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9th April 2012 Archive

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  • 'Don't break the internet': How an idiot's slogan stole your privacy...

    Special Report ... and how to get it back

    "I am the head of IT and I have it on good authority that if you type 'Google' into Google, you can break the Internet. So please, no one try it, even for a joke. It's not a laughing matter. You can break the Internet" - Jen, The IT Crowd For 15 years internet companies have been waging a war against any kind of laws that …

    Media 9 Apr 10:00

  • WTF is... UltraViolet

    Feature Cloud Nine or Hurt Locker?

    We're all used to buying movies and TV series on disc. Many of us are accustomed to downloading films and shows from the likes of Apple's iTunes. A fair few of us stream video content from Netflix or Lovefilm. Wouldn't it better to combine all three into a single system? Such a combo is what the Hollywood-backed UltraViolet …

    reghardware 9 Apr 11:00

  • The 10 baddest IT pros

    BOFHs who got caught

    In 2008 a survey of 300 sysadmins by Cyber-Ark grabbed a lot of press coverage when a whopping 88 per cent of respondents said they would steal company information if fired. BOFH: Let's go to work! One quarter said their organisations had suffered internal sabotage and security fraud, and one third believed that industrial …

    Jobs 9 Apr 13:41

  • Intel engineer turned chip spy pleads guilty

    The roadmap to jail

    A former Intel engineer who worked on the company's Itanium processors for servers and who is accused of stealing documents relating to future processor designs and chip fabrication processes has pleaded guilty to the charges. According to various reports – (here's one from Reuters and another from Bloomberg) Biswamohan Pani, …

    Jobs 9 Apr 16:30

  • Amazon's S3 object count kisses 1 trillion

    Buying Bezos by slice

    It started out so small, a mere 200,000 objects, with the 2006 launch of the Simple Storage Service (S3) object storage companion to the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) compute cloud. Six years later, and Amazon's infrastructure cloud is getting ready to handily bust through 1 trillion objects under management. In a blog post, …

    Cloud 9 Apr 16:50

  • Facebook to acquire Instagram for $1bn

    'Don't worry,' Zuckerberg says, 'we won't assimilate them'

    Facebook has announced that it will acquire photo-sharing service Instagram in a $1bn cash-and-stock deal. "I'm excited to share the news that we've agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook," said CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a statement announcing the acquisition of what the release referred …

    Business 9 Apr 17:35

  • AOL sells Microsoft 800+ patents for over $1bn

    Fading company's 'Kodak moment'

    AOL has confirmed that it is selling Microsoft a bundle of over 800 pieces of its patent portfolio for $1.056bn, and will be licensing its remaining intellectual property to Redmond and others. "The agreement with Microsoft represents the culmination of a robust auction process for our patent portfolio," said AOL CEO Tim …

    Business 9 Apr 17:42

  • 'Unibody' iPhone 5 said to debut in October

    Today's arrivals from the long and winding rumor road

    Apple's next iPhone will be released in October, not June, and it will have a unibody construction similar to that of the MacBook Pro – that is, if you believe the latest crop of rumors. Last week, the word on the street – the Taiyuan streets outside of the iPhone-assembling Foxconn plant in China's Shanxi province, at least …

    Mobile 9 Apr 18:39

  • Red Hat clustered storage goes beta

    A veritable Gluster... well, you know

    The first iteration of the Gluster clustered file system that is going through the Red Hat annealing process is coming closer to market with the launch of a the first beta of the tool since Shadowman acquired Gluster last October. There was nothing wrong with having a product called GlusterFS – that name suggested it was part …

    Storage 9 Apr 20:15

  • Sony to cut 10,000 jobs in quest for profitability

    Top execs asked to hand back bonuses

    Sony is planning a major restructuring, with around 10,000 jobs – about 6 per cent of the company's global workforce – expected to get the chop after a press conference this Thursday. Japanese newspaper Nikkei has reported (from behind a paywall) that the new chief executive Kazuo Hirai, who took the helm of the loss-making …

    Business 9 Apr 20:19

  • FBI frets about dumb security in smart meters

    Lax security costs utilities plenty

    The FBI is seeing increasing hacks on electricity smart meters, with most attacks designed to let consumers get power without paying for it. Krebs on Security claims to have an FBI intelligence bulletin that outlines the agency’s growing concern at smart meter hacks – and which along the way highlights the cavalier attitude …

    Security 9 Apr 23:00

  • Commodore founder Jack Tramiel dies at 83

    Obituary Auschwitz survivor who built best-selling PC

    The founder of Commodore, one of the driving forces in the early history of the personal computers, has died at the age of 83. Tramiel, born in 1928 as Jacek Trzmiel to a Jewish family in Poland, emigrated to the US after the Second World War after losing his parents in Hitler's camps. Tramiel spent time at Auschwitz and at a …

    Hardware 9 Apr 23:04

  • China's Internet Society backs online censorship

    Web firms must police content to prevent rumors, says NGO

    Non-governmental organisation the Internet Society has decided to wade into the murky waters of Chinese online censorship by calling on firms to increase scrutiny of the content on their sites, as the fall out from recent coup rumours continues. In a fairly transparent piece of government propaganda, state-run news agency …

    Policy 9 Apr 23:15

  • Twitter open sources MySQL enhancements

    Go get the code at GitHub

    Go get the code at GitHub Twitter has open sourced numerous tweaks it has made to MySQL, stating in a blog post that the open source database “is the persistent storage technology behind most Twitter data: the interest graph, timelines, user data and the Tweets themselves.” The post says that “Due to our scale, we push MySQL a …

    Software 9 Apr 23:40

  • Iran preps Internet cutoff

    Updated: AFP casts doubt on August date

    Iran has moved to protect its citizens’ privacy against American Imperialist Data Harvesters*; unfortunately for Iranians, the plan involves taking the whole country off the Internet. International Business Times is reporting that the country’s plan to set up a national intranet – its notorious “clean Internet” – will be …

    Policy 9 Apr 23:45