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24th May 2012 Archive

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  • Boffins develop nanoscale vacuum tube running at .46 THz

    Power hungry but radiation resistant relic could make comeback … in spaaaace

    Researchers from NASA and Korea’s National Nanofab Center have cooked up nanoscale vacuum tubes, potentially bringing some of the earliest electronic devices back into the mainstream of technology. As detailed in a new paper from Applied Physics Letters, the tiny tubes were manufactured using the same processes applied to …

    Science 24 May 01:37

  • HP takes a big profit haircut, too

    Blame printers, servers, and services

    This is taking "industry standard" a little too far perhaps. Dell's revenues got a haircut and its profits swooned in its most recent quarter, and Hewlett-Packard followed suit in its second fiscal quarter with profits falling a lot faster than its revenues dropped. The difference, of course, is that HP is a considerably larger …

    The Channel 24 May 03:52

  • China turns on the sprinklers with ambitious rain-making plans

    Points rocket launchers, guns at the sky, unleashes "weather army"

    China is to step up its use of cloud-seeding technology to open the heavens more frequently than ever before, in a bid to prevent drought and make the weather more predictable. Zheng Guoguang, administrator of the China Meteorological Administration, told attendees at the National Weather Modification Conference in Beijing …

    Science 24 May 04:48

  • Obama orders gov app deluge

    Developers cheer as every US government agency to release two mobile apps inside a year

    The US government has amplified its focus on getting the machinations of White House effectively digital with a strong push on mobile technology. President Obama yesterday issued a directive for each federal agency to make at least two key government services available via mobile apps phones within the next 12 months. The …

    Policy 24 May 04:53

  • 'Six-eyed' robot to tour National Museum of Australia

    Wi-Fi-guided bot will test NBN scenarios, augment reality for virtual visitors

    The National Museum of Australia will trial a mobile robot as a way of facilitating more student visitors to the institution. Around 90,000 students visit the museum each year, but Australia has more than four million students across all tiers of education. Most are at least 300 km from the Museum's Canberra home. The Museum …

    Policy 24 May 05:09

  • WTF is... Li-Fi?

    Feature Optical data transfer's new leading light?

    Forget about Wi-Fi - the future of home wireless networking is, according to boffins, the light bulb. So say a number of researchers and technologists who are looking to light to provide the next step in high-speed data networking in the home. The principle is simple: turn a light on and off so rapidly that the human eye …

    Hardware 24 May 06:00

  • Russian satellite beams home 121-megapixel pics of Earth

    Blue marble looking good from height of 36,000km

    Russia’s ELECTRO-L weather satellite has used its 121-megapixel sensors to send home the highest-resolution set of space pics yet. Even NASA admits it can't match the Russian bird for sheer mega-pixelage, which is yours to peruse thanks to an animated GIF proivded by the Russian Federal Space Agency. The original is a little …

    Science 24 May 06:03

  • Samsung outsources notebooks to Taiwan - report

    Compal set to be the lucky ODM

    Korean electronics giant Samsung has reportedly begun outsourcing notebook production for the first time, with Taiwanese ODM Compal Electronics the lucky manufacturer and shipments to begin as early as June. Taiwanese tech title Digitimes spoke to its familiar “notebook supply chain manufacturers” who blabbed that the deal …

    The Channel 24 May 06:06

  • Brocade shakes up sales leaders after earnings slump

    New cards, same old faces?

    Brocade has printed out a whole bunch of new business cards for its sales and marketing department, just a week after releasing Q2 results that showed sales falling year on year. Regan McGrath has been named VP of global channels and marketing at the mission critical networking vendor. He was previously veep of sales for the …

    The Channel 24 May 07:02

  • Special Projects Burro pops his hooves

    Mysterious demise of El Reg's asinine mascot

    It's with heavy hearts that we announce today the death of Aladdin – our Special Projects Burro. Our asinine mascot was perfectly OK yesterday afternoon when I popped out to see that all was well with the donkey herd, but a couple of hours later he'd inexplicably gone hooves-up. There was no external sign of injury, so we' …

    SPB 24 May 07:32

  • IT firms drown as rising tide buoys rest of UK plc

    Techy Brit biz collapse rate leaps a third

    The number of British business failures eased back in April, however IT firms bucked the trend with insolvencies up by a third compared to last year. Credit ratings giant Experian said that 1,564 businesses failed in April, compared to 1,808 company collapses in the same month last year. Put another way, this was 0.08 per cent …

    The Channel 24 May 08:01

  • Cable to stimulate stiff growth in entrepreneurs' trousers

    UK.gov to pour £200m into pockets of small biz

    Under-fire UK business secretary Vince Cable has launched the government's new £200m "GrowthAccelerator" programme to help small businesses with the potential to do well to actually do well. Meanwhile, Cable was branded a "socialist" by Tory donor and Downing Street advisor Adrian Beecroft on Wednesday, in his report on …

