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25th June 2012 Archive

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  • US govt asks Huawei and ZTE for more answers

    Dumping allegations added to security questions

    US House of Representatives Intelligence Committee chair, congressman Mike Rogers, has turned yet another blowtorch onto Chinese vendors Huawei and ZTE, alleging that the Chinese government is subsidizing the price of kit they sell in America. The committee has been investigating allegations of close ties between the Chinese …

    Data Networking 25 Jun 01:04

  • India unblocks the interwebs after protests

    Access returns to file-sharing sites

    An Indian court has finally seen sense and toned down a controversial anti-piracy ruling which blocked access to a large number of legitimate sites in the country. Madras High Court clarified an interim injunction granted at the end of April to Chennai-based anti-piracy firm Copyright Labs, which wanted to stop the illegal …

    Law 25 Jun 05:27

  • The Beatles Yellow Submarine restored

    Review At last, the Blue Meanies on Blu-ray

    Long absent from video stores, The Beatles' trippy 1968 animation Yellow Submarine has been painstakingly restored for its Blu-ray debut. With the original elements in a perilous state of decay, the movie has been meticulously cleaned and repaired frame by frame. The soundtrack has also had a 5.1 DTS HD Master Audio makeover …

    Hardware 25 Jun 06:00

  • MediaTek gobbles up MStar, next stop CHINA

    Taiwanese chip firms have their eyes on the prize

    Taiwanese chip giant MediaTek is set to snap up its smaller rival MStar after the two agreed a $3.8bn (£2.4bn) deal which they hope will boost their chances in the digital TV and smartphone market and create the world’s fourth largest chip design company. Hsinchu-based MediaTek first plans to buy 40-48 per cent of MStar’s …

    Hardware 25 Jun 06:15

  • Overland Storage takes market hit on ITC's initial patents ruling

    Updated OK we're falling ... have we got a bungee on or not?

    Overland Storage has lost the initial determination of a trade violation case it was hoping to win and its shares have dived off a cliff. Is this a bungee jump with a bounce back, or a one way street? Overland makes tape and disk-based data protection gear and Snap-brand filer and block access arrays for the SMB market. It's …

    Storage 25 Jun 06:34

  • 'We've got $6m and we will use it to REVOLUTIONISE storage'

    Startup company's amazing claim

    Nimbus, Solidfire and Pure Storage better look out: there's a new flash kid on the storage block. Behold Skyera, previously known as StorCloud, another stealthy flash array startup developing technology that it wants to apply to all storage area networking (SAN) use cases. Its sales VP, Dave Ferretti, said the Silicon Valley- …

    Storage 25 Jun 07:00

  • Antarctic ice shelves not melting at all, new field data show

    Crafty boffins got elephant seals to survey for them

    Twenty-year-old models which have suggested serious ice loss in the eastern Antarctic have been compared with reality for the first time - and found to be wrong, so much so that it now appears that no ice is being lost at all. "Previous ocean models ... have predicted temperatures and melt rates that are too high, suggesting a …

    Science 25 Jun 07:19

  • Why the Windows Phone 8 digi-wallet is different to the others

    Analysis Plays nicely with others, unlike Apple and Google

    Windows Phone 8 will have an electronic wallet, but one which spans the functionality of Google Wallet and Apple's Passbook, and plays nicely with the network operators too. Demonstrating the Near Field Communications (NFC) capabilities of Microsoft's new phone OS Joe Belfiore couldn't demonstrate pay-by-bonk, as he didn't …

    Broadband 25 Jun 07:38

  • Fujitsu bigwig: Microsoft's doing us a favour with Surface either way

    'I'm not panicking at all', says slablet CTO

    Last week's launch of Microsoft’s Surface product is a good thing for tablet veteran Fujitsu, even if it only shows the battle is actually between Android and iOS. The Japanese vendor, in its various European incarnations as International Computers Limited and Fujitsu-Siemens, has often been a lonely voice pushing tablet-like …

