12th March 2012 Archive

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The seven types of commentard

Researchers say labels beyond 'lurker' and 'contributor' needed

Throw out your old definition of online communities as comprised only of lurkers and contributors commentards. A team of academics has come up with seven categories of people who hang out online, and the same number of post types. The new classification reached the light of day in the February 2012 issue of International …

Odds and Sods 12 Mar 03:59
Cyber snoopers target NATO commander in Facebook attack

China blamed again

NATO’s most senior military official has come under a concerted cyber attack from hackers believed to be operating from the People’s Republic of China. The Observer reported on Sunday that cyber fiends had targeted Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) Admiral James Stavridis by opening fake Facebook accounts in his name in …

Security 12 Mar 04:21
China's 4G licenses still years away

Long road ahead for the base station builders

It might have close to one billion mobile subscribers but China’s 4G network infrastructure won’t be ready for another two or three years, according to a government official. Ministry of Industry and Information Technology chief Miao Wei, told local TV last week that the government wanted to double the number of 4G base …

Networks 12 Mar 05:02
NHS claws back £1.8bn from IT project fiasco

CSC in cash-back deal with Department of Health

The government has reached an agreement for a reduction in its contract with CSC, the largest supplier to the now-defunct National Programme for IT (NPfIT). The total saving for the Department of Health (DH) from NPfIT will now be approximately £1.8bn. Health secretary Andrew Lansley told an E-Health Insider event in London …

Government 12 Mar 08:01
That steady diet of EastEnders IS turning her into a shrew

Study shows soap operas trigger aggression in women

Just as the viewing of violent movies or videogames can turn people nasty, so it seems that hours spent watching angry fictional drama protagonists cheating, bullying, deceiving and shouting at one another will also have evil effects. The revelation that EastEnders and Coronation Street cause at least as much human misery as …

Entertainment 12 Mar 08:28
Rub Facebook pals in your wealth with 'social' credit card

Citibank ticks Web 2.0 boxes for moneybags

Those who don't feel they're sharing enough can now sign up for a Citibank Clear.24.7 card, linked to their Facebook account and earning awesome badges of recognition. Not just badges, the Clear.24.7 card offers coupons and the usual loyalty points to Citibank customers in Singapore, but it's the social integration the company …

Networks 12 Mar 09:02
Brocade brags about EASILY bedding campus LAN biz

Simplified networks package anticipates smartphone data deluge

Brocade is baking new campus LAN products with its HyperEdge technology providing mix-'n'-match edge switch stacking and single point management. The HyperEdge technology is said to facilitate simplified and automated access layer networks that will be able to accommodate the expected flood of data traffic to/from smartphones …

Storage 12 Mar 09:32
Kogeto Dot 360° video lens

Geek Treat of the Week For iPhone panoramic video shoots

If you’ve ever dabbled in the world of panoramic photography and tried to stitch images together so that they form a virtual reality movie, you’ll know, frankly, what a pain in the backside it can be. There’s the lining up of the shots, the careful positioning of camera and tripod, and, of course, there’s always some stray …

reghardware 12 Mar 10:00
Council spunks '£100k on how to wash your hands' vid

Outraged Telegraph administers West Sussex a righteous shoeing

West Sussex County Council is taking a bit of a shoeing down at the Telegraph for allegedly spending £100,000 on a video showing people how to wash their hands. The paper has rather incautiously put Middle England at serious risk of apoplectic fit by running the headline "Council spends £100,000 on 'how to wash your hands' …

Bootnotes 12 Mar 10:19
Jupiter and Venus get cozy in revealing late-night display

Red Planet also makes an appearance

Be prepared to hear a lot of irritating New Age chatter about the planets being in alignment over the next few days, because some of them actually will be. Venus and Jupiter have been lighting up the evening skies in the last few weeks and are drawing closer and closer together, until Venus passes just 3 degrees north of …

Space 12 Mar 10:21
1,600 pubs and bars to get free Wi-Fi

O2's shout

Yes, Mitchells & Butlers does sound like a comedy duo or a brand up up-market smokes, but it's actually the owner of a string of eateries that O2 will be equipping with gratis Wi-Fi. M&B runs Irish theme-pubs O'Neill's, plus Nicholson's pubs; All Bar One; the posh version of All Bar One, Brown's; and 1970s throwbacks Harvester …

reghardware 12 Mar 10:23
Mozilla to drop Windows 8 Firefox bomb on IE 10

One browser to straddle Metro and classic UIs

The Mozilla Foundation has started work on a Firefox port that will run in the Windows 8 classic desktop and the tablet-friendly Metro user interfaces. Moz dev Brian Bondy, who described the project in detail on his blog, said the goal is to deliver a single browser capable of straddling the Microsoft operating system's split …

