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20th June 2011 Archive

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  • From virtualisation to private cloud

    Spot the difference

    We all know what virtualisation consists of: a host containing one or more virtual machines, usually, but not necessarily, servers. Scale that up and you get dozens, or hundreds, of servers powering hundreds, if not thousands, of virtual machines. That is becoming typical of today's data centre. So what is a private cloud in …

    Data Center 20 Jun 2011, 01:00

  • Sega’s saggy security

    1.2m user details hacked

    The latest victim of a large scale attack is Sega Corp, which has admitted that security of its Sega Pass website database in Europe had been compromised. The personal information on all of its 1,290,755 registered users has been stolen. Sega sent an email on Friday alerting the affected users, who are mostly based in Europe …

    Security 20 Jun 2011, 04:11

  • Voda India scraps lawsuit over Facebook rant

    New lows with customer woes

    Vodafone’s Indian operation Vodafone Essar has dropped legal action against a customer that dared criticize its services on Facebook. The carrier has bowed to public pressure after causing a social media backlash when it legally threatened a customer to cease making negative comments on Facebook or contact its customer service …

    Mobile 20 Jun 2011, 04:19

  • Telstra’s T-Box adds Foxtel

    Keep your IPTV friends close, your enemies closer

    Telstra will start carrying Foxtel channels on its rival IPTV T-Box service from next week. In the first phase of a content alliance with Foxtel, Telstra T-Box customers will have access to up to 30 Foxtel channels plus a selection of Catch Up TV channels including FOX8, Discovery and Movie One. The service is initially …

    Broadband 20 Jun 2011, 06:00

  • Dell snaps up RNA Networks

    A veritable cluster for PowerEdgies

    Dell has quietly acquired Portland, Oregon-based RNA Networks, one of a handful of innovative startups that have been launched in the past couple of years to glue multiple x64-based servers together and allow them to look like a single, monster server to specific workloads. Dell has not made a formal announcement of the …

    Virtualization 20 Jun 2011, 06:30

  • Acrobatic US driver in 85mph back-seat drunk sex prang

    OK sarge, he says his name's 'Mister Tickle'

    A court in Virginia must decide just whether it's actually possible to drive a car at 85mph while simultaneously engaging in drunken back-seat sex. The answer is yes, according to a plaintiff who's filed a claim at Fairfax County Circuit Court for $75,000 damages against the driver who allegedly piled into his vehicle in May …

    Bootnotes 20 Jun 2011, 07:30

  • Got a website? Pay attention, Cookie Law will come

    Get ahead of enforcement, SMEs warned

    Small businesses need to be careful of the European Union cookie law - although so far most countries seem to be ignoring it. Many websites drop cookies, a small piece of software, onto visitors' machines to help with navigation, page view counts and to remember users' log-in details. But changes to European privacy law last …

    Small Biz 20 Jun 2011, 08:00

  • Intel gets into Comcast product catalog

    At Broadcom's expense?

    While Motorola’s announcements at the Cable Show in Chicago last week shows that it has come alive and is hellbent on keeping its major cable customers, in Comcast and Time Warner Cable, the emergence of an Intel chip in an announced set top box at Comcast must set Broadcom firmly back on its heels and send the shivers up …

    Hardware 20 Jun 2011, 08:28

  • Stranger danger: Worse online, or on the street?

    Bags of sweets weighed against computers

    There have been more than 2,000 child victims of "on street" grooming since 2008, but poor data collection makes combating the problem more difficult - according to an official report. Data collected by police and other agencies is patchy at best. Out of 2,083 victims recorded between January 2008 and March 2011 many did not …

    Security 20 Jun 2011, 08:53

  • Foxconn staffer jailed for iPad IP theft

    Show trial, or a new era?

    A Chinese court has convicted three Chinese citizens, one a Foxconn employee, for trade secret theft. Local companies released iPad 2 cases before the device had even been unveiled, and a Foxconn staffer was handed a jail sentence for handing over design secrets. It's unusual for a Chinese court to prosecute locals over IP …

    Financial News 20 Jun 2011, 09:10

  • Rare video: Moon flashing in front of giant's face

    Vid Mars probe, Phobos, Jupiter in one-off conjunction

    Boffins at the European Space Agency are hugging themselves gleefully after capturing a dramatic vid from a space probe in orbit above Mars which shows the Martian moon Phobos zooming across the backdrop provided by gigantic Jupiter. As readers will appreciate, the vid isn't all that stunning in and of itself: but we're …

