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22nd August 2011 Archive

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  • Telecom NZ invokes wrath of frisky rugby fans

    No sex please, we’re All Blacks supporters

    Telecom New Zealand’s annual results announcement on Friday were overshadowed by a “torrid” marketing gaff. New Zealand’s national carrier has been forced to kill a Saatchi & Saatchi created campaign, valued in the hundreds of thousands, called ‘Abstain for the Game’ which was set to run in the lead up to the Rugby World Cup …

    Business 22 Aug 2011, 00:01

  • Sulphur-loving microbes might be oldest life

    Life at Marble Bar close to life on Mars

    A microbial bacterial fossil find is being hailed as proof that life existed in the oxygen-free environment of Earth, 3.4 billion years ago. The Strelley Pool Formation in Western Australia was once a beach, but is now more than 100 Km inland near(ish) the town of Marble Bar, and is popular among paleontologists because of the …

    Science 22 Aug 2011, 01:00

  • Oracle's Sparc T4 chip: Will you pay Larry's premium?

    Hot Chips Oomph for one thread. Or many

    The Sparc T4 processor that Oracle expects to ship before the end of December for its entry-level and mid-range server platforms is probably the most important chip that either Sun or Oracle has put into the field since the dual-core UltraSparc-IV+ "Panther" arrived in October 2004. A lot of business is at stake – and so is the …

    Hardware 22 Aug 2011, 04:12

  • Sneaky tracking code (finally) purged from Microsoft sites

    'Supercookies' eluded user privacy choices

    Microsoft has deleted code on its MSN website that secretly logged visitors' browsing histories across multiple web properties, even when the users deleted browser cookies to elude tracking. Microsoft announced the move in a tersely worded blog post published on Thursday. That's the same day that a researcher revealed that MSN …

    Security 22 Aug 2011, 04:15

  • Former Insight veep Akkerman rocks up at Rackspace

    Channel warhorse gallops into the cloud

    Former Insight veep of sales Olaf Akkerman is expected to join Rackspace as enterprise sales director, according to sources close to the matter. He resigned from the reseller last month after less than a year in the role – though he had been at Insight since September 2006 when it acquired Software Spectrum. Sources have now …

    Cloud 22 Aug 2011, 07:36

  • Big pharma discredited by Twitter drug-pushing: Official

    Not supposed to punt prescription stuff to the public

    A pharmaceutical company's use of Twitter to promote medicines discredited the industry, a regulatory body has ruled. The Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority (PMCPA) said that Bayer Healthcare had violated the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry Code of Conduct (ABPI Code). The Code sets rules on …

    Media 22 Aug 2011, 08:01

  • Slow broadband blackspots mostly in south, not north

    Contention ratio an issue, possibly?

    Online tests from uswitch.com have found more "internet blackspots" in the south of England than in the north and found the quickest internet access in the UK is in Leamington Spa with download speeds of 18.665Mb/s. The numbers come from people conducting their own tests via the comparison site's online tests and should be …

    Broadband 22 Aug 2011, 08:26

  • Sony Ericsson outs social music smartphone

    Walkman + Facebook + Android

    Sony Ericsson is to mix music and social networking in a new smartphone. The Live with Walkman runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread and sports what SE called "deep Facebook integration", which basically means building Facecrack links into all the key apps. The handset has a Walkman button to trigger the music player app, and a …

    reghardware 22 Aug 2011, 08:34

  • TVOnics to add BBC iPlayer to DVRs

    Catching up

    TVOnics will add BBC iPlayer to its Freeview HD set-top boxes on Friday. TVOnics DTR-Z500HD The 26 August update will be delivered through the manufacturer's website. Just download it it a USB stick, plug that into the DVR. In addition to the BBC catch-up service - accessed through the red button on the remote - the new …

    reghardware 22 Aug 2011, 08:48

  • Cabinet Office shuns open-source in IT-tracking deal

    Maude's dept applies locks to 'level playing field' gate

    The Cabinet Office and its IT underlings have exhaustively championed the need for more OSS across government since the ConDem Coalition was cobbled together in May 2010. Nonetheless Francis Maude's department has just snubbed open source players by awarding a contract to a proprietary software provider to help establish how …

