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20th April 2012 Archive

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  • iiNet wins High Court trial

    Updated AFACT says decision exposes 'failure of copyright law'

    Big Content has lost its appeal against the Federal Court's decision that iiNet did not infringe copyright when it ignored allegations of theft by its customers sent to it by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT). The judgement summary (PDF) offers two reasons for the decision. The first is that “iiNet had …

    Policy 20 Apr 2012, 00:09

  • Curtin Uni app comp goes national

    oZAPP prize open in August

    Western Australia’s Curtin University has launched a national app competition that follows on from a successful local competition held last year. While the details of this year’s prize are yet to be announced, the university is promising “significant resources” to help winners build and launch their apps, along with providing …

    Software 20 Apr 2012, 00:15

  • How iiNet beat Big Content

    Lawyers explain the crucial bits of the case

    The High Court's decision to dismiss Big Content's appeal of the Federal Court's decision absolving iiNet of copyright infringement relies, in part, on inadequacies in Australia's Copyright Act that may need to be dealt with by Australia's Parliament. That's the opinion of Kay Lam-McLeod, the Principal of IT specialist law …

    Policy 20 Apr 2012, 02:55

  • Microsoft CRM to go browser and mobile OS agnostic

    Chrome, Firefox welcomed, native iOS, Android and WP7 clients coming

    Just weeks after Microsoft revealed SharePoint is now, and will forever be, more friendly to browsers other than Internet Explorer, the company has revealed that another of its enterprise applications will soon play nicely with others. The software in question is Microsoft CRM, which is due a significant upgrade during the …

    Software 20 Apr 2012, 03:52

  • ISPs facing global clamp down on piracy

    Service providers told to up their game in spite of court win for Oz ISP

    Aussie ISP iiNET might have won the battle in a High Court ruling today but the war internationally is swinging in the favour of the copyright holders, with service providers facing increasing pressure to act on notifications of infringement, according to one legal expert. The long-running lawsuit ended in victory for the …

    Policy 20 Apr 2012, 04:09

  • Lytro light field camera

    Review Shoot first, focus later

    Since before the days of Fox Talbot, cameras have worked like the human eye. A lens focuses an image on a plane, be it a retina, silver halide or electronic sensors. The Lytro is different Lytro: the box camera for the 21st century Instead of capturing a single image it captures the rays of light, working out what’s …

    Hardware 20 Apr 2012, 06:00

  • Intel to ship 30 MILLION Ultrabooks in 2012 - report

    Chipzilla's target is 40 per cent of consumer notebooks by end of year

    Intel has reportedly estimated that Ultrabook shipments will not exceed 30 million in 2012, a figure which could be some way lower than the one bandied about by CEO Paul Otellini, who predicted that 40 per cent of consumer notebooks would be Ultrabooks by the end of the year. The reports admittedly came from the rather dubious …

    Hardware 20 Apr 2012, 06:18

  • Just NINE per cent of Asia Pac operators have commercial 4G

    Must try harder...

    Asia Pacific mobile operators have caught up their rivals in North America and Europe but only nine per cent have commercial 4G LTE networks up and running, according to new research from analyst ABI Research. The firm’s latest study, Asia CapEx, Core & Radio Access Network Infrastructure Forecasts, beats the drum for a region …

    Networks 20 Apr 2012, 06:45

  • Stray SMS leads to aborted landing

    This is your Captain texting

    On May 27th, 2010, as an A310 flying from Darwin to Singapore descended to just 500 feet above terra firma, crew noticed the craft was not ready to land. In accordance with the procedures of the airline concerned, Australian budget flier Jetstar, the crew executed a “go-around”, the hasty cancellation of landing and consequent …

    Mobile 20 Apr 2012, 07:00

  • Killers laugh in face of death penalty threat, say US experts

    Expensive executions fail as a deterrent

    Researchers have concluded there's no concrete evidence that the death penalty has any effect on homicide rates in the United States. The Committee on Deterrence and the Death Penalty took a look at "conflicting" studies of the threat of capital punishment's influence on would-be murderers since the US Supreme Court ended a …

    Government 20 Apr 2012, 07:03

  • Three questions Fusion-io's rivals face after flash API bombshell

    Apps bypassing OS and disk to store hot data - chaos or breakthrough?

