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5th July 2012 Archive

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  • Joe Biden vs Kim Dotcom - Megaupload thriller

    Dotcom’s West Wing White House frenemy cabal

    The antipodes' most notorious online file sharer, Kim Dotcom, has vented his wrath at the White House claiming, that Vice-President Joe Biden instigated the raids on and shutdown of his Megaupload business. Dotcom made revelations to TorrentFreak that he has information asserting that Biden directed attorney Neil MacBride to …

    Law 5 Jul 03:05

  • NextDC stumps up $133m for 'bulletproof' data centre

    Telcos flock to Melb high security, green facility

    ASX listed data centre purveyor NextDC has ploughed $AU130m ($133m) into a new Melbourne based facility, M1, pitched as the city’s largest. Foundation clients include NTT Communications Australia, iiNet Business, Amcom and PIPE Networks, M2, Optus and ASG. NextDC chief executive Craig Scroggie said the company was on its way …

    Cloud 5 Jul 03:30

  • Bank Trojan crooks trouser £800k from 30,000 Brits

    Analysis How the crims outran anti-virus sniffer dogs

    Trustwave SpiderLabs has revealed how criminals stole more than £800,000 (€1m) from UK bank accounts using the Zeus Windows PC malware. The scam - which ran from June to November last year - targeted customers of six banks in Britain. It began with a flurry of emails that tricked marks into clicking on a link to a fake …

    Security 5 Jul 06:58

  • Now Apple faces Siri court room showdown

    Patent dispute could cost more than Proview pay-out

    Apple’s protracted iPad trademark battle with Proview appears to have opened the floodgates to further legal attacks in China, with Siri now being targeted in a law suit which could cost Cupertino in excess of $60 million to resolve. A Shanghai-based developer of voice assistant technology has filed against Apple and its local …

    Business 5 Jul 07:09

  • Telstra re-stocks shelves with phones from alleged sweatshop

    Telco happy after week-long investigation into VTech

    Aussie telecoms giant Telstra has decided to start selling equipment made by controversial Chinese manufacturer VTech again, barely a week after suspending sales in the wake of a report detailing serious labour and human rights violations. The report, from not-for-profit the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights, …

    Business 5 Jul 07:25

  • UK's chief procurement officer quits for COO post at recruitment firm

    John Collington's off to slash spending in the private sector

    The government's chief procurement officer John Collington has resigned to leave for a post in the private sector. Collington is leaving to become chief operating officer of Alexander Mann Solutions, a UK-based specialist in global recruitment process outsourcing. His successor will be named in due course, the Cabinet Office …

    Government 5 Jul 07:30

  • China trains its cannons on digital pirates

    Raises two fingers to Europe's ACTA ruling

    The Chinese government has announced a tough four month crackdown targeting online piracy in the country, just as European netizens celebrate their Parliament’s rejection of the controversial ACTA treaty. A typically lengthy statement indicated four government departments would be involved in the action plan – the National …

    Law 5 Jul 07:40

  • 'Amazon can't do what we do': Twitter-miner's BYO data centre heresy

    DataSift strains with Hadoop

    Sometimes floating on somebody else’s cloud isn’t enough. Sometimes you just have to float alone – no matter how young you are. DataSift, the five-year-old big data company mining billions of tweets and Wikipedia edits, reckons it’s just one year away from building its own data centre. DataSift sucks down 2TB of data from …

    Cloud 5 Jul 08:02

  • The touchscreens that push back, thanks to Brit hi-fi boffinry

    NXT's rise, fall and rise from helicopters to fondleslabs

    You'd be forgiven for never having heard of flat loudspeaker designer NXT. Mission, Quad, Wharfedale and Cyrus are the brands it all but destroyed before ending up as one of the UK's smallest listed companies, though one with aspirations to rise again. The technology behind NXT was developed by DERA, the UK's military research …

    Hardware 5 Jul 08:27

  • Total bankers: Twitter and LinkedIn's cynical API play

    Open ... and Shut Not doing evil pays better

    In tech today, it has become a truism that "if you're not paying for it, you're the product". Somehow we have applied this wisdom to consumers without recognising that the same principle applies to enterprises and their developers. Recently, however, Netflix and LinkedIn have reminded us just how precarious it is to build on …

    Developer 5 Jul 09:02

  • Big media little iPad stories suggest Apple is cranking up the spin cycle

    Officially sanctioned leaks?

