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2nd April 2012 Archive

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  • Austar one step closer to Foxtel

    While Foxtel battles parent piracy claims

    Austar shareholders have green lit the proposed merger with Foxtel despite the swirling piracy allegations against Foxtel’s majority stakeholder News Corporation and its former subsidiary NDS. Fairfax Media has been reporting allegations that in the 1990’s News Corp subsidiary NDS performed a litany of anti-competitive tactics …

    Business 2 Apr 00:22

  • Oz to review copyright law for digital age

    Law Reform Commission asked to consider social networks, time-shifting

    Australia will review its Copyright Act to ensure the they serve the nation in the digital age. The review, announced by Federal Attorney-General Nicola Roxon, will “reflect the fact that technology is constantly evolving and testing the boundaries of copyright law," Roxon said. The eventual review will be handled by the …

    Media 2 Apr 02:30

  • Free CompSci 101 finally launches this month

    Stanford lecturer's course teaches true coding secret: projects always run late

    A free Computer Science 101 course that planned to launch in February 2012 will now launch on 23 April. Stanford Lecturer Nick Parlante announced the class in late 2011 and explained, in this video, that it would include some rudimentary coding. Intentionally or not, the course inadvertently taught what happens to any coding …

    Software 2 Apr 04:34

  • China purges coup rumours from social media

    Six arrested, sites shuttered, after reports of Beijing coup spread online

    Two of China’s biggest social media companies, Tencent and Sina, have reportedly been punished by the government and forced to temporarily suspend comments on their micro-blogging sites, after the authorities clamped down in response to unsubstantiated online rumours of a coup in Beijing last month. Rumours started to swirl a …

    Policy 2 Apr 04:41

  • Big Blue to handle SKA's Big Data about Big Bang

    Dutch government hands over €32.9m for exascale computer

    Big Blue has been given the ultimate big data gig - collecting and analysing data all the way back to the universe's early history, thanks to a brief from the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) and a €32.9m cheque from the Dutch government. ASTRON and IBM will collaborate on a computer capable of ingesting the …

    HPC 2 Apr 06:34

  • Huawei looks to India to spur 4G revenue growth

    Chinese telecoms equipment giant set for 40 per cent growth

    Chinese telecoms equipment maker Huawei is looking to ramp up its investment in India to capitalise on the country’s 4G plans, as western markets become increasingly hostile towards the firm. Local daily The Economic Times revealed that Huawei made around $1.2 billion from India in 2011 and plans to grow its revenues there …

    Business 2 Apr 06:35

  • Chelsio box-o-SSDs does 1.1 million IOPS

    JBOSSD di tutti JBOSSD

    Chelsio, a network adapter card supplier, will demo a 1.1 million IOPS SAN array at SNW Dallas. They make it sound easy. All you stuff is stuff four Micron P320h PCIe SSDs in a box, add a Chelsio 10GbitE T4 unified wire adapter, and its Unified Storage Server (USS) software running, presumably, on an X86 processor. This is the …

    Storage 2 Apr 07:01

  • Bring-your-own-mobe pilot for BlackBerry-shunning council bods

    Fandroids and Apple fanbois out themselves to bosses

    Cambridgeshire county council is to launch a bring your own device (BYOD) pilot, which will allow 50 employees to access corporate resources on their own gadgets. The local authority has restricted the BYOD trial to Android and Apple products to give its staff an alternative to GCSx compliant BlackBerrys. According to the …

    Government 2 Apr 07:27

  • Analysts see no Oracle hardware-biz recovery on horizon

    Sun sinks slowly in the west

    The road ahead for Oracle's plucky band of hardware resellers in not certain say analysts. The admonition comes in the wake of Oracle's latest numbers which show that software licensing and support revenues rose in its third quarter but hardware and systems support fell 16 per cent and and four per cent respectively. …

    Channel Register 2 Apr 07:58

  • Blighty slaps £100m spending cap on govt IT projects

    MPs fed up of blowing millions on crap contracts

    The coalition's election pledge to cap IT contracts at £100m will become official policy from next month. A procurement policy notice released by the Cabinet Office sets 1 April as the deadline when the cap will come into force for central government departments, their agencies and non-departmental public bodies. The £100m …