Operating Systems 12 Mar 10:39
Dell working on cloudy analytics apps

Survey says SMBs want one SaaS throat to choke

If you have a multi-billion dollar business selling servers and PCs directly to small and medium businesses, what happens when companies start shifting some of their computing needs to the cloud? You shift from being a manufacturer of IT gear to being a maker of cloudy systems and applications and a reseller of cloudy wares …

Infrastructure 12 Mar 11:01
Apple iPad 3 'retina display' uses Sharp super-high aperture tech

Pixels too muddy without it

What's the secret behind squeezing four times as many pixels into the same iPad screen area as Apple's display suppliers managed with the previous model and making it look better? A technology called "Super High Aperture", apparently. SHA involves slapping a 3µm "photo-definable acrylic resin layer" on top of the display's …

reghardware 12 Mar 11:05
Cambridge student wins 'Hack Idol'

Updated Teen grabs trophy after 6-month challenge

A 19-year-old computer science student has been named the UK's Cyber Security Champion following months of competition. Jonathan Millican emerged victorious from finals held over the weekend at the end of a six-month challenge designed to get talented people to consider a career in cyber-security. The final showdown ( …

Enterprise Security 12 Mar 11:17
Game Group shares slide under a penny

End nigh for High Street retailer?

High street retailer Game has put itself up for sale after shares plunged to a penny this morning amid concern over the company's future. Game Group PLC's gloomy Monday morning saw its stock open at 1.75 pence, down from 3.51 pence when the market closed on Friday. A few minutes later and it plummeted further, continuing the …

reghardware 12 Mar 11:18
Picture this: Photo-fiddling app Instagram on Google Android

27 million punters is not enough

iPhone photo tinting app Instagram has bagged 27 million users and will release an Android app "very soon", CEO-founder Kevin Systrom said at SXSW. The proclamation comes a week after rumours emerged that the company's 17-month-old vignette filter was on the verge of pulling in $40m in venture funding and had been valued at $ …

Applications 12 Mar 11:33
iPad 3 ship times slip back

Weeks to wait now

Order an iPad 3 now and you're not going to get one when the new tablet officially goes on sale, on Friday, 16 March. Apple's UK website is currently listing the ship window for both black and white iPad 3s, be they Wi-Fi only or Wi-Fi and 4G, as "2-3 weeks". So you're unlikely to get one without queuing round the block at …

reghardware 12 Mar 11:44
Network security spending lifted by DoS attacks and BYOD

Staff's virus-riddled fondleslabs fuelled cash gush on kit

Organisations' efforts to safeguard against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and to manage the rise in BYOD fuelled Q4 market expansion, said Canalys. Sales across EMEA grew 9 per cent year-on-year and nearly 13 per cent on the previous quarter to $674m, the beancounter confirmed. Networking linchpin Cisco led the …

Channel Register 12 Mar 11:46
WTF is... White Space radio networking?

Feature Channel surfing

2012 will be the year White Space radio starts delivering networks of unprecedented speed and range, but if it works then White Space will also change how radio is used across the spectrum. The first commercial radio networks utilising White Space are already running, but in eagerness to associate White Space with the ever- …

reghardware 12 Mar 12:00
Marvel to animate comic action with AR app

Kerplow! Splat! out of your phone's screen

Marvel has jumped on the augmented reality bandwagon with an app that brings panels in its paper comics to life on a handset's screen. The company is pushing hard to move into the digital age through a modernisation process it calls 'Marvel ReEvolution'. The first part of that process is the app, Marvel AR, which aims to …

reghardware 12 Mar 12:21
UK cybercops cuff abortion clinic web hack suspect

Info leak threat after site vandalised

Cybercrime cops have arrested a bloke suspected of hacking into and defacing the website of Britain's largest abortion provider. The British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) site was compromised on Thursday by a hacker using the handle Pablo Escobar, who claimed an affiliation to the Anonymous hacktivist group. Escobar …

