14th June 2011 Archive

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Aussie censor bans Dead or Alive

So not PG … backflips after pressure

The Australian classification board has bowed to pressure over the rating of Nintendo 3DS title Dead or Alive: Dimensions, revoking its initial PG certificate and banning it from sale in Australia. The incident has again tested Australia's limited classification board system which currently holds MA 15+ as its highest …

Music and Media 14 Jun 00:01
Bitcoin slump follows senators’ threats

Correlation or causation?

As any investment adviser will tell you, it’s a bad idea to put all your eggs in one basket. And if Rick Falkvinge was telling the truth when he said all his savings were now in Bitcoin, he’s been taken down by a third in a day. Following last week’s call by US senators for an investigation into virtual crypto-currency Bitcoin …

Financial News 14 Jun 00:58
Site appeals feds' unprecedented domain seizure

'Operation in our Sites' challenged

The Spanish operator of a website related to sports has petitioned for the return of two domain names seized by the US government in an unprecedented campaign that confiscates the addresses without first giving owners a chance to defend themselves in court. Puerto 80, the owner of rojadirecta.com and rojadirecta.org, said in a …

Hosting 14 Jun 01:11
Xeround reinvents MySQL atop Amazon cloud

NoSQL. Without the No

Upstart database maker Xeround has taken the wraps off the 1.0 release of its flagship product, but you can't install it in your local data center. It's only available as a service, from public clouds like Amazon's EC2. Xeround got its start building massively scaled database management systems for telecom companies, including …

Platform 14 Jun 02:43
Intel, AMD in HP notebook smackdown

Which is faster? 'You tell me' says AMD

In early May, HP released a flurry of updated, redesigned Intel-based business notebooks. Now, AMD – Intel's microprocessor rival – will power these machines as well. On Tuesday, HP announced new business and consumer notebooks equipped with the latest versions of what AMD insists on calling APUs – accelerated processing units …

PCs & Chips 14 Jun 05:00
Intel 510 250GB Sata 3 SSD

Review Performance benefits

Having recently covered Crucial’s new M4 SSD, it seemed only natural to go further in-depth with it’s Intel counterpart, the 510 series. Both of these drives feature Marvell’s 88SS9174 controller, with the Intel drive using the BKK2 revision, and a SATA 6Gb/s interface. Sata 3 performer: Intel's SSD 510 Intel and Crucial’s …

reghardware 14 Jun 06:00
Patrick Byrne: 'See, I told you America's economy was busted'

The battle beyond naked shorts

Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne has declared another victory in his six-year fight to expose fundamental flaws in the American financial markets. With a piece detailing what it calls "America's dodgy financial plumbing", the latest issue of The Economist addresses the very problem Byrne has fought so hard to uncover: naked …

Financial News 14 Jun 06:13
Teen sells Perl cloud startup to ActiveState

Mojolicious Phenona

Meet Daniil Kulchenko. He was an HTML programmer at age six. He was a freelance Linux systems administrator at 11. And at 15, he founded his first business: Phenona, a platform-as-a-service for building and hosting Perl applications. Now, Kulchenko has sold Phenona to dynamic language specialist ActiveState for an undisclosed …

Platform 14 Jun 06:56
Big data can be deduplicated

Opinion Isilon view disputed

Ronaldo Yamashita, an ESG analyst in Brazil, took exception to the Isilon view that big data is not compressible and sent El Reg his reasoning why he thinks this is the case. When we talk about "text" big data, like logs or information gathered from different sources (e.g. web, credit agencies, Facebook), it is highly …

Blocks and Files 14 Jun 07:47
Nokia and Apple bury patent beef

You drop your lawyers and I'll drop mine

Nokia and Apple have settled their patent dispute, with Cupertino handing over an undisclosed lump sum and agreeing to ongoing royalties. The case has been rumbling on since October 2009, with Nokia taking the action to various courts in the US and Europe, and both companies making formal complaints to the US International …

Mobile 14 Jun 08:48
Microsoft squeaks on Google Nortel sale

Sold company should honour old agreements

Microsoft is worried that any sale of Nortel's patents could endanger the worldwide agreements it had with the company. Google is offering $900m for the remnants of the company, and its 6,000 patents, and Microsoft is calling for any existing patent agreements to be transferred. Microsoft warned that any sale would disrupt …

