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26th October 2011 Archive

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  • German boffins BREAK LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS!

    Kelvin joins Einstein in has-been corner?

    As you probably know, heat is one of the enemies of electronics, and heat management is a major design constraint of microelectronics. Now, a German research group has demonstrated using waste heat to get electricity. No, we’re not really talking about perpetual motion here. What the researchers have observed is that in …

    Science 26 Oct 2011, 00:05

  • Amazon’s shares slashed as profits drop 73%

    Sales OK, but costs through the roof

    Amazon’s share price dropped sharply after it reported overall profits have fallen 73 per cent year on year. The third quarter of the year is traditionally the slowest for retailers, but the company reported that net sales rose 44 per cent from this time last year. However, the company is selling its Kindle hardware at a loss …

    Financial News 26 Oct 2011, 00:06

  • US gov requests for Google user data grow 29%

    93-percent compliance rate

    The US government has once again outdone its peers in requesting that Google turn over user data for use in criminal investigations, with almost 6,000 demands in the first half of 2011, a 29 per cent increase from the previous six months. The 5,950 requests that US law enforcement agencies filed with YouTube and Google sought …

    Government 26 Oct 2011, 00:24

  • Obama man: 'Global internet surveillance skyrocketing'

    Think it's bad now? Just wait

    A top US government official believes that the internet is under fierce attack by authoritarian governments worldwide, and that the situation is rapidly deteriorating. "Today we face a series of challenges at the intersection of human rights, connected technologies, business, and government. It's a busy intersection – and a …

    Government 26 Oct 2011, 00:33

  • Soundfreaq Soundstep Recharge

    Review Android friendly compact speaker

    Audio dock maker Soundfreaq recently released an Android version of its iOS remote control app and is now busy promoting its Bluetooth-equipped Soundstep as something for ‘droid-heads as well as iFans. Looks good, sounds good: Soundfreaq's Soundstep Recharge SFQ-02RB For a mid-range audio device, the Soundstep looks rather …

    Hardware 26 Oct 2011, 06:00

  • DVLA tosses Virgin Media £6.7m in 3-year phone deal

    Agency will use PSN-compliant network for call handling

    The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) has signed a £6.7m, three-year deal with Virgin Media Business to provide its business phone lines, supported by a hosted call management system. It will be hosted on the company's fibre optic network and route all of the agency's incoming calls to its non-geographic numbers …

    Networks 26 Oct 2011, 07:29

  • Facebook 'bug' temporarily disappears some .co.uk links

    'Spammy, unsafe' URLs mainly harboured by news outfits, it seems ... bitch

    Stories posted on Facebook by venerable organs such as The Register were temporarily unavailable yesterday morning due to a "glitch" on the ubiquitous social network. For a brief time it appeared that many .co.uk links inserted on Facebook had been deemed "spammy or unsafe" by the site, which meant sharing of such posts was …

    Media 26 Oct 2011, 08:01

  • No BBM app for PlayBook soon, admits RIM

    BlackBerry tablet OS 2.0 delayed too

    RIM has delayed the release of the next major upgrade to its BlackBerry PlayBook's operating system - and won't be including BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) at launch. "We expect to deliver the new BlackBerry PlayBook OS to customers in February 2012," blogged David J Smith, RIM's PlayBook chief yesterday. App developers were …

    Tablets 26 Oct 2011, 08:02

  • Lenovo intros updated all-in-one

    AMD CPU, lots of Ram, er, that's it

    Another day, another low-cost all-in-one desktop, this time from Lenovo. It's the C325 and it's based around a 20in 1600 x 900 display - touch or non-touch, the choice is yours. So is the colour: black or white. There's a dual-core AMD E450 processor on board and integrated AMD Radeon HD 6320 graphics, and you spec up to 8GB …

    Hardware 26 Oct 2011, 08:21

  • UN wants two-thirds of the world online by 2015

    Moon-on-a-stick request still pending

    Freedom to communicate is a human right – as is having a broadband connection, the UN said today. The global organisation, usually hell-bent on achieving world peace, argued that it would be quite nice if 60 per cent of the world had access to the net by 2015. Governments should lift taxes on ICT services and free up radio …

