13th October 2011 Archive

Browse by publication date, or search the site.

AOL demos the human-free datacenter

100% lights out facility eliminates the BOFH cost

AOL has been operating a trial datacenter that runs without any on-site staff since the start of the month, and reports that the system is resilient and cuts costs. Dubbed ATC, the datacenter uses off-the-shelf, pre-racked/vendor integrated gear with open source code, is run as a 100 per cent lights out facility (no BOFH …

Servers 13 Oct 2011, 01:05
Googler squeals: 'We don't get platforms'

A candid rant for the ages

The dangers of social platforms have been illustrated yet again, when one of the Mountain View Chocolate Factory's Oompa-Loompas made public a long and detailed rant against his employer on Google+. The thesis of the post, attributed to Steve Yegge, is that Amazon can build platforms and expose services far better than Google …

Software 13 Oct 2011, 01:09
Apple wins for now: no Galaxy 10.1 in Oz

Injunction granted

Samsung’s Galaxy 10.1 has been blocked in another jurisdiction, with the Federal Court of Australia granting an interim injunction against the sale of the device down under. In a decision which Samsung had previously warned would devastate its sales in the Christmas period, Justice Annabelle Bennett decided today (October 13) …

Law 13 Oct 2011, 01:25
Amazon Kindle 4

Review The library in your pocket?

Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet was always going to grab the headlines when the retailer revamped its e-book reader line-up last month. But for many book buffs, its low-cost E Ink devices were more interesting. Amazon has been aggressively driving down reader prices, and its entry level Kindle 4 - aka the 'Kindle Touchless', a nod …

Hardware 13 Oct 2011, 06:00
Peer-to-peer update makes ZeuS botnets harder to take down

Not your father's zombie network

A new strain of the ZeuS crimeware toolkit comes with a peer-to-peer design that lets infected machines bypass centralized servers when receiving updates and marching orders from operators, a researcher said. The update to a custom-built ZeuS variant known as Murofet could make it harder for white-hat hackers and law- …

Security 13 Oct 2011, 06:01
Avere punches up file access with 2 more accelerators

Get those filers moving faster

Suffering from slow file access speeds? Avere has introduced two faster and more scalable filer accelerators. Its FXT accelerators are multi-tiered and clusterable nodes placed in-line in front of filers, and storing data I/Os in the most appropriate media, from DRAM, NVRAM, through flash, SAS and SATA disk, to accelerate …

Storage 13 Oct 2011, 08:01
Busting net neutrality may amount to spying, says EU

Eurocrat warns of 'massive, real-time inspection of comms'

New EU laws on net neutrality may be necessary to stop internet service providers (ISPs) from infringing individuals' data protection and privacy rights, the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) has said. The traffic inspection required to operate systems that breach net neutrality principles and prioritise some content …

Networks 13 Oct 2011, 08:19
BlackBerry stumbles to feet, full of apologies

RIM promises not to repeat BlackBerry crumble

BlackBerry services are up again, though still processing a considerable backlog of traffic, but now we have a CEO's statement promising the company will try harder in future. The services started to come back online during the night, with web browsing in Europe being the last service to be restored. Late last night US …

Phones 13 Oct 2011, 08:44
iMoney Accounting

iOS App of the Week Keep track of your cash

It must be a sign of the times, but I’m definitely seeing more personal finance apps coming my way recently. Of course, there’s already no shortage of apps for keeping track of your daily spending, but iMoney Accounting caught my eye as it’s free and also has an online reporting function that could be useful for people who …

Phones 13 Oct 2011, 09:00
Pampernaut love-rat space shuttle pilot prangs plane

Passengers unhurt in Alaskan Cessna crash

Former space shuttle pilot Bill Oefelein, famous for being the man at the centre of the romantic rivalry between troubled astronaut Lisa Nowak and air force officer Colleen Shipman - which led to the astonishing nappies, mace and car-park fracas sensation of 2007 - has suffered a mishap at the controls of a small floatplane in …

Science 13 Oct 2011, 09:21
C and Unix pioneer Dennis Ritchie reported dead

printf("Rest in peace, Dennis\n"); exit(0);

C programming language inventor Dennis Ritchie is reported to have died. Rob Pike, a Google engineer and former colleague of Ritchie, said on Google+ that the 70-year-old, who was a founding developer of Unix and known as dmr, died at home over the weekend after a long illness. At the time of writing, Ritchie's web page on …

Developer 13 Oct 2011, 09:39
Dutch ISP calls the cops after Spamhaus blacklists it

Had to unfriend TPB chums to get unblocked

Dutch ISP A2B Internet has filed a complaint with the police after it claimed to have been "blackmailed" by London-based anti-spam outfit Spamhaus. A2B managing director Erik Bais told Webwereld (report in Dutch) that Spamhaus "has gone too far". The Spamhaus Project is an international organisation, founded by Steve Linford …

Security 13 Oct 2011, 10:01
City slickers get another 5 years of free Wi-Fi

In 15 minute chunks, in a tiny piece of London ...

