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30th April 2012 Archive

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  • Nokia still has a patent business

    Apple and Micrsoft royalties prop up Nokia's balance sheet

    Nokia may have been dethroned in handset sales supremacy but in terms of reaping in royalties, the vendor continues on a sweet ride. According to Nokia’s Q1 results for 2012, the vendor estimates that the current annual IPR royalty under its smart phone and mobile devices business unit income run-rate is approximately €0.5 …

    Business 30 Apr 00:13

  • Study finds water cycle accelerating with warming

    Wet gets wetter, dry gets drier

    Climate models are inaccurate, but not in a comforting way: that’s the conclusion of an ocean salinity study conducted by CSIRO and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which indicates that changes in the water cycle are running faster than models predicted. Based on the relationship between salinity, evaporation and …

    Science 30 Apr 00:14

  • Tabcorp bets on IPTV

    Live races, punting, coming to tablets and IPTV

    Australian betting giant Tabcorp is ramping up its IPTV connectivity in significant deals with Akamai and Kit Digital as it expands its streaming media and integrated betting applications globally. Tabcorp Chief Operating Officer Brendan Parnell confirmed that Sky Racing had been working closely with the video streaming …

    Networks 30 Apr 00:27

  • Wind farms create local warming

    Turbines stir things up

    Wind farms heat up their local environment, creating an effect similar to the urban heat islands generated by cities’ intensive energy use. That’s the finding of a new paper, Impacts of wind farms on land surface temperature from Nature Climate Change, that reports on air temperature measurements across a region of Texas …

    Science 30 Apr 01:19

  • Optus’ free broadband: the details

    Has there been a bigger naked DSL rollout in Oz?

    Optus’ new “free broadband” offers are a little more complex than the “free” headline would have you believe. The telco announced the offer yesterday, bundling a broadband service offering 50Gb of monthly downloads with either a smartphone or a home phone service. The press release provided to El Reg was full of canned quotes …

    Networks 30 Apr 02:36

  • Beijing removes all online mentions of fleeing activist Chen

    'According to relevant laws ... these search results cannot be shown'

    China’s online censorship machine flew into overdrive at the weekend to remove all mention of blind human rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng, who fled house arrest and is reportedly now under protection in the US embassy in Beijing. Guangcheng, who has been a vocal campaigner against China’s oppressive one-child policy and has …

    Government 30 Apr 03:49

  • Judge delays decision in key web freedom case

    Thai journo faces TWENTY years for insulting royals

    An online news editor facing up to 20 years in a Thai prison for failing to delete quickly enough comments on the site insulting the royal family has had her case postponed again as webmasters in the country wait nervously on the outcome. Judge Nittaya Yaemsri set a new court date for 30 May, claiming more time was needed to …

    Public Sector 30 Apr 05:59

  • Thais have a taste for tablets after flood chaos

    Electronics market a curate's egg but outlook is more rosy

    The global supply chain may at last be recovering from widespread floods which hit Thailand at the end of last year but for consumer electronics retailers and manufacturers in the country the market remains pretty unstable, according to the latest figures from market watcher GFK. The research company revealed today that …

    reghardware 30 Apr 06:00

  • Expert: UK would break its own rules with web-snoop law

    Hello there, Data Protection Act

    The UK government will have to create a new exemption to the rules for processing sensitive personal data in order to facilitate any new "fast-track mechanism" for data-sharing by its departments and public bodies, an expert has said. However, data protection law specialist Kathryn Wynn of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind …

    Law 30 Apr 07:02

  • HP and Epic 'preferred bidders' for UK eHospital plan

    NHS trusts to ink 10-year deal to move to shared platform

    Cambridge University Hospitals and Papworth Hospital NHS foundation trusts have named HP and Epic as preferred bidders for the implemenation of a common technology platform, including the deployment of an electronic patient record system (EPR). The programme, known as eHospital, will see the two trusts move from their …

