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1st June 2012 Archive

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  • Google files EU complaint over Nokia/Microsoft patent trolling

    Flays Finns for fibs, takes aim at MOSAID

    Google has lodged a complaint with the European Commission over Microsoft and Nokia’s patent activities. In a statement sent to El Reg, a SpokesGoogler said “We haven't shared the complaint with anyone -- it's not customary to make these docs public,” but offered the official line that: “Nokia and Microsoft are colluding to …

    Policy 1 Jun 00:29

  • Firm applies for .sucks domain

    Says brands will use it to swallow online criticism

    A new company is planning to operate .sucks as a top-level internet domain, and its CEO says he expects big brands to embrace the concept. Vox Populi Registry is one of several companies to today announce that they have paid domain name gatekeeper ICANN a $185,000 application fee to try to get their hands on a new gTLD. The . …

    Networks 1 Jun 01:24

  • Apple and Foxconn back under fire for working conditions

    Nothing's changed two months on from FLA deal, says group

    Apple and Foxconn have yet to make significant changes to labour practices after Chinese employees complained of unpaid overtime, bullying and unsafe conditions - that's according to not-for-profit group Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM). SACOM levelled the accusations in its Sweatshops are good for …

    Business 1 Jun 03:08

  • Chargeback exposes IT shops as slow, expensive suppliers

    Pay-per-byte tech slowly evolving past politics

    In the heady days of 2008, when server virtualisation was young-ish and low hanging fruit of physical servers could be found on every rack in data centres and server rooms around the world, VMware slipped out an update to its Lifecycle Manager that included chargeback features. Chargeback enables metering of IT resources, even …

    Cloud 1 Jun 03:50

  • Hong Kong firms also at risk from Chinese hackers

    Experts warn multinationals to batten down hatches

    Security experts have warned multinationals with bases in Hong Kong that they are not immune to cyber attack from China despite the shared sovereignty between the Special Administrative Region (SAR)and its mainland parent. The Chinese authorities have long been blamed for either officially sanctioning cyber espionage attacks …

    Security 1 Jun 04:13

  • Magnetic medicines hit the cancerous spot

    Boffins develop iron core for anti-cancer drug, drag it to tumours with magnets

    A team of researchers in Australia and Scotland has designed an iron core for the anti-cancer drug Cisplatin, so that it can be dragged by magnets to wherever in your body it can do its best work. The team’s work is detailed in a new paper,Cisplatin drug delivery using gold-coated iron oxide nanoparticles for enhanced tumour …

    Science 1 Jun 04:38

  • Acorn Archimedes is 25

    Feature The first ARM kit

    The Acorn Archimedes is 25 years old this month. The first machines based on the company's ARM (Acorn Risc Machine) processor were announced in June 1987, the year after the 32-bit chip itself was launched. Four versions of the Archimedes were released in 1987: the A305, A310, A410 and A440. The first two had 512KB and 1MB of …

    reghardware 1 Jun 06:00

  • Google to show China what it's missing

    Will tell users when Great Firewall blocks their searches

    Google could be set for another tense showdown with the Chinese government after changing its search experience for users in the People’s Republic in a way that will explicitly notify them when their searches are being blocked by the authorities. Senior vice president of knowledge, Alan Eustace, announced the changes in a blog …

    Media 1 Jun 06:09

  • Microsemi rebuts silicon backdoor claim

    Researchers aren’t talking so verification is hard

    Microsemi, manufacturer of the ProASIC3 field-programmable gate array (FPGA) that researchers Sergei Skorobogatov and Christopher Woods claim has a highly hackable backdoor, has issued a statement (PDF) about the attack. The statement also casts doubt on the experimental method used to detect the backdoor, as it says the …

    Security 1 Jun 06:46

  • French court: YouTube has done 'enough' to avoid copyright liability

    Google not responsible for filtering vids uploaded to site – ruling

    The Tribunal de Grande Instance said that Google had made enough of an effort to remove copyrighted content that had been uploaded by YouTube users which the biggest TV company in France held rights for when told about the material's existence. The efforts made were sufficient to remove Google from liability for that …

    Law 1 Jun 07:02

  • Department of Health tests online NHS 111 helpline

    Can anybody help? Hello?

