22nd May 2012 Archive

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Defend your phone against loose networks? There’s an app for that

Researchers unveil ‘middlebox detection’ software

A group of researchers from the University of Michigan has released an Android app designed to defend against a common firewall vulnerability which they say commonly exposes smartphones on cellular networks. The vulnerability, “off-path TCP sequence number inference”, can allow hijacking of Web pages users are trying to visit …

Security 22 May 00:17
NextIO bags some more cash for virty server I/O push

Mystery strategic investor pumps in US$12.3m

There are plenty of ways to skin the server virtualization cat, and NextIO's means of doing so is to create a PCI-Express switch that links server nodes to each other and to Ethernet network, Fibre Channel SAN, and external peripherals such as flash drives or GPU coprocessors that are housed in an external chassis. Trying to …

The Channel 22 May 01:21
3D TV fails to excite, gesture UIs to flop: analyst

Apple, Sony, to pounce as connectivity craze catches

3D television is not exciting global TV buyers, says analyst firm NPD. While the firm notes that 3D now pops up in nearly 20% of global TV purchases for devices larger than 40 inches, Director of Industry Analysis Ben Arnold says “3D TV sales growth thus far has been more a function of the feature’s attachment to bigger …

Media 22 May 02:29
Kim Dotcom resists password grab

Megaupload founder demands ‘judicial process’

And so it winds on further: in the latest installment to the Aotearoan legal battle, Kim Dotcom’s lawyer that he will only hand over his passwords as part of a “proper judicial process”. Dotcom, head of Megaupload and accused by the FBI of racketeering and copyright infringement, is resisting extradition to the USA and seeking …

Law 22 May 02:34
Samsung boss warns of Chinese tech spending slow down

Kim Young-ha is worried, but stats tell a different story

Samsung’s head honcho in China is reportedly worried that domestic spending on technology products in the People’s Republic is slowing down, fears which if realised could have a significant knock-on effect for the global economy. Samsung Electronics China CEO, Kim Young-ha, told the FT that the domestic tech market would …

Business 22 May 04:56
Review: Raspberry Pi

Bare bones computing

No review is ever written in isolation, absent from context. Usually, you can guess the reviewer's bias within a few paragraphs, and compensate accordingly. He hates LCD display quality, she dislikes proprietary software, they yearn for the days of full bandwidth vinyl. You get the idea. Raspberry Pi Alpha board – a work in …

Hardware 22 May 06:00
Eugene Kaspersky frustrated by Apple’s iOS AV ban

Wants to retaliate first before crooks crack iOS

Eugene Kaspersky is “a little bit disappointed … Apple won’t let us” develop antivirus software for iOS devices, as he feels it is only a matter of time before criminals target the operating system. “We as a security company are not able to develop true endpoint security for iOS,” Kaspersky told The Register in Sydney today. “ …

Security 22 May 06:32
News leech's fresh cash deal with rags 'reasonable' – tribunal

Formerly 'uneconomic' costs suddenly affordable for article scraper

The fees that businesses will have to pay news aggregators of newspapers' online content for their services have been set after a Copyright Tribunal determined the terms were "reasonable". The Tribunal accepted licensing terms agreed upon by news monitoring service Meltwater and the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA). Under the …

Business 22 May 07:04
Chinese social network to recruit in-house censor

Job ad for 'monitoring editor' points to web crackdown

Eagle-eyed users of China’s popular Twitter clone Sina Weibo have spotted an unusual job ad for the company, posted on its site on Monday – internet censor. The advert, translated by the Wall Street Journal China, reportedly calls for candidates keen to try their hand at the role of “monitoring editor” who would be tasked with …

Security 22 May 07:05
China hits back at Pentagon's cyber spy allegations

US needs to "change its mind-set", says PRC

China has been forced to strongly deny claims made in a new Pentagon report that it is the world’s number one cyber spy and represents a growing threat to US economic security. Foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei expressed “firm opposition” to the report and said “China's justified and normal military development" had been …

Security 22 May 07:07
Isilon Maverick flyboy in EMC World flyby

I feel the need, the need for... reliability

EMC's coming "Mavericks" Isilon software update aims to help it play nicely in the enterprise IT zone while keeping its scale-out NAS top gun title. Announced at EMC World, the upcoming "Mavericks" edition of Isilon's OneFS storage box operating system aims to make it more of a dependable racehorse, with role-based admin and …