    Hardware 25 Jun 08:01

  • Drobo brings RAID, battery backup to the desktop - and the hand

    Kit so simple, even a Mac fanboi could use it

    Drobo has re-invented its desktop storage products, giving them a dose of Thunderbolt connectivity, SSD and 2.5-inch drive support, as well as introducing a portable Drobo mini. The company supplies curvy, snazzy-looking and ridiculously easy-to-use desktop and rackmount storage arrays with RAID-type protection and virtually …

    Storage 25 Jun 08:14

  • Apple slapped with 75 lawsuits by staff of titsup French computer biz

    Give us our Jobs back, say Fruit of Fury protesters

    Apple was sued 75 times on Tuesday as former employees of reseller eBizcuss filed individual suits against the iPhone-maker in Paris. eBizcuss was the biggest reseller of Apple products in France until the end of May, when the firm went into administration. In December the eBizcuss CEO Francois Prudent claimed that the …

    The Channel 25 Jun 08:28

  • Acer big cheese: Microsoft Surface sales will be 'superficial'

    Redmond bite will inflict only minor wound on us

    Microsoft Surface: No competitive threat, says Acer Acer EMEA boss Oliver Ahrens has brushed aside Microsoft's foray into the tablet market, dismissing the Surface as a competitive threat. Last week the covers were lifted off the Surface, a 10.6 inch devices, based on ARM and Intel platforms. "Microsoft still has a big …

    The Channel 25 Jun 08:44

  • Screen idols: higher resolution means better laptops

    Extreme Hardware Got a fast CPU - where's my ultra-high res display?

    Intel’s latest Ivy Bridge chipset, currently being deployed by every laptop manufacturer on new machines, is capable of supporting resolutions of up to 4096 pixels horizontally, using integrated graphics. Known as 4K, these ultra-high resolutions are gaining support in professional video cameras. So why do Samsung, Sony, …

    Laptops 25 Jun 09:00

  • Estonian labs chief says working for Microsoft hasn't changed Skype

    Interview Users 'good' for security 'unless there's a court order'

    Skype plans to retain its own proprietary P2P protocol even though closer alignment between Windows Live Messenger and the VoIP outfit, at least on some level, is likely in future. Tiit Paananen, manager of Skype's engineering centre in Tallinn, Estonia, said there would be closer links between Skype and Windows Live Messenger …

    Cloud 25 Jun 09:15

  • Vendors couldn't push a piano downhill without a 'sales Babel fish'

    Another client rescued from the Intergalactic bores

    In 1978, when BBC Radio 4 first broadcast Douglas Adams' sci-fi comedy series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – many a teenager “got bitten by the tech bug” and went on to forge a great career in an industry that became known as “IT”. In the radio series, which later spawned the famous series of novels, Adams conceived of …

    The Channel 25 Jun 09:25

  • Blighty laid bare as historic aerial snaps archive goes online

    Who will find the first sunbathing lovely of the 1930s?

    Today sees the launch of Britain From Above - a seriously impressive archive of 16,000 aerial views of Blighty taken between 1919 to 1953. The images were acquired for the nation in 2007 when aerial photography outfit Aerofilms fell on hard times, and following "a painstaking process of conservation and cataloguing", can now …

    Bootnotes 25 Jun 09:27

  • Sony outs Google TV set-top box

    Update Android for your telly

    Sony's Google TV-based set-top box will go on sale next month. The NSZ-GS7 will be available to buy on 16 July. A version with a built-in Blu-ray player, the NSZ-GS9, will go on sale later in the year, Sony said, though it will arrive in the US first. News of a European launch leaked in April in a report which claimed - and …

    Hardware 25 Jun 09:28

  • Chinese 'nauts couple successfully without help of machines

    Shenzhou-9 'swiftly' pulls out from Heaven, then back in

    The three Chinese astronauts currently residing in the Heavenly Palace have managed to successfully dock their ship with the Tiangong-1 manually, the first time China has tried such a thing. Liu Wang, Jing Haipeng and Liu Yang got back into the Shenzhou-9 over the weekend, which had already berthed automatically with …

    Science 25 Jun 09:45

  • RBS IT cockup: This sort of thing can destroy a bank, normally

    Analysis But in this case the taxpayers just get hit again

    The thing you have to remember about banking is that it's a confidence trick. As with all such things, once the confidence is gone the trick no longer works. That's what should be worrying the executives at NatWest and RBS over the shambles in their computer systems this week. As to what actually caused the problems, I'm …

    Financial News 25 Jun 10:00

  • Sony, Panasonic to partner for OLED TV push

    Money spinner?

