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28th July 2011 Archive

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  • eBay shopping lands wild colonial in lock-up

    Was it the potassium nitrate or the anti-personnel mines?

    A 35-year-old man from the country town of Castlemaine in Victoria has been remanded in custody to face court after spending $AU17,000 on eBay buying bomb-making equipment. Phillip Marsh has told the Bendigo Magistrates Court his intention was to “make fireworks”, after amassing a collection that included potassium nitrate, …

    Crime 28 Jul 00:01

  • Feds take closer look at Google plans to buy AdMeld

    Hurry up and wait

    The US Department of Justice is taking a closer look at Google's proposed $400 million acquisition of AdMeld, a move that could delay completion of the deal. Google lawyers are no strangers to so-called "second requests," in which government regulators ask for additional information before completing their review of the …

    Music and Media 28 Jul 00:37

  • Cabinet Office government-by-Facebook plans probed

    'Get the ICO in,' advises 'Recipe for ripoffs' report

    MPs have called on the government to work with the Information Commissioner on how to implement the Cabinet Office's personal data proposals, which include the possibility of farming out its ID-handling to third parties such as banks and Facebook. The Public Administration Select Committee's report entitled Government and IT …

    Government 28 Jul 05:00

  • Call of Juarez: The Cartel

    Review Drugs, thugs and automobiles

    In theory, The Cartel's contemporary setting is a wise move for the Call of Juarez series. The moderate success of the first two Western-themed games was instantly undone when Red Dead Redemption moseyed into the overlooked genre, rounded up the pretenders and rode them out of town. By relocating to the present day, developer …

    reghardware 28 Jul 06:00

  • Birmingham council backtracks on moving IT jobs to India

    Sent an email about it, got no answer

    Service Birmingham, the joint venture with Capita that provides services for Birmingham city council, has been asked to abandon plans to offshore IT and other jobs. A spokesman for Service Birmingham told GGC: "Our client, Birmingham city council, is asking us to revisit contractual commitments around offshoring with a view to …

    Government 28 Jul 08:02

  • HP's fondle-slab dilemma: What to do when you're No 2

    Analysis The TouchPad is good – but is being better good enough?

    After just one year, the iPad is making more revenue than Apple's 30-year-old personal computer division. It's almost bringing in as much as Dell brings in from PCs. This is a huge business, already. And nobody can quite say what their iPad is good for. If ever a computer was a means to an end, then the iPad is it – rather than …

    Hardware 28 Jul 08:23

  • Improving service monitoring with Watermelon metrics

    Broadcast When green really means red

    Are you measuring your IT services using watermelon metrics? They are green on the outside, but red on the inside. When your monitoring dashboard is a sea of green, but the phones are ringing and the directors are on your back, you have a watermelon problem. Your users just expect your services to work, regardless of how …

    Service Assurance 28 Jul 08:37

  • MPs slam government's 'obscene' IT spend

    Gov pays 7 to 10 times the going rate

    An all-party committee of MPs has found that successive governments' over-reliance on big IT companies and poor in-house skills, has led to a "perverse situation" in which governments have wasted "obscene" amounts of public money. In its report titled Government and IT – a recipe for rip-offs: time for a new approach, the …

    Government 28 Jul 09:19

  • News leech loses appeal on High Court copyright case

    Attention scrapers: Headlines are copyright

    Commercial news parasite Meltwater has lost an appeal in the High Court against the newspaper industry. The company provided a commercial headline-scraping service to clients in PR and marketing agencies. But a landmark judgment in the High Court last November decreed that it would require a licence, ruling that newspaper story …

    Law 28 Jul 09:33

  • ICO probes Tory minister PI blagging allegations

    I needed two things: a drink and a clue. I knew where to find the first...

    The ICO is making enquiries into Tory justice minister Jonathan Djanogly's hiring a firm of private detectives to blag information from his own constituents. Djanogly was exposed by the Telegraph last year for hiring the firm of private dicks. In a reversal of usual blagging exercises, they were instructed to pretend to be …

    Government 28 Jul 09:52

  • Camera Prime

    iOS App of the Week Say, 'cheese'

    After taking some really rubbish photos at a friend’s birthday recently, I decided I needed some sort of timer app for the camera on my iPhone. Besides timed capture, Camera Prime offers a framing aid There are a number of very simple timers – most of which are free to download – but then I started to think about some other …

    reghardware 28 Jul 10:00

  • Revenues down at BT for Q1, share price up

    It sucks to be us, but it really sucks to not be us

    BT reported a 5 per cent decline in revenues for its first quarter ended 30 June, while pre-tax profit climbed 20 per cent. It saw total sales of £4.76bn in Q1, compared with £5bn in the same period in 2010. Adjusted profit before tax jumped to £533m from £466m a year earlier. Earnings per share rose from 4.4 pence to 5.2 …

