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22nd November 2011 Archive

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  • Microsoft tempts Kinect developers with bacon

    Is there nothing bacon can’t make better?

    Microsoft has been seeking to recruit developers to the Kinect platform using one of the most potent bribes in the book: bacon. Microsoft is looking to double the size of its current Kinect developer team, and has hired ad agency Wexley School for Girls to promote the idea. Those bright sparks came up with the bacon idea under …

    Developer 22 Nov 00:54

  • HP's server, PC, and printer businesses stumble

    Is Whitman HP's long-awaited Lou Gerstner?

    New HP CEO Meg Whitman sure does have her work cut out for her, but she managed to notch up a quarter that was slightly better than Wall Street expected on the revenue and profit fronts. But don't call victory quite yet. HP took some significant hits in its core PC, server, and printer businesses in the past three months. In …

    Channel Register 22 Nov 01:19

  • Tor launches DIY relays in Amazon cloud

    Easy to build, cheap to run

    The Tor Project is tapping Amazon's EC2 cloud service to make it easier for volunteers to donate bandwidth to the anonymity network. Developers with the project have released preconfigured Tor Cloud images that volunteers can use to quickly deploy bridges that allow users to access the service. The new system is designed to …

    ID 22 Nov 02:02

  • Jamo S 426 HCS 3 home cinema speakers

    Review Standing room only

    There is no shortage of home cinema speaker packages priced at around the £300 mark. It is less common to find one incorporating a large floorstanding pair but that’s exactly what long-established Danish brand Jamo is offering with this bundle. It seems too good to be true, yet somehow it is. Tower of power: Jamo's S 426 HCS …

    reghardware 22 Nov 07:00

  • Ofcom denies privacy to drunk-dial-and-drive trucker

    Complaint backfires on thirsty pantechniconist

    The BBC was justified in broadcasting the unblurred face of a trucker who was pulled for being on the phone, and subsequently arrested for being drunk at the wheel, despite his right to privacy, Ofcom has ruled. The trucker alleges that an episode of Motorway Cops violated his privacy in showing him being pulled, arrested, and …

    Music and Media 22 Nov 08:31

  • Chief Rabbi: I admire Jobs and Apple and use my iPad daily

    Meant no disrespect to dead bearded Buddhist biz baron

    Despite suggesting that Steve Jobs was a Moses of consumerism who had brought sadness to the world, Britain's Chief Rabbi uses an iPad every day and has no criticism at all to make of Apple's contribution to technology, said the Office of the Chief Rabbi. The statement emailled to the Reg was intended to clarify the religious …

    Bootnotes 22 Nov 08:58

  • Bed-hopping Big Blue pops up in sack with DataDirect

    Saucy giant puts it about a bit

    A couple of months after rejecting DataDirect in favour of NetApp E-Series kit, IBM has included DataDirect SFA10K storage in a cluster config. Big Blue has branded its clustering products as Intelligent Clusters, and they are bundles of IBM x servers, Mellanox InfiniBand interconnects and DataDirect SFA10K drive enclosures …

    Storage 22 Nov 09:14

  • Huge US command-&-control airship gets quantum optics

    Fibre-fat pipage for 'Blue Devil' aerial computer warship

    Pentagon boffinry powerhouse DARPA has announced plans to fit a giant new US military command and control airship - known as "Blue Devil Block 2" - with through-the-air optical links offering bandwidth normally achievable only by fibre cables. This is to be done using newly-applied technology developed in the 1990s for use in …

    Infrastructure 22 Nov 09:27

  • UK retailers launch pre-Xmas sales Yank style

    Paint it Black Friday

    Britain's sad bid to ape American traditions - trick or treat, I ask you… - continues this month as retailers launch Black Friday sales even though we have no Thanksgiving Day holiday to precede it. Amazon has been flogging off watches, electric toothbrushes, power tools and assorted second-rate fare this week, but will Dixons …

    reghardware 22 Nov 09:36

  • Tablets mean tubby HDDs must get thinner - A*STAR

    Porky platter wobblers must trim their bulging booty

    Tablet computers need skinnier hard drives to provide more capacity than flash, with flash caches adding speed to the single spinning platter mix. Researchers at the Singapore-based A*STAR or Data Storage Institute, which has been popping up in El Reg's pages quite a lot recently, think that current 7mm-thick single platter 2. …