The City of London has extended its deal with The Cloud for blanket Wi-Fi coverage, including the offer of 15 minutes of free access intended to lure surfers into paying £2 for a day pass. The service has been running since 2007, provided by The Cloud and covering just about all of the Square Mile that makes up the City of …

Broadband 13 Oct 2011, 10:13
Valve chief says Apple will own your living room

iConsole on the cards?

Valve Software chief Gabe Newell reckons Apple will soon become a major player in the console biz by launching a product that will own the living room. The prediction was made by Newell at the WTIA TechNW conference this week in Washington DC. The head of the outfit behind games such as Half Life and Counter-Strike, as well …

Hardware 13 Oct 2011, 10:25
Where am I going tomorrow? My 'leccy car charger wants to know

ERIC Pumping the right amount of juice for your journey

There’s a definite green tinge to Intel’s European Research and Innovation Conference (ERIC) this year, with a cash-saving electric car charger being touted alongside energy management ideas. It's not escaped El Reg that Intel is touting its green tech wizardry in Leixlip, Co. Kildare, in the Emerald Isle. The "context-aware …

Bootnotes 13 Oct 2011, 10:31
Chinese whisper of low-cost Kindle-confounding iPad

Smaller model too?

Given that many a fanboy's assumption that Apple would announce a new-design iPhone earlier this month derived from claims made to market analysts by sources within Chinese component makers, you should probably treat the following with some scepticism. For what it's worth, more of those oriental moles have told Brian White, an …

Tablets 13 Oct 2011, 10:37
Cloud file tech finds Big Blue one in bed with it

Excited cries of joy at Nirvanix

IBM is OEMing Nirvanix cloud file storage technology, and catapulting Nirvanix into the front ranks of cloud storage service providers. IBM's Jan Jackman, who is vice president of Global Cloud Services, provided a statement that could be framed and hung on every Nirvanix office wall: “Nirvanix’s cloud storage services offer …

Cloud 13 Oct 2011, 10:46
The keys to security compliances

Live Today Not at the expense of user and IT productivity

Social networks, local admins, unlatched software, missing USBs: the causes of security problems in your business are often not just the big stuff that tries to get inside the firewall, it's the little problems that are already on the inside. Today at 16:00 BST/11:00 EDT,our latest live Regcast takes a closer look at the …

Tech Panel 13 Oct 2011, 11:00
Did a Seagate sales bloke just say 5TB drives are coming?

Talks up big disks within three months in web vid

Has a Seagate Middle East sales guy just let slip that 5TB drives will be here in three months? He's identified on a video uploaded to YouTube as "Christian from Seagate", and his video interview has been mentioned on Twitter. The Tbreak video, below, records an interview at GITEX '11, a technology event in Dubai. …

Storage 13 Oct 2011, 11:14
Down but not out: Flash in an HTML5 world

Adobe hedges bets with Nitobi

Anyone hoping to pronounce Flash dead as Adobe transitions to the brave new HTML 5 world will have been disappointed, based on the company's MAX Conference last week. That said, there is evidence of a partial transition towards HTML. The big story in this respect is Adobe's acquisition of Nitobi, creators of the PhoneGap tool …

Developer 13 Oct 2011, 11:32
IBM's unified V7000 will hook up with just about anything

NAS heads and file access added to cloudy box

IBM has added SONAS-style NAS heads to create a Storwize V7000 Unified storage array that complements, it says, both SONAS and its NetApp-sourced N-Series filers. The Storwize V7000 is a tiered mid-range block-access storage array with SAN Volume Controller (SVC) code enabling it to virtualise its storage as a single pool and …

Cloud 13 Oct 2011, 11:44
One in 10 Brits leaves web passwords in their will

You will inherit your parents' iTunes accounts

Your gran could pass on her iTunes password along with the family silver as a survey suggests that 11 per cent of Brits have either put internet passwords into their wills or plan to do so. The main reason for passing on the keys to internet accounts was the valuable content amassed in the cloud – with 25 per cent of the 2,000 …

Cloud 13 Oct 2011, 12:02
Ace Combat: Assault Horizon

Review Wings and roundabouts

“For good or for ill, air mastery is the supreme expression of military power,” said Churchill, “and fleets and armies, however vital and important, must accept a subordinate rank.” Taken under the wing That may be true in the real world, but when it comes to videogames air combat has long accepted a subordinate rank to the …

Games 13 Oct 2011, 12:12
Revamp the network to cope with explosion in mobile kit

Expert Clinic Coping with end-point number growth and altered traffic flows

Three experts; three different views; that's what you get when the three look at the impact of the substantial rise in the number of mobile devices accessing the network. All these devices send traffic across the network and much if it hits servers and causes storage transactions. Ethernet set up as a fabric can help here. But …