    The latest 'iPad Mini' rumours don't tell us anything more about the putative device than we knew already - what's telling is where the rumours are being reported. Step forward news agency Bloomberg and newspaper The Wall Street Journal. Both covered the 7.85in tablet this week, both citing the inevitable, unnamed "people …

    Tablets 5 Jul 09:08

  • Europe's prang-phone-in-every-car to cost €5m per life saved

    MEPs demand eCall kit that dials 999 automatically

    Members of the European Parliament are backing calls for a mandatory eCall scheme, forcing every car sold in Europe to be fitted with an embedded mobile communications device to save an estimated 2,500 lives. The European Commission has already adopted eCall, which mandates the fitting of a mobile device in every private car …

    Security 5 Jul 09:41

  • 'Ed must go' – pundits round on Ofcom chief after failed Beeb DG bid

    Comment Fair and balanced? Bit tricky that one, now

    For months Ofcom chief Ed Richards was the bookies' favourite to run the BBC, but he hasn't got the job he craved. As decision day approached, the prospect of Richards running the BBC sent the Daily Mail newspaper, which had campaigned hard against him, into near meltdown. But now Richards returns to a job which requires him …

    Media 5 Jul 10:01

  • SAP bruiser Itelligence gobbles rival Blueprint

    Rseller tps up UK rvenue in aquisition sree

    Preposterously named SAP reseller Itelligence UK has swallowed rival Blueprint Management Systems (BMS) for an undisclosed sum. German-owned Itelligence has set its sights on becoming SAP's biggest Brit bruiser and the buy up of BMS adds a chunk of business intelligence and data warehousing revenues to the top line. "Our UK …

    The Channel 5 Jul 10:12

  • Did your iPhone 'just stop working' - or did you drop it in your BEER?

    No more lying at the Genius Bar - Apple patents water detection

    Apple was awarded patents on 21 of its design and engineering applications yesterday - including one for a head-mounted immersive visual display. The other 20 are a little less visionary, but at least one of the patents awarded could have an impact on fanbois who have given their phones an immersive watery experience. Patent …

    Security 5 Jul 10:16

  • Er, you remember you tried to sell me that security package...

    Poll Selling cloud security in the real world

    We all know a real world example can make all the difference when selling technology. Nothing mows down those objections like seeing the company's crowd jewels disappearing as fast as your broadband provider can upload. But at the same time, you can't wait till all your customers have had a major security scare before warning …

    The Channel 5 Jul 10:30

  • Disappearing space dust belt baffles boffins

    Did star spit out planet after inhaling galactic powder?

    Boffins were bewildered when a star's dust belt mysteriously disappeared, but they now think that the vanishing fragments could have used up in some superfast planet formation. TYC in its formerly dusty state. Credit: Gemini Observatory/AURA artwork by Lynette Cook Researchers had spotted the cloud of dust circling the …

    Science 5 Jul 10:47

  • Startup pitches £64 hackable Android console

    Free games for all

    High-profile backers have pledged support for a $99 (£64) "built to be hacked" Android-based games console which promises all titles will be free to play and welcomes any developer to the party. Startup Ouya has recruited Jawbone Jambox designer Yves Behar to style the console, which will connect to a TV and run free Android …

    Hardware 5 Jul 11:00

  • 'Apple is corrupting App Store downloads', warn angry devs

    Contents may unsettle in transit

    Apple's App Store is apparently damaging the contents of applications as they're downloading, leaving developers flooded with complaints about errors they can't fix. The file corruption problem seems to have started yesterday. Instapaper's Marco Arment was one of the first devs hit: he uploaded a new version of Instapaper to …

    Developer 5 Jul 11:17

  • Review: Samsung Chromebox

    Terminal decisions

    Moan, moan, moan: that’s how I suspected this review would come across as I pondered on my initial impressions of Samsung’s Chromebox – its Mac Mini-styled desktop computer that runs Google’s Chrome OS. You know, the online operating system that turns your computer into paperweight when there’s no internet connection. And then I …

    Hardware 5 Jul 11:21

  • Rifle-waving Yank's premature detonation ruins city's big bang

    Ricochet sparks 1am fireworks blast, wrecks rusty wrecks

    An early morning rifle test ended rather badly yesterday when a rogue shot detonated $80,000 of fireworks set aside for Fourth of July celebrations. The unnamed shooter, who was reported to be the owner of a car wrecking yard in Bainbridge Island, Washington, was giving his new firearm a go at 1am when a ricochet flew off a …

    Bootnotes 5 Jul 11:32

  • BT upset at Ofcom's wholesale leased-line price cap plan

    Watchdog hopes it'll drive down costs for telco's rivals

    BT is worried about Ofcom's plans to tighten its control of the national telco's wholesale Ethernet services prices outside of London. The communications watchdog warned today that it had proposed to come down hard on BT charges for products using leased telecoms lines - which provide high-speed links for businesses including …

    Broadband 5 Jul 12:02

  • BT broadband packs up again - second big outage in a fortnight

    Updated 'We're really sorry', sniffs enormous telco

    BT has once again suffered what appears to be a major network outage affecting what the company described as "multiple areas". A simple update on BT's customer status page currently reads: We're really sorry but we've got a problem at the moment affecting our broadband service, which means that some of our customers will be …

    Broadband 5 Jul 12:50

  • YouView: The long march to... er, where exactly?