    Channel Register 30 Apr 07:28

  • Server flash-pusher Fusion-io is running out of steam

    Record revenues ... but firm still reports $5m Q3 loss

    Fusion-io is something of a contradiction. If it's so hot why isn't it making bucketloads of cash? That's the question that comes to mind after hearing hot server flash product market Fusion-io reported a loss of almost $5m in its third fiscal 2012 quarter. Fusion revenues were a record $94.2m – 40 per cent more than a year …

    Storage 30 Apr 08:02

  • Windows Phone 7 'not fit for big biz ... unlike Android, iOS'

    B-Sides Enterprise sec expert bigs up Microsoft rivals

    Window Phone 7 is not yet fit for enterprise deployments, according to an application security expert. David Rook, application security lead at Realex Payments, told delegates at the B-Sides conference in London that the youngest of the smartphone operating systems is less mature than either Google's Android or Apple's iOS. …

    CIO 30 Apr 08:29

  • Lenovo signs with C2000, plots SME assault

    Takes two years to fill gap left by Northamber

    PC firm Lenovo has inked a distie deal with Tech Data's UK subsidiary Computer 2000 in a bid to sniff out prospective small biz customers. The firms are set to links arms from 1 July on an agreement that covers the entire Think range: desktops, All-In-Ones, workstations and servers. Lenovo UK and Ireland SME and channel …

    Channel Register 30 Apr 08:35

  • Descriptive Camera develops text instead of images

    Picture tells a thousand words

    A camera for the blind sounds almost as pointless as a comb for baldies or a pedal-powered wheelchair, yet with the Descriptive Camera - a snapper that chronicles an image in text - the possibility seems less absurd. New York University graduate Matt Richardson had a flash of genius and decided a picture should indeed tell a …

    reghardware 30 Apr 08:50

  • Griffin Helo TC Assault

    Geek Treat of the Week Minicopters... ATTACK!

    Griffin’s Helo TC Assault helicopter is the latest version of its app-powered chopper. Like the Battling Gyro helicopters I reviewed here a few weeks ago, the new Griffin offering spices up your aerial activities by adding the ability to enter combat. When the red mist descends, the Assault allows you to launch missiles from …

    reghardware 30 Apr 09:00

  • LG readies Dropbox, iCloud alternative

    USP: on-the-fly video transcoding

    Samsung is expected to launch a cloud-based sync'n'store service for its smartphones soon, but arch-rival LG has got there ahead of it. LG's cleverly named 'LG Cloud' - you see what it did there? - mixes Android, Windows and smart TV apps to auto-sync handset contents to the cloud and the user's PC, Dropbox style. A neat …

    reghardware 30 Apr 09:25

  • YouView: You're delayed - Sugar

    Set top box 'to miss Olympics 2012' deadline

    The YouView set-top box won’t be on sale in time for the Olympics, according to a report. Baron Sugar of Clapton, aka Alan Sugar, the chairman of the consortium, doesn’t deem the technology ready for prime time. YouView originated in 2008 at the BBC as ‘the iPlayer in hardware’, a disruptive ploy to bring internet apps and …

    Music and Media 30 Apr 09:38

  • Half of UK smart TV owners don't know what the 'smart' bit is for

    Bought to be up-to-date, not to connect to interweb

    More bad news for TV makers and smart-telly fans: only a third of Brits planning to buy a smart TV are doing so to make use of its internet connectivity. It gets worse: only half (53 per cent) of smart-telly owners know what the 'smart' but is actually for. Still, some who don't have manager to connect their smart sets to the …

    reghardware 30 Apr 09:44

  • Freed Facebook hack Brit vents fury at $200k cleanup claim

    Mangham longs for security job after sentence halved on appeal

    A UK man jailed for hacking into Facebook has vowed to rebuild his life – and his reputation – after winning an appeal against his sentence. Glen Steven Mangham, 26, from Acomb, near York, was jailed for eight months in February after he pleaded guilty to infiltrating the website's internal network between April and May last …