The Channel 22 May 07:29
The Falcon has taken off

SpaceX Dragon roars at last

This time, it worked: the SpaceX Falcon 9 has lifted off without incident, and is on the way to the International Space Station. After the weekend’s launch was aborted due to a valve error causing excessively high pressures in chamber number 5, SpaceX spokespeople correctly stated that there was no “failure”: the software …

Science 22 May 07:48
SpaceX Dragon, first private ship to the ISS, launched successfully

Pic Another giant step for Elon Musk's space programme

History is just days away from being made as SpaceX' Dragon cargoship finally blasted off successfully on its Falcon 9 rocket this morning on its way to a rendezvous with the International Space Station. Falcon 9 at lift-off (source: SpaceX webcast) Elon Musk's private space firm has had a number of setbacks with the latest …

Science 22 May 08:02
Mm, just what the boss wanted: Live charts about your cloud

Real-time compute, storage and network stats mashup

EMC is mashing up operational data reporting from its products to build dashboards integrating customer spreadsheet and database information to provide charge back and resource usage in an IT-as-a-service scenario. This bridging between EMC operational data and customer data leads to the mashup's moniker: DataBridge. The …

Cloud 22 May 08:29
Evernote

Android App of the Week Popular app gets Ice Cream Sarnie treatment

As a long-time user of Catch Notes it was going to take something quite impressive to get me to jump ship to arch-rival Evernote but a recent update and integration with the latest versions of HTC's Sense have persuaded me to do so. The upgrade has brought a new Ice Cream Sandwich-esque design to the app. There’s still an …

Phones 22 May 09:00
Chrome spends a week at the top of the browser charts

Asian and South American popularity pushes it to glory

Google's Chrome browser has overtaken Internet Explorer to become the world's most popular browser. According to StatCounter's Global Stats, which calculates browser popularity on the basis of 15 billion page views a month from people all over the world with tracking code installed on over three million websites, Chrome just …

Applications 22 May 09:17
Barclays online banking falls over in outage riddle

'No idea why, but our new Pingit app is working!'

The Barclays online banking website has been offline since about 8am BST this morning for reasons unknown. A spokesperson for the bank said that the issue was "still being investigated", and they didn't know yet what had caused the site to fall over, but none of their other computer systems are affected. The site is telling …

Financial News 22 May 09:38
Report: SAP exec charged with $1,000 LEGO bar-code caper

eBay sales claimed

An SAP executive is reported to have been charged with stealing LEGO from shops using the assistance of home-made bar codes before allegedly selling the kits online. Thomas Langenbach, 47, is said to have swapped the shop bar codes on expensive LEGO kits for his own homemade versions at a number of shops belonging to discount …

The Channel 22 May 10:01
ICO: Managed to comply with Cookies Law? Go help the other kids

Commish tells gov websites to learn as they go and share what they discover

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) wants public sector bodies that have made their websites comply with EU cookie regulations to share their knowledge with others. "We are seeing elements of good practice and what we hope is that, as those get implemented, it will be much easier for those who are not ready to see …

The Channel 22 May 10:14
Sony's customisable Xperia U hits retail

Whatever NXT

Sony's latest Android smartphone, the Xperia U, hit retail today, completing the first trio of handsets in the company's NXT collection. The Sony Xperia U is the smallest of its NXT range siblings, with a 3.5in Bravia-branded touchscreen at a resolution of 480 x 854. Powered by a 1GHz processor with 512MB of Ram, the phone …

Mobile 22 May 10:22
EMC pushes out FORTY-TWO products at megalaunch

Avamar, VPLEX, Atmos, Isilon gear and more

EMC has dubbed its EMC World in Las Vegas a megalaunch with some 42 product announcements. We've covered the new VMAX products announced at EMC World already. Some of the others are highlighted below. There is a VNXe 3150, the entry-level VNX array, which has quad-core processors and flash, supports up to 100 drives, and has …

The Channel 22 May 10:32
Vodafone's cash mountain rocked by eurozone emergency

Hung up on Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece

Vodafone is rolling in cash thanks to a healthy year in the US and stability in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands. However the telco is still only drawing 14.5 per cent of its £43bn service revenue from mobile data, despite the fact that it represents the majority of traffic carried. Total revenue across the group over the …

Management 22 May 10:43
Will Nvidia 'n' pals pwn future gaming?