    Newsflash! Content is still king

    When YouView was conceived at the BBC in 2007 as "the iPlayer in hardware" it caused huge convulsions across the TV industry. Sky and Virgin grumbled about anticompetitive practices. Now, several years later, we can see that YouView is exactly what was promised: it's the iPlayer in a box. But the idea that it's revolutionary, …

    Media 5 Jul 13:34

  • Ex-France Telecom CEO probed over staff suicide spate

    Supremo quizzed in court after union cried foul

    Former France Telecom chief executive Didier Lombard is under investigation following a spate of staff suicides at his firm in 2008 and 2009. Lombard was in charge of the company when more than 30 employees took their lives and others attempted to kill themselves amid mass redundancies at the telco. A court in Paris, which is …

    Security 5 Jul 14:02

  • Blizzard coughs to boring Diablo III conclusion

    F**kin hunt

    Blizzard admitted flaws with Diablo III this week and conceded the game failed to keep players engaged for as long as they might have expected. "We recognise that the item hunt is just not enough for a long-term sustainable end-game. There are still tons of people playing every day and week, and playing a lot, but eventually …

    Games 5 Jul 14:20

  • Used software firms win small victory in shrinking on-premises world

    US next battleground as vendors flee to the cloud

    Software-makers were caught off guard by a July judgment by the Court of Justice of the European Union on the UsedSoft GmbH v Oracle International Corp case. The court ruled that “An author of software cannot oppose the resale of his ‘used’ licenses allowing the use of his programs downloaded from the internet”. “The Court of …

    Applications 5 Jul 14:44

  • Trekkie pays £45,000 for rusty shuttle

    Captain's flog

    A dilapidated shuttlecraft prop used in the original Star Trek series has sold at auction for $70,000 (£45,000). Some Trekkies have far too much cash in their hands. As you can see from the image below, the 24ft long shuttle, which had been acquired by a collector years ago, has clearly seen better days. This didn't stop a …

    Hardware 5 Jul 15:11

  • Buy Smarter: what you need to know about... SSDs

    Smarter Memory Speed up your laptop

    The solid state drive (SSD) is like a fast hard disk drive (HDD) with no moving parts. Many SSDs can be used as direct replacements for mechanical hard drives, although usually with a capacity restriction. They are better suited to notebooks, netbooks and Ultrabooks because capacities in these tend to be lower than in desktop …

    Hardware 5 Jul 15:12

  • Watch smarter: video guide to... SSDs

    Smarter Memory All the info you need

    The solid state drive (SSD) is like a fast hard disk drive (HDD) with no moving parts. Many SSDs can be used as direct replacements for mechanical hard drives, although usually with a capacity restriction. Our exclusive video has all the info you need to make the right choice. var MediaPlayerVars = { '_': { 'http://www. …

    Hardware 5 Jul 15:16

  • Google makes Opera bloggers an offer they can't refuse: Use Chrome

    Nice browser you got there, shame if something happened to it

    Google is warning Opera web browser users they must switch to Chrome in order to use Blogger.com, the search giant's blog-hosting service. No technical incompatibilities have been found to justify the alarm. After a reader tip-off, El Reg created a Google blog using Opera 12.0 for Mac this morning, and received this message …

    Developer 5 Jul 15:20

  • BA staff to google for snaps, dirt on biz-class passengers

    Airline denies building secret dossiers on VIPs

    British Airways has denied "compiling secretive data" about its business-class passengers after launching its "Know Me" programme to personalise customers' travel plans. The Evening Standard today reported that BA staff will be given Apple iPads and told to use Google to research key frequent flyers. The employees are …

    Security 5 Jul 16:29

  • California clears way for Steve Jobs' 'private Apple spaceship'

    Council rushes through giant glass doughnut campus

    Apple's giant glass doughnut with apricot groves will be fast-tracked through the planning system, Cupertino City Council announced, smoothing the approval process for its 3 million square foot (278,709m2) Campus 2 building. The move comes six weeks after Apple buried its neighbours in publicity material explaining how great …

    Government 5 Jul 17:02

  • Spring father Rod Johnson pushes eject, pops out of VMware

    SpringSource executive migration

    Spring Framework creator Rod Johnson has left VMware, where he headed up the virtualisation giant’s open-source Java and middleware efforts. In his blog, Johnson said he had left to “pursue other interests". He’s understood to have been spending more time in his native Australia, away from the VMware mothership in California …