    Government 2 Apr 08:31

  • Battling remote-control helicopters

    Geek Treat of the Week Aerial combat

    If flying a remote control helicopter is no longer enough of a challenge, it’s time to move to the next level and add a little spice to the mix. The Battling Gyro helicopter allows you to do just that by including an ‘attack’ button on the remote control. That button activates an infra-red beam on your helicopter, the idea …

    reghardware 2 Apr 09:00

  • Druva adds BYOD crenellations to its data fortress

    Fondleslab'n'mobe package lets you manage users not boxes

    Druva's inSynch product has been revved to add tablets and smartphones to its existing laptop data protection scheme and bring them all into a uniform enterprise data protection and security scheme. Both Android and IOS tablets and smartphones are supported with a single user profile covering a user's bring your own device ( …

    Cloud Business 2 Apr 09:18

  • Are you an ECO POET? Climate science needs YOU

    Creative writing and global warming formally allied

    The dividing line between creative writing and climate science - sometimes thin - has been triumphantly dissolved. A new postgraduate course at the University of East Anglia hopes to bring together "researchers in the environmental sciences, philosophy, history and literature to develop new ways of thinking about environmental …

    Energy 2 Apr 09:42

  • Red Hat: Amazon love 'yes', its own cloud 'no'

    'We don't use Oracle as a model'

    Red Hat won’t spin up its own public cloud service but is getting serious with Amazon on OpenShift. That’s according to Red Hat’s vice-president for cloud computing Scott Crenshaw who last week said the open-source biz has “no plans” to become a cloud provider. Crenshaw told reporters in London that Red Hat wants to focus on …

    Cloud Business 2 Apr 09:57

  • Nokia v Apple nanoSIM format war: Victor will be named next month

    4FF: Even smaller than it sounds

    Telecoms standards overlord ETSI has postponed its vote on the official tiny SIM design until the end of May - while carefully considers who it can afford to upset the least. There are two proposals for the fourth form-factor (4FF) SIM chip, one from Nokia and one from Apple, and the European Telecommunications Standards …

    Mobile 2 Apr 10:14

  • Game chain sold

    Retailer rescued by Comet owners

    UK High street retailer Game has been acquired by Comet owner OpCapita. The Game Group's administrator, PwC, yesterday said it had agreed to sell the troubled company's UK business to Baker Acquisitions Ltd, an entity overseen by OpCapita, for an undisclosed sum. The move takes The Game Group's UK operation out of …

    reghardware 2 Apr 10:20

  • Freeview TV shoved aside for iPad-compatible 4G

    Ofcom mulls 2018 frequency bump

    Ofcom's latest wheeze for better wireless broadband in the UK is to bump Freeview down into the 600MHz space no one wants, enabling US-compatible LTE for anyone still using a new iPad come 2018. As part of its ongoing efforts to satisfy the public's unquenchable thirst for mobile bandwidth Ofcom's proposal involves shifting the …

    Telecoms 2 Apr 10:29

  • Tibetan activists' Macs targeted using trojan-laden MS Office files

    Backdoors popped by unusually sophisticated methods

    A string of booby-trapped Microsoft Office files that plant malware in Apple Macs via rarely abused vulnerabilities have been detected in the wild. The malicious documents were uncovered in a run of spam messages sent by pro-Chinese hackers to Tibetan activists, security tools biz AlienVault reports. It said the assault was …

    Malware 2 Apr 10:43

  • UK.gov to unveil reborn, renamed net-snoop plans in Queen's Speech

    If at first people protest, try telling them on Sunday

    The Coalition's plans to hugely step up surveillance of the internet aren't new - indeed they date from well before the Coalition - but readers could be forgiven for thinking it's all brand new this morning after a quick look at the national newspapers today. David Cameron's government first published its intentions to snoop …

    ID 2 Apr 10:55

  • Sony opens up with comfortable headphone collection

    MA in design

    Sony made noise today with its MA series, a new range of headphones with open-backed designs. The highlight of the bunch are the MDR-MA900s, a pair of fully open dynamic headphones with 70mm drivers and an über wide frequency response of 5Hz - 40KHz. They also feature a low impedance of 12Ω at 1KHz. Built from lightweight …

    reghardware 2 Apr 10:58

  • Toshiba AT200 Excite

    Review The world's thinnest tablet, apparently

    At only 7.7mm thick, Toshiba boasts that its new tablet is the slimmest yet and it’s a claim I can’t argue with either. Dubbed the Excite in the US and the rather less exciting AT200 elsewhere, Tosh's slim slab is 0.9mm thinner than the previous title holder, the Samsung Galaxy 10.1. While the Apple iPad 2 seems positively …

    reghardware 2 Apr 11:00

  • Steve Jobs' death clears way for Ashton Kutcher's role of a lifetime

    But WHO will play Ballmer?