HPC blog GeForce Grid could disrupt everything

With the introduction of VGX and the announcement of Nvidia's GeForce Grid offering, Nvidia and their partners are taking square aim at one of the biggest market opportunities around: gaming. Video games are big business. For example, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 totted up more than a billion in sales after only 16 days on …

HPC 22 May 11:04
Virgin Media mauls UK.gov for pumping millions into BT

Cash gift 'not in Blighty's best interests'

Virgin Media's monopolistic cable network is closed to competition - unlike BT's - but that hasn't stopped the telco from grumbling about government subsidies being dished out to its rival. VM's chief operating officer Andrew Barron has penned a letter, published in the Guardian last night, ahead of a Lord's committee hearing …

Broadband 22 May 11:13
Ex-Yahoo! bigwig! admits! insider! trading!

He spilled beans on Microsoft search deal

The US stock market regulator has charged an ex-Yahoo! exec and a pal with insider trading after the pair discussed a search engine partnership between Yahoo! and Microsoft. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said Robert Kwok, who was Yahoo!'s senior director of business management, breached his duty to the company …

Security 22 May 11:28
Kcom shrugs off revenue slip to boost profits

Promises bigger dividends and brags about Cisco hookup

Comms services provider Kcom jacked up profits for its full year despite a slip in revenues, preliminary results released this morning show. The erstwhile local telco said this didn't distract from its ongoing refocusing, and it still intended to up its dividend this year. Kcom turned in total revenues of £387.3m for the year …

The Channel 22 May 11:43
IT distributors: The only people adding value to the world economy

More than just middlemen...

Why distributors? More specifically, why electronics distributors? Why have these intermediaries in the markets at all? Yes, obviously, someone somewhere has to have pieces of kit on a shelf somewhere for when a customer wants to make an order. Someone has to crate it up and ship it off too: but why do we still have …

The Channel 22 May 12:02
Activision may bung Bungie $2.5m ratings-based bonus

Destined to make big bucks?

Halo developer Bungie's lucrative ten-year deal with games publisher Activision has been made public, revealing the coder is set to receive an unprecedented bonus should its next title win critical acclaim. The studio will pocket a tasty $2.5m (£1.6m) bonus if the game in development, dubbed Destiny, though that's probably …

Games 22 May 12:14
Titsup WHMCS calls the Feds after credit-card megaleak

Web billing biz ransacked, smashed offline by hacktivists

WHMCS, which provides billing and customer support tech to many web hosts, was comprehensively hacked on Monday and remains offline. Hackers tricked WHMCS's own hosting firm into handing over admin credentials to its servers. The group that carried out the hack, UGNazi, subsequently extracted the billing company's database …

Security 22 May 12:21
Apple's trial experts are 'slavish fanbois who believe in magic'

Samsung wants witnesses tossed out of patent battle

Samsung has asked a Californian court to dismiss seven of Apple's expert witnesses in a patent case - and claimed their "slavish" love for the Foxconn-rebrander means they are unable to give useful testimony. In a Motion to Exclude Opinions of Certain of Apple's Experts, the South Korean giant's lawyers described the Apple …

Law 22 May 12:38
Why can't ICANN just 'get s**t done', ask dot-brand hopefuls

gTLD registration site relaunches amid brickbats

Web overlord ICANN has reopened its bug-plagued new top-level domain name registration system almost six weeks after taking it down to patch an embarrassing security hole. Companies signed up to the TLD Application System (TAS) now have until a minute before midnight on Wednesday, 30 May to apply for new generic dot-words such …

Hosting 22 May 13:04
Fake Facebook pull-down tricks social climbers into swallowing vile load

Malware-slingers understand your need to network

Scammers are attempting to trick prospective marks into opening malware via spam messages falsely warning that their Facebook account is in the process of being closed. The dodgy email poses as supposed account cancellation confirmation messages that point to a third-party application running on the Facebook platform. The …

Security 22 May 13:17
Star Trek's Scotty boldly goes where he always wanted to

James Doohan's ashes hitch a ride on the SpaceX Dragon

Elon Musk's Dragon spaceship that successfully took off this morning was carrying extra special secret cargo: Star Trek's Chief Engineer Scott. The Falcon 9 rocket, which launched the privately funded SpaceX craft containing supplies and science experiments for the International Space Station, also took up the ashes of actor …

Science 22 May 13:37
Official: Apple, IBM are world's most valuable brands

While Microsoft is the McDonalds of the tech world

Technology companies dominate a listing of the hottest worldwide brands with Apple and IBM taking the top slots, though how much of a benefit this is for resellers might be open to question. Millward Brown's BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands 2012 survey saw four tech and three comms providers in the top 10. Apple was …