    Happy days are coming for the denizens of data centre technology areas. Applications are going to get such an incredible speed boost that they will become jet-propelled, turbo-charged, super-charged. The average app will virtually be able to stop doing disk I/O ever again... well, for most things. It's a two-step improvement. …

    Storage 20 Apr 2012, 07:29

  • Channel bites Apple's hand off for any old iPads in Q1

    Euro sales via indie disties soared by 42%

    Apple sales via independent distributors across Western Europe soared 42 per cent in Q1, figures from channel analyst Context reveal. The sales-out numbers detailed by the beancounter's Vendor Performance Monitor (VPM) shows that the majority of growth was generated by the previous generation of iPads, up 180 per cent. This …

    The Channel 20 Apr 2012, 08:01

  • Top UK.gov CIOs dealt string of pay cuts and freezes

    Purses and wallets tightened over past four years

    A number of major Whitehall departments have slashed their CIO salaries since 2008, according to central government figures. The salary of the Department for Work and Pensions' (DWP) CIO, a job previously held by Joe Harley before his retirement at the end of March, was £265,000-£270,000 in 2008-09. By 2011, that figure had …

    Management 20 Apr 2012, 08:32

  • Norwich FC scores own goal in net kit leak

    Fans cry foul over bully boy tactics

    Norwich City FC has apologised for its thuggish response to a teenage fan who grabbed pictures of the the football team's new strip from its own website. The club's web designers mistakenly exposed pictures of the kit on public parts of the site, while prepping a page to promote next season's kit. Chris Brown, a 17 year old …

    Media 20 Apr 2012, 08:55

  • iKlip Studio

    Accessory of the Week The ideal tablet stand for musos?

    The hackneyed old cliché about the iPad being a consumption device was long blown out of the water. The Apple tablet is used by creative professionals for a variety of tasks, but one group who who have been drawn to it more than most are musicians. There’s a huge number of apps that allow the iPad to act, if not as the hub, …

    Tablets 20 Apr 2012, 09:00

  • NetApp dips a toe into Flash Pool

    New NAND stuff at Sunnyvale

    NetApp has revealed plans to enhance its flash offerings and offer a single tier, flash cached array design with a sexy new name. Remember Hybrid Aggregates? They have become Flash Pools. According to our close-to-Sunnyvale sources, we should envisage an array with a controller having Flash Cache – for read I/O acceleration – …

    Virtualization 20 Apr 2012, 09:17

  • Sony Xperia P glows for advance orders

    NXT generation display

    Sony's second addition to its NXT range of smartphones - the Xperia P - has gone up for pre-order in the UK with a price tag of £330. Unveiled at industry shindig Mobile World Congress 2012 in February, the Android blower debuts the company's WhiteMagic display tech. Similar to Sharp's yellow-pixel Quattron tellies, this …

    Phones 20 Apr 2012, 09:25

  • Battlefield Earth ruled worst film EVER

    Sci-fi cobblers cops Reg reader shoeing

    It's official: Battlefield Earth is the worst film ever according to our beloved moviegoing readers. The final result of our poll of cinematic shame ended with Roger Christian's masterpiece on 1,454 votes, roundly beating The Phantom Menace into second spot with 1,022 votes. By chilling coincidence, Christian was second unit …

    Media 20 Apr 2012, 09:38

  • Microsoft seeks Skype for Xbox engineering gang

    Talking tiles

    Microsoft's plans to bring Skype to the Xbox appear well underway, if job postings for positions in a new "Skype Xbox Engineering Team" are anything to go by. The software giant is seeking a software development engineer and an engineering manager to join the London-based team. After acquiring Skype for $8.5bn in 2011, you'd …

    Hardware 20 Apr 2012, 09:53

  • 'Searching staff emails would be time-consuming'

    Quotw Plus: 'You got it all wrong, I LOVE Facebook and Apple'

    This was the week when the details of Facebook's acquisition of revenueless app firm Instagram – for $1bn – emerged. The social network's CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly negotiated Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom down from $2bn and agreed the deal from the comfort of his couch in his home in Palo Alto – purportedly without informing …