    Sony may have shown off its Crystal inorganic LED TV at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) earlier this year, but it clearly reckons there's money in organic LED technology or it wouldn't have agreed to partner with Panasonic on OLED TV development and production. The pair's work will, they said today, come to fruition in the …

    Hardware 25 Jun 10:10

  • RIM 'pondering sell-off of hardware biz' to focus on messaging

    Sunday Times what-if session spills onto the paper

    Troubled BlackBerry maker RIM could be getting out of the hardware business, with the Sunday Times reporting a plan to cut RIM in two and flog off the hardware division to focus on messaging and device management. The Sunday Times doesn't list any sources for its conjecture, but confidentially claims the plan is being …

    Business 25 Jun 10:20

  • China is racing past US, rest of world - and into the Cloud

    EMC bigwig's amazing claim

    China has finally stepped out from the shadow of the United States and is leading the world at the cutting edge of cloud computing deployments, according to EMC. Speaking at the storage giant’s EMC Forum 2012 event in Hong Kong last Friday, president of Greater China, Denis Yip, argued that mainland customers are often …

    Cloud 25 Jun 10:30

  • Google unwraps cloudy personnel/fleet tracking via Droid

    Makes wind turbines work better too, seemingly. Bonus

    Google wants to track your staff, and let you know where they are as well as what they're supposed to be doing, with a cloudy dispatch system called Google Maps Coordinate All the employees need is an Android app which will show them the list of outstanding jobs, and let them opt out of the real-time tracking when they're …

    Cloud 25 Jun 10:44

  • Huawei Ascend G300 budget Android

    Review The best low-cost smartie you can buy?

    As an example of how much the budget smartphone has come on over the last 12 months you need look no further than Huawei's G300, which at £100 pre-paid is Vodafone’s latest entry-level Android smartphone. Cost conscious: Huawei's Ascend G300 What do you get for your 100 spondulicks? A 480 x 800 4in LCD screen, a 1GHz …

    Phones 25 Jun 11:00

  • Book-scented perfume gives eReaders whiff of authenticity

    Eau de Foyles

    eReader adoptees who miss the nostalgic niff of real paper books, can now coat their Kindles and Nooks in Paper Passion, a perfume that bottles the very scent of bookshops. The Paper Passion fragrance captures the odour of a freshly printed book, its maker claims, so if you share the late Ray Bradbury's sentiments that e-books …

    Hardware 25 Jun 11:01

  • Belkin takes on Slingbox with TV-to-net streamer box

    Smartphone users pay extra

    Accessory maker Belkin is taking on Slingbox. Its @TV, which is set to go on sale next month, pulls in content from set-top boxes and other media players and streams it out over the internet to a dedicated playback app. The compact box provides an Ethernet port for streaming, but it also incorporates Wi-Fi to allow mobile …

    Media 25 Jun 11:02

  • Stonehenge WASN'T built by ALIENS - Boffins' shock claim

    Actually symbol of complex farm-subsidy deal

    Bone-digging boffins claim to have discovered the true purpose of Stonehenge - to mark the unification of feisty fighting farming communities who decided to lay down their battle-hoes and make peace. Teams from the universities of Sheffield, Manchester, Southampton, Bournemouth and University College London have all been …

    Science 25 Jun 11:14

  • Private Cloud and IT Service Delivery

    Report Reg Readers spill the beans on IT budgets and more

    IT budgets under pressure, ‘doing more for less’ – we’re all familiar with the headlines. And of course vendors are always at the ready with solutions that address those very pain points. ‘Spend to save’ is the accompanying mantra. But what’s actually happening in the real world? Is the IT budget situation as dire as it’s …

    Cloud 25 Jun 11:30

  • RBS collapse details revealed: Arrow points to defective part

    Exclusive Software that caused cockup apparently run from India

    The tech problems at the RBS banking group that left millions of people unable to access money for four days last week were caused by a failure in a piece of batch scheduling software, sources have told The Register. And at least some of the support staff for that software have been outsourced to India - as recently as …

    Financial News 25 Jun 11:38

  • Google Nexus 7 price, details confirmed in pre-I/O leak

    Jelly Bean 'iPad Mini', anyone?