    Networks 26 Oct 2011, 08:31

  • Corning launches can-stand-the-heat Lotus glass for phones

    Sheet hot

    One of the key brand names tossed around in relation to smartphone and tablets this year has been Corning's Gorilla Glass. Next year, it may be Lotus Glass. Corning announced Lotus' commercial availability yesterday, and immediately began touting the display material's suitability for "cutting-edge technologies", including …

    Phones 26 Oct 2011, 08:43

  • Sunday Mirror must face Kylie's ex-lover in France privacy case

    ECJ: Internet publishers liable wherever material is accessible

    Individuals can sue internet publishers in each country in which they believe their image has been harmed as a result of content posted online, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled. Publishers, though, should not be subject to stricter laws than would apply if the court action was taking place in the country in which …

    Law 26 Oct 2011, 09:01

  • Worm wriggles through year-old flaw, builds zombie-net

    'More a business failure than a software security failure'

    A new worm doing the rounds is turning servers running older versions of the JBoss Application Server into botnet drones. The malware behind the attack is significant both because it targets servers rather than PCs and for its reliance on exploiting a vulnerability that is over a year old – a flaw in JBoss Application Server …

    Security 26 Oct 2011, 09:29

  • BioWare Baldur's Gate

    Antique Code Show Put down the dice

    I remember one summer when my dad decided it would be great to go on holiday for two weeks in a stone farm house in Scotland, it rained and we spent the whole time playing Dungeons and Dragons. A few more options than a roll of the dice Yet it wasn’t until the release of Baldur’s Gate in 1998 that my vision of how D&D might …

    Games 26 Oct 2011, 10:00

  • PowerPivot: a new spin on understanding your business

    Building relationships

    The Catch 22 of business intelligence is that to understand your business, you have to deal with vendors who want to “understand your business”, better known as “see how much we can charge you”. You then have to hope that something you don’t know might be really valuable. The most useful results are surprises not suited to the …

    Desktop 26 Oct 2011, 10:08

  • HP PC biz gets aggressive again

    Reseller rebates overhauled in SME and mid-market growth drive

    HP's Personal Systems Group is reverting back to a target-based rebate model for resellers after more than three years of operating a linear model as the tech titan eyes aggressive market share wins. The move kicks in across Europe next week (1 November) at the start of HP's fiscal New Year at a time when the traditional PC …

    The Channel 26 Oct 2011, 10:20

  • HP hooks up with Calxeda to form server ARMy

    I see no Atom ships

    HP is partnering ARM-licensee Calxeda to build energy-efficient micro-servers for large data centres, the WSJ reports. Calxeda is producing 4-core, 32-bit, ARM-based system-on-chip (SOC) designs, developed from ARM's Cortex A9. It says it can deliver a server node with a thermal envelope of less than 5 watts. In the summer it …

    Servers 26 Oct 2011, 10:39

  • Nokia launches Windows Phone range

    Free satnav and more

    Nokia officially launched its Windows Phone range today, kicking the line off with the Nokia Lumia 800, the device we've previously known as Sea Ray. In his Keynote speech at Nokia World 2011, company CEO Stephen Elop introduced the handset as "the first real Windows Phone", a bold statement if ever we heard one. As expected …

    Phones 26 Oct 2011, 10:47

  • Google cuts ribbon on Berlin research institute after ponying up €4.5m

    It's not for Google, it's for EVERYONE

    A Google-funded internet research centre opened its doors in Germany yesterday. The €4.5m academic institute will explore web innovations in general – and not just those related to Google. "This is not a 'Google Institute'," the company stressed in a blog post. "It is an independent academic body. Google will not interfere …

    Networks 26 Oct 2011, 10:58

  • Google report reveals YouTube takedown requests... by country

    UK wants jihadists off, Germany nixes Nazis, US wants to hide cop brutality

    The UK government asked Google to take down 135 YouTube videos for reasons of national security in the first half of this year, states Google's biannual Transparency Report, released yesterday. The report also shows that the German government asked for videos that included Nazi memorabilia to be removed, and that US police …