    Storage 22 Nov 09:43

  • Successful space station shift change by Russian rocket

    NASA commanders ride up and down courtesy of Moscow

    The three returning crew members of the International Space Station touched down safely last night, marking another success for Russia's Soyuz spacecraft. Expedition 29 commander Mike Fossum of NASA and flight engineers Satoshi Furukawa, from Japan, and Sergei Volkov, from Russia, landed on the central steppe of Kazakhstan at …

    Space 22 Nov 09:59

  • Lapse It Pro

    Android App of the Week Speed it up

    When it comes to photography apps, iOS still has an advantage over Android. But the little green robot is catching up. The latest iOS-standard photography tool to hit the Market is a rather tasty time-lapse app. Called Lapse It Pro, it's advertised as the only time-lapse app for Android with its own rendering engine. This …

    reghardware 22 Nov 10:02

  • ePlods charge man, 60, with chick-lit MP Twitter threats

    Bonkbuster pol slightly out on age of bullying 'kids'

    A man, arrested in August on suspicion of menacing Tory MP Louise Mensch via Twitter and threatening emails, has been charged under section 127 of the 2003 Communications Act. "A man arrested over allegations of malicious communications and threats made via email and a social networking site against Louise Mensch MP has been …

    Networks 22 Nov 10:09

  • Security takes a backseat on Android in update shambles

    Mobe makers sit on new versions for six months

    The majority of Android smartphone users are walking around with insecure devices running out-of-date OS builds, leaving personal and business data at greater risk of attack. The latest figures from Google's Android developer web site show that 44.4 per cent of users have the latest version of Android (Android 2.3 or later …

    Mobile 22 Nov 10:21

  • US trade body rejects S3 'Apple nicked our IP' claim

    Early 'did infringe' ruling ruled out

    Apple has not ridden roughshod over 3S Graphics' intellectual property rights, the US International Trade Commission (ITC) has decided. S3, a company owned by Taiwan's VIA that designs graphics chips, complained to the ITC in May 2010, claiming Apple's iDevices and Macs make use of technology it owns - and do so without its …

    reghardware 22 Nov 10:25

  • We're searching for life, Jim, but not as we know it

    Boffins less fussy about what's a space alien

    Some of the world's top space boffins have proposed a new way to figure out the odds of finding life - but not as we know it - on another planet. The brainy bunch, composed of scientists from NASA, SETI, the German Aerospace Centre and four universities, suggested that so far our search for life in the universe has …

    Space 22 Nov 10:32

  • Man faces prison after enormous red chopper panics woman

    Cops feared it could have prompted an evacuation

    An Ohio man could face six months in the slammer after his enormous red chopper induced panic in a woman. Bill Morrison was busted after the woman spotted his enormous rubber chopper when he entered Corky's Thomastown bar in Akron, Ohio on October 16. The woman called 911 to say a man with long hair, and a trench coat, had …

    Bootnotes 22 Nov 10:48

  • Coders are creatives too: Where's our love?...

    Opinion The underappreciated class

    Developers conjure something from nothing, all day, every day; to my mind this is creation in its purest sense. Okay, we’re not knocking up a universe in seven days or putting the final touches to The Scream – although it may often feel like that – but building order, fun, even beauty, from a tapestry of ones and noughts is …

    Developer 22 Nov 11:00

  • Fake doc cuffed in concrete arse shocker

    Performed buttock-boost with 'cement and flat-tire sealant'

    Miami cops last week slapped the cuffs on a transgendered woman accused of performing a buttock enhancement with "cement, mineral oil and flat-tire sealant". The unnamed victim of the procedure, keen to sport a more shapely derrière, approached Oneal Ron Morris, 30, in May 2010 on the recommendation of a friend, CBS reports. …

    Bootnotes 22 Nov 11:09

  • Apple boots MacBook Air wannabes out of slim case fabs

    Building an aluminium ultrabook? Forget it

    MacBook Air competitors may have to be made out of plastic, rather than aluminium, because Apple has first dibs on the factories that make the light metal cases. The success of super slim MacBook Air has kickstarted a trend for svelte laptops called ultrabooks. But although the Air's tough and light unibody aluminium casing is …