    Operating Systems 22 Aug 2011, 08:58

  • UK, German Android-ers can buy apps on phone bills

    Vodafone is the first domino to fall

    Vodafone will be the first operator in Europe to add the cost of apps to the phone bill, signing up with Google Marketplace to offer the service in the UK and Germany. Vodafone customers with Android handsets will be able to have the cost of applications added to their bill, or deducted from their prepaid balance, with the …

    Business 22 Aug 2011, 09:19

  • LG lights up smartphone for the sunshine

    LG has brought a sun-friendly Android smartphone out into the light. The Optimus Sol is based around a 3.8in OLED screen that LG confidently claimed is "one of the best displays on the market" that's "easy to see even in bright and sunny conditions". As an OLED, the screen only consumes power when a given pixel is …

    reghardware 22 Aug 2011, 09:38

  • Sage stuffed in Mind Your Own Business bid

    Geordies scuppered by share prices

    Geordie small biz provider Sage has been beaten in the battle over Australian accounts provider MYOB even though it was offering more for the firm. Sage was offering A$1.3bn and was supposedly the preferred bidder. But fears over its not being able to gain shareholder approval tipped the balance to favour Bain Capital. The …

    Business 22 Aug 2011, 09:42

  • 2012 to be year of the ultrabook

    Notebook makers desperately seek novelty

    World+Dog will next year be after ultra-skinny laptops running Windows 8. So says Simon Lin, chairman of Wistron, a Taiwanese contract manufacturer specialising in notebooks. The slimline MacBook Air-style machines - dubbed by Intel "ultrabooks" - will be a key growth driver in 2012, Lin said during a chat with DigiTimes. …

    reghardware 22 Aug 2011, 09:53

  • Networks, handset makers vie for mobile dominance

    Who's left standing following the WebOS train crash?

    WebOS is all but dead, and died without apparently leaving a gap for its competitors to fill, but the bloodbath of mobile platforms isn't over despite the clearing field. LiPS, LiMo, Moblin, Maemo and MeeGo are all dead or dying, while Symbian fights on like some jungle soldier who has not been told of the surrender. Access is …

    Developer 22 Aug 2011, 10:01

  • Skype gulps group app as it is swallowed by Microsoft

    Redmond's in-house 'We're In' may in fact not be any more

    Another Microsoft me-too Web 2.0 project looks to be headed for the chop with Skype's proposed purchase of a mobile messaging start-up. Skype is buying GroupMe, another app masquerading as a business, that has 20 employees and $10.6m in funding. The service lets you marshal your contacts into groups. Microsoft itself is in …

    Business 22 Aug 2011, 10:14

  • Hotboxer Xiotech drops the 'tech', goes all-caps

    No need to SHOUT

    Xiotech is dropping the "tech" to become just XIO and it has souped up its Hybrid ISE box. XIO as a term has form; check Wikipedia: "XIO is a packet-based, high-performance computer bus employed by the SGI Origin 2000, Octane, Altix, Fuel and Tezro machines. The XIO forms a bus between high-performance system devices and the …

    Storage 22 Aug 2011, 10:26

  • Osun MushRoom Green Zero USB charger

    Geek Treat of the Week Cute carbon cutter

    Leaving your gadgets plugged in and charging has two drawbacks. One, you continue to draw juice when you don’t need it, to the general detriment of life on Earth. Second, it hardly helps with battery life. As an HTC Desire HD owner, it’s the latter I worry about. Even with a perfectly healthy battery, the time between charges …

    reghardware 22 Aug 2011, 10:30

  • Detective on phone-hacking probe team is arrested

    Dick cuffed after messy leaks

    A police officer working on Scotland Yard's investigation into alleged phone-hacking at the now-defunct Sunday tabloid the News of the World was arrested by cops from the anti-corruption unit of the Metropolitan police late last week. The Met said that on Thursday 18 August they cuffed "a serving MPS officer from Operation …

