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23rd June 2011 Archive

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  • Australia toughens cybercrime laws

    Conventional thinking

    Australian carriers and ISPs will be forced to retain customer’s private data such as email and text messages by police and authorities, without a warrant, if it is required for investigations into cybercrime. The requirements are part of legislation introduced to strengthen cyber security laws and enhance Australia’s ability …

    Security 23 Jun 00:20

  • Man battles police siege with Facebook

    'Homie' outs SWAT tactics

    Local US police are deciding whether to charge the friends of a suspect for Facebooking with him during an armed siege. Utah resident Jason Valdez, 38, was reportedly holding a hostage during an 16-hour, overnight stand-off with police and SWAT teams. He took time out, however, to keep his friends and family up to date on …

    Music and Media 23 Jun 00:22

  • Red Hat: 'Yes, we'll break $1 billion this year'

    Rolls in the green

    Red Hat's top brass talks a good game about being concerned with the global macroeconomic situation, but the truth of the matter is that what Red Hat has is selling despite the economy, or maybe because of it. And all that the world's largest beneficiary of the open source community needs to do is not screw it up and it will …

    Financial News 23 Jun 00:26

  • Naratte launches ultrasonic contactless payments

    Takes soundings on ditching NFC chips

    A Californian tech upstart called Naratte is using soundwaves instead of NFC chips to perform secure mobile transactions. The company has unveiled Zoosh, an app that delivers data using short-distance sound transmissions (at around 20,000Hz). It is said to work with any device loaded with a speaker and microphone. Zoosh could …

    Business 23 Jun 01:50

  • ANU plasma thruster gets research boost

    Hopefully to Europe, and beyond

    Plasma drives are much-beloved of both science fiction and real -world space research, for good reason: they have a good thrust-to-fuel ratio. Now, more than ten years' work by Australian National University physicists will get a research boost on its way to space via a European satellite. The $3.1 million grant from the …

    Space 23 Jun 02:30

  • Man infects college PCs to steal huge database

    Uni president targeted in brazen attack

    A former college student has admitted taking part in a criminal scheme that used malware to steal and sell large databases of faculty and alumni, change grades, and siphon funds from other students' accounts. Daniel J. Fowler, 21, of Kansas City, Missouri, pleaded guilty in federal court there to computer hacking conspiracy and …

    Malware 23 Jun 04:24

  • Oracle's Android claims slashed by US patent authorities

    Prior art cited

    Oracle's broad legal front against Google has been whittled back further, this time by the US patent and trademark authorities, according to Groklaw. The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has rejected 17 of 21 claims associated with one of the patents in Java that Oracle asserted Google had violated with Android. The …

    Developer 23 Jun 05:08

  • Tritton AX Pro 5.1-channel gaming headphones

    Review Four speakers per cup, anyone?

    Gaming headset outfit Tritton may not be a household name, but you can expect its profile to grow in the UK now that Mad Catz is handling the brand. The peripherals giant picked up the specialist headphone maker a year ago, pledging to bring this distinctive marque to a wider audience. As a consequence, it’s giving a fresh …

    reghardware 23 Jun 06:00

  • Which apps belong in the cloud?

    Live Today Reg reader joins us, speaks from experience

    Today at 11:00 BST Reg editor Tim Phillips is joined by Reg reader James Greenman, Group IT Director at Care UK, to talk about where, when and why cloud might make sense for your apps. Care UK has started creeping into cloud and James has kindly agreed to join us to share his experiences. He'll explain what Care UK has done, …

    Tech Panel 23 Jun 07:22

  • VMware taps Google ethos with Cloud Foundry

    Structure One admin for every thousand machines

    Two years ago, VMware boss Paul Maritz recruited a pair of Google infrastructure engineers to help build what would become Cloud Foundry, the company's open source answer to "platform clouds" such as Google App Engine and Microsoft Azure. At one point, Maritz asked the pair – Derek Collison and Mark Lucovsky –  how many admins …