    Financial News 28 Jul 10:04

  • Three prunes prices of smartphone contracts

    Ends call for upfront charges

    Three has encouraged consumers to join the smartphone bandwagon today by slashing prices on five models and removing upfront handset costs. Although in most cases, the monthly cost is roughly the same as its competitors, Three has outdone its rivals by saving buyers up to £150 in upfront costs. Firstly, there's the Samsung …

    reghardware 28 Jul 10:20

  • Symantec bubbles up, though services revenue deflates

    'Threat landscape continues toxic and targeted'. Er, quite

    Although services revenue was a blot on the earnings landscape, Symantec revenues and profits increased nicely in its first fiscal 2011 quarter. The company reported revenues of $1.653bn, a chunky 15 per cent up year-on-year, with net income up 7 per cent to $172m. Symantec increased its operating margin from 13.5 per cent in …

    Storage 28 Jul 10:34

  • Last day on the job for Phoenix IT Group boss

    Robinson hanging up boots after 18 years

    Phoenix IT Group's long-serving chief exec Nick Robinson is hanging up his boots today after attending his last Annual General Meeting in the role. The services provider and reseller is handing captaincy of the ship over to industry veteran Dave Courtley at the beginning of next week. Courtley will need to draw upon his …

    Channel Register 28 Jul 10:37

  • Jupiter spacecraft mounted atop bloody big rocket

    Juno to ride the thrust of five mighty strap-ons

    NASA's Juno spacecraft has been mated to an United Launch Alliance Atlas V 551 rocket ahead of its forthcoming trip to Jupiter. The "most powerful Atlas rocket ever made" is sitting on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station while technicians carry out "a final flurry of checks and tests" to see if all is well for a …

    Space 28 Jul 10:46

  • Pwned HBGary Federal boss cancels debate after threats

    Barr barred from no-holds-barred battle

    Ex–HBGary Federal chief exec Aaron Barr has abandoned plans to speak at the DefCon security conference in Vegas next week. Barr was due to take part in a panel discussion on 6 August but cancelled these plans in response to a threatened legal injunction by lawyers acting for his former employers, security blog Threatpost …

    Security 28 Jul 11:00

  • Nintendo cuts cost of 3DS by a third

    Giant game giveaway too

    Nintendo has confirmed it will slash prices of the 3DS by a third next month and offer current owners 20 free games, so early adopters don't end up feeling shortchanged. The global trade price will reduce from 12 August to combat subdued interest, after Nintendo failed to meet initial sales targets. How much of this reduction …

    reghardware 28 Jul 11:05

  • Film studios thrash BT in Newzbin site-block test case

    Analysis Who comes out of this looking worse?

    In a landmark test case, the High Court in the UK has ordered BT to block access to the pirate site Newzbin2. The site makes movies, music and applications available and describes itself as "the Google of Usenet". It's a stunning victory for six major Hollywood film studios who brought the case, with counsel from the Motion …

    Music and Media 28 Jul 11:30

  • ICO won't investigate Tory minister

    No-one will investigate his investigators

    Tory justice minister Jonathan Djanogly will not be investigated for setting a team of private investigators on his own constituency staff. Djanogly spent £5,000 getting private detectives to pretend to be journalists in order to find out what local party officials thought of him. His staff criticised him as a poor politician …

    Government 28 Jul 12:01

  • Ashley Highfield quits Microsoft, becomes Scotsman boss

    Former iPlayer overlord gets £500k hello

    Ashley Highfield is leaving Microsoft following a management restructure at the company. A replacement for Highfield has already been found. Microsoft has hired Andy Hart, who previously worked at Associated Northcliffe Digital. He will head up the software vendor's advertising and online division in the UK. A recent reorg …

    Music and Media 28 Jul 12:04

  • Naughty JavaScript can be planted in IM status messages

    Technique shown for ICQ as well as Skype

    Security shortcomings in both ICQ instant messenger for Windows and the ICQ website create a possible mechanism for account hijacking, a security researcher warns. Levent Kayan warns that the software fails to screen against the inclusion of JavaScript code in user-supplied status messages. The shortcoming means that this …