    Enterprise Security 30 Apr 10:02

  • Revealed: Inside super-soaraway Pinterest's virtual data centre

    How to manage a cloud with 410TB of cupcake pictures

    It's every startup's dream: to be growing faster than Facebook without having to build a Facebook-sized server farm. Pinterest is an online picture pinboard for organising your favourite snaps and sharing them. It was founded by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp in March 2010, and it's growing like crazy with just …

    Cloud Business 30 Apr 10:13

  • Woz says Windows Phone 'sets the mark' for mobile UI

    Would pick it over Android

    Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has again voiced support for Cupertino's rivals, this time professing his admiration for Microsoft's Windows Phone platform. He believes is "sets the mark for user interface". The outspoken innovator and educator spoke of the four handsets he was carrying at the time, during a podcast with A New …

    reghardware 30 Apr 10:13

  • Hosting firm suffers 'innocent' intrusion after billing system hacked

    Sore eUKHost: No financial data was taken

    Web-hosting firm eUKHost has been hacked by Pakistani hacking team UrduHack, which appeared to have gained access to its billing system. The company sent out an email to customers and announced on its website over the weekend that it had spotted the intrusion within the last 24 hours. "We can confirm that an administrator …

    Hosting 30 Apr 10:28

  • Boffins cross atom-smasher streams, 'excited' beauty pops into being

    Like Weird Science on a sub-atomic scale

    Topflight scientists operating vast, difficult-to-comprehend machines located in an underground cavern laboratory say that an "excited beauty" has been called into existence after they crossed the streams emanating from two unprecedentedly powerful particle accelerators. Sadly for devotees of such films as Weird Science, the …

    Physics 30 Apr 10:44

  • Relationship between private and public cloud

    Tech Panel help us to explore this further...

    We were really surprised by the positive sentiment that surfaced in relation to private cloud during our recent survey on the topic. The stark contrast between this and the mixed reaction we usually get when asking readers about public cloud was very noticeable, and the differences too great to be accounted for by the bias we …

    CIO 30 Apr 10:53

  • Lenovo U300s Ultrabook

    Review 'Ang on, lads, I've got an IdeaPad

    A body made from a single piece of aluminium. Uh-huh. A case held shut with magnets. Righty. A multi-gesture trackpad with a glass surface. Ohhh-kayyy, I think I can see what's happening here. Lenovo IdeaPad U300s Ultrabook With the IdeaPad U300s, Lenovo wants to convince you it has created the most attractive Ultrabook yet …

    reghardware 30 Apr 11:00

  • Bank dumps customers in 'irrigation ditch'

    House repossessed? Please update your address details

    It's clear that things are pretty rough in Spain, but we wonder if it's really necessary for banking monolith La Caixa to rub its customers' noses in it. No doubt La Caixa has plenty of account holders who, in times of plenty and easy credit, took out a couple of mortgages (flat in Madrid, nice little place in the country) and …

    Bootnotes 30 Apr 11:16

  • LOHAN enjoys a silicone lightbulb moment

    Cracks hypobaric chamber seal

    We've been beavering away on the Rocketry Experimental High Altitude Barosimulator (REHAB) element of our Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) mission, and last week enjoyed a lightbulb moment as to how to create a decent seal between the metal hypobaric chamber and the glass lid. Those of you who are new to REHAB …

    SPB 30 Apr 11:29

  • Star Wars set to expand into Disneyland

    Space conversion in Paris

    Disneyland Paris is said to be working on a new Star Wars zone that'll include a Jedi Academy and even a Mos Eisley Cantina restaurant. Whispers an invasion of Disneyland Paris by the Star Wars empire circulated the park's official forums before the Disney and More Blog confirmed Disney Imagineers are indeed working on a more …

    reghardware 30 Apr 11:33

  • Foxconn daddy's shares slip on weak Q1 profit

    Hon Hai is spending more on staff and new factories

    Foxconn's parent company Hon Hai's shares dropped 7 per cent today after it announced weaker profits than expected in the first quarter. Hon Hai reported a net profit of NT$14.9bn ($510.8m, £314m) for the quarter, down just a little from the same period last year when the firm made NT$15.3bn ($523.2m, £322m). The group's …