    Infrastructure 23 Jun 07:52

  • Faking reviews? You should fret about more than illegality

    Opinion Fibbing risks f***ing your reputation

    A recent newspaper investigation uncovered evidence that companies are paying agencies to create false online reviews for their services. But what those companies may not realise is that this is illegal and could ruin their businesses. The practice is called astroturfing, because it fakes grass-roots support, and it is not …

    Small Biz 23 Jun 08:53

  • Plods roll out new Police National Database

    'You'd be amazed how crap our IT was until now'

    The National Policing Improvement Agency, in charge of central British police databases, has announced the rollout of the new Police National Database, an intelligence-sharing tool designed to let coppers access information across force boundaries – a thing which was very difficult to do until now. "In many cases forces have …

    Policing 23 Jun 09:17

  • Feds crack multi-million scareware ring

    Multinational gang face 20 years

    The Department of Justice and the FBI have cracked an international scareware ring believed to have scammed over $72m (£45m). Operation Trident Tribunal seized more than 40 computers and servers and arrested two people in Latvia. 22 computers were seized in the US along with 25 machines in France, Germany, Latvia, Lithunia, …

    Crime 23 Jun 09:20

  • Dixons reports huge losses of £224m

    One-off charges and consumer meltdown batter PC-peddler

    Dixons Retail this morning reported whopping losses of £224m for fiscal 2011, after absorbing one-off charges for shutting up shop in Spain and goodwill write-downs of its Greek and online operations. Total group sales for fiscal 2011 ended 30 April including businesses to be closed or already closed fell 2.2 per cent to £8. …

    Channel Register 23 Jun 09:20

  • Quick Office

    iOS App of the Week Take your work away

    DataViz’ Documents To Go is perhaps the most popular office suite for the iPhone and iPad. I don’t, count Apple’s Pages, Numbers and Keynote as a ‘suite’ as you have to buy each one separately. Quick Office lets you create any kind of office document out of the box However, I found myself dipping into the recently-updated …

    reghardware 23 Jun 10:00

  • Winklevoss twins drop Facebook settlement appeal

    Lengthy legal dispute draws to a close

    Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss have decided not to appeal against a ruling upholding the twin brothers' $65m settlement with Facebook, after a long-running dispute with the company's founder Mark Zuckerberg. The brothers, whose fight with Zuckerberg was dramatised in the Hollywood movie The Social Network, lost an appeal in …

    Financial News 23 Jun 10:19

  • Phone hack police make new arrest

    Non-journo nabbed

    Metropolitan police officers working for Operating Weeting have arrested a woman in West Yorkshire. The investigation into alleged voicemail hacking by the News of the World was reopened earlier this year after the Met said it received significant new information. The 39-year-old woman was arrested at a residential address in …

    Policing 23 Jun 10:20

  • Indians appoint Huawei as technical spycatcher

    No one else wanted the gig

    Huawei will help set up a research centre in Bangalore dedicated to checking out foreign kit for covert listening technologies, something Huawei obviously knows nothing about. The centre has already started operating on a pilot basis, but is funded for expansion, according to The Times of India. Who is paying – and how much – …

    Data Networking 23 Jun 10:23

  • UK census data is safe

    Nobody knows you're a Jedi

    The Office for National Statistics has confirmed that UK census data collected in March is safe and has not been hacked. The rumour that LulzSec had pinched the data on 25 million UK households started when someone put a fake note on PasteBin. LulzSec had already denied the break-in two days ago. The hacking collective, …

    Enterprise Security 23 Jun 10:56

  • Unlock the secrets of data encryption

    Be safe rather than sorry

    Encrypting your backup data always sounds like a good idea. It protects data and appears to be cost-free. So what's not to like? In practice, it isn't always a good idea, it doesn't always protect your data and it is not free. There is a time and a place to deploy encryption, but it needs planning and thought. The walls have …

    Data Centre 23 Jun 10:58

  • Three strikes, throttling coming to US surfers

    Oh, really?