    The Department of Health is trialling an NHS 111 online service as part of a plan to provide a service to complement locally driven telephone services. The department plans to have rolled out the 111 helpline by April 2013. It is supposed to replace NHS Direct as the first port of call for patients with urgent, but not life- …

    Policy 1 Jun 07:32

  • 'Europe two years late' to the US cloud party

    Privacy, security and economic meltdown blamed

    Cloud adoption in Europe will lag the US by a minimum of two years due to concerns over data privacy, security and regulations. Or so says abacus-stroker Gartner, which reckons that the eurozone's economic meltdown won't help either. "The opportunities for cloud computing value are valid all over the world, and the same is …

    Cloud 1 Jun 08:01

  • Tube bosses: 'Wireless tickets too slow, we think'

    TfL hasn't actually tested NFC tech since 2009

    Transport for London's director of customer experience thinks wireless payments are still too slow for London's Tube, though he admits TfL hasn't tested them since 2009. Speaking at the Open Mobile Summit, TfL's Shashi Verma told the assembled that radio-based NFC payments were just too slow for the underground, but when …

    Mobile 1 Jun 08:32

  • Fans get date with Lara Croft

    Don't hate the players

    Square Enix already revealed Lara Croft's next outing in Tomb Raider had been pushed back but today it announced a definitive release date for the game. Crystal Dynamics' Tomb Raider reboot - delayed for quality improvement - will be available on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC from 5 March 2013. Fresh content is expected at the E3 expo …

    reghardware 1 Jun 08:55

  • iLuv Vibro Classic II

    Accessory of the Week Feel the noise

    ILuv’s Vibro II is notable for two things. The first is its size. It’s tiny for a speaker dock, around the width of a traditional bedside radio alarm clock and not much taller. The second notable feature attaches to the back of the speaker dock by means of a 2m cable. It’s about 5cm square and slides under your pillow. When …

    reghardware 1 Jun 09:00

  • Three releases 'value' MiFi modem

    Tethered phone alternative

    Three has priced up - and released - its "value" portable modem-cum-wireless-router. The Huawei E5331 will cost you £50 if you want it PAYG mobile broadband, though that includes 1GB of data. You can get the MiFi for £30 if you're willing to cough up £16 a month, a deal that grants you 5GB of data each month. The gadget …

    reghardware 1 Jun 09:04

  • LINX 'downed by ethernet loop' on external network

    Who typed 'Google' into Google this time?

    The London Internet Exchange (LINX) suffered an hour-long outage yesterday evening, after an unnamed external network caused an ethernet loop and protective measures failed to work. LINX is currently trying to diagnose what went wrong. Reports on Twitter suggested that the exchange went titsup after Juniper's PTX Series packet …

    Hosting 1 Jun 09:16

  • 82 London Underground stations to get free Wi-Fi for the Olympics

    After that, you're paying. And it's a monopoly

    Virgin Media has begun rolling out its wireless network to the London Underground with Oxford Circus, Stratford, Kings Cross, Liverpool Street and Leicester Square being among the first stations to offer a Wi-Fi service to commuters. The telco said that it planned to connect 82 stations on the Tube network by the end of July. …

    Broadband 1 Jun 09:36

  • Motorola adds THIRD SIM to Qwerty handset

    Threesome with a Brazilian

    Motorola is no stranger to mobile devices with two Sim-card slots, however with its Motokey 3-Chip handset, the bar has been raised to include a third. Aside from its defining trait, the Motokey 3-Chip is a fairly bog-standard Qwerty blower, with a basic UI, 2Mp camera and a Micro SD card slot with a capacity limit of 32GB. …

    reghardware 1 Jun 09:56

  • Are your applications ready to live in the cloud?

    It's all in the preparation

    So, you are ready for a journey to the cloud. You have evaluated the benefits and you think you are ready to migrate your applications to a castle in the sky. But the road to cloudy happiness is a long and winding one. Getting your applications into the cloud takes preparation. Why move? The first step is to nail down the …

    Cloud 1 Jun 10:00

  • Eurozone death spiral forces Microsoft to ease UK licensing price hike

    Somewhat smaller pillow for Brit customers to bite

    Microsoft has confirmed that the pending price hike on volume licensing will not be as steep as the initial preview indicated due to the weakening of the Euro currency in recent weeks. At the start of last month, Redmond said it expected UK biz customers would pay between 7.5 per cent and 33.5 per cent more for software …

    Channel Register 1 Jun 10:13

  • Facebook goes offline, shares stabilise at merely disastrous level

    Hey, nobody forced you to buy the toy money ... bitch

    It's not just Facebook's share price that's been down in the dumps - the site itself fell off the interwebs for some users on Thursday. The dominant social network, which claims it's closing in on a billion regular users worldwide, has coughed to a few outage wobbles. "Yesterday, some users briefly experienced issues loading …

    Media 1 Jun 10:27

  • Sharp to show OLED 'retina' display for laptops

    3840 x 2160 screen, anyone?

    Fancy a 3840 x 2160 display in your next 13in laptop? Form an orderly queue outside Sharp's offices then, and loudly demand it turns its latest prototype panel into shipping product. The 13.5in screen contains just under 8.3 million white OLED pixels filtered for RGB colour. Its dimensions yield a pixel density of 326 pixels …

    reghardware 1 Jun 10:37

  • The Great Border Agency IT Crash: Just who was responsible?