Data Networking 13 Oct 2011, 12:16
Nokia's NFC-stocked Symbian smartphone surfaces

Belle me later

Nokia has brightened up its Symbian range with the introduction of a NFC smartphone that shouldn't put much of a dent in your wallet. The Nokia 603 - the company's latest Symbian Belle-powered handset - features a 1GHz processor, Bluetooth 3.0 and Wi-Fi connectivity. There's also a 3.5in, 640 x 360 touchscreen and a 5Mp camera …

Phones 13 Oct 2011, 12:28
An ode to rent-a-nerds and cable monkeys

Sysadmin blog Love 'em or hate 'em, we'd be screwed without them

Writing an article for El Reg takes between two hours and several weeks of research. Different articles have different origins. I usually have some techie-type problems occurring that could make for an interesting article, but every so often I get a bug about something and dive into a pile of off-topic research. I have been …

Servers 13 Oct 2011, 12:32
Social net sites do wonders for crooks, spooks and bosses

RSA Europe 'Computers are making people easier to use everyday'

Social networks make obtaining sensitive background information on people as a prelude to stealing their identities – and running attacks on corporations – easier than ever before. Ira Winkler, president of ISAG (Internet Security Advisors Group), an ex-NSA officer and cybercrime guru, has called for increased security …

Security 13 Oct 2011, 12:44
Spotify 'sold soul' to boy king Zuckerberg

Comment Faustian deal

I can't quite recall serial entrepreneur Michael Robertson ever running a big, successful, profit-making internet business – and his latest radio venture seriously misjudges both the medium and the market. But as a pundit, he occasionally airs views that others are too timid to articulate. Robertson takes aim at digital music …

Media 13 Oct 2011, 13:02
NHS orgs not keen on UK gov's mega-intranet

The other PSN also makes people nervous

NHS organisations in England are showing a reluctance to consider future use of the Public Service Network (PSN), according to officials and a supplier taking part in its early implementation. Bringing healthcare bodies within the PSN – the "network of networks" for which the Cabinet Office recently launched the first …

Policy 13 Oct 2011, 13:33
Ubuntu Server 11.10 leaps onto OpenStack clouds

A dreamy dwarf leopard for microservers

Right on time, the Ubuntu Server 11.10 operating system has tiptoed out onto the intertubes and wants to play with your workloads. Developed under the codename "Oneiric Ocelot", the latest server release from Canonical – the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu Linux distribution – brings a number of new features for building …

Cloud 13 Oct 2011, 14:00
Future wars will be over water not fuel, warns Intel sage

ERIC Keyring-size PCs, web healthcare and more foreseen

If you think you’ve seen the thinnest, smallest form factors computers can go into, Intel CTO of Datacentre and Connected Systems Group and senior fellow Steve Pawlowski reckons you’re dead wrong. Asked at the European Research and Innovation Conference to give a talk on his predictions for the next 10 years, Pawlowski’s …

Science 13 Oct 2011, 14:32
Dennis Ritchie: The C man who booted Unix

Obituary strcat(obit, "Quiet revolutionary");

It was 1968 and students and workers were on the march, protesting against the Vietnam War, with the western world seemingly teetering on the brink of revolution. In the sleepy, leafy suburb of New Jersey's Murray Hill, a young maths and physics graduate was laying the groundwork for an entirely different revolution. For …

Developer 13 Oct 2011, 14:46
RIM: 'Faulty switch took out faulty-switch-proof network'

Sleepy BlackBerry bosses to wait for postmortem ...

Blackberry bosses held a short press conference at 10am EST (15.00 GMT) today to calm investors, answer media questions and shed (a little bit) more light on the faulty switch that caused the three-day service outages across the UK, Europe, Africa and Latin America. RIM’s co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, as well as …

Applications 13 Oct 2011, 15:29
Fretting Googler retracts anti-Google+ rant

Please don't fire me!

A Google engineer who accidentally published a long rant about the failings of Google+ has since issued an apologetic make-up piece, explaining why he has taken the piece down, how kind Google are for not immediately firing him and that really Steve Yegge is a lowly oompa-loompa who knows nothing and to whom nobody should pay …

Cloud 13 Oct 2011, 15:44
Microsoft whips Apple with global Xbox TV deals

Gaming network taps up broadcasters

If the Xbox Live network was a cable operator it would be the largest such operator in the world, with 35 million customers, which is why Microsoft is turning the Xbox into an over-the-top TV delivery device – something it has dreamed of ever since it first made the Xbox one of its IPTV Mediaroom set-tops. Redmond announced …