    ISPs and media industries have agreed on a range of countermeasures to tackle copyright infringement, according to a CNET report. The deal has been brokered by the National Cable and Telecommunications Industry trade group, the report suggests. Infringers would receive a series of notices, and if they persist, a range of " …

    Telecoms 23 Jun 11:00

  • Women's gaydar (for men) improves when ovulating

    Red-hot 'mating prime materials' inflame sorority girls

    Trick-cyclists in Canada have found that women become much better at telling whether a man is gay – based merely on looking at a photo of his face – when they are ovulating and fertile. In the course of determining this, the psychology profs revealed that they possess highly effective scientifically-verified texts, the mere …

    Biology 23 Jun 11:08

  • Schmidt sees NFC terminals everywhere

    But Google won't be paying for them

    Eric Schmidt reckons a third of shops will be NFC enabled in 2012, but Google won't pay for the terminals – that's up to the credit card companies. According to Google's executive chairman, credit card companies will pay for the new terminals, with the critical mass of one in three to hit sometime next year and enabling Google …

    Mobile 23 Jun 11:19

  • Zerto offering hypervisor-level replication

    Just another ESX service from the Brothers Kedem

    The brothers who founded replication start-up Kashya – sold to EMC in 2006 – aim to replicate their replication success with Zerto, a start-up integrating replication into VMware's hypervisor. Instead of replication being done at the storage array-level, with a need for identical arrays either side of the replication network …

    Virtualization 23 Jun 11:47

  • Apple pulls 'intifada' app

    Developer guidelines to the rescue

    Apple has removed an Arabic ‘intifada’ app from its iTunes store in response to a complaint from the Israeli government. The Israeli Public Diplomacy Minister Yuli-Yoel Edelstein wrote to Steve Jobs expressing concerns that the app, ThirdIntifada, accessed content that, he alleged, incites violence against Israel, Reuters …

    reghardware 23 Jun 11:51

  • Ten... festival survival gadgets

    Product Round-up Happy camping

    With Beyonce's bouncy appearance at Glastonbury just days away, the festival season is well and truly underway and unless you sell wellies, you're probably praying for sunny skies. It can't hurt to be prepared for the worst, though. So as you don those prosthetic horse-heads and gallop off for another weekend of hedonism, we …

    reghardware 23 Jun 12:00

  • Speed is the essence of WAR

    WAR on the cloud, Part 4 Data location, location, location

    In part 3 I tested some different semi-cloudy solutions for mirrors of my site and I am in the process of replacing one dedicated WebVisions Linux machine with two virtual private system (VPS)es in separate AsiaPac countries, for less money in total. Ker-ching! Cloud files: public or private? But this still isn't really …

    Platform 23 Jun 12:00

  • Travelodge hacked, investigating

    Hotel chain's customers aggrieved

    Travelodge is investigating its IT systems to discover how customer email addresses have gone astray. The Reg was contacted this morning by a reader who was receiving spam emails to a unique email address he had only given to Travelodge. Several other customers have blogged of similar experiences, here's Shepy's post on the …

    Enterprise Security 23 Jun 12:13

  • Aussie web host sells up after devastating hack

    Industry rallies following crippling online strike

    Distressed domain hosting outfit Distribute.IT and its offshoot Click n Go have been acquired by larger competitor the Netregistry Group after a systematic hack attack brought down the company's operations. Neither party have disclosed the sale price or customer numbers but it is clear Distribute.IT's priority was to ensure …

    Hosting 23 Jun 12:29

  • Mirror TV hits the wall

    Viewer glass darkly

    Televisions may well be part of the furniture but design savvy company NEOD (New Era Of Device) is turning the idiots’ lantern into the furniture by applying a mirror finish to the TV screen. The concept is taken still further with the addition of bezel adornments to frame the mirror and match your decor. When turned on, it’ …

    reghardware 23 Jun 12:41

  • Virgin Media blames Activision for Call of Duty lag problems

    'Rubbish scores... dead before I get the game on screen!'