    Media 26 Oct 2011, 11:14

  • ITU sees an internet full of developing youth

    Digital divide splits high-income and low-income countries

    The developing world, including China and India, now accounts for 62 per cent of the internet's population, and while China dominates, it is by no means a controlling interest in the connected world of 2011. The International Telecommunications Union, enjoying its now-annual bash in Geneva, has released the figures, which show …

    Networks 26 Oct 2011, 11:29

  • Nokia's Brave New World is (almost) Finn-free

    Nokia World Things are different around here, now...

    What a difference a year makes. The only Finnish presence on stage during the 90-minute opening session of Nokia World this year was a dead architect. None of the five speakers was a Finn, and they said some very un-Nokian things. It’s a sign of how much Nokia is changing under Stephen Elop. Although Nokia still speaks its own …

    Mobile 26 Oct 2011, 11:46

  • Nokia to flood emerging markets with budget blowers

    Brimful of Asha

    Before unleashing its Windows Phone range on the world, Nokia first unveiled the Asha collection, a Series 40 line of low-end handsets. The Nokia Asha 200, 201, 300 and 303 are designed to get users in developing countries connected to the web. Looking at Nokia's new numerical naming system, it's easy to see where these guys …

    Phones 26 Oct 2011, 11:49

  • SUSE previews OpenStack-SLES cloud

    Waiting on Essex release

    Commercial Linux distributor SUSE, which was taken private by Attachmate back in April and split from former owner Novell, wants to do for OpenStack what it did for Linux. It is also what everybody else in the OpenStack cloud fabric camp seems to want to do: make some money selling support for OpenStack. The idea worked for …

    Developer 26 Oct 2011, 12:00

  • WHSmith Kobo Touch wireless e-book reader

    Review Has the Kindle met its match?

    The joys of the e-book reader are considerable. You can carry a thousand books in your pocket and download more in a matter of seconds while you’re sitting in the garden – assuming the Wi-Fi stretches or you have a 3G model. If there are words you don’t recognise, you can look them up with one touch too. And in the case of …

    Tablets 26 Oct 2011, 12:01

  • BT gets 14 days to block Newzbin2

    Web-blocking begins...

    Websites and IP addresses will become unreachable for the first time in the UK for copyright reasons. The High Court has ordered BT to block subscribers access to Newzbin 2, as well as any other sites or end points it uses. BT has 14 days to implement the measure, and must pay for it, too, a cost estimated at £5,000 initially …

    Law 26 Oct 2011, 12:14

  • Return of native: HTML5's enterprise battle

    Open ... And Shut Following the Facebook playbook

    Consumer smartphone apps may get all the press, not to mention $15bn in market size by 2013, but enterprise smartphone apps may well prove to be the bigger market. This may be particularly true of HTML5 apps, which have been all the rage at Facebook, the Financial Times, and other consumer-facing app developers. The reason? …

    Applications 26 Oct 2011, 12:29

  • Binned PCs were stuffed with MoD and Sun staffers' privates

    Updated Resold without wiping Rebekah Wade's naughty bits

    Security researchers have found personal records of Sun newspaper and MoD staff on the hard drives of discarded or resold computers. The study, The ghosts from the machines: A history of 10 years of carelessly discarded data, found that both businesses and consumers are getting rid of old PCs without wiping them clean. …

    Hardware 26 Oct 2011, 12:46

  • Euro banks unhappy with proposed e-payment rules

    Tighter security and fewer fees would interfere with the 'business model'

    The European Payment Council has taken issue with a number of the European Commission's proposals to try to make direct debits and credit transfers across the continent easier and cheaper. The council, which is a group of European banks and financial institutions helping to standardise e-payments, is unhappy with the changes …

    Business 26 Oct 2011, 13:01

  • Tsunami Trojan: First Mac attack based on Linux crack

    Slips in Mac OS X backdoor, phones home

    Malware writers have derived a new Trojan for Mac OS X by porting an older Linux backdoor Trojan horse onto another platform. The newly discovered Tsunami Trojan is derived from an earlier Linux-infecting backdoor Trojan, called Kaiten, which phoned home from infected machines to an IRC channel for further instructions. …

