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18th January 2012 Archive

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  • Plan hatched to view Milky Way's black hole heart

    Stargazers to test if Einstein was right

    A conference being held this week in Arizona will lay the groundwork for an attempt to visualize the supermassive black hole that resides at the heart of our galaxy. Since a black hole absorbs light itself, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team is looking for the ring of matter that forms around the perimeter of the structure …

    Space 18 Jan 00:56

  • Another trans-Tasman link underway

    Huawei jumps on board Optikor

    The ditch between Australia and New Zealand is getting a lot more hectic with moves for another trans-Tasman cable link underway. Axin Limited and Huawei Marine have signed a survey agreement for the trans-Tasman Optikor Network. This fresh trans-Tasman link, a rival to Southern Cross Cable Networks, is set to be completed by …

    Business 18 Jan 04:51

  • Netgear ReadyNas Duo v2 network storage

    Review ARM twist tactics

    Netgear’s ReadyNas Duo v2 appears to be identical to its predecessor from the outside, yet it actually represents a rather radical shift in hardware design for the company. This dual bay ReadyNas model does away with the Infrant Technologies IT3107 SPARC processor featured on earlier models and replaces it with a 1.6GHz ARM CPU …

    reghardware 18 Jan 07:00

  • German ISP doesn't have to block foreign 'illegal' betting sites

    Court: Deutsche Telekom not on the hook for site's content

    A German internet service provider (ISP) does not have to block its customers from accessing foreign betting websites even if they are considered illegal in the country, according to reports. The Administrative Court of Düsseldorf ruled that Deutsche Telekom did not have to block access to the sites, according to a translation …

    Law 18 Jan 08:02

  • Fans goad Valve for Half-Life 3 gen

    Let us be Freeman

    Fans of Valve's groundbreaking FPS franchise, Half-Life, have taken to the net en masse to voice their frustration regarding a lack of information on the series' next installment, Half-Life 3. Seven years or so have passed since Half Life 2 hit shelves for the PC. Ever since, the gaming world has sat patiently holding its …

    reghardware 18 Jan 08:14

  • New stealthy botnet Trojan holds Facebook users hostage

    Victims must pay $25 to get back into stalkerbase

    A new strain of cybercrime Trojan is targeting Facebook users by taking over their machines and shaking them down for cash. Carberp, like its predecessors ZeuS and SpyEye, infects machines by tricking punters into opening PDFs and Excel documents loaded with malicious code, or attacks computers in drive-by downloads. The …

    Malware 18 Jan 08:29

  • NHS trust to digitise millions of patient records

    IT director boasts: We're paper-light

    The Heart of England NHS foundation trust has signed a five-year deal to digitise its patient records. The £7m contract, signed last year, sees EDM Group charged with converting the trust's millions of paper records into electronic format. The records are collected daily from three trust sites and then tracked, transported, …

    Government 18 Jan 09:04

  • Phages: The powerful new bio-ammo in superbug war

    Keep calm and carry on research

    They're the most abundant form of life on Earth – they have astonishing properties – and we know bugger-all about them. Bacteriophages were only discovered in 1912, and the Red Army and the Wehrmacht both carried phage water as a bacterial treatment. Then antibiotics came along and science ignored bacteriophages for a very …

    Biology 18 Jan 09:32

  • Dizzy: the Ultimate Cartoon Adventure Part Deux

    Antique Code Show The agony and the eggstacy

    For my money, one of the greatest games ever made for the Amstrad CPC was Fantasy World Dizzy. At age seven, I was positively ravenous for my fix of Dizzy's latest adventures, and my brimming fervour to play it was good training wheels for the likes of Sonic 2 and Street Fighter II: Special Champion Edition. You gotta Troll …

    reghardware 18 Jan 10:00

  • Five Koobface botnet suspects named by New York Times

    Trojan coins millions for its masters, say researchers

    Five suspected masterminds behind the infamous Koobface botnet have been unmasked in a move abetted by Facebook to put the heat on cyber-crimelords. Koobface, one of the most sophisticated strains of malware developed to date, has been harassing users of Facebook (and to a lesser extent Twitter) for years. Typically the virus …

    Malware 18 Jan 10:25

  • Government launches hydrogen motoring task force

    Can Britain be ready for 2014 h-car rollout?