Crime 12 Mar 12:32
Apple resellers left to pick bones of dwindling iPad stocks

Demand 'off the charts' says channel bully boy

Apple has run out of iPads stocks worldwide, before the third-generation slab of fondling loveliness has even hit store shelves. The devices were available for pre-order last week on Apple's website with shipping date in the US set for 16 March but that has slipped by three days. Expectant owners in other early release …

Channel Register 12 Mar 12:46
Jimbo Wales 'to advise Whitehall on transparency'

Foxes to advise on henhouse security

In what may prove to be a political gift to Labour, Wikipedia's spiritual leader Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales has been hired to advise Whitehall on openness and transparency. Rohan Silva, the No 10 advisor whose brainchild is rebranding the leisure startups of Shoreditch as "TechCity", announced the news at the SXSW conference and …

Government 12 Mar 12:47
Nokia Money shot: Mobile banking service axed

World domination plans crumble under boot of reality

Nokia is axing its banking service in India, the only place it was ever launched, as the company continues to scale back to focus on selling mobile phones. Following trials going back to the start of 2010, leading up to a national launch across India late last year, Nokia Money is shutting down in the face of increasing …

Financial News 12 Mar 13:02
Nanocapacitor slab to boost car batteries

Oz company hopes to cash in on green 'stop-start' car plans

Australian company CAP-XX has announced a supercapacitor module for cars that it hopes will take a load off chemical batteries. Capacitors are common in most electronic devices, thanks to their ability to hold a small charge for a short time. CAP-XX's current schtick is making very small and thin capacitors which, thanks to …

Science 12 Mar 13:20
iPhone tethering app uses HTML5 to defeat Apple's censors

Pushing web language to the limit

A Wi-Fi tethering application for the iPhone has managed to bypass Apple's restrictions on such apps by doing the whole thing in HTML5 - and charging for it too. Tether did pop up in the Apple store briefly; it was available for about 20 minutes before Cupertino spotted the app was allowing iPhone users to share their mobile …

Applications 12 Mar 13:38
Samsung spanks Apple in world's biggest mobile market

iPhone maker snubs 650m Chinese punters

Apple’s efforts to dominate the largest mobile market in the world are being frustrated by old foe Samsung and its own stubborn refusal to bring out a 3G device compatible with market-leading network China Mobile. According to Gartner stats picked by Bloomberg, Apple still languishes in fifth place in the smartphone market in …

CIO 12 Mar 14:01
Take your pics: Facebook shuts down Gowalla

SXSW Location service checks out

Facebook have shuttered the check-in location service Gowalla three months after acquiring it. The Gowalla site is displaying a notice thanking users for "going out" with the service – and offering users the option to download their photos and check-ins. The announcement at tech and media fest South By Southwest (SXSW) comes …

Applications 12 Mar 14:17
Legendary artist Moebius dies

Sci-fi loses another visionary

The world of sci-fi is in mourning after legendary French cult artist 'Moebius' died following a long battle with cancer. Jean "Moebius" Giraud, whose stunning fantasy artwork and drawings for comics influenced some of the biggest names in the business, succumbed to his ailments this weekend aged 73. As well as providing …

reghardware 12 Mar 14:39
Human 4G masts assemble roaming hobonet for pennies

SXSW Homeless bods strapped to wireless kit at Texas bash

An advertising agency has broken boundaries by attaching 4G gear to homeless people and encouraging them to roam around the SXSW festival while radiating data packets. Homeless Hotspots, a novel system concocted by the New York branch of Bartle Bogle Hegarty, allow techies and journalists to rapidly blog and check their …

Wireless 12 Mar 14:43
Windows 8: Thrown into a multi-tasking mosh pit

Sysadmin blog Ribbon rescue rope too slippery to climb

Does Windows 8 improve upon Windows 7 for the use cases that my real world customers and users demonstrate? After a week of tinkering with the consumer preview, the answer is far from simple. Now that's what I call multitasking (click to enlarge)... First up is the ribbon. For new users to a product, my experience …

Sysadmin blog 12 Mar 15:02
EU antitrust bigwig offers Apple, publishers ebook truce

But only if sacrifices are made

The EU is willing to consider settling its differences with ebook publishers and Apple if they're willing to make some sacrifices, the European Commission's antitrust chief said. The commission is in the midst of an investigation into whether Apple colluded with five major publishing houses to fix prices for digital books in …