    Foursquare investor, Twitter personality, Rihanna love-interest and actor Ashton Kutcher has been chosen to play Steve Jobs in an upcoming biopic film - titled Jobs. They both have brown eyes, an interest in tech, and are associated with small social networks (cough, cough, Ping) - but the uncanny resemblance is probably what …

    Entertainment 2 Apr 11:14

  • Limber up for a more dynamic approach to managing change

    Put away your fire-fighting kit

    For most of the past 20 years, the provisioning and daily operations of IT systems has been mainly concerned with specifying the physical components – servers, storage and networking – required to deliver the expected service levels. Because many workloads have little hard data upon which to base usage calculations, most …

    Service Assurance 2 Apr 11:30

  • Pastebin.com hiring staff to get rid of activists' dumps

    No matter how I scrub, stink of leakage still on me

    Pastebin.com has promised to police content on its site more tightly by hiring staff to delete data dumps and other sensitive information more quickly. The site, one of several of its type and originally set up primarily for programmers, has become a favourite dumping ground for hacktivists from Anonymous and LulzSec over …

    Hosting 2 Apr 11:44

  • Groupon bungles figures, slides $65m into the red

    Investors squirm at web upstart's Q4 accounts gaffe

    Discount coupon hawker Groupon has revised its fourth quarter revenue-and-loss statement, heightening concerns about the quality of its financial reporting. The snafu takes the web upstart's revenues for the period down $14.3m to $492.2m and increases its losses to $65.4m from $42.7m, as the firm needed to set aside more money …

    Financial News 2 Apr 11:59

  • Capita job cuts, offshoring 'driven by expectations', says MD

    Union rattles strike sabre as management gets out chopper

    Capita IT Services (CITS) boss Mark Quartermaine told staff the rapid expansion of the group through acquisition and more recently a slow down in sales led to the redundancy programme. As exclusively revealed by The Register, the public sector IT supplier informed 1,000 staff - more than 26 per cent of its total workforce - …

    Jobs 2 Apr 12:14

  • Adam Sandler's cross-dresser shocker is Razzies stonker

    Jack and Jill sweeps all ten movie dishonours

    Adam Sandler's cross-dressing "comedy" Jack and Jill made a little bit of movie history over the weekend by scooping all ten Razzies, with the actor sensationally picking up both Worst Actor and Worst Actress awards. The 32nd "antidote to Tinsel Town's annual glut of self-congratulatory awards" also honoured Sandler's "twaddle …

    Entertainment 2 Apr 12:31

  • Coders' 'lives sucked out' by black-and-white Visual Studio 11

    Beta testers feel trapped in 1920s Metro movie madness

    Windows software developers have given a thumbs down to the black-and-white Metro-style Visual Studio 2011 and sent Microsoft back to the drawing board - preferably one with coloured pencils. More than 4,000 Visual Studio users have so-far voted on Microsoft’s UserVoice poll to say the code development suite's black-and-white …

    Developer 2 Apr 12:46

  • Big Blue preps 'next gen' machines that manage themselves

    Well let's just see you install yourself, Mr Clever

    IBM is getting ready to launch a new server platform, known internally as the "Next Generation Platform" and also known by that moniker in discussions with business partners that have been briefed over several weeks. Externally the NGP machine is being called an "expert integrated system", and it will debut in two weeks. The …

    Servers 2 Apr 13:01

  • Vodafone deputy chairman to quit amid CWW rows – report

    Sir John Buchanan legging it to ARM

    Vodafone's deputy chairman Sir John Buchanan is reportedly exiting the company after taking up a chairmanship post at Cambridge-based semiconductor firm ARM. According to Saturday's Daily Telegraph, Buchanan's close pals have denied claims that he is leaving the mobile giant because of concerns about Vodafone becoming the …

    Telecoms 2 Apr 13:19

  • No-strings nookie radar tugged offline in stalking backlash

    Women-hunting app was for 'geo-social exploration', say devs

    Russian developers have hit back at claims that their Foursquare app Girls Around Me was a creepy tool for anonymous stalkers. A representative from dev house I-Free spoke to the Wall Street Journal yesterday, protesting that the software, which used Foursquare and Facebook APIs to locate nearby women, only used information …

    Mobile 2 Apr 13:39

  • Check Point in domain expiry snafu

    How to firewall off your website - the wrong way

    Security giant Check Point failed to renew its dot-com domain name on time over the weekend. Screen grab of the Check Point (or should that be Chick Point?) cock-up. Click for larger As a result surfers visiting the Checkpoint.com site were confronted by the above holding page, with links to backorder or renew the domain …

    Hosting 2 Apr 13:57

  • What does the Titanic's sinking tell us about modern science?