    Financial News 30 Apr 11:46

  • Google KNEW Street View cars were slurping Wi-Fi

    Wheels fall off 'one rogue engineer' claim

    Google knew its Street View cars were slurping personal data from private Wi-Fi routers for three years before the story broke in April 2010. When the revelations were made, Google said its map service's cars were merely collecting SSIDs and MAC addresses. The following month, it said network data had been captured, but this …

    ID 30 Apr 12:00

  • Welsh NHS fined £70k for patient psych file leak blunder

    Email address typo leads to ICO spank first

    The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has slapped its first fine on the NHS after a mental health patient's file was leaked in an email gaffe. The ICO handed the Aneurin Bevan Health Board in Wales a bill for £70,000 for sending the sensitive information to the wrong person. A consultant from the NHS organisation …

    Enterprise Security 30 Apr 12:16

  • What smaller businesses should look for in cloud software

    Cutting SaaS down to size

    Cloud services – particularly software as a service, or SaaS – ought to be an obvious option for a smaller business. Who wouldn’t want to cut their hardware costs? Isn’t it a good idea to gain instant access to a range of otherwise unaffordable enterprise grade software, get better security systems and shift the IT budget from …

    Small Biz 30 Apr 12:30

  • Google's latest webspam crusade 'breaks' search results

    Webmasters label Penguin update a dud

    Google's latest search engine algorithm update – dubbed Penguin – is proving to be something of a dud, according to website owners not happy with the latest tweak. The Chocolate Factory debuted its latest search engine optimisation (SEO) change last week, at which point its engineer Matt Cutts penned a blog post explaining the …

    Developer 30 Apr 12:41

  • LightSquared founder Falcone steps aside on creditor's orders

    Swaps power for seven-day debt extension

    Philip Falcone, the force behind wannabie network operator LightSquared, has stepped aside in exchange for delaying bankruptcy by a week while a longer extension is negotiated. LightSqared, the box o' frogs idea to jimmy a cellular network into satellite frequencies, has always been Falcone's baby, financed largely by his …

    Financial News 30 Apr 13:02

  • The truth about Apple's mind-boggling low tax rate

    Analysis NYT reckons it's 9.8 per cent - and that's BONKERS

    The New York Times has revealed, as a simple matter of fact, that Apple's cash-paid tax rate for 2011 was only 9.8 per cent. Which is a stunningly good result from the fruity tech titan's bean counters and one that should be applauded by us all, if only it hadn't been calculated using the wrong tax year. First, let's look at …

    Financial News 30 Apr 13:33

  • Everything Everywhere rolls out the 4G astroturf

    Celebrities line up to deny involvement

    Everything Everywhere's attempt to garner public backing for its UK monopoly on 4G launched to angry responses today. EE has promised to inject £75bn into Blighty's economy if only the regulator would stand aside. The operator wants Ofcom to approve its application to deploy LTE (aka "4G") in the swath of 1800MHz spectrum …

    Wireless 30 Apr 14:01

  • BT to swing axe at sales account managers – sources

    Redundancies feared at Engage IT as Dabs staff face chopping block

    Staff at BT Engage IT are bracing themselves for further redundancies amid talk of a shift away from traditional reselling to managed services. The reseller arm of the telco giant merged its disparate brands last autumn, laying off a number of staff in the process including chief operating officer Chris Leigh and former bigwig …

    Channel Register 30 Apr 14:28

  • Microsoft stuffs $300m into Nook, bolts B&N app to Windows 8

    Let's go double-team college students and forget about that Android

    Microsoft has made a big push into ereaders today by pumping $300m into the makers of the Nook tablet - bookseller and Amazon arch-rival Barnes & Noble. The cash will buy Microsoft a 17.5 per cent stake in a new Nook subsidiary of B&N, dubbed NewCo until a name is decided. Redmond also announced that the Nook collaboration …

    Financial News 30 Apr 15:03

  • Nokia, private equity chat about €200m bling phone firm sale

    Vertu is its own reward?