Law 12 Mar 15:27
High Court asked to keep 'cheap DVD' VAT loophole open

Judicial review begins this week

The English High Court will tomorrow begin an investigation to determine whether online retailers should be allowed to avoid paying VAT on CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray Discs. The judicial review, demanded by the Governments of Jersey and Guernsey, follows Chancellor George Osborne's decision to close the Low Value Consignment Relief …

reghardware 12 Mar 15:28
Thousands of Brits bombarded in caller spoofing riddle

Small biz blamed for silent calls at 2am

Thousands of Brits were tormented by nuisance calls after West Midlands businesses were caught up in a caller ID spoofing blitz. Firms including We Solve IT and solicitors Bridgehouse Partners appeared to bombard residents at all hours of the day and night thanks to a foreign outfit that used the companies' numbers to mask the …

Telecoms 12 Mar 16:02
SafeNet swallows cloud-based authentication firm

Cloudy Cryptocard acquisition for cash rain...

SafeNet has bought UK-based cloud-based authentication firm Cryptocard. Financial terms of the deal, announced Monday, were not disclosed. The deal will allow SafeNet’s existing server-based authentication technology to work alongside Cryptocard’s Blackshield cloud-based services. Cryptocard markets a range of SMS-based …

CIO 12 Mar 16:17
Hackers penetrate smut site, claim to have slurped users' privates

Used to be my Digital Playground

Hackers claim to have made off credit card records and other personal information after mounting a smash-and-grab raid on porn site Digital Playground. A previously unknown group called the The Consortium claims to have extracted the user names, email addresses and passwords of 73,000 subscribers to the grumble flick portal. …

Enterprise Security 12 Mar 16:43
Asus: We are NOT killing off Transformer Prime

It's just that availability has been pants

Asus has not placed the Eee Pad Transformer Prime on the scrap-heap just yet, but availability has been so poor that channel folk can be forgiven for thinking it had been killed off, the vendor has admitted. Typically, non-iPad vendors have struggled to create the same level of hype around their tablets that Apple has mastered …

PCs & Chips 12 Mar 17:01
if year > 2013 then PC != Personal Computer

Personal Cloud will be your digital hub instead

The abbreviation 'PC' will soon no longer stand for 'Personal Computer', but 'Personal Cloud'. Come 2014, the latter will be where consumers keep their digital content, not the former. So says Gartner, a market watcher, reckons what you might call 'PC 2.0' will be ushered in by legions to tech-savvy punters already used to …

reghardware 12 Mar 17:07
New iPads to hit Apple stores on Friday

But they're not in the back room, m'kay?

Staff at Apple's Covent Garden store confirmed that they will have the new iPads in the shop first thing on Friday morning, despite pre-orders clearing out piles of the slabs. The store didn't have any tablets, explained the Apple helper on Monday, meaning that somewhere in the UK – and not in the back room of the Covent …

PCs & Chips 12 Mar 17:13
IDC: Big data biz worth $16.9 BILLION by 2015

Up from $3.2bn in 2010 ...

How big is the big data business? That depends on how you dice and slice it. The box-counters at IDC have cooked up a very precise and formal definition of big data that will keep everything from being thrown into the big data pot. To some ways of thinking, big data is just the new ERP for a webby world, and to others it is …

HPC 12 Mar 17:22
Nokia readying Win8 tablet for 2012 release?

Finnish phone folks to dip tiny toe in tablet market

The long-rumored Nokia Windows 8 tablet is set to debut in the fourth quarter of this year, according to the Taiwanese market-watchers at DigiTimes. Citing "sources at upstream component suppliers," DigiTimes reported on Monday that Nokia's ARM-based Windows 8 tablet would be based on a dual-core Qualcomm platform, have a 10- …

Mobile 12 Mar 17:58
How a tiny leap-day miscalculation trashed Microsoft Azure

Redmond drills into cause of eight-hour outage

As soon as Microsoft's cloudy platform Azure crashed to Earth, and stayed there for eight hours, on 29 February, every developer who has ever had to handle dates immediately figured it was a leap-day bug. Now the software biz behemoth has put its hands up and admitted in a detailed dissection of the blunder how a calendar …