    Science 20 Jun 2011, 09:18

  • Microsoft gains DoJ anti-trust approval on Skype buy

    VoIP outfit 'fires' top execs

    Thr US Department of Justice approved Microsoft's $8.5bn acquisition of Luxembourg-based Skype Technologies SA on Friday. The software giant said last month that it was buying Skype in a deal that went into the Redmond history books as the biggest takeover ever bagged by Microsoft. That's despite the fact that many questioned …

    VoIP 20 Jun 2011, 09:23

  • Huawei outs 'first' Android 3.2 7in tablet

    Confirms Honeycomb currently not good for seven-inchers

    Chinese handset maker Huawei has taken the wraps off its latest tablet: the 7in, Android 3.2-based MediaPad - the first of its kind to run that version of the Google OS, Huawei claimed. Huawei confirmed that 3.2 is the first version of Honeycomb to be "suitable" for 7in tablets - previous versions, 3.0 and 3.1, are not, said …

    Tablets 20 Jun 2011, 09:46

  • Orange spreads Glasto goofery to t-shirts

    Extreme noise phone powerwear!

    Orange has outdone itself with its traditional Glastonbury green-tech, this year touting a t-shirt which generates power from the gig itself and provides enough to charge a mobile phone. The t-shirt uses a piezoelectric panel to convert vibrations into voltage, which is accumulated in a battery which can then be used to charge …

    Mobile 20 Jun 2011, 09:57

  • ICANN opens the domain floodgates

    US185k and name your gTLD

    The peak international regulator for domain names has ICANN has approved a groundbreaking plan to increase the number of generic top-level domains (gTLDs) from the current 22 such as .com, to customizable ones which could include brand names, different languages or scripts. Applications for new gTLDs will be accepted from 12 …

    Business 20 Jun 2011, 09:58

  • Vintage Psion prototype: Yours for £85,000

    Worst paperweight ever

    An unreleased Psion prototype can be yours for a mere £85,000 - if you hurry. Just don't expect it to do anything. The item listed on eBay dates from 2001, and is a prototype of "Conan", the monochrome Revo model with Bluetooth that was due to ship that summer, based on Symbian (nee Epoc) Release 6. Don't expect it to do much …

    Hardware 20 Jun 2011, 10:08

  • Apple to revamp desktop Macs

    New Pros and minis in August, apparently

    Apple will refresh its Mac Pro and Mac Mini desktop computers in August, with the new range featuring Intel’s new Sandy Bridge CPUs and Thunderbolt, the company’s latest high-speed peripheral interface developed in collaboration with Intel. The unofficial news of these Mac desktop arrivals come from the Twitter account of CNet …

    Hardware 20 Jun 2011, 10:19

  • Win! 12 RHA MA-350 earphones up for grabs

    Competition British-designed punchy performers could be yours

    Glasgow-based Reid & Heath Acoustics (RHA) has a dozen pairs of its new MA-350 in-ear 'phones - each worth £29.95 - to give away to 12 lucky Reg Hardware readers. We liked the British-designed and engineered RHA SA-850 headphones, and we reckon - compo aside - the MA-350s will be a big hit too. We've used 'em - and they're …

    Hardware 20 Jun 2011, 10:31

  • World braces for domain name EXPLOSION

    ICANN meeting ICANN approves dot-everything

    The number of top-level internet domains is set to double over the next few years, after ICANN today approved the launch of a program that will let any company apply to run dot-anything. During a meeting here at the Raffles City Convention Center in Singapore, ICANN's board of directors voted 13-1 with one abstention, to …

    Hosting 20 Jun 2011, 10:32

  • 30,000 Shreks besmirch BeautifulPeople

    Updated Virus lets horrid hordes into hottie hook-up site

    Surface-preoccupied hook-up site BeautifulPeople.com has culled 30,000 uglies who were accidentally allowed to join the "largest most exclusively beautiful community in the world". The site was last month hit by a "Shrek" virus which compromised the software allowing existing members to vet newbies. As a result, thousands of …

    Security 20 Jun 2011, 10:35

  • Orange eco T-shirt boosts Glasto goers' blowers

    Put on a charge

    Orange has once again dived into this year's festival season with a nifty eco-product for charging mobile devices – a T-shirt that uses sound energy to produce an electrical charge. The shirt packs an A4-sized piezoelectric film, a material that has found a use in speakers. By reversing this application so that the film …