    Nokia's plan to sell off Vertu, its subsidiary that makes handsets for folk with so much money they don't even need sense, emerged back in December 2011. Now it looks like the sale may go ahead. Talking to the Finnish phone giant is, one mole claims, Permira, a Europe-based private equity company. The alleged asking price: € …

    reghardware 30 Apr 15:12

  • Judge: Big Five ISPs must block The Pirate Bay

    'Musicians, sound engineers, video editors deserve to be paid for their work'

    As expected, the High Court has ordered British ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay. Five ISPs – Virgin Media, TalkTalk, BSkyB, Everything Everywhere and Telefonica – are involved in this case, which was brought by nine record labels. In February, Justice Arnold gave the labels the green light to pursue blocking orders. …

    Law 30 Apr 15:26

  • Boy wrecks £22k worth of MacBooks by weeing on them

    IT department gets pissy

    An 11-year-old boy has been charged with vandalism after relieving himself on a cartful of Apple MacBooks at school, causing $36,000 (£22,170) worth of damage. The computers, the property of Upper Allen Elementary School in Pennsylvania, were destroyed beyond repair, local publication PennLive reports. Source: James Cridland …

    reghardware 30 Apr 15:35

  • Visa Europe muscles in to UK cloudy wallet market

    Another day, another payment platform...

    Visa Europe is filling in some of the details behind the logo it launched last year, scheduling a autumn launch for its cloud-based wallet as the payment war heats up. V.me was announced last November, but at that time consisted of little more than a logo. Now we have a few more details including a commitment to launch in the …

    Financial News 30 Apr 16:01

  • BT missing from Pirate Bay High Court slap-down

    ISPs, entertainment industry react to web blocking order

    BT has been granted more time to respond to an order to block The Pirate Bay that was handed down by the UK's High Court in London late on Friday afternoon. The Register understands that a separate announcement from BT is imminent. "We continue to have discussions with the BPI and we hope to announce an outcome acceptable to …

    Law 30 Apr 16:15

  • Zunicore adds GPUs to clouds

    Cloudy child follows hosting parent into HPC

    Zunicore, the cloudy infrastructure division of Peer 1 Hosting, is going ceepie-geepie hybrid and making its cloud suitable for parallel supercomputing workloads that are goosed by GPU coprocessors. The GPU-assisted cloud capacity is in beta testing now and will be opened up to commercial customers in July, a spokesperson at …

    Cloud 30 Apr 16:39

  • Over 1,200 dot-word bids flood ICANN at $180k a pop

    Domain explosion showers net overlord with cash

    Web baron ICANN has braced itself for at least 1,200 applications for new top-level internet domains in the first round of its controversial gTLD expansion programme. CEO Rod Beckstrom said that the organisation's beleaguered TLD Application System (TAS), which is still offline more than two weeks after a data-leaking security …

    Hosting 30 Apr 16:43

  • Cedexis helps admins fight performance anxiety

    And shop for cloudy infrastructure

    If you are shopping around for cloudy infrastructure or content delivery network providers, you probably experience a certain amount of performance anxiety while you're haggling. Even if you get a good price for compute, storage, or network capacity, you can't know how various services are performing until you have made your …

    Infrastructure 30 Apr 16:59

  • Fusion-io's flash drill threatens to burst Violin's pipes

    Blocks and Files Both touting in-mem databases with SSD backing

    NoSQL database supplier Couchbase says it is tweaking its key-value storage server to hook into Fusion-io's PCIe flash ioMemory products - caching the hottest data in RAM and storing lukewarm info in flash. Couchbase will use the ioMemory SDK to bypass the host operating system's IO subsystems and buffers to drill straight into …

    Storage 30 Apr 17:28

  • SpaceX test-fires Falcon 9 rocket as Dragon sleeps

    Launch rescheduling confirmed for 7 May

    NASA and SpaceX have confirmed that the new launch date for the blastoff of the Dragon cargo capsule to the International Space Station will be 7 May. Liftoff was supposed to happen today, after it was supposed to happen on February 7, after it was expected before the end of last year. The Falcon 9 rocket will now boost the …