    All the details you've read about Google's Nexus 7 are true - if an allegedly leaked training document is genuine. The bumf landed on a desk at Gizmodo Australia and details a 7in tablet with a 1280 x 800 IPS LCD display and based around a 1.3GHz Nvidia Tegra 3 chip. There's 1GB of Ram and either 8GB or 16GB of on-board …

    Tablets 25 Jun 11:39

  • Google brings HD sneezing pandas to UK: But why?

    Analysis Gets out lipstick and wrestles the porker one more time

    Google's TV venture has been an expensive flop so far – and proved catastrophic for partner Logitech. But can new, flashier hardware and a better delivery path make a difference? We'll be able to find out when the service is launched in the UK on 16 July. Founding partner Sony provides the new hardware. The NSZ-GS7 is a bundle …

    Data Center 25 Jun 12:00

  • Boffins program peripheral visions for ultra TV immersion

    Viewers 'feel' explosions

    Scientists have improved the immersive experience of watching telly, with projectors which extend our views into peripheral vision territory. Researchers at MIT's Media Lab have put together software which extends the image viewed on our tellies onto extra screens in a suitably blurry fashion to mimic what we see in our …

    Hardware 25 Jun 12:05

  • Mensch pal Bozier defends Menshn security, dubs critics 'snippy geeks'

    'Your SQL is like what my 4-yr-old would write'

    The launch of a Twitter-like messaging service co-founded by UK politician Louise Mensch on Sunday has been accompanied by a huge security flap. According to users who sent in complaints, Menshn.com allegedly harboured a variety of security flaws. Most glaring of these, one user insisted, was an alleged failure by the site – …

    Security 25 Jun 12:49

  • UK regulators eye up Facebook's $1bn Instagram bid

    Should just one man control such AWESOME POWER?

    Facebook's bid to buy photo-sharing app Instagram for $1bn will be probed by the UK's Office of Fair Trading, according to the watchdog, which invited informal submissions of comment on Friday. The dominant social network's takeover plan of Instagram has concerned the OFT, which is worried that the photo app market could be …

    Financial News 25 Jun 15:02

  • LulzSec suspects plead guilty to DDoS attacks

    Pelted police, spooks, corps with digital refuse

    Two LulzSec hacking suspects have admitted launching hacking attacks against the CIA and the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency. Ryan Cleary, 20, of Wickford, Essex, and Jake Davis, 19, of Lerwick, Shetland, both admitted involvement in a string of computer hacking attacks at a hearing at London's Southwark Crown Court on …

    Security 25 Jun 15:41

  • Resistive Ram cache to make Flash fly, say boffins

    Wham, bam, thank you, RRam

    SSDs appeal to ordinary computer users because of their speed and silence. Data centre folk appreciate those qualities too, but also like the SSD's very low power consumption. Energy is no small cost for a data centre, where there can be tens of thousands of drives all slurping electricity at once. But it's not a free ride. …

    Storage 25 Jun 15:46

  • UK net-biz cleanup squad plans to establish international operations

    IWF says battle against vile imagery needs to go global

    The Internet Watch Foundation has made improvement of international co-operation a key objective in the next phase of its fight against the online distribution of child abuse content. Establishing an international arm to fight paedophile content is at the centre of the Internet Watch Foundation’s (IWF) new three-year strategy …

    Security 25 Jun 15:57

  • Taiwanese weathermen pick Fujitsu PrimeHPC super

    No commie iron for us

    Fujitsu got a big wad of yen last year from the Japanese government to build the K supercomputer, which until this month was the fastest parallel supercomputer in the world. Now Fujitsu is on a tear to commercialize the supercluster, which it sells with upgraded processors as the PrimeHPC FX10. So it was quite a coup when …

    HPC 25 Jun 16:32

  • Dash for Flash: Seagate in NAND cash splash

    Will WD join in sudden barge into controller boudoir?