Virtualization 12 Mar 18:01
Oracle starts peddling Exalytics in-memory appliance

Analysis Big data costs big bucks

Oracle has begun shipping its Exalytics in-memory appliance, and if you are thinking about using one of these devices, you had better brace yourself for an intense negotiation about deep price cuts, as well as writing a big check to Oracle even after you get a good deal. Exalytics ain't cheap. And that is not necessarily a …

Servers 12 Mar 18:16
Megaupload boss: Site popular among US government users

May be tempted to name names in Justice, Senate

The boss of the recently shut-down Megaupload file-sharing site claims that his records show plenty of US government users, including members of the Senate and the Department of Justice. "Guess what – we found a large number of Mega accounts from US Government officials including the Department of Justice and the US Senate," …

Law 12 Mar 19:25
Speedy 3D printer creates 285µm Formula-1 speedster

Nanoscale engineering just got much faster

Scientists at the Vienna Institute of Technology have demonstrated a polymer and laser etching technique that promises to dramatically speed up the printing of tiny 3D objects. The technique uses a fluid polymer developed at the university, which hardens when hit by a strong light source. A laser was used to create a series of …

Physics 12 Mar 20:33
Big Blue goes terabit with opto transducer

‘Holey Optochip’ sets record for speed and cheesy names

With the growth of terabit optical systems, the race has been on to shrink their components, so it’s no surprise that IBM has attracted attention with its demonstration of the ‘Holey Optochip’, a single-chip transceiver with terabit per second transfer speeds. The prototype, demonstrated at the Optical Fiber Communication …

Data Networking 12 Mar 21:16
Commbank bakes Kaching into NetBank

Apps encourage download and use of wireless payments app

Weeks after using free beer and food to promote its Kaching wireless payments app, the Commonwealth Bank has baked it into its iOS banking app. Kaching allows peer-to-peer payments between users, in some cases mediated by Facebook. The Commonwealth Bank says it has been downloaded 110,00 times, but is cagey about how many of …

Networks 12 Mar 22:14
PayPal slaps down Dr Who ‘charity book’

Payment processor plays the Dalek

This can only end in tears: a PayPal processing ban has stalled production of a charity book based on celebrity’s memoirs of Dr Who. Just ten days after the producer of the book began his “crowdfunding” experiment by accepting pre-orders for the book, PayPal stopped accepting payments, according to the producer’s blog. …

Business 12 Mar 22:30
Yahoo! fires! patent! lawsuit! at! Facebook!

You're not really trying unless you're suing someone

As rumored late last month, Yahoo! has filed a lawsuit against Facebook, alleging – what else? – patent infringement. Apparently feeling left out of all the fun currently being enjoyed by the legal teams of Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Motorola, Symantec, Oracle and others, Yahoo!'s hired guns filed suit on Monday in a San José …

Law 12 Mar 22:41
40,000 XO PCs destroyed in Peru fire

Lima residents warned of pollution as One Laptop Per Child project burns

40,000 XO computers, the model used in the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, have gone up in flames in Peru. The computers were in a Peruvian Education Ministry warehouse, along with 20,000 conventional laptops. That warehouse burned down last Friday. The OLPC project says that no-one was hurt and quotes Peruvian President …

PCs & Chips 12 Mar 22:43
Oldest skeleton found in South Australia

500 million year old fossil like ‘a thimble with needles’

Researchers from the University of California Riverside and the South Australian Museum have turned up a surprising creature more than half a billion years old, showing signs of a skeleton. The find, called Coronacollina acula, is the oldest fossil so far discovered to show signs of ‘hard structure’ development, the …

Biology 12 Mar 23:00
HP readies public cloud for May launch

Like Amazon, but really OpenStack in a suit

After three CEOs and several years, it looks like server juggernaut HP is finally getting ready to launch its public cloud. The company has been tight-lipped about its plans, but Zorawar Biri Singh, senior vice president and general manager of its Cloud Services unit, was in a talkative mood when approached by The New York …

Cloud 12 Mar 23:21
Twitter buys microblogging service Posterous

Rumors suggested pre-Posterous sale

Twitter has bought the microblogging service Posterous and will be running it as an adjunct to its main client – for the time being, at least. "This team has built an innovative product that makes sharing across the web and mobile devices simple – a goal we share," said Twitter in a statement. "Posterous engineers, product …

Business 12 Mar 23:25