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28th June 2012 Archive

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  • US nuke lab goes back for BlueGene/Q seconds

    A Vulcan rated at 5 petaflops

    Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the big nuke labs funded by the US Department of Energy, does a lot of super-secret classified nuclear weapons design and management work but it also lets the scientific community play with its biggest machines during shakedown phases and keeps around some iron that they can use on …

    HPC 28 Jun 00:49

  • 'Evil' hacker gets two and a half years in the slammer

    cyber crime motivated by ego and unemployment

    Australia’s most notorious country town, truck driving, cyber criminal David ‘Evil’ Cecil has been handed a two-and-a-half year prison sentence after being arrested nearly a year ago. Cecil hacked into telco service provider Platform Networks, owned by the ASX-listed Eftel Group and was charged with one count of an …

    Security 28 Jun 01:12

  • WIPO signs new treaty for cross platform performers

    ISOC welcomes recognition of the interwebs

    A new treaty for the rights of audiovisual performers has been finalised by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) after 12 years of negotiations. The treaty will give performers, for the first time, protection in the digital environment. The new treaty, brokered in Beijing, will when implemented allow performers …

    Government 28 Jun 04:45

  • Breaking: Megaupload seizures illegal says NZ High Court

    Case in disarray

    America’s case against Megaupload boss Kim Dotcom is looking increasingly shambolic, with a New Zealand High Court judge finding that the property seizures in January raid were illegal. Both New Zealand’s National Business Review and TVNZ are reporting that Judge Helen Winkelmann has declared the warrants used in the searches …

    Law 28 Jun 05:50

  • AMD and Intel mainstream desktop CPUs

    Review Cheap as chips?

    It’s fair to say that Intel has the very high end desktop processor market pretty much to itself, however, it’s a different story in the lower end of the food chain. Although Intel – through the sheer number of different processors it offers – seems to have it all its own way, AMD does make a good fight of it at a number of …

    reghardware 28 Jun 06:00

  • Mighty ROBOT achieves total SUPREMACY over feeble humans

    At rock-paper-scissors, today. Tomorrow ...

    No matter how many John-Wayne-inspired moments you've had in front of the mirror, you're not as quick on the draw as the Janken robot. Ishikawa Oku Laboratory in Tokyo has built the android to have a perfect score at rock-paper-scissors, identifying which way its human opponent is going to go in one millisecond. The boffins …

    Rise of the Machines 28 Jun 07:17

  • Microsoft to open UK retail store early next year

    Springtime for Ballmer and Redmondy

    Microsoft is laying the foundations to open up a retail store in the UK with a launch date marked for early next Spring. The software maker revealed plans to open up 75 stores across the globe at its worldwide partner conference last July and as one of the largest tech markets in Europe, the UK will act as an appropriate …

    Channel Register 28 Jun 07:30

  • No need to comply with data laws if it's too difficult - EU ministers

    If you don't know data is personal, maybe it isn't?

    Organisations will not have to abide by data protection laws if it would be too difficult, time-consuming and use up too many important resources to check whether information they hold is personally identifiable, the EU's Council of Ministers has proposed. The Council has outlined some revisions (112-page/575KB PDF) to the …

    Law 28 Jun 07:54

  • Fujitsu raises UK minimum wage to £14k

    Union temporarily happy, but sees trouble ahead

    Fujitsu has agreed to up its minimum wage for its British workers following sustained pressure from union Unite. The Japanese corporate put in place a £12,000 base salary in 2010 after negotiating with the union and agreed to review this annually. The union said it was pushing for Fujitsu to raise the threshold to £15,000 to …

    Channel Register 28 Jun 08:13

  • Exotic proto-mineral 'panguite' from before the planets found in meteor

    Used to be all fields round here. Of space rocks

    Boffins have discovered a primitive mineral in an ancient meteorite that pre-dates the formation of planets. The Allende meteorite's fireball tore through the atmosphere over Mexico in 1969, exploding thousands of pieces of itself across the state of Chihuahua, but it's just recently that Caltech scientists found a new mineral …

