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14th February 2012 Archive

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  • EU, US sign off on Googorola merger

    Now the real fun and games begin

    As expected, EU competition authorities and the US Department of Justice (DoJ) have cleared Google’s proposed $12.5bn merger with Motorola Mobility. The merger, initially announced in August, has been on hold while regulators decide if the pool of over 17,000 patents granted to Motorola (and over 7,000 still pending) would be …

    Mobile 14 Feb 01:09

  • Mars, Europe losers in Obama's 2013 NASA budget

    Winners: Hubble's successor, high-flying humans

    President Obama has revealed his proposed 2013 budget, and buried inside the $3.8-trillion wish list – along with tax credits for students, tax increases for the wealthy, cuts to the military, and other Republican bait – is $17.7bn for NASA that brings good news to some and bad news to others. First, the good news for sky- …

    Space 14 Feb 01:13

  • HP previews ProLiant Gen8 servers

    Project Voyager launches Xeon E5s

    You can look at HP's new ProLiant Gen8 servers, but you can't touch. At the company's Global Partner Conference in Las Vegas this week, HP previewed some of the forthcoming machines' capabilities, but – much to the chagrin of hardware enthusiasts – didn't talk about the processors, system boards, and other "slots and watts" …

    Servers 14 Feb 01:44

  • Prada Phone by LG 3.0

    Review Diallers are a girl's best friend?

    Why is black and white classier than colour? And should we want our phones, with their increasingly glorious screens, to mute their rainbow hues? It’s the arrival of LG’s third collaboration with Prada that’s raised these questions – a handset that favours an interface dressed mostly in black and white. Glamour puss: Prada …

    reghardware 14 Feb 07:00

  • FIVE more councils say soz for exposing people's privates

    'Disclosing details about someone's social housing status can be upsetting'

    The Information Commissioner's Office has found that five local authorities have breached the Data Protection Act by failing to protect personal information about citizens. Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council breached the Data Protection Act four times over two months in 2011. In one incident, which occurred in May, an …

    Government 14 Feb 08:06

  • Sepaton plans to crush mid-range boxes

    'Kill the rabbit...'

    Sepaton, the large enterprise deduping storage vendor, reckons its big boxes can replace lots of those pesky, seemingly continuously accumulating Data Domain mid-range boxes with a single system that does the job properly. There are a few stand-alone survivors from the deduplicating array start boom of 10 to 15 years ago. …

    Channel Register 14 Feb 08:26

  • Debian, Ubuntu patching up rocky romance

    FOSDEM Deb supremo speaks as devs link arms in ARM

    The recent FOSDEM was great this year, and Belgium still had beer left before, during and after. Still lots of people, though with an extra building open – it was a little less crowded. There were over 400 sessions on themes from Mozilla, Java, cross-distro and embedded to Ada and law. There was lots of Debian at FOSDEM, and I …

    Operating Systems 14 Feb 09:01

  • Trustwave to escape 'death penalty' for SSL skeleton key

    Analysis Moz likely to spare certificate-confession biz same fate as DigiNotar

    Trustwave's admission that it issued a digital "skeleton key" that allowed an unnamed private biz to spy on SSL-encrypted connections within its corporate network has sparked a fiery debate about trust on the internet. Trustwave, an SSL certificate authority, confessed to supplying a subordinate root certificate as part of an …

    Enterprise Security 14 Feb 09:28

  • Tesco offers broadband for LESS THAN THE PRICE OF A PINT

    Read the small print

    Tesco is offering broadband for a mere £2.50 a month. It sounds like a good deal, but catches abound. For a start, you have to possess a Tesco Clubcard, and you have to cough up for a £13.75 Tesco line rental fee each month. Tesco touts the package as one that offers "unlimited downloads", but there is the inevitable fair use …

    reghardware 14 Feb 09:46

  • SexInfo 101

    NSFW App of the Week Bend me, shape me, anyway you want me

    The Android market is full of apps dedicated to the various positions you and your other half can tie yourselves into, but be warned: many have a terrifyingly long Permissions list. In other words many are nothing more than scams targeting the randy and stupid. 139 types - count 'em - of rumpy-pumpy SexInfo 101, on the …

    reghardware 14 Feb 10:00

  • Microsoft probes IE8 dll AWOL hell

    Windows XP PCs browserless

    Microsoft has said it is investigating a niggling problem with an Internet Explorer 8 update that's disabling a number of Windows XP machines. Admins and users are reporting here that after they installed an IE8 patch on PCs running Windows XP the machines were unable to boot Microsoft's browser. One Reg reader contacted us …