    PCs & Chips 22 Nov 11:21

  • Boffins one step closer to Terminator vision

    I want your clothes, your boots and your computerised contact lenses

    Boffins have come a step closer to creating a Terminator-style field of vision with contact lenses that give hands-free info updates. Soon you too could assess random bikers for the probability that their clothes will fit you and locate your primary target with the computerised contact lenses, which researchers have been …

    Biology 22 Nov 11:29

  • Amazon's Android-friendly Kindle Fire splutters

    Open ... And Shut Acclaim comes cheap

    Amazon's new Kindle Fire is almost certain to be a financial success for Amazon, and may finally make a name for Google's Android in tablets. If only the success and acclaim were deserved. Amazon has done quite a bit to soften Android's rough edges, but in my experience it hasn't gone nearly far enough to rival the iPad for …

    Developer 22 Nov 11:39

  • Facebook 'shrinks' six degrees of separation theory

    Define friendship... bitch

    Researchers at Facebook and the University of Milan reckon that the degrees of separation between any two people in the world have been reduced to 4.7 from social psychologist Stanley Milgram's "small world experiment" of six back in the '60s. The study, which measured how many friends people have on Facebook, found that the …

    Music and Media 22 Nov 11:49

  • No Xbox Live hack say insiders

    But gamers losing money to phishing scams

    Microsoft sources have denied a claim that Xbox Live has been hacked, stating instead that gamers said to have had up to £100 lifted from their accounts were victims of phishing scams. Allegations that cyber criminals have "hacked into thousands of Xbox Live accounts to steal millions of pounds" in the UK were made by The Sun …

    reghardware 22 Nov 11:52

  • Nimble Storage gets a little clustered

    Scale-out coming

    Flash-enhanced iSCSI array startup Nimble Storage is going to add scale-out clustering to its boxes. At a press briefing in Silicon Valley, CEO Suresh Vasudevan said "Scale-out is very relevant to our customers who want to offer cloud services ... We're not in the cloud." He didn't add the implied "yet." We understand that …

    Storage 22 Nov 11:58

  • Hideous orchid that just wants a one-night stand found

    One to definitely regret in the morning

    A flower that only opens in the hours of darkness has been found in the primeval forest of the New Britain Island in Papua New Guinea. Perfect floral gift for a loved one, no? (Bulbophyllum nocturnum by Andre Schuiteman) Pollinated by moths, it was observed to open its petals at 10pm and shut them again at 10am by Dutch …

    Biology 22 Nov 12:07

  • Market watcher ayes claim iPad 3 to sport 1536 x 2048 screen

    More dots before your eyes

    Another analyst has claimed Apple's iPad display makers have started punching out 2048 x 1536 panels for the tablet's next incarnation. So says Richard Shim of DisplaySearch, a market watcher in an interview with Cnet. An Asian mole recently said LG, Samsung and Sharp have already shipped more than a million of the hi-res …

    reghardware 22 Nov 12:07

  • UK nuclear: Walking into darkness with eyes screwed shut

    Comment 'Watching brief' will be difficult when lights go out

    So the House of Lords Science and Technology committee has reported on the state of the UK's nuclear industry and government plans for carrying it forward: and, as anyone who follows these matters would expect, the noble lords have reported on a situation of total, shambolic chaos. That chaos has come about, not by unavoidable …

    Environment 22 Nov 12:17

  • Ten... Monster tellies

    Product Round-up The big picture show

    Back in the day you had to resort to a cabinet-sized rear projection TV if you wanted to watch Dallas on anything larger than a 37in CRT. Thankfully times have changed. Technically advanced, visually stunning super-screens are now the order of the day from every major brand. You need only oust some living room essentials – sofa …

    reghardware 22 Nov 12:29

  • Gates: Novell are sore losers, Word trounced WordPerfect

    Microsoft supremo testifies at antitrust hearing

    Hard work and the competition's ineptitude saw Microsoft Word thump WordPerfect, Bill Gates told a US court hearing the $1bn anti-competition case brought by Novell. Gates told a court in Salt Lake City, Utah, on Monday that his Redmond minions "worked super-hard" on Word. He added: "It was a ground-breaking piece of work, and …