Telecoms 14 Jun 08:49
Metro Bank in schoolboy email error snafu

bcc fail for stripling bank

Metro Bank, the newly established UK retail bank, has irked its customers with a schoolboy email error. The latest marketing missive from the bank was sent using all the email addresses in to To: field instead of using the bcc (blind carbon copy) field. In the process, the bank disclosed the email addresses of around 1,200 …

Enterprise Security 14 Jun 08:50
Samsung pips rivals with 1TB internal 2.5-inch drive

Top of the leapfrog league

Samsung is the first disk drive vendor to launch a 1TB, internal, 2-platter, 2.5-inch hard drive, leap-frogging the other four HDD suppliers. Western Digital has a 3-platter 1TB 2.5-inch drive, the Scorpio Blue, but its 3-platters and 12.5mm z-height measurement means it can't fit in a standard 9.5mm z-height drive bay as the …

Storage 14 Jun 09:07
Businesses believe tribunal system favours employees

81% of companies said claimants had 'tried it on'

Almost all employers think the current Employment Tribunal system favours employees over businesses, a new survey has found. Only 3 per cent of firms are satisfied with the current system while 97 per cent of companies think the system is weighted in favour of workers, the survey by law firm Pinsent Masons said. Pinsent …

Small Biz 14 Jun 09:19
LulzSec hacks US Senate

Bethesda also bashed in latest attack

Hacker tricksters LulzSec is baiting US lawmakers with its latest attack on the US Senate. The hacking group posted what security experts Sophos characterised as "basic information on the filesystems, user logins and the Apache web server config files" of the Senate website on Wednesday morning. The group also posted a …

Enterprise Security 14 Jun 09:26
Dam Busters dog dubbed 'Digger'

Guy Gibson's mutt rebranded for the US movie market

Scriptwriter Stephen Fry has announced he's successfully tackled the thorny problem of just what to call Guy Gibson's dog in Peter Jackson's upcoming remake of The Dam Busters. The mutt will be rebranded "Digger", Fry announced to the BBC, because "there is no question in America that you could ever have a dog called the N- …

Entertainment 14 Jun 09:36
BT ramps up fibre-optic roll-out plan

5m homes with potential access by June

BT Openreach is to connect a further 66 exchanges - together feeding almost 1m houses and office premises - to its fibre-optic network between now and the end of 2012. Openreach, BT's infrastructure arm, has a list of existing and will-be-connected exchanges on its website. The company said the 66 new locations - and a …

reghardware 14 Jun 09:43
Dolphin Browser HD

Android App of the Week The Dan Marino of mobile web browsers

There’s not much wrong with the stock Android web browser but if you fancy something a bit more capable you might want to consider Dolphin HD as an alternative. Dolphin HD: browse with tabs Now before I go on, this recommendation is not about page rendering speed. If you want to download Dolphin, Opera, Firefox or any of …

reghardware 14 Jun 10:00
Wassup with systems and service management?

Reader poll You tell us

"Do more with less" springs to mind when describing the conflicting demands placed on IT: new devices, more services with better performance, not to mention making it all nice and secure too. And, oh, we want all that at a lower price please. Trying to shoehorn this into existing ways of working is likely to end in tears. So …

Tech Panel 14 Jun 10:00
ARM server hero Calxeda lines up software super friends

Preparing to battle The Atom

With Intel's top brass bad-mouthing ARM-based servers, upstart server chip maker Calxeda can't let Intel do all the talking. It has to put together an ecosystem of hardware and software partners who believe there's a place for a low-power, 32-bit ARM-based server platform in the data center. To that end, Calxeda, formerly …

Servers 14 Jun 10:00
Cable & Wireless in talks to acquire 2e2

Private equity backers holding out for £450m

Cable & Wireless Worldwide has opened acquisition talks with systems integrator 2e2, according to industry insiders. Sources reckon that long term 2e2 backer Duke Street Capital (DSC), which acquired 2e2 from venture capitalist Gresham in September 2006 for £130m, is edging toward its five-year exit plan. A second private …

Channel Register 14 Jun 10:00
Neal's Yard Remedies its supply chain

Video With IT department of one

Neal's Yard is famous for its natural remedies sold in distinctive blue bottles. But how do the perishable and rare ingredients get to the factory, and how do the products of this £20m business get to market? Neal's Yard has both a sophisticated supply and distribution chain - and an IT department of one to run it. In this …