    Malware 28 Jul 12:28

  • Ten... in-ear headphones

    Product round-up Aural fixation

    It's time for another headphone roundup and considering we've already covered the bulkier over-ear and on-ear models, it was inevitable that in-ears would follow. After all, not everyone likes walking the streets, turning heads with a pair of oversized Mickey Mousers on. The market is inundated with hundreds of in-ear monitors …

    reghardware 28 Jul 12:28

  • Geeks Guide2... iPhone 4 Development

    Reader offer 40% off! Includes iPad

    In this week's edition of Geeks' Guide we look at a Cocoa Touch bestseller, Beginning iPhone 4 Development, by Dave Mark, Jack Nutting and Jeff LaMarche. This dream team collaboration has a wealth of experience. The trio are considered experts on iOS development, Mac programming, Cocoa and Objective-C. The book has been …

    Site News 28 Jul 12:41

  • Nearly everyone in SOUTH KOREA HACKED IN ONE GO

    Local equivalent of Facebook hit: Fingers point at China

    Personal information on as many as 35 million users of a South Korean social network site may have been exposed as the result of what has been described as the country's biggest ever hack attack. Local authorities were quick to blame hack attacks against the Cyworld social networking website and the Nate web portal – both of …

    Enterprise Security 28 Jul 12:54

  • Intel: SSD 320 power loss bricking bug can be fixed

    In the meantime, try not to have a power loss

    The bug making Intel SSD 320s shrink to 8MB bricks is close to being fixed, according to Intel. A posting on the Intel Support Community website states: Intel has been investigating the 'Bad Context 13x Error' as seen on select Intel® SSD 320 Series drives. This was previously noted in the Intel community post as "SSD Power …

    Storage 28 Jul 13:01

  • UK's first Stealth fighter in successful catapult test

    Vid Royal Navy version of the F-35 shot into sky

    The tailhook version of the F-35 Lightning II stealth combat aircraft – which, following the recent UK defence review, is now planned to fly from new Royal Navy carriers in years to come – has successfully completed its first catapult launch test. The test launch took place on the landbased steam catapult at US Naval Air …

    Government 28 Jul 13:26

  • Beeb rolls out global paid iPlayer app in €urope

    Slab-fondlers lured with Fawlty Towers and so on

    Expats or foreigners who own an Apple iPad and are interested in a weekly dose of Brit TV gruel – grisly East End folk, crappy daytime shows or pointless period dramas – should rejoice, as the Beeb is launching an international version of iPlayer. The on-demand service app will be available in 11 European countries in the …

    Music and Media 28 Jul 13:54

  • Vanishing OEM robs Quantum of black ink

    'There's a bunch of people who need to improve'

    If sales revenue had been just 3 per cent higher, Quantum would have broken even. Instead its first fiscal 2012 quarter showed a $5m loss on revenues of $154m – instead of the expected $160m. Those revenues were 6 per cent down on the year-ago quarter. Then revenues were higher because $9.5m came in from an OEM selling Quantum …

    Storage 28 Jul 14:16

  • World first: UK boffins print out working 3D aeroplane

    Tech for difficult, shapely beauties like the Spitfire or LOHAN

    A team from the University of Southampton has produced the world's first fully "printed" airworthy plane – a 1.5-metre-wingspan UAV created in just five days by selective laser sintering (SLS). According to New Scientist, the £5000 Southampton University Laser Sintered Aircraft (Sulsa) was an attempt to see just how …

    SPB 28 Jul 14:24

  • Lithium cells take salt to extend life

    Imide live longer

    Li-ion battery technology looks set to be given a new lease of life with the emergence of an improved electrolyte process that promises increased heat tolerance and a significantly longer lifespan. Today's Li-ion batteries have limited lifespans thanks to the build up of crystal deposits within the electrolyte that hinder …

    reghardware 28 Jul 15:00

  • Ubuntu dressed in cheap elastic support, sent out in public

    Public cloud, that is

    Canonical's Ubuntu Linux variant is popular out there on the public clouds of the world, but there is a serious mismatch between how support contracts are sold for bare-metal servers used inside corporate data centers and how virtual servers are deployed and used out there on the cloud. And Canonical wants to fix that and make a …

    Infrastructure 28 Jul 15:23

  • Ubisoft revisits Internet-at-all-times DRM

    Drive away the pirates

    Ubisoft has revealed that in order to play its forthcoming title Driver: San Francisco on a PC, users will require a permanent internet connection. The news was Tweeted by a Ubisoft community developer, who in response to a Driver related query, simply stated "PC version requires permanent Internet connection." This is …

    reghardware 28 Jul 15:30

  • DHS scraps nukes-in-cargo-containers scan plan

    We will rely instead on Jack Bauer

    Plans to install nuclear radiation detectors at all US ports of entry have been dropped. Technical glitches and false alarms with temperamental kit led to a decision to ditch the $1.2bn scheme by Homeland Security officials. Instead of a nationwide rollout, only a few trial deployments of 13 prototypes will now take place: a …