    Bootnotes 20 Apr 2012, 10:02

  • Apple, Google and Intel to face angry ex-IT workers in court

    Class action suit over no-poaching rules goes ahead

    A US judge has ruled that Apple, Google, Intel and other firms have to face their former employees in court in an antitrust lawsuit that alleges the firms conspired to keep wages down by stifling competition. The three companies – along with Adobe, Intuit, Pixar and Lucasfilm – are accused in the class action suit of working …

    Jobs 20 Apr 2012, 10:13

  • New tech revolution: Small biz begins to lock out industry giants

    Sysadmin blog VDI, BYOD, SaaS and cloud salad could free us all from vendor lock-in

    Software as a Service (SaaS) combined with Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)-style technologies promise to free us from vendor lock-in once and for all. The consumerisation of IT, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and hybrid cloud-based applications are additional marketing buzzwords relevant to this discussion. Each concept is …

    Servers 20 Apr 2012, 10:32

  • Nvidia: phone GPUs to outplay current consoles by 2014

    End of gaming as we know it?

    The smartphone killed the PDA, the MP3 player and the PMP - will it kill the games console next? Ask graphics chip maker Nvidia and it will undoubtedly say 'no', not least because it would rather like to sell lots of high-power GPUs to Microsoft and Sony. But it certainly reckons that, come 2014, smartphone graphics cores …

    Phones 20 Apr 2012, 10:34

  • Everything Everywhere begs Blighty to back 4G push

    Exclusive Grassroots campaign spotted in greenhouse

    Everything Everywhere is planning a "grassroots" lobbying campaign for 4G infrastructure, but sadly 4G Britain hasn't the space to say who's funding it, or who stands to gain most from its success. The site isn't even live yet, though a mocked-up version has popped up a few times in the last week, and letters (seen by El Reg) …

    Broadband 20 Apr 2012, 10:46

  • What kind of LOSER sits in front of a PC...

    Something for the Weekend, Sir? ...to read a book?

    I have just wasted half a day at the London Book Fair, hoping to discover some new e-book readers with a view to reviewing them for El Reg. Expecting to wade waist-high through stacks of competitive continental European brands, I was disappointed to find that the exhibition's Digital Zone was dominated by companies offering to …

    Tablets 20 Apr 2012, 11:00

  • No more 'rip-off' IT disasters – UK.gov will be too busy tweeting

    RT @SirHumphrey_Appleby A courageous move, minister

    Blighty's government has promised that its new "digital by default" campaign will put a stop to billion-pound IT catastrophes that have dogged the public sector for years. In a commitment-light response to a report subtly titled Government and IT "a recipe for rip-offs" - published in January by MPs on the Public …

    Government 20 Apr 2012, 11:14

  • Analyst: 'revolutionary, compelling' iPhone 5 out in October

    Waiting for Qualcomm

    Apple's iPhone 5 will be out in October and sport a "revolutionary" industrial design. That, plus 4G LTE connectivity courtesy of 28nm Qualcomm chippery, will make the handset a "compelling upgrade". So said market observer Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray, a broker, yesterday. Munster said the iPhone 5's October debut may be …

    Phones 20 Apr 2012, 11:21

  • Biologists create synthetic DNA capable of EVOLUTION

    Morph-happy bio-soup strained

    Synthetic DNA and RNA has been shown to be capable of evolving in the lab, carrying hereditary traits with it. The synthetic form of DNA, life's building block, was able to share information with real DNA and undergo directed evolution into biologically useful forms. Boffins are studying the fundamental question about DNA: …

    Science 20 Apr 2012, 11:29

  • Rapidshare tells world+dog: Stop PIRACY now!