    Law 22 Aug 2011, 10:43

  • LOHAN rival to inflate bulging orbs with hydrogen

    Trifling explosion hazard outweighed by greater buoyancy

    We at the El Reg Special Projects Bureau are well aware that some of you are less than impressed with the choice of lifting gas for our Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) project. Well, we're not going to be swayed on the matter, but the Hindenberg fans among you are directed to the STARS Project, a private High …

    SPB 22 Aug 2011, 10:58

  • Cookie respawning, history sniffing case dropped

    Ad network didn't cause enough harm, says US judge

    A computer user who alleged that an advertising network breached US privacy laws did not prove she had suffered sufficient damages for those charges to be further examined, a US court has ruled. Sonal Bose claimed that Interclick's use of Flash cookies and "history sniffing" code "invaded her privacy, misappropriated personal …

    Law 22 Aug 2011, 11:19

  • National web-2.0 dogturd photo scheme goes live

    UK to collect mighty archive of poo snaps

    Orange's latest wheeze is to get customers photographing dog shit, and other street clutter, for forwarding to local authorities – in the hope they can afford to do something about it. The idea actually comes from LoveCleanStreets, but has been picked up by Orange as part of the operator's "Do Some Good" campaign aimed at …

    Government 22 Aug 2011, 11:31

  • Google unleashes Street View upon the Amazon

    River, not webshop. Spy cars also to slurp Israel

    Google's Street View is heading down the Amazon to capture pictures of "some of the most remote and biodiverse areas in the world", according to its official blog. The Street View team will be floating downriver in partnership with the Amazonas Sustainable Foundation (FAS), the non-profit conservation organisation that invited …

    Cloud 22 Aug 2011, 11:38

  • iPhone 5 to include Japanese earthquake warning system

    Jesus Phone saves

    The Japanese version of iOS 5, Apple's latest mobile OS, will let you know if an earthquake is coming a good minute or two before it hits. Such functionality is common in natively produced handsets, but imported brands have been slow to integrate the warnings which use a standardised tone and go off even if the phone has been …

    Operating Systems 22 Aug 2011, 11:57

  • Neato Robotics XV-15 vacuum cleaner

    Review Another sucker joins the robot wars

    Robot vacuum cleaners are becoming increasingly popular, with a few companies joining Roomba in the market over the last couple of years. Neato is the latest to offer a product in the UK, with the XV-15 which boasts laser mapping, and a powerful vacuum – some of the other models are careful to describe themselves as cleaners …

    reghardware 22 Aug 2011, 12:06

  • Here lies /^v.+b$/i

    Stob Which programming language to use on one's headstone?

    After I've gone In a melancholy mood, this week. Went back home to have a look at Dad's bench. He was a Classics scholar, actually; went up to Cambridge and everything. And so above his name and dates on the brass plaque screwed into the wood, instead of "He loved this place" or something equally fatuous, it says: ORE STABIT …

    Developer 22 Aug 2011, 12:20

  • Bundled music newbie Boinc aims for year-end launch

    Remains to be seen if Beyond Oblivion actually is

    The disaster that was Nokia's Comes With Music hasn't deterred entrepreneurs from having another go at bundling music access with hardware. Beyond Oblivion has raised a huge amount of cash to do much the same thing – and told the FT it will launch by the year end. The service will be called Boinc, continuing the tradition of …

    Media 22 Aug 2011, 12:42

  • How to get a firm grip of applications performance

    Monitoring for good behaviour

    When applications go wrong, they can either stop working or slow to a crawl. The problem for IT managers is keeping track of when this happens and why, and preferably preventing it altogether. How can they do this? Ideally, your applications are all written under one framework, like J2EE or .Net, which makes monitoring web …

    Service Assurance 22 Aug 2011, 13:00

  • Afghan coppers trained with Playmobil

    Lego Taliban daren't mess with tiny no-nonsense lawmen

    In case you ever wondered just what kind of preparation Afghan police recruits get in order to prepare them to face the Taliban, rest assured they're offered the very latest in high-tech training technology. For proof, check out the fourth snap in this slideshow from FOCUS online. Regular readers will note the same scrupulous …