    Security 28 Jul 16:03

  • Microsoft boffins propose cloudy home furnaces

    Heat your digs with a basement data center

    A team of Microsoft and academic researchers has come up with a proposal for using cloud computing not as an energy drain, but as a source of country-wide energy savings by turning cloudy servers into home and office furnaces. "In this paper, we argue that servers can be sent to homes and office buildings and used as a primary …

    Infrastructure 28 Jul 17:23

  • ElasticStack 2.0 allows clouds to catapult SANs

    Sheepdog herds server disks

    ElasticStack has just revved its eponymous infrastructure cloud software with a 2.0 release that lets it run more cheaply than the prior release and gives its more attention grabbing rivals a run for the money. VMware, Eucalyptus Systems, Citrix Systems, Canonical, and the open source OpenStack project get most of the …

    Infrastructure 28 Jul 18:44

  • Bulgarian coeds exposed in hidden camera stuffed apartment

    Air-bags, pizza, Florida? You get the picture...

    A brace of Bulgarian coeds have been left shaken after discovering that their Florida apartment was bristling with hidden spy cams. Vanya Samokovareva and Ralitsa Dzhambasova, both in their early 20s, came to the US for two months as exchange students, and were working part-time as waitresses before becoming "pizza babes" for …

    Bootnotes 28 Jul 19:17

  • UK Cops 'duped' into arresting wrong LulzSec suspect

    Will the real Topiary please stand up?

    The 19-year-old Scotsman fingered Wednesday as a central figure of the LulzSec hacking crew is a fall guy who was framed to take the heat off the real culprit, according to unconfirmed claims from a rival group. “We believe MET Police got the wrong guy and it happens because of lot of disinformation floating on the web,” a …

    Crime 28 Jul 19:41

  • Dell PowerEdgies built like Marilyn Monroe

    'Cos some like it hot

    A lot of new hardware features were rolled up into Dell's PowerEdge 11G servers, which came out in 2009 and were enhanced throughout 2010. But up until now, Dell has not discussed an important feature of the plain vanilla PowerEdge servers that it has kept in its back pocket in reserve as it did further testing: They can run …

    Servers 28 Jul 21:28

  • NEC squeezes out Aussie blackspots

    Extends DSLAM network in multi-million dollar investment

    NEC Australia has made the first significant investment in its Nextep network in five years with the upgrade of its regional DSLAM and MPLS core networks. The extensive upgrade geared to providing regional business users with high speed network connectivity, is part of the Federal Government’s Regional Backbone Blackspots …

    Telecoms 28 Jul 21:39

  • Pacnet adds Honkers datacentre

    Rollout targets Asian cloud

    Pacnet is continuing its Asia-Pacific data centre expansion with a new Hong Kong data landing station (DLS), which the company says provides a one-stop collocation and connectivity solution. The new Hong Kong facility has direct connectivity into the carrier’s Asian submarine cable network. Bill Barney, Pacnet’s CEO, says the …

    Cloud 28 Jul 22:08

  • Intel: Apple has online app sales exactly backwards

    Hipsters mixing up hats and hammers says chip giant

    Apple may be having phenomenal success with its iOS App Store ecosystem, but Intel thinks it's going about online app sales in the wrong way. As might be expected, Intel prefers its app-store-in-a-box AppUp program, which allows world+dog to create their own app stores using its software tools, then let Intel handle all the …

    Cloud Business 28 Jul 22:27

  • Sony brings its online bank to Aus

    No, seriously...

    Sony’s financial arm is moving into Australia opening a Sony Bank representative office in Sydney in August. The move will be the first international expansion for its online banking initiative, which it hopes to launch throughout the Asia Pacific. Sony confirmed that it has already obtained relevant approval from the …

    Business 28 Jul 23:00

  • Cray gears up for big Q4, shrugs off US.gov debt worries

    Waiting on Opteron 6200s

    Trying to cram a half year's worth of business into the final few weeks is no mean feat. And if it were not for the fact that supercomputer maker Cray already did it once already, in 2010, then Wall Street would probably be all kinds of jumpy about Cray trying to do it again here in 2011. But as it turns out, last year was a …

    Servers 28 Jul 23:13

  • Novell's Vibe Cloud floats away

    Farewell, web-collaboration service – we hardly knew ye

    After floating it around the market for only three months, Novell has decided to evaporate its Vibe Cloud web-based "social collaboration platform for the enterprise". The decision to decommission the Vibe Cloud service as of September 30 was announced by Novell's new president and GM Bob Flynn in a Thursday post on the …

    SaaS 28 Jul 23:49