    The UK government hopes Britons could be motoring in Hydrogen-powered cars as early as 2014, Business Minister Mark Prisk said today. Speaking in London at the launch of UKH2Mobility, an initiative to evaluate what Britain needs to make that vision a reality, Prisk admitted that the e-car is still part of the government's CO2 …

    reghardware 18 Jan 10:26

  • A preview of SOPA: Web shut down before my eyes

    Sysadmin blog Hated anti-piracy laws will hit everyone

    On Saturday, 7 January, a Canadian DNS host named EasyDNS winked out of existence. This was a preview of what SOPA promises to be like. Suffering from a massive DDoS, all DNS services provided by EasyDNS simply ceased to function. Metacritic and DSL Reports are two examples of sites that affected me directly. Random but …

    Sysadmin blog 18 Jan 10:41

  • Russian boffins: US radar didn't fry Phobos-Grunt

    Megawatt ray-gun not to blame for Martian probe fiasco

    Russian boffins have pooh-poohed the theory that duff Martian moon probe Phobos-Grunt failed to leave Earth's orbit because it had been knackered by US radar. Yesterday, news website RIA Novosti reported that a Russian government commission scrutinising the fiasco was mulling whether or not US radars interfered with the craft …

    Space 18 Jan 11:02

  • Virgin Media broadband goes titsup for 3 hours

    Routing gear fingered for nationwide outage

    Virgin Media was hit by a major broadband service blackout early last night that affected an unspecified number of the telco's five million customers. The company confirmed that the downtime started on Tuesday evening. "If you experienced a loss of internet connection between 5pm and 8pm on Tues 17th January, we experienced a …

    Networks 18 Jan 11:19

  • Samsung denies sniffing around RIM

    Blog's BlackBerry biz buyout blab sparked share spike

    A blog which reported Samsung was looking to buy RIM triggered a jump in the Canadian company's shares, before Samsung had the chance to deny it was interested in the company. The shares in RIM went up by 8 per cent on the BGR.com story, which claimed the only thing preventing a sale was RIM's CEO holding out for more money. …

    Channel Register 18 Jan 11:41

  • Google boots out OpenStreetMap-nobbling contractors

    Don't be evil on our network

    Google says it has kicked two unnamed contractors off its projects after OpenStreetMap alleged that someone working for the company had vandalised the free map service. A Google spokeswoman said: "The two people who made these changes were contractors acting on their own behalf while on the Google network. They are no longer …

    Cloud 18 Jan 12:01

  • Ten... laptop accessories

    Product round-up Gadgets to go

    Those of you with laptops will undoubtedly agree that even with all convenience of portable computing, there remain compromises aplenty. Yet add a gadget here and there and mobile working can be improved tremendously. Whether it's a tool to keep it cool, a way to boost the audio or simply better ways to keep the darn thing …

    reghardware 18 Jan 12:02

  • Trevor explores Microsoft virtual training

    Designs, UI and information overload?

    I've spent quite a bit of time recently exploring Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA). Putting aside the site's content, I think that the website design itself is worth a discussion. MVA runs on a clean, elegant website. What you need to find is easily found; what you need to do is easily apparent. In an era where information …

    Developer 18 Jan 12:32

  • Homeless Intel science compo whiz off to see Obama

    Teen semifinalist gets invite to State of the Union address

    Intel science competition semifinalist Samantha Garvey has been invited to attend US President Barack Obama's State of the Union address. Garvey, whose tale of academic excellence in the face of adversity has turned her into a media darling, will have a great seat in the gallery at the President's speech, as the guest of New …

    Science 18 Jan 12:34

  • Alienware takes aim at consoles with mini PC

    Desktop 360

    Alienware joined the mini PC biz this week, revealing a powerful games machine roughly the same size as an Xbox. The Alienware X51 desktop squeezes high-performance components into a compact chassis, the Dell subsidiary said, in a bid to be the brains of a your home entertainment hub. As such, the X51 veers away from the …

    reghardware 18 Jan 12:37

  • Windows 8 hardware rules 'derail user-friendly Linux'

    Installing OS will be a pain for newbies, says Red Hat bloke

    The question of whether Secure Boot technology in UEFI firmware could exclude Linux from PCs running Windows 8 has taken a fresh twist. Red Hat engineer Matthew Garrett, one of the first to flag up the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface issue, has blogged that Microsoft's rules for certified Windows 8 hardware do not make …

    Windows 8 18 Jan 12:46

  • WTF is... 802.11ac?