Cloud 13 Oct 2011, 16:17
Citrix buys cloudy storage biz ShareFile

Follow me the data

Server and application virtualization juggernaut Citrix Systems has bought ShareFile, which runs a cloudy document sharing service aimed at businesses, not at consumers. ShareFile was founded in Raleigh, North Carolina, in November 2005 and has grown organically and without any venture funding since that time. The company was …

Cloud 13 Oct 2011, 17:02
Galleon chief Rajaratnam gets 11 years in the slammer

Tech insider trading doesn't pay

Raj Rajaratnam, the former heard of the former Galleon hedge fund that was the epicenter of several insider trading rings that came to light two years ago , was sentenced in New York today to 11 years in prison for his kingpin role. Rajaratnam was the founder and managing director of the $7bn Galleon Management hedge fund, and …

Security 13 Oct 2011, 17:20
Ubuntu One client now available for Windows

Open source sync service comes to Redmond

Canonical has moved its Ubuntu One file-synchronization service for Windows out of beta, with the new build of the operating system. Ubuntu One gives users 5GB of free cloud storage that allows files and music to be selectively synchronized on Ubuntu, Android, iOS, and now Windows devices. Users can buy 20GB of extra storage …

Operating Systems 13 Oct 2011, 17:24
Flashback trojan targeting OS X shuns virtual machines

Mac malware grows up

Underscoring the growing sophistication of Mac-based malware, a trojan preying on OS X users has adopted several stealth techniques since it was discovered last month. Updates to the Flashback trojan, which gets installed by disguising itself as an Adobe Flash update, now prevent the malware from running on Macs that use VMware …

Security 13 Oct 2011, 18:43
AMD 'unleashes' unlocked FX processor family

Overclockers, rejoice. The rest of us, not so much

AMD has released its long-expected AMD FX processor line, and – as also expected – they're shipping them unlocked, thus warming the cockles of overclockers' hearts. Early testing, however, reveals others' cockles to be somewhat chilly. "AMD FX CPUs are back with a vengeance," AMD client group headman Chris Cloran promised in a …

Hardware 13 Oct 2011, 21:10
Quigley defends FTTP to parliamentary committee, again

Oz network delays recoverable says CEO

NBN Co CEO Mike Quigley and federal opposition communications spokesperson Malcolm Turnbull have spent another half-hour or so sparring over whether or not FTTN should be deployed as an interim step towards the National Broadband Network’s fibre-to-the-premises policy target. After repeated questions from Turnbull, during a …

Broadband 13 Oct 2011, 22:04
OccupySF BOFH runs protest network on pedal power

Protest IT staff running ultimate bare-bones system

Since the end of September, a small – but growing – group of protestors has set up camp outside the Federal Reserve Bank building on San Francisco’s Market Street to demonstrate against corporate greed, government inaction, and the squeezing of the middle and lower classes. The Occupy movement currently claims encampments in …

Networks 13 Oct 2011, 22:32
IRS audits Google for funneling profits to Ireland

Savings of $1bn per year from 'Double Irish' loophole

The US Internal Revenue Service is auditing strategies that Google uses to cut its tax bill by about $1 billion a year by funneling profit into subsidiaries located in territories with low or non-existent rates, according to a published report citing unnamed officials. The agency is “bringing more than typical scrutiny” to …

Financial News 13 Oct 2011, 22:58
The exaggerated “death of text”

How much is already free?

It’s time to put to bed the idea that SMS costs millions per Gigabyte – a game I have played in the past, along with many others – now that every major mobile carrier in Australia has plans with text allowances stretching all the way up to “unlimited”. This week has seen a burst of stories proclaiming the death of SMS – in …

Broadband 13 Oct 2011, 23:00
Carriers move to shore up safe harbour

Industry body seeks amicus curiae status in AFACT vs. iiNet

Australia’s peak carrier and service provider body, the Communications Alliance, is seeking “friend of the court” (amicus curiae) status in the “iiTrial” High Court appeal. The Hollywood catspaw is appealing to Australia’s top court to overturn decisions further down the legal food chain, which gave iiNet immunity against its …

Media 13 Oct 2011, 23:30
ACCC to appeal Google decision

Dead horse: check. Whip: check.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has decided it will appeal against the decision that recently let Google off the hook in relation to misleading advertisements in Australia. Back in September, Federal Court judge Justice Nicholas had decided that while “ad-squatting” – a business buying ads using the trading …

Law 13 Oct 2011, 23:36
Solar car teams bask in Darwin sunshine

WSC Plucky Brits versus American juggernaut

The El Reg's elite Special Projects Bureau team touched down in a very hot and sticky Darwin yesterday, as teams challenging for the World Solar Challenge crown prepared their vehicles to face the vast interior of Oz. No sooner had we set foot on the Lucky Country in Brisbane on Thursday, than we were treated to the …

SPB 13 Oct 2011, 23:54