    Virtualization 5 Jul 17:34

  • Global players wolfing down chips again after crap Q1

    Analysts chipper about future sales

    The chip market is growing again after slumping a bit in the past several months, holding out hope for semis that the growth rate in the second half of the year will be sufficient for the industry to eke out some increases for the full year. It all hangs on whether the global economy and the insatiable desire of consumers for …

    Hardware 5 Jul 18:03

  • Russia's 'Silicon Valley' dumps a million bucks into US cloud biz

    Moscow suburb welcomes American Java house

    Russian government-backed technology fund the Skolkovo Foundation has pumped $1m into a private American cloud company - Jelastic - which means the Palo Alto start-up will open a secondary office in Russia's Silicon Valley – Skolkovo Innovation Park in the Moscow suburb of Skolkovo. Jelastic is an easy-to-use cloud platform …

    Cloud 5 Jul 19:06

  • DNSchanger shutdown may kick 300,000 offline on Monday

    FBI: Killing that connection in order to save it

    An estimated 300,000 computer connections are going to get scrambled when the FBI turns off the command and control servers for the DNSChanger botnet on Monday. The FBI took control of the botnet in November after identifying its command servers and swapping them out for their own systems – as well as arresting six Estonians …

    Security 5 Jul 19:13

  • Computer error triggers mass rocket launch

    Rise of the machines thwarted ... for now

    Americans love their fireworks on Independence Day, but it is possible to have too much of a good thing. That's what spectators got on July 4 in San Diego, California, when an errant computer triggered every rocket in the city's annual display to launch at once. The pyrotechnics were meant to last 18 minutes. Instead, the …

    Security 5 Jul 19:25

  • Calxeda ramping up ARM server boards

    Updated Benchmarks against x86 iron need some work

    Calxeda, the ARM server-chip upstart that HP tapped for its "Redstone" hyperscale servers last November, is getting ready to ramp up production on the server cards that use its quad-core EnergyCore ARM processors, and is making waves with benchmarks while promising to do a better job with comparative testing against x86 …

    Servers 5 Jul 20:01

  • Storage company bribed bankers to win fat contracts - Feds

    FalconStor grafted hard to win bank IT chiefs' favour

    FalconStor bribed banking executives with gambling, golf, stock and gifts to get $12.2m of business. That's what led to the founder's ousting, fines and a deferred prosecution agreement. The US Department of Justice says: One JPMorgan Chase executive received 25,000 FalconStor stock options and 40,000 restricted FalconStor …

    Storage 5 Jul 20:07

  • Judge: Patent litigants behave like animals

    And they breed almost as fast, as well

    The outspoken judge who threw out Apple's patent suit against Motorola Mobility has called into question the entire US patent system, comparing patent litigants to violent beasts. Posner: "All their teeth and claws" "It's a constant struggle for survival," Judge Richard Posner said in an interview with Reuters. "As in any …

    Law 5 Jul 20:09

  • Numbers don't lie: Apple's ascent eviscerates Microsoft

    Comment How the mighty have fallen – and how swiftly

    Microsoft Windows once enjoyed a seemingly insurmountable dominance over operating systems offered by Apple, but new market share number-crunching shows Apple's inexorable rise blasting gaping holes in Redmond's once-impregnable battlements. According to stat-happy analyst Horace Dediu, founder of Asymco, the ratio of …

    Hardware 5 Jul 21:24

  • Rutherford Appleton Lab fires up ceepie-geepie hybrid

    Southampton gets Iridis 3 cluster upgrade

    A consortium of universities in Oxfordshire and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory has finished building two new supercomputer clusters for academic and corporate researchers to let their codes loose upon. Perhaps the most interesting of the new machines is the one called "Emerald", paying homage to Nvidia and its green theme …

    HPC 5 Jul 22:31

  • Google denies Redmond report of a spamming Android botnet

    'Show us the evidence,' says Chocolate Factory

    Google is disputing claims from a Microsoft researcher that a functioning botnet is operating on Android phones and spamming out Viagra and penny stock adverts to unsuspecting punters. Terry Zink, program manager for Microsoft Forefront online security, took time during the annual July 4 "We're kicking out the Brits and will …

    Security 5 Jul 23:07

  • Texas Higgs hunters mourn the particle that got away

    The Superconducting Super Collider that never was

    Now that the elusive Higgs boson has, for all intents and purposes, been goosed into existence, the scientific world is popping champagne corks, lifting pints, and otherwise celebrating CERN's apparent success. Well, almost all of the scientific world. Deep in the heart of Texas, a small group of dispirited particle physicists …

    Science 5 Jul 23:56