    Operating Systems 14 Feb 10:18

  • iPad spanks Galaxy Tab in its own backyard

    South Korean slab fondlers opt for Apple over homegrown Samsung

    There was some welcome news for Apple in Asia this week after new figures revealed that the iPad is absolutely trouncing its rivals in the South Korean market, notably local hero Samsung and its Galaxy Tab device. The Korea Herald reported that Apple had sold an estimated one million of its shiny tablets in the country since …

    Channel Register 14 Feb 10:38

  • Apple 'seeking part makers' for 8in 'iPad Mini'

    Tinier tablet in play?

    Asian moles have once again claimed Apple is working on a smaller version of its iPad tablet, but this time the diminutive gadget is said to sport an 8in rather than 7in screen. The sources, quoted by the Wall Street Journal, say Apple has been hawking the design around component suppliers seeking partners to produce parts for …

    reghardware 14 Feb 10:41

  • Veteran launches storage torpedo among competing startups

    LeftHand founder turns right with Starboard Systems

    The founder and CEO of the second most successful iSCSI array startup, LeftHand Networks1, is trying to do it again. He's chairing the board of another iSCSI startup: Starboard Storage, which is joining the hybrid SSD-HDD array party today. What's wacky about this is that ex-colleagues of his at LeftHand have also started up …

    Channel Register 14 Feb 10:57

  • Microsoft mulls touchscreen controller for next-gen Xbox

    Tablets turned

    Microsoft appears set to follow Nintendo and equip its next-gen games console with a touchscreen-equipped controller, along the lines of the one that will ship with the Wii U. Microsoft's forthcoming console "will be a matte black media hub with a mission to bring games to life in your living room with augmented reality, …

    reghardware 14 Feb 10:59

  • 5,000 Virgin Media workers unchained to slog away remotely

    Fingers crossed those net connections stay up

    Thousands of Virgin Media employees will soon be able to work from their beds a variety of locations after the telco asked network kit biz Cisco to deploy its Quad, WebEx and Unified Comms products. The tech sets free office-based folk so they can work remotely and on-the-go with video calls and shared documents, said Cisco. …

    Business 14 Feb 11:14

  • Now Proview seeks ban on ALL iPads coming out of China

    No love with Apple after trademark row escalates

    Chinese monitor biz Proview, which says it owns the iPad trademark, now hopes to block the import and export of Apple's trendy tablets in the country. Proview International Holdings has already managed to get the expensive fondleslabs pulled out of some shops in China, following a ruling in the Asian nation's courts that found …

    Channel Register 14 Feb 11:27

  • Cryptome.org hacked to dish out malware

    Compromised whistle-blowing HQ begins site rebuild

    Cybercrooks have planted malicious scripts on top of whistle-blowing nerve centre Cryptome.org. The website this morning... The attack, which used the well-known Blackhole toolkit, exposed surfers visiting any page of Cryptome.org to a hacker-controlled page that leveraged browser exploits and the like to compromise readers …

    Malware 14 Feb 11:47

  • 21st Century Sex: the shape of things to come

    NSFW Are bits and bytes changing what we do with our bits and bobs?

    In the 1980s, when the first HIV and AIDS awareness campaigns were launched, alongside the crashing tombstones, leaflets gave frank advice about the risks involved in digital intercourse. In those days, of course, that just meant pleasuring someone with your fingers. Concerns about computers and sex related to the possibility …

    reghardware 14 Feb 12:00

  • The El Reg book library - now on ePub

    No Kindle? No problem

    You asked for it, now you're going to get it. We're talking about making the El Reg collection of ebooks available on ePub as well as Kindle. Now you can enjoy the finest collected writing from our crack journalists on your Kobo, Sony Reader, Android tablet or Nook. Or all the above, if you're that way inclined. So if you …

    Site News 14 Feb 12:01

  • MySpace no longer crying a river with 1 MILLION new punters

    Facebook love-in, new music player boosts usage post-Murdoch

    MySpace may have been dumped by media tycoon Rupert Murdoch but today its star investor - aged pop prince-turned-actor Justin Timberlake - has something to smile about: the site has gained 1 million users since December. The signups represent the first growth for the site since Specific Media bought it. Murdoch's company News …