    Mobile 20 Jun 2011, 10:37

  • Met Police confirms ICT outage but plays down attack fears

    Two weeks of IT woe for cop staff

    The Metropolitan Police Service is investigating the cause of a "major network issue" that has prevented staff using some IT services for almost two weeks. A Met spokesman confirmed the problem was first identified on 9 June, but insisted no critical systems had been downed by the incident. "As a result of a major network …

    Security 20 Jun 2011, 10:47

  • Peugeot iOn e-car

    Review iMiEV evolved

    Back in 2009, I took one of the first pre-production Mitsusbishi iMiEV’s in the UK for a spin. Spool forward to 2011 and you can now have the e-car with a Peugeot or Citroën badge on the nose. But there have been enough, albeit subtle, changes to warrant a another shufti. Peugeot's iOn: a familiar shape that looks good in …

    Science 20 Jun 2011, 11:00

  • NetApp goes a bundle with OnCommand

    Storage management upgrade for the cloud

    NetApp aims to be a best-of-breed supplier of storage to cloud computing stacks. As such, it wants its arrays to be easy to use and manageable at the storage admin and cloud orchestration layer levels. The company is doing by extending and integrating various management software apps under the OnCommand brand and providing API …

    Storage 20 Jun 2011, 11:00

  • Sprint springs into bed with LightSquared

    Clearwire invited to menage a trois?

    Sprint is to help LightSquared get its 4G network rolled out across America, and become a significant customer of that network too, according to documents seen by Bloomberg. Those letters were sent out to LightSquared's shareholders, assuring them that Sprint was not only going to be a "significant customer" of LightSquared's …

    Mobile 20 Jun 2011, 11:25

  • Japan takes the Top 500 lead with K super

    ISC'11 The mother of all Sparc systems

    Japan needs a little good news these days, and it comes from the International Super Computing 2011 conference in Hamburg, Germany, as the K supercomputer, a massively parallel Sparc-based cluster built by Fujitsu, has taken the lead in the number-crunching race as gauged by the June 2011 edition of the Top 500 supercomputer …

    HPC 20 Jun 2011, 11:39

  • Saab fingers BAE over South African fighter deal

    Arms globocorp not feeling at home in Sweden any more

    UK-headquartered arms globocorp BAE Systems is back in the spotlight over allegedly corrupt business practices after its partner Saab announced that it had submitted documents to the Swedish national anti-corruption prosecutor and specifically named BAE. Saab makes the Gripen fighters now being delivered to the South African …

    Financial News 20 Jun 2011, 11:52

  • British Library hands 200 years of history to Google

    40 million pages

    The British Library is handing 250,000 books to Google for scanning into the Google Books project. The Library had previously partnered with Microsoft which digitised books from the 19th century and Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks. The Library only owned one of the notebooks - the second was from Bill Gates' own collection. The …

    Government 20 Jun 2011, 11:54

  • Sony preps refreshed PS3 and talks down PS4

    Weight loss while you wait

    The PlayStation is slimming down again, after Sony made further tweaks to the console's innards, while insisting a PS3 successor is still a long way off. According to a report on Andriasang, the updated PS3 gobbles 30W less power at 200W, and weighs 400g less at 2.6kg. There have also been changes to the power and eject …

    Games 20 Jun 2011, 12:01

  • Intel readying MIC x64 coprocessor for 2012

    ISC'11 Knights Corner not just around the corner

    Intel doesn't seem to be in a hurry to get its own line of Knights coprocessors for HPC applications into the field, and maybe it doesn't have to be. To be sure, Nvidia is stealing most of the oxygen in the conversation about coprocessors for accelerating supercomputer applications with its Tesla family of GPU accelerators. …

    HPC 20 Jun 2011, 12:02

  • Carphone Warehouse pockets LG Optimus 3D

    And the exclusive goes to...