    Channel Register 22 Nov 12:37

  • Superhero oil-burping algae will save the world

    No more war, no more tree-hugging hippies lecturing you

    "Rely on the sun and the other eco-friendly things that Mother Earth has given us. We need to stop being dependent on the corrupting effect that is oil now!" – HuffPost Super User "ProgressivePicon86" The next energy revolution is coming - and promises the biggest disruption since the industrial revolution. Today we assume …

    Environment 22 Nov 12:49

  • Netflix raises $400m to steady its global expansion

    Movie rental firm taps investors for extra cash as it moves into Europe

    Video rental firm Netflix, soon to be hitting the UK shores, has raised $400m in fresh capital from long-time investors to try to boost the firm after a tough few months. The US company has dropped nearly 75 per cent of its market value since July, when it announced an ill-fated plan to split its DVD and streaming services and …

    Financial News 22 Nov 12:55

  • When geeks turn Green: Performance tune your energy bills

    Part 2 How to stick up a fat two to the Big Six...

    A few years ago I suddenly saw my energy bills as another performance metric that I could tweak just like optimising Lehman Brothers' derivatives calculations that I was nominally paid squillions to do. In fact, this whole area is full of numbers and graphs and science and gadgets and interesting techie puzzles, never mind the …

    Environment 22 Nov 13:00

  • Facebook phone rises from the dead, again

    'Hey, I've died twice'

    Facebook is working on a phone, and has called it "Buffy" in tribute to the impossibly-hard-to-kill vampire slayer of the same name, but don't expect to see it until 2014. That's according to AllThingsD, which reports Facebook is working with HTC to have the phone ready for launch in 12 to 18 months. That seems a long time to …

    Music and Media 22 Nov 13:11

  • Russian diplomat caught driving while 15 TIMES over booze limit

    Blood supply was boozier than a glass of claret

    A Russian diplomat was an epic 15 times over the drink-driving limit when he was collared by Polish cops on Sunday. The unnamed cunning linguist drove erratically until he was stopped by cops in the Pomerania region, the Moscow Times reports. Cops felt the foreign service operative was behaving in a "strange" manner, the …

    Bootnotes 22 Nov 13:19

  • Poll: One in six interrupt bonking to answer mobile

    I'm never too busy for you

    A dodgy survey of surveys by online pawnbrokers CashGenerator.co.uk has compiled a list of bad phone habits that are stopping the world's smartphone owners sleeping, socialising and having sex. It's a sorry picture. The standout finding is that one in six of us would interrupt sex to leap out of bed and answer the phone, 83 …

    Mobile 22 Nov 13:28

  • Acer eyes 'untapped' rural China as West snaps purse shut

    PC-maker plans to make cash by penetrating farmers' market

    World number four PC-maker Acer is focusing on the folk still buying computers and hoping to grow its China sales by 20 to 25 per cent next year. The Taiwanese firm set up a strategic alliance with Founder Technology last year for that Chinese company to use its trademark on the mainland in an effort to boost its presence …

    Financial News 22 Nov 13:39

  • Russian Mars probe heads into space WITHOUT ENGINES

    Boffins baffled by rising orbit of Phobos-Grunt

    Boffins from the Russian space agency are baffled by the odd behaviour of the Phobos-Grunt probe, which seems to be flying all on its own without the aid of its non-firing engines. The spacecraft, originally meant for a mission to Martian moon Phobos, has been stuck in an Earth orbit for most of this month after two engine …

    Space 22 Nov 13:47

  • Solar-powered data centre won't get IBM very far...

    Big blue bombast

    IBM is rolling out a solar-powered data centre in India that will, it says, be one of the first data centres that don't need the electricity grid – but 80 per cent of the time the sun isn't shining brightly enough. Rod Adkins, a senior vice president in IBM's Systems and Technology Group, said: "The technology behind solar …

    Storage 22 Nov 13:58

  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

    Review Gripping Link

    Look who it is. Just when you thought that the dust-gathering ornament you used to call a Nintendo games console was in permanent retirement, back it bounds. Why? Because there’s a new Legend of Zelda in town - a game most will have played before in one guise or another, and one that Nintendo always finds a way to freshen up …

    reghardware 22 Nov 14:01

  • Cyber-cop Trojan used iTunes flaw to spy on crims

    Gamekeeper turned poacher

    A law enforcement Trojan takes advantage of the same recently patched iTunes flaw also used by Ghost Click botnet, according to a demo at a recent German trade show. Spiegel Online reports that a promo video for a variant of the FinFisher spyware application shows it exploits a vulnerability in iTunes to update the software on …

    Malware 22 Nov 14:14

  • Got a few minutes to help LOHAN suck?