    Space 28 Jun 08:29

  • Gov ICT strategy for system upgrades needs a system upgrade

    Menace of PIECEMEAL STRANDS must be ENDED

    The Institute for Government (IfG) has urged the government to "broaden out" its ICT strategy to demonstrate more clearly how to turn the strategy from a collection of technical strands into a "clear articulation of how it will help citizens". In a report, "System upgrade? The first year of the government's ICT strategy", the …

    Government 28 Jun 08:44

  • Millionaire Ubuntu space nerd Shuttleworth live on The Reg

    Live chat Ask Mark your questions from 1500 BST / 1000 EDT today

    Just as the internet was becoming reality for most of us, Mark Shuttleworth sold his first technology venture - the second largest provider of digital certification, Thawte - to VeriSign for $575m. It was 1999 and he was 26 years old. Next, Shuttleworth paid the Russians $20m to become the first African in space - he flew …

    Operating Systems 28 Jun 09:00

  • Price Waterhouse Cooper: Only mobile comms can SAVE HUMANITY

    Future of Wireless Cables will take too long, we'll all be dead

    Speaking at the recent Cambridge Wireless conference Price Waterhouse Cooper's Director of Product Management issued a stark warning - unless governments invest massively in mobile telephony we're all going to starve to death. Colin Brereton presented his arguments as a keynote at yesterday's Future of Wireless conference in …

    Financial News 28 Jun 09:13

  • Darwin alarmed by six-legged mutant cane toad

    Beast sprouts extra legs in Oz's Northern Territory

    Anyone who doubts that the cane toad will ultimately gain supremacy over Australia is directed to the Northern Territory News, which has a chilling story on a hexaped mutant Bufo marinus captured south of Darwin. Bufo marinus (aka cane toad) - with a paltry four limbs. Pic via opencage.info licensed under Creative Commons …

    Biology 28 Jun 09:23

  • Brits get to fondle Google Nexus 7 slab in just a fortnight

    Apples are not the only fruit

    Now that Google is in tablets, it's clearly hoping to make its mark quickly, lining its Nexus 7 tablet up for shipping in the UK in two to three weeks. The Nexus fondleslab was spotted lurking in pre-order form on the Play store at £159 for its 8GB version, but no sign of the 16GB one yet. According to the site, the gear is …

    Hardware 28 Jun 09:32

  • Sysadmins: Your best tale of woe wins a PRIZE

    Competition Hey users, it's Sysadmin Day next month. We want cake

    I'd like to share with you the plight of a good friend of mine. He's a systems administrator for a mid-sized American accounting firm. His story isn't particularly remarkable, but all the more important because of it. Bob has a bachelor's in computer science, and a lot more experience than I'd normally expect someone clutching …

    Servers 28 Jun 09:46

  • FalconStor settles with feds for $6m

    We'll be good boys from now on. Extra good for 18 months

    FalconStor has settled a two lawsuits regarding alleged improper customer payments by coughing up $5.8 million and signing up to a deferred prosecution agreement. There were two lawsuits: one from the SEC and the other from the US Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York (USAO). Each suit will see falconStor pay …

    Storage 28 Jun 10:01

  • BT to fibre up another 98 exchanges, puffs 'FTTP on demand' offer

    You have to demand to pay some of the installation bill

    Earlier this week, BT announced the company's latest phased rollout of its fibre optic-cabling technology in the UK. Blighty's national telco has said that BT's Openreach engineers will be upgrading another 98 exchanges. However, the national telco declined to tell The Register the exact split between fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC …

    Cloud Business 28 Jun 10:16

  • Half the team at the heart of the RBS disaster WERE in India

    Exclusive Chiefs warned repeatedly on quality of offshored work

    Cost-cutting RBS management had halved the team within which the banking group's recent data disaster happened, sources have told The Register. The sacked British employees were replaced by staff in India, and there had been concerns about the quality of the work done in India for a lengthy period prior to last week's …

    Financial News 28 Jun 10:36

  • Google Chrome update plugs score of security bugs

    It's version 20 'cos it closes that many vulns

    Google has updated its Chrome browser to address 20 vulnerabilities, none of which are deemed critical. Chrome version 20 coincidentally covers patches for a score of security bugs, as listed here. Many of the fixed vulnerabilities involve "use-after-free" memory-related security bugs, some of which are rated as high risk. …