    Virgin Media has blamed coders of the popular Xbox Live game Call of Duty: Black Ops for slow connection issues that are hampering its service. "We're aware some of our customers are experiencing issues whilst playing Call of Duty: Black Ops on Xbox Live. Xbox Live traffic isn't managed by our systems so we've taken a close …

    Telecoms 23 Jun 12:43

  • Make sure your data finds a safe harbour

    Danger in international waters

    The drive to buy local is very much in vogue, even though the note of nationalism in the Buy British slogan may not sit comfortably with some. And despite the many good reasons to support one’s local economy, there are limits: this writer is not buying local bananas until well into retirement on Mustique. Outsourcing is also …

    Cloud Business 23 Jun 13:00

  • Harry Potter Web-2.0 'Pottermore' offering unveiled

    Hogwarts themed interactive gamebookface from Sony

    The child wizard is going online, come October, in what author JK Rowling promises will be a collaborative creation experience, not just an online game with social media attached. At first glance Pottermore looks like an online game: players (sorry, readers) will be able enrol at Hogwarts, then mix potions and cast spells to …

    Music and Media 23 Jun 13:02

  • Sega celebrates two decades of Sonic the Hedgehog

    Spiky mascot blows out the candles

    Sonic the Hedgehog is twenty years old today, raise your glasses and salute. Sega introduced Sonic in the early nineties to rival Nintendo's cash-cow Mario and improve sales of the company's waning console, the Mega Drive. Until Sonic hit the scene, Alex Kidd was top bill at Sega and let's face it, despite appearing in an …

    reghardware 23 Jun 13:20

  • Microsoft BPOS biz-cloud hit by another outage

    Corporate BOFHs in America and London left fuming

    Microsoft cloud execs are crossing their fingers that Office 365, the pending successor to the Business Productivity Online Suite, is a safer bet for customers following yet another crash in North America. Customers across the region and in London reported problems logging into the hosted service – Exchange Online and …

    Hosting 23 Jun 13:22

  • Coalition axes Central Office of Information, 400 jobs

    Keep Britain Tidy, Aids Monolith people shown the door

    The coalition government is to close the Central Office of Information with the loss of 400 jobs. The closure is part of government cuts which will see expenditure through the COI cut from £532m in 2009/2010 to nearer £168m in 2010/2011. Individual government departments have cut the number of press officers by about a quarter …

    Government 23 Jun 13:22

  • BT wary of rights holders' site-blocking proposal

    Go fly a kitemark

    The confidential series of digital economy meetings chaired by Culture secretary Ed Vaizey are a bit less confidential after the leak of a proposal put together by copyright holders. Vaizey wants internet companies and copyright groups to thrash out their differences. The most recent of the meetings last week saw a site- …

    Law 23 Jun 13:44

  • Eurodata acquired by Trinity Expert Systems

    Mid-market reseller consolidation continues in the channel

    London-based Eurodata Systems has been acquired by fellow Microsoft Gold Certified reseller Trinity Expert Systems for an undisclosed sum. Simon Aron, joint managing director at Eurodata, confirmed the deal was signed and sealed this week but was unable to provide details of future strategy at this stage. "It was just a …

    Channel Register 23 Jun 13:53

  • Europe-wide ecommerce laws ahoy!

    Better for business and consumers

    Any European citizen buying from any website within Europe will be protected by the same consumer rights on prices, delivery and returns. The EU-wide law was passed by the European Parliament this morning. It means punters will have a two-week cooling off period after receiving goods and must be given precise information on …

    Small Biz 23 Jun 14:16

  • Dutch pass net neut law

    Cloggies clobber cookies, too

    The Dutch have passed a law prohibiting internet providers from slowing down traffic unless it's to ease congestion, preserve security or block spam. The Netherlands thus becomes the first European country to legislate a rulebook for what network operators can or can't do - and only the second country in the world to do so. …

    Telecoms 23 Jun 14:34

  • Wi-Fi operators promise globo roaming standard

    An alliance of alliances

    The Wi-Fi Alliance has allied with the Wireless Broadband Alliance to sort out some standards for Wi-Fi roaming, taking its queue from the mobile industry, which does it so well. The details are still under development, but the idea is that a traveller will be able to just fire up their PC/tablet/smartphone and have it …

