4th June 2012 Archive

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Samsung set to roll with betting apps

Oz startup Two Way pushes bookies into tellies

Australian interactive TV application developer Two Way is set to deploy its betting application across Samsung’s range of internet-enabled TVs, smartphones, tablets, Blu-ray players and home theatre systems. Two Way has finalised exclusive deals with two of Australia's biggest wagering operators, Sportingbet Australia, and …

Mobile 4 Jun 00:15
Bot imitates bat for better flight

Flying fox the model for ‘BaTboT’

It may be despised as the vector of a really nasty virus*, but like all bats, Australia’s Grey-headed Flying Fox is an aerobatic (sorry) marvel – and it’s provided part of the model for researchers trying to mimic bat flight using a combination of articulated wings and smart materials. The Madrid Polytechnic researchers, …

Science 4 Jun 01:30
Chinese diplomat accused of spying on Japanese military

Embassy official was apparently attached to PLA

A Chinese diplomat with links to the People’s Liberation Army has been accused of snooping on Japanese military technology data while working in Tokyo. Police in the Japanese capital are preparing to send documents to district prosecutors which allege that 45-year-old Li Chunguang submitted false papers when renewing his alien …

Security 4 Jun 03:38
Microsoft douses Flame

Redmond smothers fake certificates fingering it as the spark

Microsoft has noticed Flame, the malware supposedly burning up the middle east and spreading like wildfire to the rest of the world, and has taken steps to stop it before becoming an uncontrollable conflagration. Redmond's chief concern, according to Mike Reavey, a senior director of the Microsoft Trustworthy Computing effort …

Security 4 Jun 03:59
China overestimates 3G numbers by HALF

Domestic 3G/landline hybrid counted as pure 3G by mistake

The Chinese government has been forced into an embarrassing u-turn after admitting that previously estimated figures for 3G subscriptions in the country were double what they should have been. Wei Leping, deputy standing director of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) Communications Science & Technology …

Networks 4 Jun 04:54
NTT demos double-sided see-through smartphone

Fujitsu-made handset has transparent appeal

Japanese mobile operator NTT DoCoMo and computing giant Fujitsu gave smartphone fans a glimpse into the future of mobile computing at this year’s Wireless Japan show, demoing a prototype Android device with a transparent, double-sided touchscreen interface. The as-yet-unnamed device features a petite 2.4in, 320x240 QVGA …

Mobile 4 Jun 06:15
Ten... bits of Jubilee ~~tat~~ tech

Product round-up Fit for a Queen?

The Jubilee weekend has landed. All that exists now is junk, drunks, plums and parties. And we've all got an additional 48 hours off from the world, man. Here in London, though, you've never seen so much human traffic. For those in the nation's capital, it isn't just the wave of tourists that are proving hard to avoid. Solar …

reghardware 4 Jun 07:00
Apple quietly reveals iOS security innards

Cupertino promises "solid protection" against net nasties

Apple has published a guide to iOS security, detailing in one place the various safeguards that stop perps p0wning fondleslabs and iPhones. Apple's diagram of iOS security measures The guide appears to have landed on Apple.com a couple of weeks ago without fanfare or PR flim-flammery, and opens with the proclamation that “ …

Security 4 Jun 07:45
El Reg's GAGA robot lawn-slasher loses its mind. For now

Credo: Things you can't do from the pub aren't worth doing

The weather has been working against us in the Hibernian branch of Special Projects: not only did it rain interminably for months but it then broke into blazing sunshine prompting an explosion of growth for which we were entirely unprepared. Location sensing is still under development, more on that later, but now we're racing to …

SPB 4 Jun 09:30
Big Data is now TOO BIG - and we're drowning in toxic information

Open ... and Shut Just why are we hoarding every last binary bit?

