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15th June 2012 Archive

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  • British LulzSec suspect charged in US over hacking

    Busy, busy Essex boy Cleary faces 25 years inside

    American prosecutors have filed charges with a federal grand jury against accused British LulzSec member Ryan Cleary over hacking attacks on Sony, Fox, and several US hosting companies. Cleary, 20, is already facing charges in the UK that he hacked into the website of Soca (the UK police agency charged with investigating …

    Security 15 Jun 00:17

  • May 2012 was second warmest on record. The warmest? 2010

    Sgt. Joe Friday meets climatology: 'Just the facts, ma'am'

    The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has released its monthly State of the Climate Global Analysis report for this May, and my, my, it's rather toasty out there: the month was the second warmest May since record-keeping began in 1880 – and the warmest was just two years ago. That conclusion of the report …

    Science 15 Jun 01:01

  • Asteroid zips past Earth

    500m space rock spotted on Monday gets within 5.3 million km

    An asteroid spotted by Australian astronomers early in the week missed Earth by just 5.3 million kilometres. “2012 LZ1” was observed from Australia’s Siding Springs Observatory last Sunday, June 10th. At around 500m in diameter, the rock is considered hazardous. Happily, 2012 LZ1 slipped by well outside the orbit of the moon …

    Science 15 Jun 02:10

  • Court delays Apple Proview ruling

    'IPAD' trademark still up for grabs in China

    The never-ending battle over rights to the IPAD trademark is set to drag on even longer after news emerged that a Chinese court will delay its ruling while settlement talks between Apple and Proview continue. The Higher People’s Court of Guangdong in southern China will not make a decision on Apple’s appeal against a previous …

    Business 15 Jun 03:35

  • BT to China: let me in!

    British telco has formed partnerships but wants full access

    BT has turned up the heat on the Chinese government, demanding that international telcos be allowed to sell their wares directly into the country. The telecoms giant’s APAC president, Kevin Taylor, told attendees at its Asia Pacific Influencer Summit in Hong Kong on Thursday that it has a good “two way partnership” with …

    Networks 15 Jun 04:22

  • Inside HP's latest global bit barn

    New Sydney data centre will serve global customers

    HP has unveiled its newest global bit barn and says it will form part of the network used to deliver its converged cloud services to customers around the world. The new facility, dubbed Aurora, is located on the fringes of Sydney in a district adjacent to the major highways that surround and/or exit the city (the end of …

    Cloud 15 Jun 04:32

  • Cabinet Office promises to challenge 'culture of secrecy' on IT projects

    New annual report will contain audits of major projects

    The Cabinet Office has insisted that it will publish details of the progress of major government IT projects, despite fears that government promises of transparency were in danger of being watered down in the face of departmental opposition. Reports earlier this week suggested that although the Cabinet Office has won plaudits …

    Government 15 Jun 06:30

  • Ten... Father's Day gifts

    Product round-up Delights for daddy-o

    While it could be a confusing day for chavs across the country and many of us wouldn't pick up the phone let alone buy a gift, we're all reminded to show appreciation to our dads this Sunday. But with several of the El Reg team fathering new offspring this year, we reckon he should be treated to something special, particularly …

    Hardware 15 Jun 07:00

  • Oz WiFi guys score top Euro inventor award

    In 1997, they couldn't find investors cos no-one wanted WiFi ...

    The original Australian CSIRO research team that created and patented WiFi technology has been international recognised with the European Patent Office (EPO) Inventor Award. The wireless standard was developed in the 1990s by a team of Australian scientists and germinated from a technology they were working on to filter …

    Networks 15 Jun 07:06

  • iPhone denies existence of Gibraltar, other bits of British empire

    Does cater for non-existent South Georgians, though

    The iPhone will not accept that people live in Gibraltar, a reader has pointed out to us, highlighting that the phone will not acknowledge this as a possibility when users are entering country names in their address book. Android phones let users type in country names manually when adding addresses to contacts, while iPhones …

    Operating Systems 15 Jun 07:18

  • Tesco grabs Peter Gabriel's musical streamer

    Unexpected item in bagging area

    British music service We7 is being acquired by Tesco, which is taking a 91 per cent stake in the company for £10.8m. A full acquisition is expected. We7 launched five years ago with backing from Peter Gabriel, who has stuck by the company despite heavy losses. Founding CEO Steve Purdham set up the company after selling …

    Cloud 15 Jun 07:39

  • Phishing, cybersquatting scum could ruin gTLD fun for biz

    Expert: Firms can't judge the risk until ICANN approves the domains

    Businesses face extra costs and risks because of new internet domains, but the publication of a list of newly applied-for domains will not allow them to calculate those risks precisely, an expert has said. Last summer directors at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is the body that oversees …