    Stand by for more trouble at Lunar House, say insiders

    IT biz Atos caused last month's disastrous Border Agency computer meltdown that caused chaos for foreigners resident in the UK, according to the agency's chief. And well-placed sources have told The Register they expect similar problems in future. Atos's service has been described by insiders with knowledge of the matter as " …

    Government 1 Jun 11:00

  • You only want me for my BYOD

    Something for the Weekend, Sir? Get your kit off... my cloud

    They've taken advantage of my goodwill yet again. The really annoying thing is that I pleaded with them to do it, so it's my own fault. And it may be yours, too. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I want to talk about BYOD. For the benefit of sole traders reading this, it stands for Bring Your Own Device and is the latest craze …

    reghardware 1 Jun 11:17

  • Google aiming to buy dot-lol cyberland, and not just for the lulz of it

    Vint Cerf sniffs potential creative innovation in gTLDs

    Google has revealed it is jockeying for a variety of top-level domains (TLDs) including .lol and .google. The ad giant went public with its plans on Thursday after ICANN's deadline passed for applications for new web address extensions. The search engine behemoth has applied for TLDs that include .youtube, .google and .lol, …

    Hosting 1 Jun 11:23

  • Ultrabooks: objects of desire but just too darn expensive

    Priced to stay on shelves?

    Here's a snippet of market data of interest to folk keeping tabs on the Ultrabook market. In the UK, during the past four years, laptops costing £800 or more have never taken more than 7.5 per cent of notebook sales as a whole. That's no great surprise, perhaps - you'd expect cheaper laptops to outsell pricey ones. But it is a …

    reghardware 1 Jun 11:34

  • Terror cops hunt laptop snatched from retired MI5 spookmistress

    Hapless thief may accidentally read her turgid novels

    A laptop belonging to the former boss of MI5 has been nicked while she was passing through Heathrow Airport. Dame Stella Rimington's computer was swiped after she left the machine on a luggage trolley at Heathrow airport last Tuesday, The Sun reports. There's no evidence the theft was anything more than opportunistic. Even so …

    Security 1 Jun 11:43

  • Facebook stock plunge leaves tax-dodge Saverin WORSE off. Haa ha

    Imagine one's concern

    While taking a break from sipping Cristal Champagne at his home in tax-haven Singapore, Eduardo Saverin - who stumped up $30,000 to get Facebook going when he was Mark Zuckerberg's roommate at Harvard - sparked a political firestorm last month when he renounced his American citizenship ahead of the social network's stock market …

    Financial News 1 Jun 11:58

  • Windows 8: We kick the tyres on Redmond's new tablet wheels

    Review Tastes like chicken

    The surprising thing about the Windows 8 Release Preview just delivered is not how much has changed from February's Consumer Preview, or even the Developer Preview from September 2011, but rather how little. Microsoft is set on delivering this hybrid tablet-and-desktop operating system pretty much as-is, despite widespread …

    Windows 8 1 Jun 12:27

  • LucasArts unveils Star Wars game for grown-ups

    Bounty be popular

    LucasArts announced its latest videogame this week, Star Wars 1313, which pushes the franchise towards a more mature audience with its proposed 18-certificate rating. The game - announced through Spike's Game Trailers TV Show last night - is said to be a third person action adventure set in a ruthless criminal underworld on …

    reghardware 1 Jun 12:59

  • LOHAN sucks Reg reader's instrument to death

    Strange doings in the shed at our mountaintop REHAB complex

    As followers of our Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) project will be aware, we've done quite a bit of head scratching as to how we're going to fire the rocket motor of our Vulture 2 spaceplane. Over the past few months, we've been working inexorably towards a test designed to see if solid rocket motors will indeed …

    SPB 1 Jun 13:00

  • Microsoft and Nokia dub Google troll moan 'desperate', 'frivolous'

    Hello Mr Kettle, will you accept a call from Mr Pot?

    Nokia has labelled Google's patent trolling complaint to the EU "frivolous" and "wrong" while Microsoft said the move was a "desperate tactic". Google said last night that it had filed a complaint with the European Commission claiming that Nokia and Microsoft colluded to raise mobile prices by sending out patent trolls to do …

    Business 1 Jun 13:27

  • My part in the GREATEST IPO SUCCESS of ALL TIME

    ¡Bong! Chewing the face off the Facebook

    [The founder of Shoreditch's leading VC investment boutique has been helping Facebook with its IPO - Ed] After a month in California on special business, during which I couldn't blog here or tweet, I returned to The Roundabout on Monday to hear that a naked man has been found eating the face off another naked man in the street …

    Bootnotes 1 Jun 14:00

  • Look out, world - Mad Leo Apotheker's back!