    Small Biz 24 May 08:33

  • Rival mobile networks hang up on EE's 4G call

    All we wanted was a monopoly

    Vodafone and Telefonica have laid out their arguments against EE's request to be allowed a monopoly on 4G telephony, and very damning they are too, but the public seems more supportive and Three's filing isn't public yet. Not that there's any doubt about where Three stands, the company told us it had filed a response with …

    Business 24 May 09:06

  • Converged system threesome show off new Vblocks

    New additions to federate and protect as trio adopt VPLEX

    VCE, the VMware/Cisco/EMC converged system threesome, has introduced two new Vblocks and adopted VPLEX to federate Vblocks. A Vblock is built from pre-integrated Cisco UCS X86 servers and Nexus switches, VMware vSphere server virtualisation and EMC VMAX or VNX storage arrays. It is ordered, installed and operated as a single …

    Storage 24 May 09:21

  • World+Dog to demand ever larger tablet-phones

    Screen-inflation nation

    We're not speaking to people on our phones, these days, we're mostly browsing the web. And that, says market watcher ABI Research, is driving demand for devices that lie in the grey area between smartphones and tablets. Come 2015, shipments of these big-screen phones or small tablets - or, as we used to call them, Mobile …

    Phones 24 May 09:34

  • Yahoo! leaks! private! key! in! Axis! Chrome! debut!

    Extension launch scuppered by certificate blunder

    Yahoo! today released its Axis extension for Chrome – and accidentally leaked its private security key that could allow anyone to create malicious plugins masquerading as official Yahoo! software. Australian entrepreneur Nik Cubrilovic, who last year garnered notice for identifying Facebook's tracking cookies, revealed the …

    Security 24 May 09:39

  • LOHAN sucks 27 inches

    Mounting excitement down in REHAB

    The epic saga of our shed-built hypobaric chamber – the Rocketry Experimental High Altitude Barosimulator (REHAB) experiment – continues today with the news that we've just laid our hands on a proper vacuum pump which allows LOHAN to suck an impressive 27 inches. REHAB newbies should get some background info here and here …

    SPB 24 May 10:02

  • Minority Report-style swishery demoed with cheap webcam

    HPC blog You'll be sorry if you flip it off, though

    New tech at GTC12 lets punters pretend to be Tom Cruise in Minority Report: opening windows, moving them, closing them, and essentially acting like a cool, futuristic cop. Eyesight Mobile Technologies performed an interesting demonstration on the exhibit floor. In the video, marketing director Liat Rostock shows us how the …

    HPC 24 May 10:14

  • LG pitches £7k 55in OLED TV, again

    Thin telly requires fat wallet

    LG showed off its 55in OLED TV at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January, and despite demo'ing the device again this week, this time over here, it's still vague about the release date. While it will start appearing in showrooms in July, just in time for Olympics footage, and LG will happily take your order, the best …

    Hardware 24 May 10:29

  • Biz law reform: Bad news for lawyers, good news for hippies

    Eco-tech funds in, tribunals out in draft bill

    Vince Cable presented his new Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill to Parliament on Wednesday afternoon, promising more action on competition, streamlined employment tribunals and a £3bn Green Bank that will funnel cash into eco-friendly energy and tech industries. The proposed changes to employment law will encourage work- …

    Management 24 May 10:33

  • Google quizzed AGAIN by French data watchdog

    CNIL unhappy with previous answers on privacy

    French data regulator Commission Nationale de l'Informatique (CNIL) has demanded more answers from Google over its handling of the data of its users. The watchdog said it was unhappy with Google's initial response to a 69 questions it submitted to Mountain View earlier this year, following the companies decision to cut and …

    Government 24 May 10:44

  • Toshiba swaps skinny Android tablet's CPU

    OMAP out, Tegra 3 in

    Toshiba has taken its very thin AT200 tablet, ripped out the 1.2GHz Texas Instruments OMAP 4430 CPU and flung in an Nvidia Tegra 3 penta-core processor instead. The result is the AT300, launched today. It's a 10.1in, 1280 x 800 job running Android 4 Ice Cream Sandwich. There's 1GB of Ram on board and a choice of 16GB or 32GB …

    Tablets 24 May 10:56

  • Zombies, Run!

    iOS App of the Week Exercise motivate-urgh, urgh

    There are dozens of apps aimed at joggers that can plot a route for you, and measure your speed, progress and calories burned. Yet none of them deal with the fundamental fact that jogging is the most boring form of exercise known to humanity. Zombies, Run! attempts to add a bit of fun to your pavement pounding by involving you …