    Wireless 23 Jun 15:04

  • Fridge-sized war raygun for US bombers gets $40m

    Pew pew pew pew pew pew WARNING OVERHEAT WARNING Aw jeez

    A long-running US military project aimed at producing a "refrigerator sized" laser raygun capable of being mounted on US combat aircraft has received further funding of just under $40m. The raygun bomber force knew how to handle the surprisingly aggressive and heavily armed tree people In a federal announcement issued on …

    Science 23 Jun 15:07

  • Nokia's Windows phone outed on video

    Mango crush

    Nokia revealed its first Windows Mobile handset this week, giving a select crowd a glimpse of the Mango phone in action. Nokia CEO Stephen Elop made the presentation to the audience who were asked to put away cameras in anticipation of being shown something hugely confidential. Rules are made to be broken, though, and a …

    reghardware 23 Jun 15:18

  • Apple closes book on iPhone-look jotter

    Branded paper pushes envelope

    Apple has flexed its legal muscles and forced a company selling iPhone-esque notepads to cease trading. The Notepod was a cute scribble-pad with a design based on the iPhone. Until recently, customers could order a set of three for just over a tenner. Unfortunately, the notepad can no longer be shipped after Apple …

    reghardware 23 Jun 16:13

  • King K super: does it refute hybrid HPC model?

    ISC'11 GPUs are still GPU-riffic

    It's been an eventful International Supercomputing Conference (ISC'11) in Hamburg. The Japanese sprang their K Computer on an unsuspecting HPC world, throwing down 8.126 Pflops on the table and raising the high-water performance mark by a factor of three. Just as surprising was the fact that they did it the old-fashioned …

    HPC Blog 23 Jun 17:00

  • Red Hat enlists another 65 names in war on VMware

    Cloud lining polished

    Red Hat has rolled out an updated version of Red Hat Enterprise MRG, an infrastructure platform that provides an application messaging service, a kernel that dovetails with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to improve the speed of low-latency applications, and a scheduler designed specifically for distributed workloads and so- …

    Infrastructure 23 Jun 17:00

  • DRM-free music dream haunts Apple's app-store lock-in

    Open...and Shut Choice? There's no app for that

    As much as we hate the wireless carriers, we may end up hating the app store vendors even more. Why? Because they create app-level lock-in that inhibits consumers' ability to move to alternative platforms. While carriers mostly locked in users by blocking phone number portability, today's app stores prevent us from having a …

    Developer 23 Jun 18:23

  • Google to be hit by US anti-trust probe - report

    FTC preps microscope, eyes Mountain View ass

    The US Federal Trade Commission is on the verge of serving Google with civil subpoenas as part of a "wide-ranging" antitrust investigation into the company's search and ad practices, according to a report citing people familiar with the matter. The Wall Street Journal reports that a five member FTC panel intends to send the …

    Government 23 Jun 18:52

  • Three flavours of client-side virtualisation

    Set your operating systems free

    Talk about virtualisation often centres on virtually hosted desktops, in which the entire desktop is run on a back-end server. But this is by no means the only way to operate. Amid all the other options, such as application virtualisation and offloading computational tasks onto rich clients, there is one model that is …

    Desktop Virtualisation 23 Jun 19:00

  • Man admits writing script that slurped celebrity iPad data

    Goatse troll first to fall

    A San Francisco man has admitted writing the code that plucked personal data of 120,000 early iPad adopters from servers AT&T had left wide open to the attack. Daniel Spitler, 26, pleaded guilty in federal court in New Jersey to one count each of identity theft and conspiracy to gain unauthorized access to internet-connected …

    ID 23 Jun 19:10

  • Microsoft commits to Windows makeover for Node.js

    Embraces open source dev darling

    Microsoft is helping refine Node.js for use on Windows and its Azure cloud. Redmond is working with cloud computing vendor Joyrnt to port Node to Windows, a move that will produce a Node.exe, according to a post on the Node blog. Joyent employs Node.js creator Ryan Dahl. Web host turned cloud champion Rackspace is also …