    Home-made vacuum pumps... bright ideas invited

    As we recently reported, El Reg's Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) team has taken delivery of an AeroTech RC 32/60-100NS rocket motor – the proposed power plant for our Vulture 2 spaceplane. However, no one – including AeroTech – is sure whether the thing will fire while freezing its 'nads off at the intended launch …

    SPB 22 Nov 14:28

  • The top five spam subjects sullying inboxes

    FW: Re: Your malware ARTICLE 123508 is enclosed

    Security biz Websense has drawn up a list of the five most common spam subject lines. The nuisance list, based on the subject lines of the millions of spam messages blocked by the firm every day, highlights the danger of opening attachments or clicking dodgy links. The most commonly seen subject lines fall into the one of the …

    Spam 22 Nov 14:46

  • SCC11: final results banquet, winners feted

    Smelly cheese consumed

    The official results of the 2011 Student Cluster Competition were revealed at the lavish SC11 Awards Gala, a luncheon held at the Seattle Sheraton. I was a little put out that I wasn’t invited for the lunch, but felt better after I got a good whiff of it. Besides, I was busy working to find exactly the right position from which …

    SC 2011 22 Nov 14:53

  • Samsung jumps into bed with Google TV

    Telly service needs a lot of lovin' right now

    South Korean electronics giant Samsung is next in line to jump into the sack with Google on its TV services, ignoring the lacklustre uptake. Despite Google TV being lambasted by hardware partner Logitech as a "beta product" that "cost [Logitech] dearly", Samsung is planning to unveil its own Google TV at an event next year. …

    Business 22 Nov 15:01

  • Council not fined after 7,200 sensitive files dumped in skip

    SHOCK! Unencrypted records left on PC

    Southwark council breached the Data Protection Act after it left an unencrypted computer and papers containing sensitive information on 7,200 people in one of its buildings when it was vacated, which were then disposed of by the building's new tenant, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has said. The local authority …

    Small Biz 22 Nov 15:14

  • World population's appetite TO DOUBLE by 2050, boffin warns

    Change farming attitude to help poor nations or face catastrophe

    In just 40 years from now, global food demand could double with potentially devastating consequences for planet Earth, a top eco professor has warned. “Agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions could double by 2050 if current trends in global food production continue,” said David Tilman, who is Regents Professor of Ecology in the …

    Environment 22 Nov 15:20

  • Cutting-edge Mirasol display finally comes to e-reader

    South Korean 'Fire' touts next-gen screen tech

    The much-awaited Mirasol display has made its debut in an South Korean e-reader, offering the colour of LCD combined with the clarity, and power consumption, of electronic ink. Mirasol technology was developed by Qualcomm, who have been demonstrating it for a few years now and even announced that screens were in production …

    Music and Media 22 Nov 15:29

  • 'Nervous' London bankers run mock cyberattack exercise

    Banks test resilience of financial system as Occupy protestors mass outside

    London banks are taking part in a simulated cyberattack exercise on Tuesday designed to test the resilience of the UK's financial service industry to a collapse of telecoms systems and Olympics-related transport disruption. The exercise is occurring against the real world backdrop of the Occupy the City protestors, camped …

    Security 22 Nov 15:46

  • MS and Samsung tout interactive table

    Surface paradise?

    Microsoft announced this week that the Surface 2.0 table it built with Samsung is now available to order, with an expected delivery date of next year. First put on show at CES 2011, the Samsung SUR40 is effectively a table that incorporates a 40in touchscreen display and a PC to drive it. The scratchproof screen supports up …

    reghardware 22 Nov 15:49

  • Penguin pulls its e-books off library shelves

    Fed up with Amazon giving away its stuff for free

    A new "security concern" has forced the British book publisher Penguin to stop making electronic editions of its new books available to American libraries. Penguin has also banned the libraries from loaning existing Penguin e-books on their shelves to Kindle owners. Although Penguin isn't stating the specifics, it is believed …