Doing Better Business 14 Jun 10:30
Anonymous vows to attack Federal Reserve

Blames bankers for impoverishing millions

Infamous hacktivist collective Anonymous has served notice that it intends to attack the websites of the Federal Reserve. The campaign – likely to take the form of denial of service attacks and possibly sit-ins – is in protest at the Federal Reserve's role in the global financial crisis, misuse of US taxpayer funds and …

Enterprise Security 14 Jun 10:32
Guy spills on girl in weird Huawei tablet teaser

Gadget users exchange fluids

Chinese comms kit maker Huawei has posted a "sneak peek" video of its MediaTab tablet - and rather a curiosity it is too. The video, not the tablet. All we can say, after watching it, is that the MediaPad has a camera and a headphone port. No doubt it has a screen too - 7in, judging by the size of the tablet - but it is never …

reghardware 14 Jun 10:33
Creationists are infiltrating US geology circles

Grand Canyon? Caused by Noah's Flood, that

Creationists are infiltrating US geology circles in an attempt to push the theory that the Earth is no more than 10,000 years old and that recognised geological phenomena which appear to contradict this idea can be accounted for by Noah's Flood and similar Bible stories. The attempt by creationist "scientists" to present …

Science 14 Jun 10:35
Carphone Warehouse considers retailing future

Big yellow boxes slipping into the red

Despite good results from its US expansion, and turning a French loss into a profit, annual figures from Carphone Warehouse show its ambitious plan to change European retailing is consuming a good deal more cash than anticipated. Losses from joint operation Best Buy UK topped £62m in the last 12 months, more than three times …

Mobile 14 Jun 11:00
Quantum recruits sales heavy hitter

Marketing splits from sales

Quantum has recruited a heavy-hitting sales VP to cope better with the complex deals and extended sales cycles it is seeing. Until now EVP Bill Britts had worldwide responsibility at Quantum for marketing, sales and services. He reported to the previous CEO, Rick Bellluzzo, and then to Jon Gacek when he took over the CEO …

Storage 14 Jun 11:05
BT earmarks 66 more exchanges for fibre-to-the-cabinet upgrade

Bucket and spade required

BT's Openreach wholesale division announced this morning the next 66 exchanges that it plans to upgrade as part of its fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) broadband rollout. Most of the locations, which are spattered all over the UK, will get the FTTC technology at some point in 2012. BT said that a few of the exchanges will "go live …

Telecoms 14 Jun 11:27
Capgemini goes French

Another acquisition

Capgemini is in advanced talks to buy Prosodie from Apax Partners and its senior managers. The exclusive negotiations should lead to a deal that will add to earnings for the year. It is based on a value of €382m, and will be paid for from Capgemini's cash reserves. Prosodie has 861 staff, turnover in 2010 of €172m and …

Channel Register 14 Jun 11:31
NFC pioneer packs in proximity payments

Bling Nation failed in bring in the bling

Having failed to find a business model that worked, the pioneering proximity payment company Bling Nation has stopped processing payments – although it claims the move is temporary while it finds a workable business model. The pay-by-sticker system was launched in 2009, striking deals with community banks and under cutting …

Wireless 14 Jun 11:35
VMware unfurls fresh Spring Java 'vFabric'

Priced by the VM

VMware has unveiled a new version of its vFabric platform, a collection of software tools for building, deploying, and running SpringSource Java applications atop VMware hypervisors. Dubbed vFabric 5, the platform offers a new incarnation of the SpringSource tc server designed to improve memory management for Java applications …

Virtualization 14 Jun 12:00
Duke Nukem Forever

Review What were we waiting for, Christmas?

In a game bursting with 1980s macho-movie quotes and in-jokes, one line resonates far beyond Duke Nukem Forever’s puerile script. Besieged by an alien invasion, the President of the United States ignores calls to beg the eponymous meathead to save the planet, lamenting, “Duke, you’re a relic from a different era.” My boot, …

reghardware 14 Jun 12:00
EA: early Battlefield 3 buyers will gain no advantage

Bye-bye boycott?