    Financial News 14 Feb 12:13

  • Samsung boss sued by his brother over stock inheritance

    Kun-hee accused of pilfering shares after father's death

    Samsung Electronics chairman Lee Kun-hee is being sued by his brother over stocks inherited from their father, the Samsung Group founder Lee Byung-chull. Lee Maeng-hee has filed the suit in Seoul, alleging that his younger brother secretly incorporated a huge amount of Samsung stocks into his assets, Korean news agency Yonhap …

    Law 14 Feb 12:34

  • SPRAY-ON antennas waved about at Google's techfest

    Turning the world into an aerial

    Presenting at the new Google-backed talk fest "Solve for X", ChamTech Operations showed its nano tech-based antenna in a spray can, turning trees into antennas and connecting submarines by radio. The technology is easy to explain, but rather harder to realise. It comes in a aerosol with which one sprays nano-capacitors – onto …

    Wireless 14 Feb 12:43

  • Twitter finally grabs wheel, drives all twits into HTTPS

    Cafe Wi-Fi tweeting protected from sniffing hackers

    Twitter has finally bedded down secure browsing on its site for all users after previously offering HTTPS as an optional feature. In March last year it debuted the opt-in setting that enabled Secure Sockets Layer encryption, but explained at the time that the option would not be switched on by default. The secure-browsing …

    Music and Media 14 Feb 13:04

  • HP gives sysadmins a little mobility

    iOS and Android clients on the way

    HP is embracing mobility with apps to allow sysadmins to receive alerts, manage systems and even shut down servers, all from the comfort of their booth seats at the pub. HP already provides SiteScope, with which one can monitor servers and receive alerts on Android and iOS devices. But in a presentation at the HP Global …

    Servers 14 Feb 13:23

  • Black Ops has best videogame ending ever

    Got your Guinness goggles on?

    Guinness World Records has confirmed Call of Duty: Black Ops has the greatest game conclusion of all time, after over 13,000 gamers cast their votes in favour of 2010's best-selling FPS. Treyarch's popular shooter, which offers a twist on the JFK conspiracy, pipped Halo: Reach and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to the …

    reghardware 14 Feb 13:25

  • Shuttleworth remixes Ubuntu... for biz users

    No offense to RHEL, m'kay?

    Inspired by the tweaks of Ubuntu-using IT departments, Canonical has released a Business Desktop Remix of Ubuntu. Re-chopping Ubuntu according to the most common changes that business users make to their installs, Canonical product leader Mark Shuttleworth hopes that the new desktop-friendly boot will make it easier for …

    Operating Systems 14 Feb 13:41

  • Hong Kong operators fudge unlimited tariff conundrum

    They're unlimited, but not too unlimited...

    Hong Kong mobile operators reacted to the introduction of new regulations on data tariffs on Monday by introducing a 5GB cap on fair usage and threatening to de-prioritise users who go over that limit. CSL, 3 Hong Kong and SmarTone all put out statements claiming they would continue to offer “unlimited” tariffs with the caveat …

    Mobile 14 Feb 14:02

  • Lego builds Lord of the Rings collection

    Another brick in the Deeping Wall

    Lego has confirmed it will bring Frodo and co. to its block party this year, with a Lego Lord of the Rings collection set to launch this summer. A Lego The Hobbit range is also earmarked for late 2012 to coincide with the film's cinema release. Gandalf the Grey, Aragorn, Legolas, Boromir and Gimli will join Frodo, Pippin, …

    reghardware 14 Feb 14:03

  • China clamps down on foreign telly on its channels

    Just in case The Big Bang Theory sparks revolution

    First it blocked the web, now it's going after TV. China has introduced tough new restrictions on channels broadcasting foreign-made telly and warned regulators to step up fines for any companies breaking the rules. The government’s State Administration of Radio, Film and Television made the announcement on Monday, explaining …

    Music and Media 14 Feb 14:31

  • Pope's PR says Vatican in grip of WikiLeaks-style scandal

    Leaky cardinals allege assassination plots, banking misdeeds

    The Pope's top PR man has declared that the Vatican is in the midst of its own "WikiLeaks" scandal after a flurry of confidential Papal documents were fed to the media by apparently disgruntled cardinals. The leaks have ranged from documents covering allegedly murky operations at the Vatican bank, to an investigation into a …