    Hosting 15 Jun 07:59

  • Vodafone's small, controversial tax bill validated by UK.gov

    See that cell tower? That's actually in Switzerland

    The National Audit Office, asked to look into Vodafone's negotiated tax bill of £1.25bn, has decided it was a reasonable deal considering the cost of taking legal action against the company. Back in 2010 Vodafone was accused of owing £6bn in tax, and the company had reserved £2.2bn to meet it's UK tax obligations, but George …

    Financial News 15 Jun 08:14

  • Mighty Blighty's channel like a giant looming across the, er, Channel

    'We're a nation of shopkeepers box-shifters' - Context

    IT distributors in the UK shifted some £1.76bn worth of kit and services in Q1, stats from Context reveal. This represents a whopping 18 per cent spike on revenues generated by the channel a year ago in spite of low consumer and business confidence and the storm clouds gathering over the Euro. "The UK market posted stronger …

    The Channel 15 Jun 08:28

  • 'Scientists' seek to set world social, economic, tech policy at Rio+20

    Comment No babies, no technology, work 'til you die

    An international body claiming to represent the world's scientists has issued a set of demands ahead of the "Rio+20" summit this month. In essence the would-be spokesmen say that people should largely stop having babies, old folk should be put to work and most modern technology should be suppressed. The rich nations of the world …

    Government 15 Jun 08:44

  • Apple 13in MacBook Pro to fall into line this autumn

    Nurse, the screens

    Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities, a stockbroker, has a good record on forecasts: he accurately predicted the launch of the 15in MacBook Pro with Retina Display just before the machine's announcement. He also correctly said Apple would kill off the 17in MacBook Pro. Now he's saying a 13in version will be out in the autumn …

    Laptops 15 Jun 08:55

  • Is it time for enterprise PC outfits to carry Apple Macs?

    Mac-maker is hard to ignore, despite being a 'difficult' vendor

    For years, the Apple Mac has played a small and niche role in enterprise computing, finding favour in areas such as desktop publishing, graphical design and video or content production. But on the whole, a perception of a high price coupled with the lack of a broad spread of general purpose applications has had the tendency to …

    Management 15 Jun 09:03

  • ICANN eggfaced after publishing dot-word biz overlords' personal info

    Bumbling wordseller opens CANN of whup-ass on self

    After proudly revealing the details of almost 2,000 new generic top-level domain applications, red-faced ICANN was today forced to yank the whole lot after applicants complained that their home addresses had been published by mistake. ICANN published the partial text of 1,930 gTLD bids – each of which carried a $185,000 …

    Hosting 15 Jun 09:14

  • 'Google released a dairy product'. What, it's cheesy?

    QuotW Plus: '...' - mute kids after Apple silenced them

    This was the week when Apple held its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco to confirm the many rumours that it had leaked had been circulating about new products and upgrades. The first unsurprise was its new iOS, number 6, which included updates for iSpeak service Siri, Facebook integration and other tweaks. …

    Bootnotes 15 Jun 09:30

  • Facebook set to file motion: Will blame NASDAQ for IPOcalpyse

    The fools gave people a chance to think!

    Facebook is planning to file a motion in the US to consolidate all its shareholder lawsuits and blame the NASDAQ stock market for its disappointing IPO. The social network is finally planning to address the 30 or so lawsuits that have been filed against it after the botched handling of its stocks' opening day and their …

    Financial News 15 Jun 09:44

  • Scottish council muzzles 9-year-old school dinner photo blogger

    Hastily organised salad bar fails to stem criticism

    A Scottish council has been accused of crushing free speech by banning a nine year old girl from blogging about her school dinners. Lunch at a primary school in Scotland: The first photo on the NeverSeconds blogpost that prompted a national media outcry The blogging nipper - whose write-ups of the cheeseburgers and …

    Government 15 Jun 09:57

  • Office 365: This cloud isn't going to put any admins out of a job

    Sysadmin blog Who says Redmond doesn't love you?

