

    Apple may have paid millions for the domain name iCloud.com, but it seems to have left dozens of related domains in the hands of former iCloud owner Xcerion. The company is expected to announce details of iCloud – rumoured to be some kind of cloud-based music service – at its Worldwide Developer Conference next week. …

    Hosting 3 Jun 12:30

  • Entire London 2012 Olympics' cultural events database held on Excel

    Updated We're all doomed!

    The London 2012 Olympics is set be a humanoid spectacle of the like never witnessed by the world's population before. Or something. But disturbing information has reached us at Vulture Central that reveals the organisation's entire cultural events database is stored in *gasp* Excel. A job vacancy currently advertised on the …

    Applications 3 Jun 13:47

  • Fort Worth joins crusade against sagging pants

    'Pull 'em up or find another ride', bus passengers told

    Fort Worth has struck a blow for fashion decency by banning anyone wearing their trousers at half-mast from boarding its buses. The city's Transportation Authority, aka 'The T', has decided its passengers should be spared the sight of hipsters' arse cleavage or underwear as they stagger about with their kecks heading towards …

    Bootnotes 3 Jun 13:56

  • Sony presents PSP2 performance prior to E3

    View of the Vita

    Footage of Sony's forthcoming handheld - the NGP - has surfaced online, showing the device in action ahead of its appearance at next week's E3 Expo. In a series of clips uploaded to the Official PlayStation Blog, the quad-core device - rumoured to be unveiled as PS Vita next week - is shown running Uncharted, a musical game …

    reghardware 3 Jun 14:07

  • UK gov to create central procurement team

    New body will contract for widely used goods and services at single price

    The Cabinet Office is to create a central team for the procurement of widely used goods and services for the whole of government. Named Government Procurement, it will set up contracts that use a single price for a specific good or service, and is aimed at removing disparities in price between departments. It will be led by …

    Small Biz 3 Jun 14:09

  • Cellphones as carcinogenic as coffee

    Comment Gentlemen... start your panic

    Tuesday's classification of mobiles as potentially carcinogenic produced some great headlines, despite being based on no additional research or statistical findings and putting phones into the same danger category as coffee. "Cellphone radiation can cause cancer" read one headline, while "Cellphone, cancer link confirmed" was …

    Mobile 3 Jun 14:10

  • Slowing economy trims jobs growth in US

    Computer systems designers doing well

    According to a report issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, job creation in the US economy has slowed and in May, the economy added only 54,000 net new jobs compared to the 160,000 anticipated by economists. The official unemployment rate inched up a tenth of a point to 9.1 per cent, and the actual unemployment rate is very …

    Financial News 3 Jun 14:19

  • Resellers and customers frustrated by botched Oracle deliveries

    Channel loses rag with Larry's logistics

    Oracle resellers are counting the cost of frequent instances of botched logistics. According to sources at several large dealers, four to six week lead times are unreliable, and deliveries are being made to the wrong addresses by the freight forwarding company. Two months can elapse from the first product arriving and complete …

    Channel Register 3 Jun 14:32

  • Beeb's iPlayer dismisses radio show as 'b011ckxs'

    Friday comedy url lol(lock)s

    Fans of comedy urls are invited to raise a pint this afternoon to the Beeb's iPlayer, which is currently providing added value to Episode 7 of the 74th series of Radio 4's The News Quiz: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b011ckxs/The_News_Quiz_Series_74_Episode_7/ As our informant Tom Davie puts it: "What a great URL …

    Bootnotes 3 Jun 14:34

  • Egyptian ad gives Vodafone credit for revolution

    It was Voda wot won it

    A three-minute video put out by its advertising agency claims that Vodafone Egypt was the driving force behind the revolution, much to the annoyance of the revolutionaries – and Vodafone. The operator is desperately trying to distance itself from the video, which was uploaded to YouTube by the operator's advertising agency JWT …

    Mobile 3 Jun 15:06

  • Webmail buggers attack Yahoo!, Hotmail users

    Gmail phishing assaults spread to MS and Yahoo! users

    The high-profile phishing campaign targeting the private Gmail accounts of government officials and political activists is part of a wider pattern of attacks also targeting Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail, according to net security firm Trend Micro. Trend said that whether or not the attacks were related, they were all aimed towards …

    ID 3 Jun 15:20

  • Hot bodies get super-slippery when wet

    Steamy balls could lead to sizzling speedy torpedoes

    An Australian boffin says he has come up with a novel method for making things such as ship's hulls or torpedoes slip through water more easily. Professor Derek Chan of Melbourne uni suggests that it would be practical for ships to exploit the "Leidenfrost effect", named after its discoverer in 1756. This refers to the …

    Physics 3 Jun 15:25

  • Union warns of strike action against HP

    Plans to offshore 200 jobs meet stiff opposition

    Around 200 Hewlett-Packard workers who provide IT services support to the Department for Work and Pensions in the North of England could see their jobs move overseas before the year is out. That's the claim being made by the Public and Commercial Services Union, which represents 2,000 HP staff in the UK. Proposals to offshore …

    Government 3 Jun 15:30

  • Google network chief jumps to ... Microsoft

    Update Network boffins predict end of Google

    Vijay Gill – the man who oversaw The Google Network – is now at Microsoft, according to sources familiar with his move. According to Gill's LinkedIn profile, he departed Google last month, and though neither Google nor Microsoft will comment on his departure, sources tell The Register that he has moved to Redmond. Vijay Gill …