    Security 28 Jun 10:44

  • Menage á tablet: Apple vs Amazon vs Google

    Analysis The three-way fight for the 7in form-factor

    The new tablet battleground is the seven-incher. The biggest names in the business are lining up to fight it out for dominance: Google, Amazon and Apple. It's Apple's focus on larger formats that has depressed the 7in tablet market to date - or at least until Amazon shipped the Kindle Fire late last year. Samsung's 7in Galaxy …

    reghardware 28 Jun 10:50

  • D-Link DHP-1565 802.11n router with integrated powerline

    Review One box, three networking technologies

    Running network traffic over the data-unfriendly environment of mains wiring is a trick Reg Hardware has been enthusing about for some years now. Only once in that time has anyone integrated it into another product. That, to refresh your memory, was a power brick Netgear put out for its routers. It was a standard AC adaptor …

    reghardware 28 Jun 11:00

  • Seattle: we built this city, we built this city in Ram'n'Rom

    Washington PC

    Old circuit boards clutter up landfill across the world, but with creativity and a little time on your hands, you could turn discarded computer parts into miniature cities instead. Check out this Ram-packed replica of Seattle's skyline. Network engineer Ali Difaez grabbed his glue gun and with a bunch of DDR 2 Dimms, RJ45 to …

    reghardware 28 Jun 11:07

  • BT Vision beats rivals to honour of being worst UK Pay-TV

    TalkTalk grip on worst-broadband place remains firm

    BT Vision is the most complained about pay TV service in the UK, regulator Ofcom said, receiving nearly four times as many whinges in the first quarter of this year as Virgin Media and nine times as many as Sky. Although moans about paid television services were generally low, BT got the most with 0.27 per 1,000 customers, …

    Networks 28 Jun 11:13

  • Brit global warming skeptics now outnumber believers

    Nothing like a taste of climate policy to put you off

    Fewer Britons than ever support the proposition that global warming is caused by human-driven CO2 emissions, according to the latest survey. Some 48 per cent of Britons now agree with the suggestion that warming could be "mostly natural" and that the idea of it being human-caused has yet to be proven. By comparison only 43 per …

    Energy 28 Jun 11:29

  • Unilever revamps IT for agility

    And tells us how it’s getting on

    On the 11th of July at 10:30am we’re broadcasting live with Garry Meaburn, the operations effectiveness and tooling manager at Unilever, dishing out practical tips on how to build a dynamic IT operation using private cloud principles. Garry's currently a good way through this sizable project. The Register's Lucy Sherriff is …

    Cloud 28 Jun 11:44

  • UK.gov: Some Open Data are more open than others

    Greatest Living Briton's star ratings will show you which

    The government’s long-awaited Open Data white paper, published this morning, introduces standards for “higher data usability”, according to the minister in charge. Frances Maude made the claim in the paper, available here, that was published following an extended period of consultation on how government data should be released …

    Cloud 28 Jun 11:59

  • Panasonic chief says no to low-cost OLED TVs

    LCD prices? Not for years

    Cheap-ish OLED TVs? Don't make me laugh. No, Panasonic's new president, Kazuhiro Tsuga, didn't use those exact words, but they succinctly summarise comments he made in Japan earlier today. Asked by reporters when he thinks OLED TVs will become as cheap as today's LCD televisions, Tsuga said he doesn't expect that to happen …

    reghardware 28 Jun 12:08

  • Maude to gov IT suppliers: If you are rubbish you will be binned

    Speaking of rubbish, those public sector buying frameworks...

    Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude will today warn some of the largest IT suppliers to government they may find themselves in the metaphorical public sector waste bin if their performance is rubbish. After the champagne cocktails hair dryer treatment, integrators including Accenture, Atos, Steria, Capita, Capgemini, Logica …

    Channel Register 28 Jun 12:29

  • Simply nobody is rushing to beat the Microsoft licencing price hike

    Redmond sets up barrel, customers refuse to bend over

    The expected hordes of customers gathering to renew Microsoft volume licensing agreements before the planned price hike next month failed to show up, say a bunch of reseller sources. With the UK price list set to rise between 1.7 per cent to 25.9 per cent from 1 July, the software maker and partners reckoned on a mad rush from …

    Applications 28 Jun 12:53

  • FileMaker Bento 4

    iOS App of the Week Make your tablet productive

    When the iPad was first launched it was very much considered to be a device for content consumption, rather than a proper computer that could be used for work. Apps like Bento show that the iPad is, in fact, a very practical work tool. Choose a template... There’s been an iOS version of the Bento database for a while, but …

    reghardware 28 Jun 13:00

  • English reseller scoops ENTIRE NHS Scotland software gig

    Ach, th' sassenach hae scooped aw oor (their) bawbees

    Trustmarque has scooped a software and services contract with the NHS National Services Scotland in a framework estimated to be worth north of £20m. Under the terms of the deal, all health trusts in the country can buy software and software asset management services from the York-based reseller. Mark Garrity, regional sales …

    Channel Register 28 Jun 14:00

  • Ministers consult public on 'opt in for smut' plans

    Just tick here, sir, in the 'I am a pervert' box

    Imagine a future where you are demanded to declare to your ISP that you wish to view pornography online? If ministers get their way, broadband customers could soon be required to opt-in to being, er, serviced by X-rated content on the internet. A 10-week public consultation document on parental controls was released by the …

    Networks 28 Jun 14:01

  • Multimillion-pound hoard of 50BC GOLD PIECES found in Jersey

    Iron Age was a golden era for someone

    Two tenacious metal-detector enthusiasts have unearthed a record hoard of Iron Age coins in a field in Jersey. Credit: Jersey Heritage Reg Mead and Richard Miles went over the same area with their detectors over and over again for the last 30 years before finally finding thousands of Celtic coins that could be worth up to £ …

    Science 28 Jun 14:28

  • Is the biggest threat to your customers' security their own false sense of it?

    Poll Yeah, there was some software on the PC when I got it....

    Almost two decades worth of hacks, viruses and data breaches should mean that everyone in business is worried about security. But are your customers really taking precautions? And is your biggest competitor the false sense of security your customers have? Afterall, it's hard to buy a PC that doesn't have security nagware …

    Channel Register 28 Jun 14:41

  • Viviane Reding says imitate US and form FEDERAL EUROPE

    Stand by for the War Against The South

    Viviane Reding, VP of the European Commission, has published an open letter calling for a Federal Europe, modelled on the USA, claiming the only way out of the financial crisis is consolidation of all the participating countries into a single administration. The letter, published on the same day that European leaders are …

    Bootnotes 28 Jun 14:53

  • Techies evac'd as raging wildfire menaces $100m Colorado data centre

    Thousands flee as flames eat into city

    A massive HP data centre in Colorado Springs is in danger of being destroyed by a wildfire raging near by. The data centre, located alongside a HP laboratory and office on Rockrimmon Boulevard in Colorado Springs, is in the mandatory evacuation area (PDF) for the fire, although the fire hasn't reached that street yet. "The …

    Cloud Business 28 Jun 15:37

  • News Corp proposes divorce, Murdoch will look after TV biz

    Doesn't he love his red-topped kids anymore?

    News Corp has confirmed the heavily rumoured plan to split Rupert Murdoch's empire in two, with the company's publishing wing parting ways with the broadcasting and entertainment division. It also means Murdoch is further distancing himself from his beloved newspaper biz. The media multinational, which has been knee-deep in …

    Financial News 28 Jun 15:49

  • London cops order Julian Assange to turn himself in

    Erratic leaker too busy boning up on Ecuadorian anthem

    WikiLeaker-in-chief Julian Assange was served with an extradition notice by the Metropolitan police this morning. Scotland Yard said that the 40-year-old Australian, who holed himself up in the Ecuadorian Embassy's digs in London a week ago in an effort to seek political asylum, was required to "attend a police station at date …