EA has denied claims that gamers who pre-order Battlefield 3 will gain an advantage in play over those who don't. Some fans began calling for an international boycott after reports surfaced that buyers who pre-order the game will gain unfair advantage thanks to the exclusive Battlefield 3 weaponry they will receive as an early …

reghardware 14 Jun 12:02
Facebook hurls insults, punctuation at growth slump report

'People... wrong. Every. Single. Time!'... bitch

Facebook flacks are up in arms about a report that pointed to usage growth slumping in the company's more mature markets such as the US, where six million people recently switched off from the world's largest social network. Inside Facebook Gold said data it had garnered about Facebook usage showed that the Mark Zuckerberg-run …

Music and Media 14 Jun 12:18
Stand by for more big, windfarm-driven 'leccy price rises

Analysis Think it's bad now? Just wait, says Grid

The National Grid has released a report into the way things are headed for the UK's electricity supplies in the coming decade, and it's not good news for anyone who finds their 'leccy bill to be a noticeable expense. No matter what happens to fossil fuel prices, British electricity is going to cost a lot, lot more in the near …

Environment 14 Jun 13:02
Facebook value hits $100bn, to go public in Q1 2012

Waiting for the burp... bitch

Facebook's valuation grew even larger yesterday, after a CNBC report suggested that share-watchers on Wall Street expected to see the company's planned IPO pop the $100bn mark. CNBC reckoned the dominant social network could take Facebook public in the first quarter of 2012, with an S-1 filing that might land as soon as …

Financial News 14 Jun 13:03
Cambridge startup launches world's first white space radio

16Mb/s, 10km range, battery-powered and licence-free... just not legal

Neul, the Cambridge startup staffed by some of the UK's top radio boffins, has started manufacturing a white space radio, despite the fact that there isn't a single country where such a thing would be legal to use. Neul launched last year, and has been talking about protocols and standards for use in white space: television …

Wireless 14 Jun 13:26
Yorks PC maker goes titsup owing £1m+

Little chance of payout as PC maker faceplants

West Yorkshire-based Cube Enterprises has gone under owing more than £1.2m to trade and expense creditors, the Reg has learned. The Wetherby firm went down in May, but a director's report presented to creditors at a meeting on 9 June revealed creditors were unlikely to recoup monies owed, resulting in anguished howls from the …

Channel Register 14 Jun 13:48
Video vigilantes in trouble again

CCTV leaks leads to ICO slap

Video vigilante service Internet Eyes is in trouble with data protection regulators again. Internet Eyes streams CCTV footage from shops to its network of users who watch the live feeds from their home computer. Keen-eyed noseyparkers can then hit an alert button if they spot a shoplifter. This information is then texted back …

Policing 14 Jun 13:53
Careless tweets cost lives, warns MoD

Vid campaign against the perils of social networking

The Ministry of Defence has knocked together a couple of videos warning just how a careless tweet or unguarded Facebook comment could end up with someone on the wrong end of an AK-47. The MoD accepts social networking sites are "great for keeping in touch with family and friends, and letting the world know what you’re up to", …

Bootnotes 14 Jun 14:21
Quantum pounces on Pancetera

Go go for VM backup to DXi

Quantum is buying virtual machine backup specialist Pancetera for a measly $12m. It's not even $12m cash as $3.6m of it is in the form of 1.2 million Quantum shares. What Quantum is buying is "a virtual appliance that can reduce virtual machine backup I/O load by up to 80 per cent, and lets sysadmins move virtual machine files …

Virtualization 14 Jun 14:27
Commons hit by rash of laptop thefts

One politico also has charm stolen

The House of Commons' perennial theft problem has become increasingly high tech, with sporadic thefts of computers in recent years turning into a veritable run on laptops, according to the latest figures. In a Commons answer last week, John Thurso detailed cases of theft on the Commons Estate over the last five years, for the …

Government 14 Jun 14:52
Belkin FlipBlade mobile tablet stand

Txt Take Rest your reader

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

reghardware 14 Jun 15:00
VMware eats Digital Fuel

Will p*ss fire and put the heat on IT budgets

Server virtualization juggernaut and cloud plumbing supply provider VMware has acquired Digital Fuel Technologies, a company that has created online applications for doing IT costing, budgeting, planning, showback and chargeback. Digital Fuel has also built systems for implementing service level agreements for IT infrastructure …

Virtualization 14 Jun 15:01
European Council: Creating hacking tools should be criminal across EU

Ministers want Europe-wide legal net for cybercrookery

The making of hacking tools and computer viruses should be a criminal act across Europe, EU ministers have said. The EU's Council of Ministers has backed the extension of criminal sanctions to tool—makers in response to European Commission plans to update EU laws tackling attacks against computer systems. Responding to …

Crime 14 Jun 15:11
A sysadmin's top ten tales of woe

Mission Critical The IT troubles I have seen

Get enough people of any profession in one room and the conversation drifts inexorably towards horror stories. Everyone loves a good “…and then it all went horribly sideways” yarn, and we all have more than one. The IT profession is flush with tales of woe. There are no upper boundaries on ignorance or inability. From common …