    Space 30 Apr 18:01

  • At last: Violin to push out HANA appliance

    It's why SAP invested

    We should be seeing HANA running on a Violin Memory platform, a HANA appliance, probably within 60 days. This is a forthcoming Violin Memory array using TLC flash with embedded servers running SAP's HANA in-memory database. Conversations with people who understand what's happening in Violin have added additional clarity to our …

    Storage 30 Apr 18:26

  • Red Hat opens up OpenShift platform cloud

    The species of Origin

    As it promised it would, commercial Linux distributor Red Hat has opened up the source code for its OpenShift platform-as-a-cloud service. When Red Hat puffed up the OpenShift platform cloud last May, it was only available as a service and it only ran atop Amazon's EC2 compute cloud. But now, with the release of the source …

    Cloud 30 Apr 21:16

  • EU plans summer launch for Optimis cloud toolkit

    Smaller businesses targeted for cloud deployment

    An EU-funded project to develop open source cloud deployment tools for business will be ready for launch in June. So far the EU has spent £8.5m in development funds for the Optimised Infrastructure Services (Optimis) project, which is aimed at helping service providers to roll out public, private, and hybrid cloud …

    Cloud 30 Apr 21:17

  • Yahoo! tacks! two! more! patents! onto! Facebook lawsuit!

    Denies FB's claims, moans about lack of integrity

    Yahoo! has slapped two more patents onto its list of grievances against Facebook in their patent battle, while denying the social network's claims and accusing it of not playing fair. The web firm said in a court filing on Friday that the social network was actually infringing on 12 rather than just 10 of Yahoo!'s patents, and …

    Law 30 Apr 21:35

  • WA sex criminals get tracked by satellite

    Perverts get their own GPS systems

    The West Australian government will use satellite tracking technology to monitor dangerous sex offenders. The WA State government has announced that it will devote $6 million to the pervert tracking initiative as part of the 2012-13 State Budget. The GPS technology platform has yet to be procured and the state government will …

    Public Sector 30 Apr 22:21

  • Australia 'needs' powers to ensure net neutrality

    Review suggests new regulatory body, structural separation for broadcasters

    Australia needs to change media policy for the digital age, because current arrangements “have outlived their purpose” and “now run the risk of inhibiting the evolution of communications and media services". That’s the thrust of the new Convergence Review commissioned by Senator Stephen Conroy to examine whether Australia’s …

    Law 30 Apr 22:30

  • UK Ministry of Defence eyes GPS patent payoff

    US cries foul over inventor’s ‘insider’ status

    A British patent is causing jitter in the GPS community, as the Ministry of Defence looking to satellite navigation vendors for royalties. The patent, Modulation signals for a satellite navigation system, describes “a method for generating a subcarrier modulation signal for modulating a further signal, the method involving …

    Public Sector 30 Apr 23:00

  • Moore's Law has ten years to run, predicts physicist

    Silicon reaching the end of the road

    Renowned theoretical physicist Michio Kaku has predicted Moore's Law will run out of steam within the next ten years as silicon designs run up against the laws of physics. "In about ten years or so we will see the collapse of Moore's Law," he says. "In fact we already see a slowing down of Moore's Law. Computing power cannot …

    PCs & Chips 30 Apr 23:00

  • Nvidia: What would you do with a petaflops super?

    One freebie Kepler GPU down, 999 to go

    Nvidia is being a tease, but your good idea could land you with a Telsa GPU coprocessor based on the future "Kepler" GPU chip. Ahead of its GPU Technical Conference, which runs from May 13 through 17 in San Jose, the graphics chip and math motor maker has announced a competition called "What Would You Do With A Petaflops …

    HPC 30 Apr 23:07

  • RuggedCom will block industrial control backdoor

    Races to fix years-old vulnerability

    A year after it was first discovered, a backdoor in industrial networking kit from Canadian RuggedCom is to be fixed – sometime soon. The company, a Siemens subsidiary via acquisition in March, has announced that it will release new firmware disabling backdoor access to devices running its ROS operating systems. These include …

    Security 30 Apr 23:30