    Music and Media 22 Nov 16:01

  • Microsoft pockets VideoSurf to create big search waves

    Hell, forget the metadata lets SCAN instead

    Microsoft has bought San Mateo, California-based VideoSurf for an undisclosed sum. The company, which was founded in 2006, developed software that scans videos to identify images, thereby doing away with the need to refer back to metadata. It currently has over 50 million users and could be considered as a would-be rival to …

    Developer 22 Nov 16:09

  • EU: Apple-Samsung row could be stifling competition

    Standardisation, IP could be TOOLS OF EVIL

    The EU has said it is concerned about the Great Patent Wars being a cover for unfair competition practices by IT firms. Despite no complaints being filed, the European Commission decided to open an investigation into the warfare between Apple and Samsung involving 3G standards patents. "We requested information from both …

    Government 22 Nov 16:19

  • Nuclear power will let NASA Mars rover beat 1970s Soviet record

    The throbbing plutonium heart of Curiosity

    Everyone knows the famous NASA Mars rovers "Spirit" and "Opportunity": but not everyone knows that for all their renowned longevity they do not hold the record for robot rover distance rolled on an extraterrestrial body. That honour belongs to the Soviet Moon rover Lunokhod-2, despite the fact that it was launched more than …

    Science 22 Nov 16:22

  • Samsung strokes big bulb that'll keep going for decades

    Hopes it doesn't go down like a LED balloon

    While we're waiting for flexible, flat, multi-cavity plasma array light bulbs to hit the market, Samsung has started selling advanced LED bulbs in the US that could last years. The bulbs, which Samsung hopes Americans will be using in their homes instead of incandescent, halogen and CFL bulbs, are inspired by the South Korean …

    Environment 22 Nov 16:39

  • Pure Storage attacks EMC heartland

    Taking the fight to Fibre Channel

    No VC is going to fund a start-up intent on attacking EMC's SAN array heartland with a disk drive array - who would be that foolish - but a flash array which outperforms VMAX/VNX and costs less? Now you're talking - if it's for real. Pure Storage is confident that it has the technology to beat EMC, Dell, HDS, HP, IBM and …

    Storage 22 Nov 17:01

  • US broadcasters team up to make Facebook for TV

    Hey, TV is like orgasms - not something you do solo

    Something big is cooking in portable TV in the US. It's possibly the equivalent of a Hulu (in that it is owned by content owners), but from a group of broadcasters who have already identified themselves as being behind the ATSC M/H Mobile DTV services: but this time the subject is both social TV and over the top (OTT) content …

    Music and Media 22 Nov 17:21

  • Cray takes Oak Ridge super to Titan

    Biggest computer upgrade – ever

    Peg Williams, Cray SVP of High Performance Computing, is working on the biggest computer upgrade in history – transforming the 200-cabinet, 42,000-processor Oak Ridge Jaguar supercomputer into its new Titan form. When it’s finished, Titan will have 21,000 16-core AMD Interlagos processors and a roughly equal number of NVIDIA …

    HPC Blog 22 Nov 18:00

  • Despite Android lead, iOS devs slurp scads more mazuma

    iPhone, iPad devs laughing all the way to the bank

    If you're a developer who wants the largest target market for your smartphone and tablet apps, write for Android devices. But if you want to make money, write for the iPhone and iPad. That's the conclusion of a pair of recent reports. Millennial Media's October 2011 Mobile Mix study reconfirms what has been true for months: …

    Developer 22 Nov 18:46

  • Groupon offer burns cupcake baker’s profits

    Be careful what you wish for

    A British baker has seen her entire annual profits wiped out after a Groupon deal went horribly awry. The Need a Cake bakery in Reading, Berkshire, signed up with Groupon to offer a 75 per cent discount on an order of a dozen cupcakes, cutting the cost from £26 to £6.25. Unfortunately for the small bakery, the offer proved too …

    Small Biz 22 Nov 18:58

  • Convirture revs up cloudy control freak

    Spanning more OSes and clouds

    Convirture is revving up its ConVirt family of server virtualization and cloud management tools to the 3.0.1 level, supporting more operating systems and public clouds, and also including a free trial of its Enterprise Cloud edition. Convirtue is among a legion of virtualization and cloud control freaks that have been coming …