    Security 26 Oct 2011, 13:19

  • Job-seeking university bods panic over incriminating online info

    Don't turn into a pumpkin at the Halloween Ball

    Nearly half of university students are fretting about their future job prospects due to concerns about what personal information about them is lurking on the interwebs. The Information Commissioner's Office tasked YouGov with asking around 500 students across Blighty to take part in the survey. It found that 42 per cent, or …

    Media 26 Oct 2011, 13:38

  • Fujitsu foresees gloom, blames exchange rates

    Weak biz spending, yen and components

    Operating profits at Fujitsu slid by a little more than third in Q2 due to weakness at its device unit, slow Japanese biz spending and unfavourable forex conversions. The Japanese IT conglomerate recorded a 35 per cent drop in operating profits to 24.1bn yen (£198.6m) – ahead of its expectations – in the quarter ended …

    The Channel 26 Oct 2011, 14:01

  • Gelsinger pops lid on top-secret EMC Lightning code

    Flash cards reveal some parts of mysterious project

    EMC's Project Lightning code is being produced by a software team in Israel, using – El Reg thinks – Micron hardware. Project Lightning is EMC's placing of its own PCIe-connected flash memory cache card in servers, with its contents controlled by FAST (Fully-Automated Storage Tiering), which passes data to it from a backing …

    Storage 26 Oct 2011, 14:29

  • PC shortages 'inevitable' says Gartner

    Flooding in Thailand set to rock supply chain

    The channel should be braced for some PC shortages in the run up to Christmas as disk drive production woes caused by the floods in Thailand take effect, Gartner has warned. In an ironic twist – the industry has been awash with stock in the year to date as consumer demand fell off the edge of a cliff – resellers and punters …

    The Channel 26 Oct 2011, 14:36

  • A rapid first hands-on: Nokia’s Windows phones

    Nokia World Our man gets a grip on Elop's mangoes

    You are about to read what may be the shortest “hands-on” review you’ve ever read. But there is something quite surprising, I discovered, not appreciated until you compare both new Nokia models. Why the Clown Colours? After half an hour putting each through its paces, the budget model is the much more impressive offering. The …

    Phones 26 Oct 2011, 14:37

  • Swedish password hacking scandal widens

    210,000 login details dumped ...

    Sweden suffered its worst internet security breach in history, with over 210,000 login details across least 60 websites made public, including personal identity numbers of journalists, MPs and celebrities. On Tuesday, at least 90,000 passwords of the popular Swedish blog Bloggtoppen were exposed through a Twitter account of …

    Security 26 Oct 2011, 15:01

  • Man builds smartphone dock into arm

    Bionic handset

    You'd think being born without a forearm would be limiting for a smartphone user. Not for catering manager Trevor Prideaux, who flipped his handicap on its head and turned his prosthetic limb into a dock for his Nokia C7, The Telegraph reports. Source: SWNS Prideaux came up with the idea after playing around on an iPhone, …

    Phones 26 Oct 2011, 15:27

  • Cloudy tech start-up Twilio jumps the pond

    US telephony API firm targets Europe from new UK office

    Cloud communications company Twilio launched its European expansion today with the release of its telephonic API to the UK and in beta for France, Portugal, Poland, Austria and Denmark. The three-year-old firm, which allows software developers to build applications that make calls and send texts, will headquarter its European …

    Cloud 26 Oct 2011, 15:29

  • Process, not just product, will save your IT department

    RTFM is not enough

    So, you’ve bought your firewall. You’ve spent thousands on an intrusion prevention system, and you’ve got expensive data leak prevention software. Are you dead sure that your sensitive customer data hasn’t been leaked? In IT security, capital expenditure on products can help to protect your systems, but it isn’t enough. …