    The Carphone Warehouse is claiming exclusivity on LG's forthcoming handset, the Optimus 3D. Last month we heard Phones 4U declare it had exclusive rights to the white model of the eye-popping Android device, and claim it would offer the black one too, although we've been informed both will arrive slightly later, so as not to …

    Phones 20 Jun 2011, 12:40

  • SpaceX goes to court as US rocket wars begin

    Nice little firm, this. Be a shame if there was a fire

    Upstart startup SpaceX, which seems set to overturn every applecart in the space business with its cheap new launchers and capsules, has gone to court after an industry consultant allegedly spread rumours that its rockets were unsafe. According to SpaceX's filing with the Fairfax County circuit court in Virginia, Joseph …

    Science 20 Jun 2011, 12:52

  • Gartner slashes UK PC shipments for 2011

    Consumer demand dire, but businesses back buying

    Gartner has nearly halved the UK PC sales forecast for 2011, blaming the stockpile of PCs buckling distributors' shelves and scrappy continued demand. Beancounters at the analyst have dramatically downgraded unit shipment estimates from eight per cent growth to just five per cent, though even this is predicated on sentiments …

    The Channel 20 Jun 2011, 12:59

  • Euro space truck prepares for fiery death

    Johannes Kepler set for re-entry burn-up

    Space truck Johannes Kepler will today undock from the International Space Station ahead of a fiery death above the Pacific. The European Space Agency's second Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) has done its duty and is now packed with 1200kg of waste and unwanted hardware which will be destroyed when the 10-tonne vehicle burns …

    Science 20 Jun 2011, 13:13

  • Oz alkie gets hammered on hospital hand sanitiser

    'It surprised us that he drank this stuff', admits doc

    Doctors at a Melbourne hospital have suggested hospitals Down Under would do well to lock up their hand sanitiser, after one patient got lashed on six bottles of antibacterial brew. According to a concerned letter in the Medical Journal of Australia, a 45-year-old chap with "a history of polysubstance misuse" was being treated …

    Bootnotes 20 Jun 2011, 13:47

  • Sony slips Skype on PlayStation Vita

    Microsoft on call?

    Sony is planning to bring Skype to PlayStation Vita, according to photos leaked online. Shots of a Sony presentation in Sao Paulo, Brazil, were upped by GameGeneration and appear to show the Skype logo alongside various expected Vita features, including PSN, Wi-Fi and DLNA. Source: GameGeneration A Skype application …

    Games 20 Jun 2011, 14:21

  • IDC warns resellers of ticking cloud time bomb

    Channel may be blown away as cloud migration speeds

    IDC has warned resellers that migration to public and private clouds is happening more rapidly than expected, and they need to gear up for it or risk becoming irrelevant. Figures out today show that early adopters forked out $560m (£345m) on cloud professional services worldwide last year, but by 2015 the number cruncher …

    The Channel 20 Jun 2011, 14:37

  • Bright Computing revs up cluster manager

    Fast provisioning, new Linuxes, CUDA, vSMP, and Python scripts

    Bright Computing, which started from scratch several years ago to create a new, integrated cluster management tool, continues to build out the capabilities of the Bright Cluster Manager with the 5.2 release of the software, announced today at the International Super Computing 2011 conference in Hamburg, Germany. Matthijs van …

    Virtualization 20 Jun 2011, 14:43

  • Jabra Chill smartphone earphones

    Txt Take Jogger's delight?

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

    Hardware 20 Jun 2011, 15:00

  • Spielberg flung Fox from Transformers 3

    Michael Bay is hardly anything like Hitler, OK?

    Executive producer Steven Spielberg demanded Megan Fox be sacked from the third Transformers movie after she compared director Michael Bay to Hitler. Fox exited the project last year, prompting speculation as to whether she jumped or was pushed. Despite denials by the actress, the word on the street was that she was given her …

    Bootnotes 20 Jun 2011, 15:09

  • Ofcom talks up telephony spectrum trading

    Wanna buy some second-hand spectrum?

    Changes to the licences held by the mobile operators will shortly enable them to buy and sell their radio spectrum, along with the obligations that go along with it. The changes (pdf, dull, really dull) come into effect on 4 July and are largely what the regulator proposed back in February. There are a few clarifications based …

    Mobile 20 Jun 2011, 15:21

  • Brits told how much they'll pay for HP TouchPad

    iPad pricing for 9.7in WebOS tablet

    HP has begun taking orders for its WebOS-based tablet, the TouchPad. World+Dog are reporting that HP's US operation and retail partners have priced up the 9.7in tablet, but British buyers can also put in an advance order too. So, HP wants £399 for the 16GB model, £479 for the 32GB version - exactly what Apple is asking for …

    Tablets 20 Jun 2011, 15:51

  • Samsung readies 'world's first' solar netbook

    The power and the glory

    Samsung has announced it will be launching the NC215S solar-powered netbook this August for customers in Russia. Using solar panels to keep laptops running is nothing new, but the company claims a world’s first here due to the panel being integrated into the lid of the netbook's 10.1in, 1024 x 600-pixel display. Rather than …