    Cloud Developer 23 Jun 19:27

  • America demands definition of fourth generation

    I did not have a 4G connection with that woman

    A bill before the US congress will require mobile operators to state which technology they're providing, and how fast it is, as well as formally defining what's meant by "4G". The "Next Generation Wireless Disclosure Act" has been proposed by Anna Eshoo (rep for California's 14th District), and calls on network operators to …

    Mobile 23 Jun 20:40

  • Google apps split with Google File System

    Closed source Hadoop jilted for 'Colossus'

    Google has moved "most" of its online services off the Google File System that has underpinned its famously distributed back-end infrastructure for a good ten years, according to Google senior vice president of operations Urs Hölzle. Hölzle – the man who led the development of the Google back-end – tells ZDNet that the company …

    Platform 23 Jun 20:41

  • IBM fattens up Netezza data warehouses

    Fresh TwinFins

    Sometimes the big data is bigger than you would like, and you need to hold onto it longer than you otherwise would for regulatory or business reasons. There's nothing worse than waiting to get a moldy gob of data back off tape, and it is even worse (and less likely to be successful) on a very large bucket of said musty data. …

    Servers 23 Jun 20:52

  • Feds declare victory over notorious Coreflood botnet

    Unprecedented take-down gets results

    Federal authorities say they have crippled a notorious botnet that penetrated some of the world's most sensitive organizations, thanks to an unprecedented take-down strategy that used a government-run server that communicated directly with infected PCs. Coreflood, as the network of compromised computers is known, enslaved …

    Malware 23 Jun 21:09

  • Apple strangleholds worldwide battery output

    Ultrathin revolution starved for power

    Ultrathin notebooks may be all the rage these days, but there's one big barrier standing in the way of their seemingly unstoppable march to market dominance: Apparently, Apple has a stranglehold on the batteries needed to power them. According to a report on Thursday by the Taiwanese market-watchers at DigiTimes, those …

    Mobile 23 Jun 22:00

  • Microsoft cites 'security' for TechNet suspension

    When did you last abuse your subscription?

    Confused about why your subscription to Microsoft's TechNet has been suspended? So is Microsoft, judging by the experience of one Reg reader. Our reader, who wished to remain anonymous, has been in touch to say how his TechNet account was abruptly suspended without warning by Microsoft. The reason given by Microsoft when he …

    Developer 23 Jun 22:15

  • Telstra, Optus expand filter list

    Not quite the “great firewall”

    Australia’s existing Internet “blacklist” – a database of links maintained by the Australian Communications and Media Authority – is to be expanded, with Telstra and Optus announcing that they will voluntarily block the additional list entries. It’s an announcement that has sent Australian press into a minor frenzy, but it’s …

    Government 23 Jun 23:00

  • Oracle to triple Exadata installs this year

    Ellison closes first $10bn quarter

    Software giant and hardware upstart Oracle has closed out its first ever $10 billion quarter, and the company told Wall Street that it can triple the base of Exadata clustered database systems in its fiscal 2012 year. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2011 ending May 31, Oracle raked in $10.8bn in revenues, an increase of 13.4 …

    Financial News 23 Jun 23:21

  • Apple Snow Leopard update sets stage for Lion

    The install before the install

    If you plan to install Mac OS X Lion on your Mac when that new operating system becomes available next month, you'll first want to install the latest Mac OS X Snow Leopard update, 10.6.8, which was released on Thursday. After all, Lion will be distributed through the online Mac App Store, and the Snow Leopard 10.6.8 update …

    Operating Systems 23 Jun 23:34

  • Accused SOCA attacker reportedly 'keen' to help cops

    Bail rejected at Thursday hearing

    A 19-year-old UK man accused of taking part in an attack on the website of the Serious Oranised Crime Agency was denied bail during a brief court hearing on Thursday. Ryan Cleary didn't enter a plea to the five offenses Metropolitan Police leveled against him on Wednesday, according to media reports. The judge at the …

    Crime 23 Jun 23:47