    You can't even afford to blink in the flash storage business without something big happening. Now Seagate's gone and invested in DensBits, the start-up that aims to make cheap slow NAND perform as well as fast flash. There are three kinds of flash: single-level cell or SLC, with 1 bit per cell, which is fast and long-lived; 2- …

    Storage 25 Jun 17:03

  • Microsoft buys Yammer in $1.2bn cash deal

    Redmond looks for social networking skills

    The rumors were true: Microsoft has acquired business social networking firm Yammer in a 1.2bn cash deal announced on Monday. "The acquisition of Yammer adds best-in-class enterprise social networking to Microsoft’s growing portfolio of complementary cloud services; world-class talent that knows how to deliver rapid innovation …

    Business 25 Jun 18:32

  • Dell still on a Quest quest for software?

    Someone is trying to outbid equity firm – again

    It looks like someone – very likely Dell, if all the rumors are right – still wants to get its greedy mitts on the software bits being sold by Quest Software, a company that has collected a hodge-podge of tools aimed at data centers over the past decade, and that in March received a $2bn takeover offer from private equity firm …

    Business 25 Jun 19:31

  • Cisco, Citrix link arms for VDI partner push

    Virty desktops are like ERP in the 1990s

    Citrix and Cisco are arch enemies in the online meeting racket, with their respective GoTo and WebEx online collaboration services, but they do agree on one thing: virtual desktop infrastructure is such a big market, and such a messy and complex sale, that they must cooperate to realize the potential revenue streams that can …

    The Channel 25 Jun 19:43

  • US East, West Coasts face fast-rising sea levels

    Wet times ahead for Oracle, Facebook; cool times for UK

    Two new reports indicate that sea-level rise will put the hurt on both the East and West coasts of the US, and that if one of the West Coast's all-too-familiar major earthquakes should occur, things could get mighty dicey mighty fast. According to the US Geological Survey – hardly a hotbed of wild-eyed alarmists – the East …

    Science 25 Jun 21:33

  • Ballmer welcomes Yammer to the Microsoft family

    Analysis Anyone seen Mommy Dearest?

    Microsoft has finally tied the knot with enterprise social networker Yammer, and in a press call following the announcement, Steve Ballmer laid out the future for Redmond's newest recruit. "Yammer will be a fundamental part of the Office family," a "thrilled" Steve Ballmer said, adding that it would become a core addition of …

    Business 25 Jun 21:35

  • Users still slack about passwords: Trustwave

    eHarmony analysis shows people just don’t care

    Trustwave's SpiderLabs has completed an analysis of the passwords dumped on the Internet in this month’s eHarmony breach, and reached the depressing conclusion that too few people really seem to care about password strength. Having recovered 80 percent of the 1.5 million passwords in the dump file, the company says only 0.5 …

    Security 25 Jun 22:31

  • Stephen Hawking to demonstrate speech via brain scan

    The Hawk to talk via iBrain hacked headspace

    Next month Professor Stephen Hawking will provide details of how a brain-scanning headcap will enable him to communicate more easily. At the Francis Crick Memorial Conference on July 7 in Cambridge, Hawking – and Dr. Philip Low, formerly of Stanford University's School of Medicine - will show how a non-invasive portable …

    Science 25 Jun 22:31

  • Boffins demo 2.5 Tbps OAM-modulated light signal

    ‘Twisted wave’ trick works with light

    Back in March, a group of Italian and Swedish radio researchers demonstrated that a characteristic of radio waves called orbital angular momentum (OAM) can be used as a multiplexing technique, vastly increasing the theoretical capacity of wireless transmissions. Now, according to Nature Photonics, the same technique has been …

    Science 25 Jun 23:00

  • T-Platforms to roll out itsy-bitsy HPC cluster

    A cute li'l Windows HPC Server on casters

    If you are looking for a desktop supercomputer cluster that can use X86 or a mix of X86 and GPU coprocessors to run simulations, then Russian supercomputer maker T-Platforms has a machine for you. Or rather, it will by this fall. It's called the T-Mini P, and it is basically a P8000 blade enclosure mounted on wheels. Not so …

    HPC 25 Jun 23:41