Unless you have found a clever way of avoiding the internet completely, you no doubt have been warned that THERE IS A BIG DATA EXPLOSION! By many accounts, we are currently drowning in information - from log files to stock charts to customer profiles - and face a host of new products cropping up to help us manage the onslaught. …

Cloud Business 4 Jun 10:00
Music Biz: The Man is still The Man, man

An insider's extraordinary tale

A long weekend is traditional time for gentlemen to retire to the garden shed. Even if you're not planning to do so yourself, please do spare half an hour to read what I think might be the best analysis of the music business I've read this year - or, I think, any year. It's a quite magnificent, panoramic view of the landscape …

Media 4 Jun 11:06
How to get a job in Australia

Diamond Jubilee washed out? US jobs data scary? Ride out the recession Down Under!

Here in The Register's antipodean eyrie, we have good economic news! Australia skipped the worst of the GFC and avoided a recession. Annual growth remains close to three per cent and unemployment hovers near five per cent. We gather things aren't so good elsewhere. Brits seem to be grumbling about a double dip recession and …

Jobs 4 Jun 11:30
Hyperscale servers sell like hotcakes

Linux machines eclipse Unix boxes

The first quarter was not an easy one for the server business, according to IDC, and analysts say that 2012 is shaping up to be an interesting one. Modular servers – including traditional blades and density-optimized servers aimed at hyperscale web operators and supercomputer installations – are where the action is. IDC tracks …

Servers 4 Jun 12:00
Small banking Trojan poses major risk

Size doesn't matter, after all

Security researchers have discovered a tiny, but highly capable banking Trojan. Tinba (Tiny Banker, or otherwise known as Zusy) hooks itself into browsers before stealing banking login information and snaffling network traffic. The malware used injected code and Man in The Browser (MiTB) tricks to change the way banking …

Malware 4 Jun 12:30
AMD gooses the clocks on 'Bulldozer' Opterons

Last hurrah until 'Piledriver'?

Chip giant Intel has hogged all of the headlines lately in the server racket lately, and Advanced Micro Devices this morning is trying to get a word in edge-wise with some clock speed bumps on its "Bulldozer" family of processors for server with one, two, or four sockets. Don't get too excited, though. This is not a rev on the …

Servers 4 Jun 15:32
Falling share price exposes NetApp

Looks vulnerable

NetApp's market worth has dropped 51 per cent in 16 months, making it vulnerable to a takeover. In February 2011 NetApp shares cost $60.60 and its market capitalisation was $21.9 billion. Now it's worth just $10.9 billion with shares trading at $30.02. Why? Investors think it has gained storage market share relative to Dell, …

Storage 4 Jun 15:34
HP freezes out SAN fabric

Directly attaches 3PAR to blades

HP is removing the need for a Fibre Channel fabric linking its 3PAR arrays and BladeSystem servers with a quasi direct-attach supplied though its Virtual Connect technology. The technology, announced today HP's Discover event in Las Vegas today, forms part of HP's Converged Infrastructure product set. Virtual Connect Direct- …

Storage 4 Jun 18:00
HP doubles down with dedupe speed record

Boosted HP no longer needs Sepaton

HP reckons it can claim the dedupe speed king crown, ingesting at 100TB/hour and spitting it our at 40TB/hour, faster by far than the dedupe dominator, Data Domain. The enhanced dedupe performance was announced at the HP Discover event in Las Vegas on Monday. HP gets to such giddy heights by combining its StoreOnce Catalyst …

Storage 4 Jun 18:12
Firefox 13 now available for download

Updated Arrives one day early with New Tab and Home pages

Although its official release date is not scheduled until this Tuesday, Firefox 13 is now available on the Mozilla website. Notable among the upgraded features in Firefox 13 are redesigned Home and New Tab pages. The Home page – accessible rather intuitively by entering about:home in the address field – allows easy access to …

Software 4 Jun 19:02
SanDisk mimics EMC's Lightning

PCIe flash card

SanDisk has a PCIe server flash card called, as if to mimic EMC, Lightning, developed from its existing Lightning SSDs. The card is available this month from SanDisk resellers with the suggested retail price for the 200GB product of $1,350, $2,350 for the 400GB version. Both have a five-year warranty. EMC introduced its …