    Compliance 26 Oct 2011, 16:04

  • Pure challenges Spotify with cloud-based music service

    Get tuned in

    DAB radio specialist Pure has revealed its take on Spotify, launching a cloud-based music service for streaming tunes across a variety of platforms. For a subscription of £5 a month, Pure Music streams millions of songs, mixes and radio channels to laptops, smartphones and - yep - its DAB radios. As with Nokia's new music …

    Media 26 Oct 2011, 16:14

  • Avira anti-virus labels itself as spyware

    Auto-immune confusion

    Avira anti-virus detected components of its own application as potentially malign on Wednesday following a dodgy signature update. Avira detected its own AESCRIPT.DLL library file as the previously obscure "TR/Spy.463227" strain of malware. The dodgy AntiVir virus definition file was quickly pulled and replaced with a new …

    Security 26 Oct 2011, 16:29

  • Arrow Electronics sales and profits up in Q3

    Distie behemoth claims share from rivals, plans expansion

    Distribution juggernaut Arrow Electronics ploughed through Q3 with sales and profits up by double digits. The US firm, which recorded an 11 per cent rise in turnover to $5.19bn (£3.26bn) and an 11.5 per cent climb in profits to $132.2m (£83.1m) for the period ended 1 October, is now planning to beef up its vendor and services …

    The Channel 26 Oct 2011, 16:33

  • Hitachi unveils roadmap for cloudy offerings

    Layers upon virtualised layers

    Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has come up with a cloud strategy roadmap featuring three cloud tiers, but with precious little product detail fleshing out the strategy. The strategy involves BlueArc and ParaScale's scale-out file system being added to its existing storage products. It's also providing three cloud services either …

    Cloud 26 Oct 2011, 17:12

  • Apple plans big solar farm to clean dirty datacenter

    Project Dolphin – how green can you get?

    Apple is planning to build a huge solar farm to augment the power supply of one of its dirtiest datacenter clusters. The company has asked permission to clear 171 acres of land for a solar energy harvesting operation at a new datacenter in Maiden, North Carolina – codenamed Project Dolphin. Apple’s existing datacenter …

    Data Center 26 Oct 2011, 20:40

  • Rosat dropped over the Bay of Bengal: DLR

    Unknown how much survived the burn

    DLR, the German space agency, has stated that Rosat, the scientific satellite that re-entered the atmosphere on October 23, made its re-entry over the Bay of Bengal. While the agency had earlier stated there was a risk that some of the satellite could survive re-entry, in particular its mirror which was protected against …

    Science 26 Oct 2011, 21:30

  • Citrix snaps up App-DNA for app migration

    Throws kit and caboodle into clouds

    Citrix Systems has thrown a dizzying array of cloudy things at its partners and customers at the Synergy customer conference it is hosting in Barcelona, Spain this week, and like the cloud itself, the whole thing was a bit amorphous. The main takeaway is that Citrix is going to buy or build the tools necessary to make itself a …

    Cloud 26 Oct 2011, 22:25

  • ‘Want to be more secure? Don’t be stupid’ redux

    SANS Institute violently agrees

    The SANS Institute has endorsed the idea that Internet security is partly an IQ test, acknowledging Australia’s Defense Signals Directorate for its work on how best to defend systems. The DSD’s advice was that most attacks on most networks could be defeated with just four key strategies – patching applications and always using …

    Security 26 Oct 2011, 22:30

  • Quickflix set to stream from next month

    Finally press play on digital

    Australia’s latest IPTV aspirant Quickflix will launch its online based digital streaming subscription service from November 10. The ASX listed company launched its BWM created marketing campaign last night in Sydney with further details of its long anticipated move to digital. The company announced that it has secured a raft …

    Media 26 Oct 2011, 23:00

  • Why the FBI’s 'new Internet' is a dumb idea

    Behaviour is the disease, insecurity is the symptom

    The FBI’s Shawn Henry says the world needs a second Internet for critical systems – apparently never having been told what a “private network” is when you don’t prefix it with the word “virtual” – and the idea is taking off in other quarters. Here’s why it’s a dumb idea: it won’t work. It’s not just that the easiest defenses …

    Security 26 Oct 2011, 23:30