    Phones 24 May 11:00

  • Attack of the clones: Researcher pwns SecureID token system

    Analysis But RSA claims it would only work on rootkit-compromised gear

    RSA Security has downplayed the significance of an attack that offers a potential way to clone its SecurID software tokens. The attack, developed by Behrang Fouladi, senior security analyst at SensePost, offers a potential way to defeat the hardware binding and copy protection embedded in RSA's software. Having defeated this …

    Security 24 May 11:13

  • Reg readers love Private Cloud (true)

    Playing the SLA long game

    When IT is your day job it is easy to lose sight of why you are doing it. Alright, it’s to pay the bills, fund your next holiday, buy nice stuff and so on. But from the point of view of whoever is paying your salary, the point is to enable and add value to the business. You and your colleagues in the IT department are there to …

    Cloud 24 May 11:30

  • SpaceX does what it HASN'T done before: Dragon in close ISS flyby

    Station 'nauts see light on but no one home on capsule

    It's another moment of truth for upstart space startup SpaceX as once again the company attempts to do something that has only ever been accomplished to date by major government space agencies: docking one spacecraft to another in orbit and transferring cargo. First time a US spacecraft has been seen from this vantage since …

    Science 24 May 11:35

  • New smart meter tells Brits exactly what they already know

    Live 'leccy stats from the cloud to save 'millions'

    We're all going to be much richer thanks to British Gas, which will push kit from Cambridge startup AlertMe into 10,000 homes this summer. The rollout will reach the rest of the energy giant's ten million customers in the autumn. Not that AlertMe is guaranteed to be supplying all the kit, which will integrate with smart meters …

    Science 24 May 11:48

  • How I went from Unix engineering to flogging Google apps

    My 25 years of comical IT buzzwords

    When I started work as a Unix software engineer at Logica nearly 30 years ago, we were on the cusp of a revolution in IT. IBM was top dog in tech and Digital Equipment Corporation was the world's second-largest IT company. The other major players were the BUNCH companies: Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data Corporation and …

    The Channel 24 May 11:58

  • Pipex 'silence' condemned punters' emails to spam blackhole

    Analysis ISP blocked for a week after 'ignoring' complaints

    Pipex subscribers struggled to send emails for several days after antivirus biz Trend Micro declared the ISP's network a source of spam. Messages sent via Pipex's servers were either blocked or deliberately delayed by internet providers and businesses that rely on Trend Micro's services to filter emails. El Reg stepped in to …

    Security 24 May 12:03

  • Met cops get new pocket-sized fingerprint scanners

    Mobile print-takers identify perps in seconds

    Met bobbies will soon be able to scan suspects' fingerprints on the street and pull up their records in seconds using internet-connected handheld gadgets. London's top cops ordered 350 phone-size devices, which will be used to run identity checks on anyone believed to have committed an offence or potentially wanted for a crime …

    Law 24 May 12:22

  • NetApp streaks ahead, avoids trip-up by bum flash leg

    Don't want to be an all-flash also-ran

    NetApp is a veritable money machine these days, and is currently clocking in growing fourth quarter and annual results, but a blip may have appeared on the horizon as it searches for a way to bolster its flash offering. The tech giant has signalled it will partner up to expand on flash technology and work on a few in-house …

    The Channel 24 May 12:42

  • Sysadmins: Chucked your Exchange servers up? Let's enable SSO

    Sysadmin blog Keeping things simple for the users...

    My previous article focused on migrating Exchange into Microsoft's cloud, but there is more to Office 365 than just Exchange. Single Sign On (SSO) between Office 365 and your local Microsoft domain can be a bit tricky. A proper implementation has high minimum requirements, and there are very good arguments against cutting …

    Servers 24 May 13:02

  • Moshi Monsters pushed onto pint-sized kiddies' mobes

    Under-10s' social network spreads

    Monstro city, the social network frequented by all the coolest kids in the playground, is going mobile and has signed a deal with Gree to deploy at least two games on that platform. UK-based Moshi Monsters is school-yard flavour of the month right now, boasting collectable figurines and a social gaming network which makes …

    Small Biz 24 May 13:33

  • Fake Angry Birds app makers fined £50k for shock cash suck

    Making money-grabbing malware is too easy on Android, say experts

    A firm that disguised Android malware as Angry Birds games has been fined £50,000 ($78,300) by UK premium-rate service regulator PhonepayPlus. A1 Agregator posted mobile apps posing as smash-hit games, including Cut the Rope, on Android marketplaces and other outlets. Rather than offer free entertainment, the software silently …

    Security 24 May 14:01

  • EMC denies big server biz plans ... but IS building servers

    Embedded ones, true, but what's wrong with off-the-shelf hardness?