Storage 4 Jun 19:15
Salesforce goes social with $689m Buddy Media buy

Aims for cradle-to-grave social media

Salesforce.com has lashed out $689m on social media marketing firm Buddy Media as part of its plan to work social media deeper into its platform. The purchase will be merged with social-media monitoring tools added with last year's acquisition of Radian6, messaging group Dimdim, and social platform Rypple, as well as with …

Business 4 Jun 20:17
Flexible Willow glass displays thin and curvy gadget future

Ultra-slim sheets ready to roll

Corning has been showing off a new form of flexible glass that is the thickness of a sheet of paper yet easy to mass-produce. Dubbed Willow glass, the material can be manufactured to just 0.05mm thickness compared to current 0.2mm or 0.5mm screens, and is suitable for touch control systems and with LCD and OLED displays. The …

Data Centre 4 Jun 22:13
IBM rejigs Platform control freakery for supers

Hadoop MapReduce clone, new HPC stacks ship this month

Big Blue wants everything to be about Smarter Planet, but its acquisition of grid computing pioneer Platform Computing back in October 2011 was about giving IBM a place in the cloudy, gridded, and automated cluster management space and some necessary tools to maintain some sort of control – both literally and financially – in …

HPC 4 Jun 22:14
Researchers hide malware from Google Bouncer

Nastyware makes it into Android Market

Google’s Bouncer malware detection system might not be as strong as the Chocolate Factory hopes, with a pair of security researchers demonstrating flaws in the system. Duo Security’s Jon Oberheide and Charlie Miller, preparing a presentation for this week’s SummerCon in Brooklyn, have demonstrated that it’s possible to slip a …

Security 4 Jun 23:02
IBM strides along the storage edge

Compresses data and manage storage better

IBM has at last added compression to its Storwize V7000 product and made a raft of storage announcements at its EDGE event in Florida today. The overall aims are to increase storage efficiency and simplify management so that customers can store and manage more data. It has branded these storage initiatives Smarter Storage, …

Storage 4 Jun 23:16
Oz sysadmin says Windows 8 not ready for business

Crashes, authentication problems, Metro weirdness, make Win 8 "unworkable"

This is a guest post by Kieran Cummings, a network/server admin. Kieran tweets as @sortius My week with Windows 8 I decided over the weekend to install Windows 8 on my Dell XPS 15z. It's no Precision Workstation, but it’s definitely up to the task of running Windows 8. After resizing my main partition and readying my machine …

Windows 8 4 Jun 23:24
TPPA so deep a secret not even the minister knows what’s in it

‘Yes Ministering’ a non-minister in Senate Estimates

Australia’s bureaucrats appear to have learned the lesson from ACTA’s slow-motion train wreck in Europe, and aren’t letting the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) anywhere near something as unpredictable as a parliament. Under questioning by The Greens’ Senator Scott Ludlam, the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and …

Policy 4 Jun 23:43
Oz has to go nuclear, says Adelaide U scientist

Stop worrying, learn to love nuclear power

Prominent University of Adelaide climate scientist Professor Barry Brook says it’s inevitable that Australia will embrace nuclear energy in the battle against greenhouse gas emissions. The director of climate science at the university believes that by the end of the century, Australia will need at least 100 gigawatts of …

Science 4 Jun 23:45
Asia needs US$1.1 trillion telco spend this decade to stay digital

Alcatel-Lucent sees NBNs everywhere

Asia has been warned that it will need to invest USD $1.1 trillion in telecom infrastructure by the end of the decade in order to compete in the digital economy by Alcatel-Lucent Asia Pacific president Rajeev Singh-Molares. Speaking at the World Economic Forum on East Asia 2012 in Bangkok last week, Singh-Molares warned that …

Networks 4 Jun 23:59