The Channel 22 May 13:59
X-Com reboot invades Blighty this October

Aliens in autumn

2K Games has announced the UK release date for X-Com: Enemy Unknown. The anticipated franchise refresh is set to shoot onto shelves this October. With the original X-Com released in 1994, and the last sequel launched as far back as 2001, followers of the franchise have been twiddling their thumbs for what feels an eternity. …

Games 22 May 14:12
Google officially buys Motorola, hits refresh on CEO

Plonks senior veep Dennis Woodside in driving seat

Google has officially bought Motorola Mobility and gifted Mountain View's senior veep Dennis Woodside with the task of the running the company. Motorola's current CEO Sanjay Jha has been dropped in favour of Woodside - a Ironman triathlete who Google chief Larry Page described as being "phenomenal at building teams". Page also …

Financial News 22 May 14:28
Steve Jobs' 'private Apple spaceship' seeks public love

Can Cupertino locals swallow biz baron's glass doughnut?

Apple's head bean counter has asked his company's neighbours to back plans for a new 2.8 million sq ft glass doughnut office in Cupertino, California. Chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer sent out leaflets to locals last week asking them to support the fruity tech titan's planning application for a new gaff - called …

Management 22 May 14:28
VIA outs $49 Raspberry Pi-alike

'Bicycle for your mind', apparently

El Reg hasn't written about VIA for yonks, but it's one of the original x86 CPU makers, thanks to its purchase of processor design firm Centaur in 1999. VIA has long pitched low-cost, low-power CPUs, and now it's trying to do so again, this time with ARM technology, in a bid to take a bite out of Raspberry Pi. Banana Pi, …

Hardware 22 May 14:47
EMC takes on Box, SugarSync and other sync 'n' sharers

Buys Syncplicity

EMC is buying Syncplicity for its file-sharing and synchronisation technology and thus taking on Box, SugarSync, and other enterprise Dropbox look-alikes. Business and public sector organisations need their users to be able to share files securely in a world of proliferating user devices and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) for …

The Channel 22 May 15:04
Greene King pubs to offer free ~~beer~~ Wi-Fi

Ale Caesar

Pub chain Greene King will soon offer free Wi-Fi access in all of its 2400 boozers and eateries, courtesy of The Cloud. The two companies kicked off 2012 by wiring up 300 pubs with wireless hotspots, but Greene King today said it was not only going to have all of its 1000 tied houses and other establishments thus equipped but …

Broadband 22 May 15:15
Orange pulls out of women's Fiction

No longer the only kind of fruit

The Orange Prize for Fiction, awarded annually to the best English-language novel from a female human author, will henceforth be known as the "Prize for Fiction" as Orange is taking its money elsewhere. Orange will pay for this year's jamboree, which comes to a head next week, but after that the organisers will have to find …

Media 22 May 15:26
Big Bang secrets hidden in hundreds of petabytes of tape

Blue Waters supercomputer spews into Spectra kit

The NCSA Blue Waters petascale supercomputer is getting massive amounts of Spectra Logic tape library storage. It will start with four 17-frame Spectra T-Finity tape libraries for near-line data archive needs in the first year. Two more will be installed the following year. This means a raw capacity of 328PB and read/write …

HPC 22 May 15:42
New UK MVNO offers white list calling for kiddies' mobes

Data to follow in September

The UK has a new virtual operator, one specifically targeting parents who believe their children need a mobile phone before they're old enough to cope with the pressure of having one. For three quid a month (plus call/text charges), Bemilo lets parents vet potential contacts, read every SMS and lock down the phone at night to …

Small Biz 22 May 16:02
US space programme in shock metric conversion

Falcon 9 launch proves a 'small, one-metre step for man'

We are sure our readers have been enjoying NASA's footage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch to the ISS earlier today, but amid the excitement, you may have missed another historic moment for the US space programme. Listen carefully... That's right, at around 1:10, a mission control operative explains: "Altitude 5.3 kilometres, …

Science 22 May 16:26
Amazon offers cloudy app test drives

Casting Android handsets as very thin clients

Amazon is extending its cloud-based Test Drive to its on-device store, offering browsers a quick shot at an Android app, on their own phone, as a prelude to closing the sale. The service doesn't require developers to do anything, it just pops up as an option in the application's details (assuming you are in the USA), allowing …

Cloud 22 May 17:31
Anonymous hacktivists dump 1.7GB load slurped from DoJ site

US Justice Department: 'It was nothing major'