    Comment Oh those crazy Frenchies

    Wild-eyed former HP CEO Leo Apotheker is back in the IT hot seat after bagging a spot on the supervisory board at French tech outfit Steria. The appointment of the bumbling exec was approved by 99.8 per cent of shareholders at the Annual General Meeting on 15 May. At the same time, Laetitia Puyfaucher was also voted onto the …

    Channel Register 1 Jun 14:27

  • US secret spaceplane will come back to Earth sometime soon

    Air Force says black minishuttle due back in June

    The US Air Force is preparing for the imminent landing of its second secret spaceplane, which is expected sometime at the beginning of June. The reusable X-37B, an unmanned shuttle with an unknown mission, will probably come down at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, although Edwards Air Force Base in the same state is a …

    Science 1 Jun 14:58

  • US officials confirm Stuxnet was a joint US-Israeli op

    Well, sure ... so why are you telling us, Mr President?

    Cyberattacks on Iranian nuclear program were a US-Israel effort started under the Bush administration and continued by President Obama, The New York Times reports. The confirmation from Obama-administration officials that Stuxnet was a joint US-operation comes from extracts from a forthcoming book, Confront and Conceal: Obama' …

    Security 1 Jun 15:14

  • WHMCS under renewed DDoS blitz after patching systems

    'Undesirable people' are all over us

    WHMCS, the UK-based billing and customer support tech supplier, has once again come under denial of service attacks, on this occasion following an upgrade of its systems to defend against a SQL injection vulnerability. The security patch was applied on Tuesday following reports by KrebsOnSecurity that a hacker was auctioning …

    Cloud 1 Jun 15:27

  • EMC drops secret cash wad on Canadian software firm

    Watch4net will manage hybrid cloud element performance

    EMC is on the acquisition trail again, if it ever really stepped off it. The latest target was Watch4net, a Montreal-based supplier of performance management software for undisclosed wads of cash. Watch4net is privately owned and was founded in 2000, with offices in Montreal, London, England, Munich and Toronto. Its software …

    Cloud 1 Jun 16:01

  • Japanese giant NTT gobbles London data centre biz Gyron

    'I sold that', insists Vince Cable. 'Me!'

    NTT Communications has coughed an undisclosed financial fur ball to take a majority stake in data centre services provider Gyron. The Hemel Hempstead-based Gyron sells colocation and connectivity services to large enterprises including Adobe, Symantec and music streaming outfit Spotify via a 3 MW server farm on the outskirts …

    Channel Register 1 Jun 16:27

  • Newcomer gets out its box, plans to sell it cheaply to all comers

    I swing all ways, iSCSI, Fibre Channel, CIFS, long time

    Here's another hybrid flash/disk array that's using dedupe and compression to produce impressive cost/GB numbers. Tegile's Zebi product has been shipping for about a year and been bought by some 75 customers, with 80 per cent of involved in server and desktop virtualisation. It is a multi-protocol box, offering iSCSI, Fibre …

    Storage 1 Jun 17:03

  • Jobs gloom in the US: But a few bright spots in IT

    Truly, it's us carrying the rest on our backs

    Factory output is slowing in China. Europe is still struggling with debts in Greece, Spain, and Ireland. And now the United States is adding a lot fewer jobs than needed. And, as it turns out, American companies have in the past few months added even fewer jobs than the Department of Labor originally thought. According to the …

    Jobs 1 Jun 17:57

  • Activist claims victory in forcing Facebook vote over rule changes

    Can Facebook users be bothered to vote?

    The Europe-v-Facebook campaign organized by Austrian law student Max Schrems is claiming victory after the social networking giant announced it is holding a vote on updates to its operating policy. "Today we are asking you to join our second global site governance vote," said Elliot Schrage, VP of communications and public …

    Business 1 Jun 21:13

  • Dell's takeover talks with Quest stall

    Time for HP to swoop in

    Dell has made no secret of its desire to build up a systems software business with a tidy recurring revenue stream and a broad portfolio of products with which it can peddle to enterprise customers. But every deal that Dell wants to do doesn't always happen, and this seems to be the case with its rumored interest in acquiring …

    Software 1 Jun 22:30

  • Advertisers slam Microsoft over 'Do not track' decision

    Accuses Redmond of going rogue

    Microsoft's decision to enable the "Do not track" feature by default in Internet Explorer 10 should please privacy advocates, but it has sparked condemnation from the online advertising industry. Microsoft made the announcement on IE10 with the release of the (probably) final beta for Windows 8 on Thursday, and Brendon Lynch, …

    Business 1 Jun 22:43