    Bootnotes 22 Aug 2011, 13:24

  • Rebel hackers seize Libyan domain name registry

    Also much of meatspace capital

    As fighting rages around Colonel Gaddafi's compound in Tripoli, hackers have taken the fight online to the country's domain name registry nic.ly. The site's homepage now hosts an image of the rebel flag and the message "bye bye Gaddafi", as well as the date 17 February, the day Libyan protestors started demonstrations and were …

    Hosting 22 Aug 2011, 13:24

  • Windows Phone may be cheaper than Android - Inq boss

    Free operating systems not unlike lunches, apparently

    Google's proposed acquisition of Motorola has obliged one operator to look more closely at Windows Mobile. So says Inq boss Frank Meehan, who runs the Hutchison-owned handset company. He has a very interesting reason, which might surprise some of you. Inq puts its own UI on Android, as seen here with the Cloud Touch Meehan …

    Developer 22 Aug 2011, 13:40

  • Marriage makes women get fat, divorce does same to men

    Lonely swingbellies scoff chips once wife departs

    Modern-day feminists will tell you that marriage is good for men and bad for women, and now they have the research to back it up. Getting married puts women at risk of piling on the pounds, while for men, divorce is the foundation of flab, according to a new study from Ohio State University. “Married women often have a larger …

    Science 22 Aug 2011, 13:57

  • WikiLeaks admits insider deleted loads of its data

    We do have more than one source, honest. Well, we did

    WikiLeaks has explained the non-appearance of Bank of America data it frequently promised to publish: a defector took the only copies with him when he left the organisation and has now deleted the files. Daniel Domscheit-Berg left WikiLeaks last summer and took the documents with him following a dispute with Julian Assange. …

    Media 22 Aug 2011, 14:19

  • Celebrity Google+rs do need steenkin' badges

    Choc Factory ID police erase 'Creepy Eric Schmidt'

    Google has begun loading "verification badges" onto profiles created in its online estate, in a move to flush out imposters and solidify its ID-linking plans. Mountain View said the badge will prove an individual is who they say they are, just as Twitter previously labelled some of its accounts with a "verified" button to help …

    Networks 22 Aug 2011, 14:56

  • Anonymous/LulzSec chick-lit MP kid threat pooh-poohed

    Hacktivists would never use email; too nerdy for violence

    Chick-lit authoress and politician Louise Mensch, somewhat famed for being fired from EMI due to "inappropriate dress" and copping to possible drug use and bad dancing in her salad days, says that hacktivists from Anonymous and/or LulzSec have threatened her children by email. The Tory MP, who has penned various lighthearted …

    Security 22 Aug 2011, 15:07

  • German authorities park tanks on Facebook's lawn

    Wir verlangen ein Abneigungsknopf … weibchen

    Facebook has once again been criticised by a data protection authority in Germany for siphoning off information about the country's citizens to servers based in the US. This time the company's "like" button and "pages" feature have been attacked by DPA officers in the Northern German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein. On …

    Government 22 Aug 2011, 15:22

  • Ultra-cheap HP TouchPads to hit UK at 6pm

    Put it on the slate

    In the wake of HP's decision to axe the WebOS platform, the price of the HP TouchPad has been falling quicker than Cristiano Ronaldo in the opposition's penalty box. The $99 offer which has seen hordes of people lapping up the slate Stateside, is about to be replicated in Blighty, with Dixons announcing dramatic price …

    reghardware 22 Aug 2011, 16:14

  • IBM's BlueGene/Q super chip grows 18th core

    Hot Chips It's nice to have a spare

    The mystery surrounding the number of cores in the 64-bit Power processor that will be at the heart of the 20 petaflops "Sequoia" BlueGene/Q supercomputer has been finally cleared up. Back at the SC10 supercomputing conference in November 2010, a software engineer working on the BlueGene/Q system told El Reg that the processor …