    Cloud Business 3 Jun 16:06

  • Syria shuts off interwebs

    Wait for the blackout

    Syria appears to have begun shutting off internet links to the rest of the world. Approximately two-thirds of all Syrian networks became unreachable by Friday afternoon as part of a process that began early in the morning. Routes to 40 of 59 networks were withdrawn from the global routing tables, leaving the internet in Syria …

    Networks 3 Jun 17:31

  • Lara Croft returns in next-gen Tomb Raider title

    Blood bath on the beach

    Lara Croft has returned in (almost) all her glory today, appearing in a promo trailer for the new Tomb Raider game, out next year. With E3 round the corner, Square Enix decided now was a good time to give fans a taste of things to come. And there's no better way of showing off Tomb Raider than with a spot of that age-old fan- …

    reghardware 3 Jun 17:56

  • Hackers say Acer breach leaked data for 40,000 users

    Welcome to the club, Acer

    Hackers say they breached the website security of computer-maker Acer and made off with data for 40,000 of its customers. Screenshots posted on Friday on The Hacker News appeared to show the purchase histories, names, email addresses, and partial addresses and phone numbers for a limited number of customers stored on acer-euro. …

    ID 3 Jun 18:17

  • Microsoft's anti–Google Docs weapon locked and loaded

    Launch date named, reliability claimed

    The rebranded edition of Microsoft's answer to Google Docs is officially launching on June 28, a top company executive has revealed. Jon Roskill, corporate vice president for the worldwide partner group, has Tweeted that the beta label comes off the productivity and collaboration cloud on June 28, when it will become generally …

    SaaS 3 Jun 19:00

  • Judge blasts Cisco's 'unmitigated gall' in ex-exec's arrest

    Canadian jurist denies extradition of alleged 'hacker'

    A Canadian judge has lambasted Cisco for its "unmitigated gall" and "duplicity" in goading US prosecutors to push for the public arrest of a former executive who was suing the US networking giant. Justice Ronald McKinnon's comments were made on Tuesday when he ordered a stay in the extradition of the ex-exec, Peter Alfred- …

    Channel Register 3 Jun 19:16

  • Microsoft's patents shakedown betrays spirit of Gates

    Open...and Shut Innovative products, not intellectual property, rule

    Microsoft, once the ruler of the software universe, doesn't even make Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt's Gang of Four influential tech companies. It's not that Microsoft has lost its ambition. But it may be that Microsoft's ambition has changed, and for the worse. Microsoft once prided itself on minting profits from …

    Software 3 Jun 19:45

  • How to get cloud skills

    Microsoft flexes training muscles

    Disclosure first - El Reg is a media partner of the Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA). And that means it's time for some, umm, media-ing. With the battle for mindshare in the cloud market reaching fever pitch, Microsoft aims to cement its position by training you to be a master of these new Cloud-arts™. Unsurprisingly, the …

    Platform 3 Jun 19:49

  • Lenovo to swallow German PC giant

    Largest deal since IBM PC biz borging

    Chinese PC maker Lenovo has agreed to acquire German consumer electronics and PC manufacturer Medion in a move that it says will double its market share in Germany, making it the third-largest PC company in that country. "This agreement represents another bold move for Lenovo to realize its long-term strategy," said Lenovo …

    Channel Register 3 Jun 20:49

  • Caswell crams MIPS chips into cloud crates

    Micro servers aren't just for Xeons, Atoms

    Taiwanese network and communications equipment manufacturer Caswell has thrown its hat into the micro-server ring – but instead of starting out with a box based on x64 processors from Intel or AMD, the box maker is adopting a variant of the MIPS RISC processor. At this week's Computex trade show in Taipei, Caswell and chip …

    Servers 3 Jun 20:55

  • Android app brings cookie stealing to unwashed masses

    Hello. It's time for always-on SSL

    A developer has released an app for Android handsets that brings website credential stealing over smartphones into the script kiddie realm. FaceNiff, as the Android app is called, can be used to steal unencrypted cookies on most Wi-Fi networks, giving users a point-and-click interface for stealing sensitive authentication …

    ID 3 Jun 21:49

  • Google pits C++ against Java, Scala, and Go

    C++ wins. If you're a genius

    Google has released a research paper closely comparing the performance of C++, Java, Scala, and its own Go programming language. According to Google's tests (PDF), C++ offers the fastest runtime of the four languages. But, the paper says, it also requires more extensive "tuning efforts, many of which were done at a level of …

    Developer 3 Jun 23:15

  • Student suspended for posting random satire on YouTube

    School calls cops over off-campus videos

    A Canadian student has been suspended from school and had the police sicced on him due to satirical animations that he posted to YouTube. Jack Christie, a 12th-grade student at the Donald A. Wilson Secondary School in Whitby, Ontario, Canada, created the videos in his own time, off-campus. His animations in the Jack Christie …

    Music and Media 3 Jun 23:27

  • Notorious rootkit gets self-propagation powers

    TDSS boasts new DHCP server

    One of the most notorious rootkits has just acquired a self-propagating mechanism that could allow it to spread to new victims, a security researcher has warned. A new version of the TDSS rootkit, which also goes by the names Alureon and TDL4, is able to infect new machines using two separate methods, Kaspersky Lab researcher …

    Security 3 Jun 23:40