    Laptops 20 Jun 2011, 16:23

  • Wimbledon fans lobbed virtual serving challenge

    Game, set, match

    Tennis stars began swinging rackets at Wimbledon today, marking the 125th anniversary of the prestigious tennis tourney. To celebrate, Ralph Lauren has put together a serving challenge for all to try. Boris Becker was at hand today to launch the competition, which features a custom-made tennis arena modelled on the famous …

    Games 20 Jun 2011, 17:17

  • World+dog yawn over NFC smartphone shopping

    Apple, Google trusted more than bank cards

    Although the technorati may be salivating over the brave new tap-to-buy smartphone world, a new survey has discovered that only one in five smartphone owners could give a rat's patootie about "mobile wallets". "Unfortunately for mobile wallet providers," concludes a study by the shopping site Retrevo, "the overwhelming …

    Mobile 20 Jun 2011, 17:23

  • Wikipedia awash in 'frothy by-product' of US sexual politics

    You can't make this santorum up

    The world's Wikifiddlers are obsessed with santorum. Though they can't agree on what that is. For some, it's a word. For others, it's not: it's the result of a campaign to create a word. The distinction – however subtle – has sparked weeks of controversy among the core contributors to Wikipedia, the "free encyclopedia anyone …

    Media 20 Jun 2011, 18:07

  • Quantum crypto felled by 'Perfect Eavesdropper' exploit

    All your photons are belong to us

    Researchers have devised a technique for eavesdropping on communications secured through quantum cryptography that allows an attacker to surreptitiously construct the secret key encrypting the secret content. The so-called Perfect Eavesdropper uses off-the-shelf hardware to defeat a key benefit of the alternative crypto system …

    Security 20 Jun 2011, 19:14

  • Microsoft's WebGL claims bashed by own employee

    'Scare report' pooh poohed

    It didn't take long for researchers to pooh pooh last week's advisory that claimed that hard-to-fix design flaws in the emerging WebGL 3D standard seriously imperiled end users who relied on it. Surprisingly, the most outspoken critic of the analyses, published Thursday by UK-based Context Information Security and Microsoft's …

    Security 20 Jun 2011, 22:03

  • Aus gaming and ICT get R&D tax boost

    AUD$1.8m tax credit for innovators

    Australia may increase its international competitiveness as a gaming and ICT development hub following a new R&D tax incentive passed by the Federal government. From July 1 an AUD$1.8 billion R&D Tax Credit comes into effect for innovative industries including manufacturers, ICT and biotech. It will deliver a 45 percent …

    Business 20 Jun 2011, 23:19

  • Google revives TV buzz with SageTV buy

    TV transformation 2.0

    Faced with almost-universal indifference to Google TV, the Chocolate Factory has decided to splash some pocket change on buzz-generation and acquired SageTV. Google announced that it had transformed television last year, but TV somehow remained stubbornly un-transformed. People are still perfectly happy to use YouTube, and …

    Business 20 Jun 2011, 23:24

  • Making sense of Adobe's enterprise pitch

    More REST, less wordage. Please

    Adobe has announced its Digital Enterprise Platform for Customer Experience Management. My tip to Adobe: that is too many words with too many syllables for busy IT people who are trying to get their work done. What on earth is it? The same old stuff repackaged, or something genuinely new? The answer is a bit of each. Adobe has …

    Developer 20 Jun 2011, 23:37

  • Intel code guru: Many-core world requires radical rethink

    Data-shuffling outranks flops-optimizing

    Intel is readying its many-core "Knights Corner" coprocessor for release next year, but programming the 50-core-plus beastie and its 100 or 200 core follow-ons will require a whole new approach to code wrangling. "Something that might have been only a couple per cent overhead at most in a one- or two-core system may become …

    HPC 20 Jun 2011, 23:47

  • Microsoft's Hyper-V 3.0 coming to Windows 8?

    New desktop to run virtually anything

    Microsoft is slipping its Hyper-V virtualization software into the forthcoming Windows 8, according to a report. WindowsNow.com blogger Robert McLaws writes that he has uncovered code for Hyper-V version 3.0 in a leaked, early build of the Windows 8 code base. McLaws has spotted a number of enhancements in Microsoft's …

    Virtualization 20 Jun 2011, 23:50