Enterprise Tech 14 Jun 15:30
No Gingerbread snack for Desire owners, says HTC

We didn't put enough Ram in, admits manufacturer

HTC today told Desire smartphone users they won't be getting a Gingerbread update after all because it didn't put enough memory in its handsets. Oops. The company made the announcement on its Facecrack page, claiming the handset lacks memory for both Gingerbread and the Sense UI. Solution: give users the choice to upgrade to …

reghardware 14 Jun 15:47
Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

Physicists say sunspot cycle is 'going into hibernation'

What may be the science story of the century is breaking this evening, as heavyweight US solar physicists announce that the Sun appears to be headed into a lengthy spell of low activity, which could mean that the Earth – far from facing a global warming problem – is actually headed into a mini Ice Age. Ice skating on the …

Science 14 Jun 17:00
Duke Nukem sniffs out a number one

Chart topper scores better on PlayStation

Despite an influx of bad reviews, Duke Nukem Forever has clawed its way into the top spot of the UK's videogame charts for all consoles. It appears the perennial bombardment of hype has paid off and although fans have waited 14 years to play the bloody thing, interest hasn't faded. It now sits on top of the all-formats charts …

reghardware 14 Jun 18:09
AMD promises 10 teraflop notebooks by 2020

Fusion Summit Demos next year's Trinity and talks elephants

AMD has demoed its next-generation "Trinity" processor, promising 10-teraflop notebooks based on follow-ons to its new A-series "Liano" APUs by 2020. "Two and a half years or so ago ... I brought up a bold promise: that in 2011 AMD would deliver a supercomputer in a notebook," AMD senior vice president and products-group …

PCs & Chips 14 Jun 18:31
World's biggest ad agency keelhauls 2000 'pirate' sites

No, not Google

Advertising giant GroupM will stop buying advertising space on more than 2,000 global sites said to offer pirated or unlicensed content. The blacklist, assembled with help from key entertainment clients, includes The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents, but also features legitimate download sites such as BitTorrent Inc and business …

Music and Media 14 Jun 18:54
Malware abusing Windows Autorun plummets

You'll never guess why

Microsoft saw a sharp drop in malware infections that exploit a widely abused Windows Autorun feature almost immediately after it was automatically disabled in earlier versions of the operating system. As measured by Microsoft's various antimalware programs, Windows XP and Vista suffered 1.3 million fewer infections in the …

Malware 14 Jun 19:06
Citigroup hack exploited easy-to-detect web flaw

Brute force attack exposes 200,000 accounts

Hackers who stole bank account details for 200,000 Citigroup customers infiltrated the company's system by exploiting a garden-variety security hole in the company's website for credit card users, according to a report citing an unnamed security investigator. The New York Times reported that the technique allowed the hackers to …

Crime 14 Jun 21:25
Google Instant Pages: Search sites rendered before you click

Webmasters, beware fake traffic

Google has unveiled several new desktop and mobile search tools, including a Chrome service known as Instant Pages that attempts to accelerate your searches by rendering pages before you actually click on them. Already available with the developer version of Google Chrome – and due to arrive in the next stable version of the …

Music and Media 14 Jun 21:47
IBM: Palmisano mulls Big Blue line of succession

We have a plan. Almost

It's no coincidence. As IBM celebrates its 100th anniversary, the Wall Street Journal is running a vague story about IBM president, CEO, and chairman Sam Palmisano "seeking advice" on how to handle the transition to a new set of executives. IBM's age has got Wall Street thinking about how old Palmisano is – and who will be …

Servers 14 Jun 22:30
NBN downstream wholesale arrives, courtesy of Nextgen

Entry-level for smaller ISPs

One of the criticisms of Australia’s National Broadband Network – a case prosecuted by Internode founder Simon Hackett, among others – is that product suites offered by NBN Co don’t suit smaller ISPs. Nextgen Networks is seeking to address that by crafting an alternative wholesale product. The company says its “NBN Connect” …

Telecoms 14 Jun 23:05
'Harmony' for open source contributors on horizon

Just don't mention the Canonical bit

A controversial push to establish clear-cut rules for contributing to open source projects is nearing completion. Project Harmony – no, not that Project Harmony – has spent a year collecting feedback on how to refine terms governing contributors to open source projects, and it's scheduled to wrap up this effort on June 23. …

Developer 14 Jun 23:49