    Next-gen Wi-Fi beamforms in

    Wireless networks are never fast enough, but for the moment at least they are generally quicker at shifting packets of data than the broadband connections they're typically linked to. That's changing. Broadband speeds are rising, especially those fed through fibre-optic lines. Fortunately, Wi-Fi is keeping up. A number of chip …

    reghardware 18 Jan 13:02

  • Symantec 'fesses up: 'Code theft worse than we thought'

    pcAnywhere users - batten down the hatches

    Symantec has backtracked on its previous assurances about a recent source code theft, admitting its network was breached and code for a larger number of products than previously thought was swiped. Two weeks ago the security giant confessed that a blackhat crew had made off with source code for older versions of some of its …

    Channel Register 18 Jan 13:21

  • George Lucas: 'No more Star Wars'

    Director calls quits on blockbusters

    George Lucas has announced his retirement from the movie business. The director blurted the news to the New York Times in an extensive interview centred on Lucasfilm's upcoming flick, Red Tails. "I’m retiring," Lucas told the paper. "I’m moving away from the business, from the company, from all this kind of stuff." While …

    reghardware 18 Jan 13:22

  • Clearwire and China Mobile link up for 4G time-div trials

    I don't want to pair up, I want to have one after another

    As part of the Global TD-LTE Initiative US-based Clearwire and China Mobile are joining forces to test time-divisioned networks in both countries, though we'll likely see the technology in the UK too. That's because Ofcom, the UK regulator, has earmarked 50MHz of spectrum for the TD variant of 4G telephony, despite the fact …

    Mobile 18 Jan 13:39

  • Apple wants to OWN YOUR VERY SOLE

    Patented location-garb, shoes points out nearest bogs

    Clothes that track your every move could fill Apple fanbois' wardrobes after the fruity tech titan patented new wearable technology. The designs, approved yesterday, describe "smart garments" with embedded sensors and a two-way communications link to an external database. Based on the existing Nike+ iPod trainers, the new …

    Cloud Business 18 Jan 13:57

  • Mars attacks! Morocco pelted with rocks from the Red Planet

    Ochre space bonanza worth ten times its weight in gold

    Excited boffins have confirmed that a meteorite shower over Morocco last July dumped about 7kg of Martian rocks on our planet. The find is only the fifth time that scientists have been able to tell that a witnessed meteor shower contained samples from the Red Planet. It's quite handy for Martian meteors to land on Earth since …

    Space 18 Jan 14:19

  • Alleged Muscovite cybercrime daddy hauled in to face US court

    Feds allege père et fils duo scooped $100ks using malware

    A suspected Russian cyber-crook has arrived in the US to face charges of security fraud, computer hacking and ID theft following his deportation from Switzerland. Vladimir Zdorovenin, 54, of Moscow, Russia, is alleged to have masterminded a series of credit card theft and stock manipulation scams in conjunction with his son, …

    Crime 18 Jan 14:56

  • Peeking up the skirt of Microsoft's hardy ReFS

    Getting under the skin of Windows 8's new server filesystem

    As reported this past fortnight, Microsoft's new Storage Spaces for Windows 8 is only half the story; the operating system builder is also throwing in a new Resilient File System (ReFS) while retaining most NTFS features and semantics. Storage Spaces is a Windows 8 feature that enables a PC user to aggregate physical disk …

    Channel Register 18 Jan 15:32

  • Xio shells data centre citadels with barrels of disks

    Growing Hyper ISE biz eyes up global domination

    Xio, under fresh new executive management, is renewing its assault on computer data centres, convinced that this time, with a better, more focused business structure, it can breach the big data centre citadel walls it has been assaulting time after time. It is extending its international business structure; concentrating …

    Channel Register 18 Jan 16:08

  • Cisco boasts of 10,000th server customer

    $1.1bn in iron a year, and snowballing

    The jury is still out as to whether Cisco Systems' foray into servers hasn't done more harm than good to its overall business, but one thing seems certain: the business is growing. Cisco's iron is competing and the Unified Computing System blade and rack servers cannot be called a failure. Earlier this month, Cisco added its …

    Channel Register 18 Jan 16:31

  • Nexenta scores another $21m

    Will use to grow until ... IPO?