    Moving all of your email onto Office 365 is pretty easy; making it work properly once it's there is another story. As a salable product, I find Office 365 extremely curious; it's workable enough if you have a decade or two's experience beating Exchange into submission ... but a little too complex for anyone else. The cloud is …

    Servers 15 Jun 10:15

  • Unilever cutting tech bods, moving jobs to Bangalore: 800 face axe

    Welsh ITers can no longer live off Marmite and Pot Noodle

    Unilever is entering into a redundancy consultation process with techies amid plans to relocate the UK tech hub from Ewloe in Wales to its head office in Merseyside and outsource "some" roles to India, although it would not confirm how many. Around 800 staff will face the chop by 2013. The move is part of a wider cost-cutting …

    Jobs 15 Jun 10:27

  • Microsoft plots entry into tablet trade

    Arm's its weapon

    Microsoft will launch its own tablet device next week, entering the booming slate market without the help of a separate hardware manufacturer, it has been claimed. The company has promised to make a major announcement at an event on Monday, 18 June said to be related to its tablet strategy. Sources close to the matter say …

    Tablets 15 Jun 10:31

  • PFY vs Bearded 80s Netscape Bore: BOFH

    Episode 5 I've written a plugin BLAH BLAH BLAH

    You know what it's like. Some idiot in senior management buys a crap bit of software online - with functionality that's already built into Outlook, but is just slightly different - and it has to be installed right now. And the moment you double-click on the installer you know you're in trouble when it tells you that it's …

    BOFH 15 Jun 10:39

  • Must try harder: Cumbria tells BT and Fujitsu to resubmit fibre plans

    Sends them homeward to think again

    Residents in Cumbria have long complained about their broadband coverage being one of the weakest in the UK, and now the county's push for a faster fibre network faces delay after its council rejected bids from BT and Fujitsu. Both telcos have been granted more time to come back to the council with better offers. The authority …

    Broadband 15 Jun 11:05

  • Scots council: 9-yr-old lunch blogger was causing 'distress and harm'

    Canteen pic blackout will prevent 'misrepresentation'

    A Scottish council have said that a nine-year-old food blogger was misrepresenting her school dinners and distressing the canteen staff, by publishing a photoblog about her lunch. The media attention caused by the photos, such as the one below was causing "distress and harm" to staff the council said. The photos, such this …

    Government 15 Jun 11:26

  • Apple 15in MacBook Pro with Retina Display

    Review Simply, a stunner

    You’ve got to hand it to Apple. Having created the first Ultrabook about three years before Intel even got around to coining the brand, it has now taken another step forward with the new MacBook Pro With Retina Display. The 2880 x 1800 screen is certainly a looker, and you can understand why Apple has chosen to focus on that …

    Laptops 15 Jun 11:44

  • Job-slashing HP 'to hire 15,000 staff in India' – report

    UPDATE 'We haven't announced any such thing'

    HP may be axing 27,000 staff members globally, but it could be about to help improve unemployment figures in India, with 15,000 hires possibly on the cards. At least this is according to Indian news site Daily Bhaskar, which claims the troubled tech titan has written to Chandigarh city administrators in eastern India to ask …

    The Channel 15 Jun 12:02

  • German KIT v Fighting Seawolves in student cluster deathmatch

    HPC blog Reg bookie reports from the digital ringside

    According to bettors, the upcoming ISC’12 Student Cluster Challenge in Hamburg will come down to a competition between home-country team KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) and the New York-based Stony Brook University Fighting Seawolves. (No, I don’t know what a ‘Seawolf’ is either.) The competition next week, jointly …

    HPC 15 Jun 12:27

  • Tumbleweed-plagued Google+ is minus Bejeweled and Wooga

    EA'd rather have 70% of something than 95% of buggerall

    Two games developers are withdrawing from Google's troubled social network Google+. Kiddie game dev Wooga and Popcap, which is owned by giant Electronic Arts, confirmed they are deploying their resources elsewhere. Popcap markets the popular Bejeweled game. Ironically, it is in games developers' long-term interest to see …

    Cloud 15 Jun 12:48

  • Retina Display detachment

    Something for the Weekend, Sir? It's not what Apple adds, it's what it cuts, stupid

    Those Cupertino Infinite Looping gits have done it again. I don't mean this in an upbeat, admiring, I-can't-believe-it's-not-butter kind of way. I mean it more in a they're-selling-us-less-for-more-cash, not to mention a downbeat now-everyone-else-will-do-the-same, kind of way. As regular readers are aware of me mentioning at …

    Laptops 15 Jun 13:00

  • Logitech's G600 mouse packs keypad too

    Rolls with button cluster

    Logitech has unveiled the G600 MMO gaming mouse, a customisable clicker that squeezes a total of 20 buttons into the body. Schweet. The G600 makes quite a splash as it enters the gaming mice pool, with a cluster of 12 keys on one side and its own in-built memory so customised settings can be saved to the mouse itself, rather …

    Hardware 15 Jun 13:39

  • Windows Metro Maoist cadres reach desktop, pound it flat

    3D effects are bourgeois revisionism

    The revolutionary dogma of Metro is sweeping through the old Windows desktop, too, a new leak of Window 8 confirms. The leaked build, newer than the public release of a fortnight ago, abandons the 3D design elements introduced into Windows in 1990 for a resolutely two-dimensional world. The 'legacy' desktop in Windows 8 is …

    Operating Systems 15 Jun 13:58

  • Council chief overrules blackout on Scots 9-yr-old's school lunch blog!