Anonymous-affiliated hackers dropped a 1.7GB torrent of data onto file-sharing networks on Monday after hacking into the US Bureau of Justice Statistics. The leaked files purportedly include "internal emails" as as well as other files supposedly culled from other compromised databases at the BJS, the US government agency that …

Security 22 May 18:03
Microsoft's FDS data-sorter crushes Hadoop

Getting Bing to sit up and bark

Techies at Microsoft Research, the big brain arm of the software goliath, have taken the crown in the sorting benchmark world. The researchers are thinking about how to implement new sorting algorithms in the Bing search engine to give Microsoft a leg up on the MapReduce algorithms that underpin Google's search engine and other …

HPC 22 May 18:37
iPad grabs lunch money from mobile PCs, pushes them in the stingers

Steve Jobs' soul goes marching on ... in the Channel

iPad sales trounced sales for netbooks and notebooks in the first quarter of 2012 pushing Apple to the dominant position in the mobile PC market, show new figures from analysts NPD. NPD ran together tablets with netbooks and notebook PCs in their "Mobile PC category" and skyrocketing iPad sales of 13.6 million in the first …

The Channel 22 May 19:01
Ballmer says 500 MILLION 'users' to 'have' Windows 8 in 2013

Promises 'deepest, broadest' penetration with new tool

Microsoft's given its first indication of how many devices it expects to ship running Windows 8 next year. Chief executive Steve Ballmer is reported to have said 500 million "users" would "have" Windows 8 next year - he was speaking at the Seoul Digital Forum, in South Korea. There were no more specifics, and there was no …

The Channel 22 May 19:28
Big names unleash 1,000-node Hadoop stampede

Coming of age for twee cartoon elephant?

Hadoop, the distributed big-data processing system named after a toy elephant, now has a group of suppliers behind it. The tech giants are collectively aiming to develop the popular big data beast with a 1,000 node cluster – dubbed the Analytics Workbench – as a laboratory. EMC's Greenplum, Intel, Mellanox Technologies, Micron …

Servers 22 May 20:02
Social media off to war with propaganda posts

Disinformation campaigns will start with NSFW honeypots

Social media posts which lure readers with the promise of illegal, amoral or forbidden products and services may become a cold war cyber weapon, according to Kaspersky Labs CEO Eugene Kaspersky. Speaking to The Register in Sydney yesterday Kaspersky said the usual suspects – Duqu, Stuxnet, whatever happened in Estonia and the …

Security 22 May 20:15
Wallace & Gromit teach Oz kids to respect patents

Museum exhibit “contains strong and accurate IP messages”

Wallace & Gromit have taken on their toughest challenge yet: teaching Australian kids to respect intellectual property rights raising a generation of patent trolls. The plasticine pair travelled to Australia to appear in the Wallace & Gromit's World of Invention exhibition at Scienceworks, one of several museums run by Museums …

Media 22 May 21:00
Dell gets a frightful haircut in Q1

Tough competitive environment

Slowing sales of notebook PCs, sluggish markets in Europe and Asia, and tepid buyers in the public sector all combined to shave Dell's revenues and give its net income a serious haircut in its first quarter of fiscal 2013. In the quarter ended May 4, Dell had $14.4bn in sales, down 4 per cent and below even the low end of its …

The Channel 22 May 23:06
Boffins track birds ... from Spaaaaaaaace

Endangered, not-so-angry, birds capture big data

An elite group of black Carnaby’s cockatoos has been fitted with satellite tracking devices in an Australian first bird data collection measure. The six rehabilitated Carnaby’s cockatoos were released at Perry Lakes in Perth, their natural habitat, and will be monitored to examine the dispersal and movement patterns of the six …

Science 22 May 23:15
Apple, RIM didn’t infringe Kodak patents

Smartphone vendors rehearse grave dance

Kodak’s hopes to parlay its patent portfolio into a get-out-of-Chapter-11 card have been dealt a blow, with a ruling that Apple and RIM haven’t infringed its digital image preview patents. The patents have been subject of lawsuits in both directions: Apple has accused the moribund icon of “ransacking” its IP to secure the …

Business 22 May 23:30
NSW gov backs mobile apps

Seven projects for govt get cash

The NSW government has awarded grants to seven mobile consortiums under the Collaborative Solutions program for Mobile Government. The government will provide around AUD$1 million to help the consortiums develop new mobile solutions for the public sector after a competitive pitch. The solutions will be trialled with NSW Trade …

Policy 22 May 23:59