    Infrastructure 22 Nov 19:52

  • Apple sucks porn domain names from squatters

    'iphonexxxforce.com' forced to come clean

    Apple has succeeded in prying loose a gaggle of iPhone-related domain names that were being used by a porn purveyor to redirect to its digital rumpy-pumpy wares. As The Reg reported earlier this month, Apple filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) alleging misuse of 'iPhone" in the seven …

    Hosting 22 Nov 20:22

  • HP to forge x86 Integrity and Superdome servers

    HP-UX Unix not making the x86 Odyssey

    HP will forge Integrity and Superdome machines based on Intel's Xeon processors in addition to the Itanium machines it currently is selling, and plans to upgrade through at least two more processor generations. Not that we didn't warn you. El Reg anticipated this when the "Tukwila" Itanium 9300-based Integrity and Superdome 2 …

    Servers 22 Nov 21:11

  • Amazon set to build Aus data centre

    Hiring staff but still quiet on plans

    Amazon is ramping up its activity down under, confirming that it is investing in an Australian data centre via a job advertisement. Speculation has been mounting since July over Amazon’s level of commitment to the Australian market, following a visit from Amazon VP and CTO Werner Vogels in July during the Amazon Web Services …

    Business 22 Nov 21:30

  • Google mail crypto tweak makes eavesdropping harder

    'Forward secrecy' protects data for the long term

    Google engineers have enhanced the encryption offered in Gmail, Google Docs, and other services to protect users against retroactive attacks that allow hackers to decrypt communications months or years after they were sent. The feature, a type of key-establishment protocol known as forward secrecy, ensures that each online …

    Enterprise Security 22 Nov 21:31

  • Engineers seek funds for world’s largest Tesla coil

    Ten stories of electromagnetic goodness

    A team of engineers is seeking $348,000 in funding on Kickstarter to build the world’s largest Tesla coils, capable of spitting artificial lightning for hundreds of feet. The Lightning Foundry, the brainchild of high voltage engineer Greg Leyh, will stand ten stories high (the original plan was 20 per cent higher) and will be …

    Physics 22 Nov 21:31

  • Cracked emails again deployed against climate researchers

    Taking the whip to the dead Climategate horse

    More University of East Anglia emails from the “Climategate” era have been posted online ahead of the upcoming Durban climate talks. The emails, wrapped up in a 170 MB zipfile hosted at this http://dump.kurthbemis.com/ site (having apparently been removed from the Russian site to which they were originally posted), represent …

    Environment 22 Nov 21:45

  • Oz Post taps telco luminary for new strategy

    Your mobile’s in the mail

    When Australia Post tapped former banker Ahmed Fahour as its CEO, speculation ran riot that the government-owned enterprise would head into retail banking. Now, it’s added a high-profile telco executive to its ranks, with Optus’ current head of regulatory affairs, Maha Krishnapillai, to join Aus Post in January. According to …

    Business 22 Nov 22:00

  • Attachmate checks into Melbourne for regional HQ

    Hires 40 ground staff

    The Attachmate Group, the new owner of Novell, has selected South Yarra in Melbourne as it Asia Pacific headquarters. The US-owned company is in the process of hiring 40 new staff. The Attachmate Group includes Attachmate, NetIQ, Novell and SUSE which will be brought together in the new Melbourne office. "The Asia Pacific is …

    Business 22 Nov 22:30

  • Parallel import argument turns toxic in Oz

    Vendors vs consumers Canon, Nikon in JB HiFi hissy fit

    With retailers in Australia getting shafted by vendors and consumers alike, it’s hardly surprising that the "Iron Curtain" of channel control is starting to fall. With it, price discrimination – the “hell, Aussies will pay anything” thinking that’s set prices for imported goods since time immemorial – is also breaking down, …

    Channel Register 22 Nov 23:00

  • FCC slips dagger into AT&T, T-Mobile merger

    'AT&T's thousands of jobs claim? Pure codswallop!'

    The US Federal Communications Commission has thrown a major stumbling block in the way of AT&T's proposed $39bn acquisition of T-Mobile by taking the unusual step of requesting an administrative hearing on the merger. Such administrative hearings are rare, and as The Wall Street Journal points out, the last time such a step …

    Telecoms 22 Nov 23:39