    Law 28 Jun 16:02

  • Obama is best Pres 'to beat alien invasion'

    But Americans would rather leave it to Batman

    Two-thirds of Americans reckon Barack Obama would be better than his Republican presidential rival, Mitt Romney, at defending the Land of the Free when Mars attacks. While Romney is punters' favourite for fixing the US economy, Obama will do a more sterling job of protecting planet Earth from little green men with lasers. Of …

    reghardware 28 Jun 16:25

  • Red Hat snaps up open source SOAer FuseSource

    Red Hat Summit Shadowman gets the message on integration

    A bunch of open-source Apache projects relating to application integration and messaging protocols have found what will very likely be their final commercial home, as Red Hat has just bought the FuseSource subsidiary of Progress Software. FuseSource is a major contributor to a number of different Apache projects and …

    Financial News 28 Jun 16:38

  • Berkeley Lab to air-cool Cray Cascade super

    2 petaflops, 6 petabytes for a mere $40m

    Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, which runs the big and unclassified science projects for the US Department of Energy, is sticking with Cray for its next-generation supercomputer, tentatively called NERSC-7. That's short for National Energy Research Scientific Center, which is one of the largest basic science computational …

    HPC 28 Jun 19:50

  • Google claims Chrome is the world's most popular browser

    Google I/O Apple targeted with Chrome and Drive builds for iOS

    Google has been shouting the praises of its newly patched Chrome on the second day of its I/O developer conference, and is claiming that Chrome is undoubtedly the world's most popular browser. "According to all the metrics and everything we see out there, Chrome most is the most popular browser," said Sundar Pichai, VP of …

    Applications 28 Jun 19:53

  • Security still slack in WA government agencies

    Auditor General highlights payment security concerns

    While not as utterly hopeless as last year, IT security is still troublesome in Western Australia’s government agencies. In last year’s annual audit, the Auditor General strolled through fourteen agency networks in an undetected penetration test. This year, the auditor’s staff have looked at payment security in nine agencies, …

    Security 28 Jun 21:53

  • Google downshifts App Engine to infrastructure cloud

    Google I/O Half the cost of the competition

    Microsoft just downshifted its Azure platform cloud so it could support raw virtual machines and any old applications companies want to cram into them, and now Google has followed suit with Compute Engine. Announced today at the Google I/O extravaganza in San Francisco by Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of infrastructure at …

    Infrastructure 28 Jun 22:11

  • Dixons and Best Buy start selling Google Chromebooks

    Google I/O Whether people will buy them is another issue

    Google is trying to get its Chromebook into the mainstream and is starting to push it in retail stores, signing up Best Buy in the US and Dixons in the UK to distribute the ChromeOS systems. The Chocolate Factory's ChromeOS is the red-headed stepchild of the operating system market. Since its launch last year, the sales of …

    Hardware 28 Jun 22:13

  • Ex-NASA group plans private, crowd-funded asteroid hunter

    Sentinel sparks space hypegasm

    A group of former astronauts, astronomers, engineers, and the ubiquitous Tim O’Reilly (presumably for the publishing rights) are getting together to try and punt a privately-funded space telescope to scan for dangerous asteroids. Since the question is not “if” Earth is struck by a large object but “when” (the last big hit was …

    Space 28 Jun 22:34

  • Nextgen connects data centres for cloud boom

    Australia loves big, fat data

    The rise of cloud based services and data centre proliferation has prompted Nextgen Networks to launch a premium grade transmission service connecting nominated data centres in mainland capital cities. Offering up to 10 Gbps, the Data Centre Connect service is available on Ethernet, SDH or Fibre Channel interfaces. Nextgen …

    Infrastructure 28 Jun 22:55

  • RIM delays BlackBerry 10 launch, bins 5000 bods

    What's that smell? Yes, it's death

    RIM has reported disastrous quarterly results and is delaying the launch of the new BlackBerry 10 operating system until next year. The company will also shed 5,000 staff. In its latest earnings call the company reported revenues fell 33 per cent to $2.8bn in the last quarter, leaving them down 43 per cent on this time last …

    Financial News 28 Jun 23:59