    'No place for censorship here', thunders local pol

    An hour after accusing a nine-year-old girl of causing distress with her "inaccurate" lunch blog, the Argyll and Bute council has overturned its cameras-in-the-canteen ban and once again allowed school children the option of photographing their lunch. The last meal photographed by nine-year-old food blogger Martha Payne: she …

    Government 15 Jun 14:22

  • Ethiopia to send Skype users to the slammer

    Call the lawyer... on a landline

    The Ethiopian government has outlawed Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services. Those who disobey and continue to use programs such as Skype face up to 15 years in chokey. The law, passed last month, is said to help provide more national security. National security? Don't make me laugh. It's undoubtedly an effort to …

    Mobile 15 Jun 14:37

  • US culture to spread worldwide by means of Kindle, not iPad

    Walk softly and carry an e-reader with central connection

    The US State Department has defended its decision to deploy thousands of Amazon Kindle devices over the next five years, saying that putting the bid out to tender would be pointless as Amazon's rivals just won't do the job. The $16.5m figure comes from a Justification and Approval document published earlier this week, which …

    Cloud 15 Jun 15:02

  • UK.gov Open Data site fills up with spam

    Opened-up government floodgates work both ways

    Spammers have forced the Cabinet Office to close portions of the UK's open data website. Comments have been disabled after the CAPTCHA gateway was smartly circumvented. "After a long analysis of the spam in our site, we have a strong feeling that human intervention is also at play," writes Antonio Acuna, head of the data.gov. …

    Government 15 Jun 15:18

  • Successful remnant of Motorola acquires successful remains of Psion

    Farewell at last to the ghost of British pocket-puters

    Psion Plc, once famous for producing excellent pocket computers and still selling handheld computing into vertical markets, has been bought by Motorola Solutions and will be subsumed into its new US owner. The deal values Psion at £129m ($200m) with shareholders getting 88 pence on a share. The closing price yesterday was 60.5 …

    Phones 15 Jun 15:39

  • Apple-Moto patent punchup can come into court, says judge

    But you're not exactly blowing my judicial skirt up here

    The US judge who "tentatively" dismissed an Apple v Motorola case last week has decided to give the companies another chance to prove each other wrong with an injunction hearing. Judge Richard Posner said in a court filing yesterday that he had decided to grant Apple's request for an injunction hearing before he makes his …

    Law 15 Jun 15:51

  • Apple, Samsung snatch smartphone biz booty

    Grab all the profit, flog the most units

    Who's making money selling smartphones? Apple and Samsung and… er… that's it, market watcher ABI Research said today. Together, these two raked in more than 90 per cent of the market's profits. That's for the three months to the end of March 2012, and it's not at all bad considering the two of them only account for 55 per cent …

    Phones 15 Jun 16:05

  • Apple must be tried for the bug in every fanboi's pocket

    Yes, she's talking about the iPhone

    Apple will stand trial over accusations that it misled iPhone owners by storing detailed information about their location even when location was switched off, a judge ruled yesterday. Apple had asked for the class action location-tracking case against it to be dismissed, but Judge Lucy Koh of the San Jose District Court in …

    Mobile 15 Jun 17:35

  • FCC: Let's kill analogue early, fob diehards off with converter boxes

    Opinion Only thing left on the channels is fat ladies singing

    Every pay TV market has its idiosyncrasies, particularly for Multi System Operators (MSOs) such as Time Warner or Comcast in the US and Virgin Media in the UK. And in the US, one of these idiosyncrasies is the requirement that cable operators retransmit so called "must-carry" signals in both analogue and digital formats. This …

    Media 15 Jun 18:01

  • Mystery buyer scoops working Apple 1 at auction

    Bidding war ends in $374,500 sale

    A working Apple 1 computer has broken records at auction, with a mystery buyer shelling out $374,500 for the system, with a handwritten memo from Steve Jobs also selling for well over the guide price. The items were auctioned off by Sotheby's and nearly doubled the expected guide price for the items. The Apple 1, one of only a …

    Hardware 15 Jun 20:21