    Cyberlocker says it's on the straight and narrow

    Rapidshare wants to lose its notoriety as a haven for copyright infringement – and become a legitimate cloud service. The cyberlocker’s chief lawyer Daniel Raimer has written a four-page "anti-piracy manifesto" and hopes this will head off stronger laws that will make legitimate takedowns of infringing websites easier. …

    Media 20 Apr 2012, 11:46

  • Mellanox rides the Xeon E5 wave

    Big supers bump up network gear sales

    Switch and server adapter card maker Mellanox Technologies is surfing on two upgrade waves: Its own shift to faster InfiniBand and Ethernet products and Intel's launch of the Xeon E5-2600 processors, which came out in early March. In the first quarter of 2012 ended in March, Mellanox posted revenues of $88.7m, up 61.2 per cent …

    HPC 20 Apr 2012, 12:01

  • Home Office 'technologically clueless' on web super-snoop law

    Scrambling for Safety 2012 Ex-top cop, net experts trash real-time UK packet sniff

    Computer experts, politicos, civil liberty campaigners and even a retired top cop universally agreed yesterday that the Home Office's real-time mass internet surveillance plan demonstrated just how "clueless" Theresa May's govt department is on implementing such a system. Speaking at the Scrambling for Safety event at the …

    Government 20 Apr 2012, 12:19

  • 2,500 copycat hack attempts on abortion provider site – report

    BPAS under siege following hacker's arrest

    Five weeks after a man was cuffed by police for swiping around 10,000 records of women who registered with British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), the site remains under sustained hack attempts, the BBC reports. The man in question – 27-year-old James Jeffery from Wednesbury, West Midlands – was jailed for two years and …

    Security 20 Apr 2012, 12:38

  • Public IT supplier frameworks aren't baffling – gov organ

    'No confusion' over trio of overlapping deals... say procurement peeps

    Government Procurement Services (GPS) has defended the matrix of monolithic public sector IT purchasing frameworks, claiming purse-holders will figure out where to spend taxpayers' cash. It emerged this week that the forthcoming £4bn IT Hardware & Services framework, due to go live on 1 June, will run in parallel with two …

    The Channel 20 Apr 2012, 13:00

  • Nanodot memory smashes RAM, sets new speed record

    Electro-optics boffins on a charge

    Boffins in Taiwan and the University of California predict that nanoscale CMOS memory could soon be on its way after research showed nanodot memory operating 10 to 100 times faster than current RAM. The electro-optics researchers also emphasised that they had used materials that are compatible with mainstream integrated circuit …

    Hardware 20 Apr 2012, 13:28

  • Behind Facebook's $1bn Instagram antitrust dodge

    Open ... and Shut A free pass for Zuck, not Microsoft

    Apparently it's wrong to dominate the market for free search and free web browsers, but it's perfectly fine to dominate the market for photo sharing. That seems to be the lesson from the curious silence from antitrust authorities on Facebook's proposed $1bn acquisition of Instagram. Pundits applaud Facebook's strategic coup, …

    Management 20 Apr 2012, 14:03

  • Ten... mad materials made into tech

    Substance abuse?

    Whether they're attempting to increase durability, lower production costs or simply impress with aesthetics, manufacturers are always looking for new materials to build their tech with. Apple was this week rumoured to be coating the iPhone 5 in Liquidmetal, a metal alloy with the structure of glass that can be injection …

    Hardware 20 Apr 2012, 14:27

  • Hamburg court: Google must police YouTube content

    GEMA notches up another copyright victory

    German composers and music publishers' society GEMA has notched a copyright victory in its long-running dispute with Google. A Hamburg court ruled that The Chocolate Factory is responsible for what it publishes, and may need to install filters on uploaded video material. What's it all about? GEMA summarised its case (in …

    Jobs 20 Apr 2012, 14:32

  • Qualcomm runs out of chips as punters wolf down SnapDragons

    Can't make 'em fast enough for smartphone boom

    Qualcomm can't make its Snapdragon chips fast enough, forcing some companies to consider alternatives while waiting for supplies of the 28nm powerhouse. Responding to question during a conference call on earnings, archived by Seeking Alpha, Qualcomm reps admitted they'd failed to gear up production fast enough and were now …

    Hardware 20 Apr 2012, 15:01

  • 'I'm no visionary': Torvalds up for $1.3m life-changing gong

    Anyone who's used the Linux supremo's Git tool certainly agrees

    Open-source poster child Linus Torvalds, who kickstarted development of the Linux operating system kernel, has been nominated for the €1m Millennium Technology Prize - but says he's "no visionary" and is surprised Linux has been so successful. Torvalds and stem cell engineer Dr Shinya Yamanaka are finalists for the gong - one …