    Analysis No, we didn't get that the wrong way round

    Tons more mouldering bilge scooped from the wreck of RMS Titanic has hit the science news this week: it tells us nothing of note about the liner's sinking, but it does tell us quite a lot about the state of scientific publishing. Just to catch up, we learn that no, the great liner was seemingly not sunk - as one might have …

    Science 2 Apr 14:11

  • Dell's bespoke server unit pushes over $1bn of tin

    Five years old, and growing like a weed

    It has been five years since Forrest Norrod and his colleagues at Dell drew up the first custom server design on a napkin at a bar at the Driskill Hotel in Austin, Texas, getting the server maker into the tailoring business. Dell now custom fits servers for very precise workloads and can cater to the tight data center power and …

    Servers 2 Apr 14:32

  • Qualcomm's S4 chip set to shrink laptops further

    Ultrabooks aren't light enough, apparently

    Qualcomm is readying its own quad-core Snapdragon S4 chips for super lightweight laptops, which will go head to head with Intel's next batch of Ultrabooks due later this year. Qualcomm reckons the new S4 chips will go into laptops skinnier than than the MacBook Airs and Ultrabooks currently found on the market, IDG News …

    reghardware 2 Apr 14:44

  • Visa dumps Global Payments after it flashed 1.5m US card numbers

    Processing firm: This was our first intrusion...

    Visa has dropped Global Payments from its list of approved service providers after a security breach at the firm exposed 1.5 million US card numbers. The world's largest credit and debit card company has booted Global Payments off its list because of the "unauthorised access into a portion of [its] processing system". Global …

    Financial News 2 Apr 15:02

  • Internet Explorer nibbles browser rivals, swells by 1%

    Microsoft celebrates market share rise as competitors droop

    Internet Explorer's share of the browser market went up last month, by 0.99 per cent, according to new data from Net Market Share. Microsoft's slow claw-back of market share from its rivals puts Internet Explorer's global market share at 53.83 per cent, saving it from plunging below the 50 per cent mark and marking an overall …

    Applications 2 Apr 15:19

  • Mac Java hole exploited by wild Flashback Trojan strain

    Flaw fixed for Windows, Apple fanbois left out

    Security watchers have discovered a strain of Mac-specific malware that exploits an unpatched vulnerability in Java. A variant of the Flashback Trojan exploiting CVE-2012-0507 (a Java vulnerability) has been spotted in the wild, F-Secure warns. Oracle patched the vulnerability for Windows machines in February but is yet to …

    Enterprise Security 2 Apr 15:38

  • Terrafugia flies first prototype: Flying cars 'within a year'

    Unleaded fuel-chugging wing-mobile passes the test

    The much-delayed street-legal flying car from US firm Terrafugia has passed another milestone on its long road to mass production: a successful flight from an airport. It's not too pretty. But it can fly... The Transition carplane prototype passed its initial drive and conversion test before taking off from Plattsburgh …

    Physics 2 Apr 15:50

  • Thin-client giant Wyse gobbled by Dell

    Someone's in a hurry to pump clouds into desktops

    PC and server maker Dell never made a machine that needed a dumb terminal, but it does make servers that could end up driving the 21st century equivalent: the thin client served up a virtual desktop over the internet. That is why Dell has shelled out an undisclosed sum to snap up Wyse Technologies, the volume shipper of thin …

    Channel Register 2 Apr 15:55

  • Ice Cream Sandwich gives Android mobes brainfreeze – Sony

    Phones choke on big, slow and crashing upgrade

    Sony says its customers should avoid upgrading their Android devices to Ice Cream Sandwich, adding that many of them won't get the option anyway. In a blog posting on Sony's Developer World the company explains why the latest version of Google's mobile OS uses a lot more memory and is slower than its predecessor, not to …

    Mobile 2 Apr 16:17

  • HTC sues fans for premature unboxing

    One X-posed

    HTC is attempting to sue an HTC fansite for unpacking - 'unboxing', as The Kids calls it - the company's forthcoming flagship smartphone, the One X, on camera. The Taiwanese firm is also upset at French site HTC-Hub for giving the Tegra 3-based handset a run through and comparing it to HTC's other unreleased blower, One S. …

    reghardware 2 Apr 16:28

  • Microsoft withdraws software silos from Germany in patent war

    Distribution HQ moves to The Netherlands to dodge Motorola showdown

    Microsoft is moving its European distribution centre out of Germany and into The Netherlands to protect itself from patent machinations in the German courts. The software giant is shifting its software logistics out of harm's way as it awaits decisions in disputes with Motorola Mobility in the ongoing patent wars. Microsoft …