    HPC 22 Aug 2011, 17:00

  • Coders breathe Android into dead HP fondleslab

    Resuscitation by Google desserts

    If you bought an HP TouchPad, you bought a tablet whose operating system has, shall we say, an uncertain future. But a group of independent developers is working to give your purchase a new lease on software life. Under the aegis of Rootz Wiki – an online community of Android developers – a quartet of coders has launched a …

    Mobile 22 Aug 2011, 17:36

  • NetApp Flash Cache for no cash

    FAS 6000s only

    Rumour central has NetApp offering free Flash Cache on its high-end FAS6000 arrays. This news comes from a usually reliable source, and our belief is that it could be announced in a time period of single-digit weeks. The FAS arrays would get 512GB of Flash Cache to accelerate read I/Os, with no price increase. NetApp has …

    Storage 22 Aug 2011, 18:45

  • PHP users warned to stay away from latest update

    5.3.7 marred by serious crypto bug

    Maintainers of the PHP scripting language are urging users to avoid an update released last week that introduces a serious bug affecting some cryptographic functions. The flaw in version 5.3.7 involves the crypt() function used to cryptographically hash a text string. When using the command with the MD5 algorithm and some salt …

    Security 22 Aug 2011, 20:26

  • Poulson Itaniums hit 'Replay' for reliability

    Hot Chips New instructions, better HyperThreading

    The future eight-core "Poulson" Itanium is not just a process-shrink of the current four-core "Tukwila" Itanium 9300. Intel has been working to add new features to Poulson to make it useful running enterprise workloads – and to do so more reliably. Intel already released a lot of Poulson details back at February's IEEE's …

    Servers 22 Aug 2011, 20:37

  • Skitch gets stitched by Evernote

    Another Aussie digital start-up heads to the Valley

    Australian digital imaging app developer, Skitch, has been snapped up by Mountain View start-up Evernote. Evernote, which launched in 2008, is a platform with 12 million users that "stores memories" digitally. Users can store notes, photos, PDFs and other digital information in online notebooks that are synchronised and …

    Business 22 Aug 2011, 22:19

  • Skype bug may expose users to malicious code

    Updated Skype: Does not. Researcher: Does so

    The latest version of Skype for Windows contains a security vulnerability that allows attackers to inject potentially dangerous code into a user's phone session, a German security researcher has reported. The XSS, or cross-site scripting, vulnerability in Skype 5.5.0.113 is the result of the voice-over-IP client failing to …

    Security 22 Aug 2011, 22:28

  • AMD gooses low-power Fusion chips

    Faster clocks, better graphics, improved battery life

    AMD has beefed up its low-end lines of its Fusion CPU/GPU-combo processors, parts that the company insists on calling "accelerated processing units", or APUs. "With these new APUs, we're bringing premium features to entry-level products that let users get a richer computing experience," AMD client-division general manager …

    Hardware 22 Aug 2011, 22:31

  • Apple rumor mill predicts 'all new Mac'

    Un-Mac Mac arrives 'this year'

    Apple is planning to release an entirely new Mac by the end of this year, according to a Japanese news 'n' rumor website. Such is the power of Apple's cult of secrecy that even the flimsiest rumor from a web source with a hit-or-miss record can excite the imaginations of fanbois worldwide. As far as your humble Reg reporter …

    Media 22 Aug 2011, 23:13

  • CSC secures A$25m utility deal

    10-year history stays electric

    Utility Powercor-CitiPower has awarded CSC a renewed five-year IT services contract worth AU$25m. CSC was the incumbent provider of IT services for Victoria's largest electricity distributor. The last time the contract was extended in 2006, the five-year contract was valued at $AU17.8m. The utility giant provides services to …

    Business 22 Aug 2011, 23:30

  • Ukrainian authorities charge four in huge carder ring

    $20 million in alleged harm

    Ukrainian authorities said they arrested four people who were part of organized hacking gang that caused about $20 million in damages through the use of fraudulent payment cards. The individuals were seized earlier this month, along with data stored on a computer for about 100,000 cards, according to a statement (Google …

    Security 22 Aug 2011, 23:30