    EMC has always maintained that it is not is in the server business, but now it is developing servers – albeit to go into its arrays and run application software inside VM containers. At EMC World in Las Vegas, the company once again strongly refuted suggestions that it was entering the general server business. In fact, it is …

    Storage 24 May 14:28

  • Mars rover Opportunity spots WALL-E in crater ramble

    Pic Me and my shadow

    NASA's Mars rover Opportunity snapped a dramatic photo of itself roaming around the planet's Endeavour Crater today. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ The image caught the clear shadow of the hardworking robot, which to our wise eyes on the Vulture space desk looks a bit like the cute movie character …

    Science 24 May 14:50

  • Google to bring Raspberry Pi to Bash Street

    Computers for kids

    Google is to indirectly equip 102 UK schools with Raspberry Pi devices. The ZX81 de nos jours - though Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, who announced the scheme last night, likened the Pi to the more education-centric, posher BBC Micro - will come to schools through UK charity Teach First. Google and Teach First will …

    Hardware 24 May 14:53

  • Cookies on The Register

    The cookies we set and why

    This website is owned and operated by Situation Publishing. When someone visits www.theregister.co.uk / www.channelregister.co.uk we collect standard internet log information and details of visitor behaviour patterns. We do this to find out things such as the number of visitors to the various parts of the site. We collect this …

    The Company

  • Top Facebook exec begs students: 'Click on an ad or two'

    Keep Zuck's shareholders happy... please

    Now that Facebook is being scrutinised by its new-found shareholders, it really needs people to start clicking on its ads. That's a fact shamelessly highlighted by Mark Zuckerberg's right-hand woman, chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, who was speaking to business students at Harvard University this morning. According to …

    Financial News 24 May 15:25

  • Unions urge under-fire HP workers to 'resist' job cuts

    Attempts to protect 1,600 UK staff ... not including Lynch

    Unite and the Public Services Commercial (PCS) unions will form a tag team to "use every means possible" to safeguard the jobs of 1,600 HP UK employees under risk of redundancy. The tech monster revealed late last night that it is hitting the eject button for 27,000 workers worldwide – including Autonomy founder Mike Lynch – …

    The Channel 24 May 15:33

  • Bigger, longer deals dangled at G-Cloud 2.0 launch

    UK.gov buffs incentives in revamped tech bazaar

    The UK government has launched the second version of G-Cloud, its tech shopping catalogue for the public sector, with reworked conditions to entice suppliers. Among the changes, the length of some IT contracts up for grabs has been doubled to 24 months under “exceptional” circumstances. There’d been some concern from civil …

    Government 24 May 15:59

  • How zombie LulzSec exposed privates' love lives with PHP hack

    Single soldiers site swallowed surprise load

    A dating website for US soldiers was hacked and its database leaked after it blindly trusted user-submitted files, according to an analysis by security firm Imperva. The report highlights the danger of handling documents uploaded to web apps. "LulzSec Reborn" hacktivists attacked MilitarySingles.com and disclosed sensitive …

    Security 24 May 16:28

  • China's home grown mobile platforms drive smartphone growth

    Xiaomi's Android-based MIUI hailed as Apple rival

    The trend among domestic Chinese mobile players to build their own, highly localised, operating systems based on Android, is set to drive additional revenue and push smartphone adoption to a tipping point in 2013, but many efforts are likely to be short-lived, according to IDC. The trend for hyper-local Androids can be …

    Mobile 24 May 20:00

  • Fantasy cabal sells off novel-as-app platform

    Neal Stephenson’s Subutai splits into content and publishing software companies

    Subutai Corporation, the brainchild of Neal Stephenson, has sold its Personal Ubiquitous Literature Platform (PULP) to a company called Brainstem Media. Brainstem is founded and run by the PULP’s developers. PULP was developed to deliver chapters of a serialised novel to an iOS and Android app. The novel in question, The …

    Media 24 May 21:30

  • Australian government kicks off IT price discrimination inquiry

    ‘Oz tax’ under scrutiny

    The infamous practice of adding a price premium to tech products imported into Australia is now under the scrutiny of a parliamentary committee, with submissions open until 6 July, 2012. If vendors bother to respond at all – in his letter establishing the inquiry, Senator Stephen Conroy notes (PDF) that the tech sector was …

    Policy 24 May 23:19

  • Motorola Mobility loses to Microsoft in German patent battle

    All your long texts are belong to Redmond

    Motorola Mobility has suffered another blow in Europe, with a German court deciding it’s breached Microsoft patents. Already under EU investigation for allegedly reneging on its FRAND responsibilities, Motorola Mobility has been found to be infringing Redmond’s IP by allowing users of its mobile phones to send long text …

    Business 24 May 23:21

  • Singtel to build pan-Asian storage and compute cloud

    VMware in the box seat in Oz, Singapore and Hong Kong

    Singtel will federate its hosting facilities across Asia to create a single cloud for its customers. The company appears not to be taking the full public cloud plunge, announcing yesterday that it will “launch a regional PowerON Compute cloud service in the second half of this year.“ The new offering “will enable customers …

    Cloud 24 May 23:42