    Developer 20 Apr 2012, 15:27

  • Nokia's older mobes infringe IPCom patent – court

    Firm: New ones are fine so we don't care

    Nokia has lost a patent dispute with intellectual property firm IPCom in the Mannheim regional court in Germany. The court ruled that Nokia mobiles were infringing on a patent related to emergency services access, but the Finnish phone firm said the violating phones were all old ones. "The Mannheim court found that Nokia’s …

    Law 20 Apr 2012, 15:59

  • Oracle v Google round-up: The show so far

    What’s going on here? Who’s winning?

    After years of waiting for the contenders to open fire, the Oracle-Google shooting match is now on, and the bullets are pretty expensive. The opening salvos have landed, so let's take stock. It’s worth keeping at the back of your mind how strange it is to be here at all. Judge Alsup has spent three years trying to persuade …

    Law 20 Apr 2012, 16:24

  • Ubuntu signs HP as heavy-metal support act

    Pair enter pact for x86, ARMed Linux cloud tour

    Canonical's cloudy ambitions and Metal-as-a-Service vision for Ubuntu have landed the muscular backing of Hewlett-Packard. HP will certify Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Server, due to land on 26 April, for selected ProLiant servers, making this the first time users of the Linux distro can receive HP's hardware warranty support. Newer …

    Servers 20 Apr 2012, 17:01

  • Oracle pops cork as cut-price ZFS array creams NetApp rival

    Plenty more bang for your bucks in SPECsfs2008 benchmark

    An Oracle ZFS 7420 storage array provides 40 per cent more performance than a NetApp FAS6240 at a $700,000 lower price point. That's according to the SPECsfs2008 benchmark, which tests how effective an array is at servicing NFS IO transactions. The chart shows a selection of vendors' SPECsfs2008 IOPS scores in the fewer-than-1 …

    Storage 20 Apr 2012, 17:33

  • Anonymous crashes Formula One site over Bahrain protests

    Nervy petrolheads face three days of protests

    Hackers claiming to be from Anonymous have taken down the official Formula One website as protests grow over this weekend's controversial Grand Prix in the Kingdom of Bahrain. "The F1 Grand Prix in Bahrain should be strongly opposed. The Al Khalifa regime stands to profit heavily off the race and has promised to use live …

    Security 20 Apr 2012, 17:38

  • Sandisk's revs circle drain as mobile flash demand drops

    Heads for a second quarter loss

    We thought flash demand was booming, but flash supplier Sandisk's quarterly revenue has dropped to its lowest point in seven quarters after price drops and demand falls. It expects the next quarter to be even worse. Revenues in its first 2012 quarter were $1.21bn, down 7 per cent year-on-year and a thumping 24 per cent …

    Storage 20 Apr 2012, 18:02

  • Workers' comp covers sex-related injuries, judge rules

    Peace of mind while on the job AND on the job

    Injuries sustained while having sex on a work trip are covered by workers' compensation, an Australian federal judge has ruled. The ruling accepted that the nookie-related injury sustained by a government employee on a business trip occurred during "the course of employment", overturning an earlier rejection of the woman's …

    Jobs 20 Apr 2012, 19:31

  • Apple claims Aussie 3G is so good it's 4G

    Novel defence for Australian iPad 4G connection claims

    Apple has hit back at claims it misled Australian buyers of "the new iPad" with the unusual defense that Australia's 3G networks are so fast they are in fact 4G in all but name. Cupertino has been taken to court by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) after is began an investigation into complaints from …

    Mobile 20 Apr 2012, 19:43

  • Google offers I/O tickets to atone for Code Jam snafu

    Developers get happy ending

    Google has decided on its "least unfair" solution to its mistakes in the Code Jam tournament to win tickets to its I/O conference: everyone will be a winner. Yesterday the Chocolate Factory admitted that its coders had made a mistake in a competition that would see 100 developers win the right to buy highly prized tickets to …

    Developer 20 Apr 2012, 20:40