    Privately held startup and ZFS zealot Nexenta has snagged $21m in a C funding round and, as the self-proclaimed fastest-growing growing company in enterprise storage, is ready to power on to IPO-land and Croesus-level riches for its backers – or so they wish. The company supplies NexentaStor, an Open Solaris and ZFS-based …

    Channel Register 18 Jan 17:07

  • The Register to publish other sites' blacked-out content in SOPA protest

    Updated Vulture Central in selfless bid to save the internet

    As many Register readers will be aware, websites across the internet have pledged to black out all or part of their content as a protest against the proposed US Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). We at the Register applaud these noble acts of self-sacrifice, in which we will see the English-language Wikipedia sort-of blacked out ( …

    Bootnotes 18 Jan 17:27

  • LightSquared accuses government of ‘rigged’ interference tests

    Company claims collusion with the GPS industry

    LightSquared has issued a public protest over the results of GPS interference testing by the US government of its planned LTE mobile network, claiming the tests have been “rigged” to fail. Last week EXCOM released the results in a letter to the US Commerce Department, and they were about as unequivocal as it gets. The …

    Mobile 18 Jan 20:45

  • Two PROTECT IP sponsors drop support for their own bill

    Politicians scatter in the face of public ire

    Two of the co-sponsors of the PROTECT IP anti-piracy bill currently working its way through Congress have dropped support for the legislation. “I have decided to withdraw my support for the Protect IP Act,” said Florida Senator Marco Rubio on his Facebook page. “Furthermore, I encourage Senator Reid to abandon his plan to rush …

    Government 18 Jan 20:46

  • Facebook ANZ boss unfriends gig

    Exits but set to stay in Australia

    Facebook downunder is without a leader following the announcement that after less than three years in the country, Facebook Australia and New Zealand leader Paul Borrud will leave the house of Zuckerberg next month. In an unexpected move, Borrud has also told Australia's Ad News that he would be staying in Australia to pursue …

    Business 18 Jan 21:43

  • Chocolate Factory moves into the fridge

    Chill no evil

    It’s hard to decide which is worse: the breathtaking triviality of the patent, or the idea that Google doesn’t just want to see your fridge, it wants to track changes of ownership. The patent in question, US 8,091,772, was granted on January 10, part of a clutch winding its way through to publication in the last fortnight to …

    Hardware 18 Jan 22:30

  • Atlassian get top G'day gong

    Praised for 10 years of uber innovation

    Australian softwar darlings Atlassian has been recognised by the Australian government for its achievements, securing a G’Day USA Excellence in Innovation Award. G’Day USA is an annual program designed to showcase Australian business capabilities in the United States. In 10 years, Atlassian has amassed more than 17,000 …

    Business 18 Jan 23:00

  • Australia, US agree to space junk talks

    America adds ‘national security’ caveats

    Australia and America have decided that Europe’s moves against the half-a-million items of space junk might be a good thing. Australia’s participation was announced January 18 (Australian time) by foreign minister Kevin Rudd, while Space.com reports that Hilary Clinton issued a statement on January 17 (US time). America’s …

    Space 18 Jan 23:30

  • Red Hat guns for VMware with RHEV 3.0

    Linux virtualization – that's Shadowman's home turf

    Red Hat has built a $1bn company, more or less, predicated on the idea that open source Linux is cheaper than Windows or Unix and that open source Java application servers are cheaper than commercial alternatives like WebLogic and WebSphere. For two years now, Red Hat has been trying to convince the world that it has a chance …

    Infrastructure 18 Jan 23:35