    Bootnotes 14 Feb 14:54

  • Insight exits 2011 on a high as sales and profits rise

    Reseller turns small revenue boost into cash pile

    Insight Enterprises ground out a decent set of Q4 numbers in spite of the global economic meltdown and a decline in underlying profits across EMEA. The reseller giant made an operating profit of $42.2m, up 13 per cent, and net income of $34.7m, up 39 per cent, on the back of a two per cent climb in sales to $1.4bn. It reported …

    Channel Register 14 Feb 15:18

  • Teen hacker claims smut site hack

    Hardcore group 'fesses up to breach as youth uploads 'members' privates'

    A teenage hacker claims to have broken into the Brazzers, the hardcore porn portal, before making off with hundreds of thousands of user login details. The 17-year-old Morocco-based hacker uploaded a sample of the stolen data – customer email details, usernames and passwords – as apparent proof of his exploits. He claims to …

    Crime 14 Feb 15:29

  • HELLISH LOVE INFERNO TO SWEEP LONDON

    Don't leave things lit and unattended while half-lit and, er, well-tended...

    The London Fire Brigade have taken it upon themselves to warn the romantically inclined that a Valentine's date could end with death in a burning hell blaze. Those who expect Valentine's Day to end with liquor, chocolates and a fumble between the sheets could instead find themselves fighting for their lives in a room filled …

    Odds and Sods 14 Feb 16:01

  • Shakira attacked by sea lion who mistook BlackBerry for a 'fish'

    Shiny mobe tempted sea-dweller out to lunch

    Latin pop singer Shakira was "paralysed with fear" after a sea lion lunged for her BlackBerry, she recounted on Facebook. The animal appeared to have mistaken the BlackBerry for a fish, Shakira explained, and lunged for her while she was taking pictures of it on the phone. "I believe what happened is that it confused the …

    Odds and Sods 14 Feb 16:19

  • Nimbula stretches Director to VMware ESXi clouds

    Hyper-V when enough customers ask

    Thus far, Amazon's EC2 compute cloud is the standard for virty server infrastructure running on what amounts to a public utility. But there are two problems with it: you can't run your own EC2, and Amazon doesn't support VMware's ESXi hypervisor, which is the hypervisor of choice for x86 servers in corporate data centers. But …

    Virtualization 14 Feb 16:38

  • Ultra-high resolution laptop, tablet screens to revive display biz

    IGZO's 'retina screen' revival

    Market success is a product of two factors: supply and demand. Only when both are growing and, at the same time, closely matched will a market perform well. The production of flat-panel displays for everything from tablets to televisions has been suffering from a period in which supply has far outstripped demand. Together, …

    reghardware 14 Feb 16:55

  • Mozilla throws 'freedom' at Microsoft, Google, Apple tanks

    All the web's a platform, and the lock-down merchants merely players

    The Mozilla Foundation is coming to the rescue of Tim Berners-Lee's sanity. The Firefox shop is this year throwing itself at walled gardens from Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft: armed with a device-neutral and API-neutral app store and a "web platform". Mozilla's building a Marketplace for Apps that will open in June and …

    Developer 14 Feb 17:04

  • Scroogle: Dear Google, we're not bots, we're HUMAN

    With every Choc Factory privacy policy season, die die die!

    A not-for-profit search engine that serves up a privacy-friendly version of Google has been out of action for much of today. Scroogle, which has routinely been scraping the Chocolate Factory's search results since 2002 in very workmanlike fashion, sported an error message announcing that it was down for most of the day. " …

    Applications 14 Feb 17:34

  • EMC Greenplum Hadoop elephant straddles Cisco iron

    Cah. Took them long enough

    Well, that took long enough. Cisco Systems and the Greenplum big data unit of server partner EMC have finally gotten together and put the Greenplum wares on Cisco's Unified Computing System servers. In a blog posting, Raghunath Nambiar, an architect at Cisco's Server Access and Virtualization Technology Group, reveals that the …

    Servers 14 Feb 17:58

  • Cloudy bigshots eclipse open source

    Open... and Shut Cloud computing and mobile hog the limelight

    Open source seems to have waned in importance over the past few years as cloud computing and mobile have taken centre stage. Of course open source remains a key ingredient for cloud infrastructure and mobile tooling, but is it still important for end users? About as much as it ever was, which is to say, not very much. So while …