    Channel Register 2 Apr 16:36

  • Proview snatched from liquidators' jaws to pursue iPad fight

    Fat lady hasn't sung on trademark battle with Apple

    Ailing monitor biz Proview has a green light to pursue its long-running dispute with Apple over the IPAD trademark after a Shenzhen court rejected a request from one of its creditors to liquidate the company. China Daily reported that Fubon Insurance failed in its bid to claw back some of the money it pumped into Proview …

    Law 2 Apr 17:01

  • Violin Memory flashes $50m wad from SAP

    HANA in-memory database prospect

    Flash array start-up Violin Memory has gained business software powerhouse SAP as an investor. SAP Ventures and Highland Capital have joined existing investors Toshiba, Juniper Networks and others in injecting $50 million in a D-round of funding, bringing total funding to $150 million since it was founded in 2005. CEO Don …

    Storage 2 Apr 17:31

  • Parents shocked by priestly PowerPoint pr0n

    'No crime committed' says church

    Parents in Northern Ireland were shocked when a priest's PowerPoint presentation in preparation for their children's First Holy Communion displayed gay pornography. Father Martin McVeigh, the local Catholic priest, was giving the presentation to parents (and one child) at St Mary's School in Pomeroy when he inserted a USB …

    Security 2 Apr 18:14

  • Apple relents, doubles EU warranty (sort of)

    Another victory for 'European Socialists'

    Apple has quietly updated their warranty coverage in the European Union, extending it to two years as required by EU law. That's the good news. The bad news is that Apple's new EU warranty has a loophole large enough through which to drive a Scheuerle EuroCombi. As noted on Apple's website, Cupertino's own Apple One-Year …

    Channel Register 2 Apr 19:07

  • Net access restrictions lifted for ‘Megaupload four’

    Dotcom also allowed to go swimming, record an album

    As the “Megupload conspiracy” case grinds on, a New Zealand District Court judge has reinstated Internet access to the four key co-accused, Matthias Ortmann, Finn Batato, Bram van der Kolk and Kim Dotcom. In a curious addendum to the applications, heard yesterday before judge David Harvey, Dotcom has also had two other …

    Media 2 Apr 22:05

  • Google, Oracle settlement talks fail, trial to begin April 16

    Java, Android patent tussle to have its day in court

    After nearly 20 months of private settlement talks, public posturing, and legal jousting, Oracle America, Inc. v. Google, Inc. will finally go to trial over Oracle's assertion that Page & Co.'s Android infringes upon Ellison & Co.'s Java patents and copyrights. "Despite their diligent efforts and those of their able counsel, …

    Law 2 Apr 22:14

  • Fujitsu fires up first petaflopper PrimeHPC FX10

    A chip off the new K

    IT conglomerate Fujitsu has fired up the first installation of its PrimeHPC FX10 massively parallel Sparc-based supercomputer, a machine called Oakleaf-FX that weighs in at 1.13 petaflops of peak raw performance. The University of Tokyo's Super Computing Division/Information Technology Center is the home of the Oakleaf-FX …

    HPC 2 Apr 23:00

  • Scientists refine smart self-assembling building blocks

    'Smart sand' replication algorithms proven

    Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say they have shown how to code smart substances that can automatically copy an object and reproduce it. The team from MIT's Distributed Robotics Laboratory have developed a testable algorithm that uses interlinking smart systems – in this case, "smart pebbles." These are …

    Science 2 Apr 23:08

  • Neutrino mass, dark energy measurements refined

    South Pole Telescope spots cosmic Shadows

    The pattern of galactic clusters in the early Universe is helping to reveal the secrets of the neutrino. Not only that, but astronomers working on South Pole Telescope (SPT) data also hope to yield more information about the dark energy that’s driving the universe apart. The new results, announced by University of Chicago …

    Science 2 Apr 23:48

  • Sydney's CBD heading off the grid

    Recovered heat from buildings, small gas generators, will make city 70% self-sufficient

    The City of Sydney is going ahead with its long-planned “trigeneration” proposal, in which localized power plants on building roofs and basements will supplement – and eventually partly replace – the coal-fired electricity that currently powers the city. The council has approved the first $100 million stage of a $AU440 million …

    Science 2 Apr 23:50