    Developer 14 Feb 18:32

  • OCZ out-flashes EMC's Lightning

    16TB of caching vMotioning flash

    OCZ has announced a 16-terrabyte server flash-card whopper that supports vMotion and – spec-wise – tosses EMC's puny 300GB Lightning card out of the pram. OCZ's announcement of the Z-Drive R4 CloudServ is anorexic, detail-wise, but here's the little we've gleaned from it and a couple of other outlets: Capacity ranges from …

    Storage 14 Feb 19:08

  • Chip boffins demo 22-nanometer maskless wafer-baking

    A possible savior when Moore's Law hits the light wall

    An international consortium of chip boffins has demonstrated a maskless wafer-baking technology that they say "meets the industry requirement" for next-generation 14- and 10-nanometer process nodes. Current chip-manufacturing lithography uses masks to guide light onto chip wafers in order to etch a chip's features. However, as …

    PCs & Chips 14 Feb 20:47

  • ACCC pins ADSL wholesale price

    Seeks input on final declaration

    The ACCC has settled another piece of unfinished business in the broadband market, announcing yesterday that it has issued a “service declaration” for Telstra’s wholesale ADSL service. In service declarations, the regulator has the power to set prices ad other terms for bottleneck services – those required by all players in an …

    Telecoms 14 Feb 21:15

  • LibreOffice debugs and buffs up to v.3.5

    Dancing on the grave of OpenOffice

    The Document Foundation (TDF) has announced the release of LibreOffice 3.5, which it modestly describes as “the best free office suite ever.” This latest 201MB build strips out a lot of redundant code from the OpenOffice base around which LibreOffice is built, a move which initially caused the software some stability problems …

    Applications 14 Feb 21:38

  • Damn it, where’s our NBN scandal?

    Another night in Senate estimates…

    In a simmering scandal that’s showing every sign of completely failing to fester as a good scandal should, it has emerged that NBN Co CEO Mike Quigley’s legal bills associated with the “Alcatel affair” amounted to almost nothing. And so another Senate estimates hearing passed last night, the only real news being that it …

    Telecoms 14 Feb 22:00

  • Canonical takes the Ubuntu Server pulse

    Lovin' those Long Term Support releases

    Commercial Linux distributor Canonical has released its third annual survey of the Ubuntu Server installed base to show what is going on out there among the Shuttleworth faithful. The survey comes just as Canonical is getting ready to put its next big server release into the field in April. Depending on how you slice up the …

    Servers 14 Feb 22:31

  • UK crime-busters knock hiphop site off the Internet

    SOCA occupies, accuses RnB Xclusive

    The UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) has moved on a popular hip-hop news and track-exchange site, RnB Xclusive, and is threatening those trying to access the site with criminal investigation. The site, described by TorrentFreak as a popular blog posting news, commentary and links to music, has been seized by SOCA and …

    Policing 14 Feb 22:55

  • Qld council gets crafty with mobile data mining

    Logan's mobility run

    South East Queensland’s Logan City Council has implemented a mobile strategy that assists the local council in data collection and deployment of business services. The experimental council, with a population of 280,000, recently completed a trial with Rype, a Queensland-headquartered mobile and cloud integration consultancy, …

    Business 14 Feb 23:15

  • Japanese robot mirrors master’s movements

    Do dat crazy Avatar dance

    The Avatar headlines were inevitable, weren’t they? Japanese researchers have unveiled a master-slave robot that moves in synch with kit worn by the robot’s controllers. Telesar V of Keio University has a more serious purpose than entertainment, though: its developers hope it could be a precursor to robots designed to enter …

    Rise of the Machines 14 Feb 23:30

  • Apple CEO defends fixes to suppliers' working conditions

    Underage labor 'abhorrent', overtime abuse 'endemic'

    CEO Tim Cook wants you to know – really wants you to know – that despite what you may have heard, Apple takes working conditions at its Asian contract manufacturers quite seriously and is working to improve them. "No one in our industry is doing more to improving working conditions than Apple," Cook told investors and analysts …

    PCs & Chips 14 Feb 23:42

  • Alcatel-Lucent opens up Aladdin's cave of patents

    Signs up with RPX licencing cabal

    Alcatel-Lucent has joined an international patent licencing syndicate RPX Corp which will open up its portfolio of 29,000 issued patents and expects to reap a handsome fiscal return. The RPX model allows the owners of IP to make some dosh out of their latent smarts, without the legal headaches. Participation in the new …

    Business 14 Feb 23:45