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9th July 2012 Archive

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  • Android Trojan leaves 100,000 users out of pocket

    MMarketPay buys content from China Mobile's app store

    Security researchers are warning of yet another Android malware outbreak which has spread to nine app stores and infected 100,000 with code designed to covertly purchase apps and content from China Mobile’s Mobile Market. Mobile security firm TrustGo explained that the MMarketPay.A Trojan could be hidden in a number of …

    Phones 9 Jul 06:14

  • Comcast makes up with Boxee after cable encryption spat

    Cable TV + internet boxes sector keeps swelling

    The proliferation of third-party aggregation devices to combine cable TV with internet content in the home is set to continue in the US following a landmark deal between Comcast and Boxee. This is significant because Comcast is the largest US multi-system operator – with 22.5 million pay TV customers – while Boxee is the most …

    Media 9 Jul 07:01

  • SMART's new SSD wrings extra juice from MLC flash

    89,000 write cycles ... are you sure that's not SLC?

    SMART has introduced a solid state drive that can do 50 full drive writes a day for five years using consumer-grade MLC flash; that's 89,000 P/E cycles and a 50X jump up from the raw NAND rate. The new product is the Optimus Ultra Plus: a 2.5-inch, 6Gbit/s SAS SSD that has the same performance numbers – 500MB/sec dual-port …

    Storage 9 Jul 07:19

  • Analysts hail Burma's untapped IT goldmine

    Tech firms will be queuing up for Asia's 'unpolished gem'

    Forget China, Burma could be the next big growth market for IT investors as long as the country continues its political and social reforms, according to IDC. The analyst’s latest report, Myanmar ICT Market 2012–2016 Forecast and Analysis, predicts 15 per cent year-on-year growth in IT spending this year, with the market …

    Management 9 Jul 07:38

  • Chinese boffins build nuclear-powered deep-sea station

    Underwater mining plans a step closer

    Not content with ambitious plans to dominate space exploration over the coming decades, China is also looking to master the ocean with the development of a deep-sea station which could be its first step towards large-scale underwater mining. Plans for the nuclear powered mobile deep-sea station were unveiled earlier this year …

    Science 9 Jul 07:45

  • Olympus MEG4.0 smart glasses will photoshop the REAL WORLD

    Camera firm's Google Glass competitor has GPS, smartphone linkup

    Japanese camera and optics company Olympus is developing a set of smart glasses along the lines of Google's Project Glass which, besides its other more useful functions, will allow users to view the real world with a brighter, friendlier glow. Olympus showed off the prototype in a press release on its website. Hot on the …

    Hardware 9 Jul 08:02

  • US ponders fibre link to Guantanamo

    Residents to get better broadband than us

    The US is pricing up a $40m fibre-optic cable connecting Guantanamo Bay to the US mainland, providing broadband connectivity to the place where 169 inmates still languish. To be fair to the US Navy, the connectivity isn't just for the prisoners, it will also connect up the military personnel and contractors on the base. The …

    Broadband 9 Jul 08:14

  • Welcome, friend, to Metroland

    Stob You Betjeman

    When I saw that my editor had written 'Metro isn't the problem: catapulting into Metro land (and back again) is', I said: 'There's an idea - I could do try out the Betj pastiche macro in my HTML editor'. And scurried out the door before anybody thought to stop me. Metroland Bright with non-translucent tiling, Pastel blobs …

    Verity Stob 9 Jul 08:33

  • Cypress waggles ANOTHER unwanted take-over bid at Ramtron

    I know we're fabless but which part of no don't you understand?

    Non-volatile RAM chipper Ramtron has received a second unwanted take-over bid from serial acquiring chip vendor Cyprus Semiconductor. Ramtron is a fabless semi-conductor company making Ferroelectric RAM, dynamic memory that is non-volatile. It is based in Colorado Springs, is capitalised at $106.3m and its shares trade at $3. …

    Storage 9 Jul 08:45

  • 'Biologically accurate' robot legs walk like an Egyptian

    Vid Or anyone else for that matter

    US boffins have come up with a pair of robotic legs that they reckon are the first to walk in a biologically accurate (if somewhat jerky) manner. The researchers want to try to mimic the actual process of walking, particularly the bit where people don't actually have to think to do it, so they can figure out how babies learn …

    Science 9 Jul 08:58

  • Burnt Samsung Galaxy S III singed by external source, probe reveals

    Microwave to dry it out, it seems

    Pictures showing a heat-damaged Samsung Galaxy S III smartphone were seemingly the result of a bonkers bid to dry out a wet handset by heating it in a microwave oven. The snaps appeared online last month. They showed an S III with burn damage down near the phone's Micro USB port. The battery was intact and undamaged. Samsung …

    Phones 9 Jul 09:10

  • NASA was WRONG on arsenic-gobbling aliens, claim boffins

    Weird Earth bacteria need their six a day

    Scientists in Switzerland have blown apart the theory that some bacteria can live off arsenic, disproving a controversial 2010 study by NASA. Felisa Wolfe-Simon, one of the space agency's astrobiologists, faced scepticism when she declared two years ago that she had discovered the snappily named GFAJ-1* microbe thriving in the …

    Science 9 Jul 09:30

  • Emulex coughs up $58m in Broadcom fibre optic patents clash

    Don't put that chequebook away just yet

    Emulex is paying Broadcom $58m to partially settle patent infringement claims. Broadcom makes (among many, many things) Ethernet gear and attempted to sue Emulex for infringing 10 of its its patents in 2009. The 2009 suit came just months after Emulex rejected a second takeover bid from Broadcom. With this settlement, three …

    Business 9 Jul 09:44

  • HP parts with sales director Richard Logan

    Printer and PC worlds collide

    HP sales director Richard Logan is exiting the organisation as the printer and PCs business units collide, say channel sources close to the vendor. The shake-up at the top of the Printing and Personal Systems (PPS) biz began some months ago with Eric Cador, EMEA head of the PC division, bagging the most senior role in the …

    The Channel 9 Jul 09:48

  • LOHAN finally checks into REHAB

    First hypobaric rocket motor test today

    We're pleased to announce that today sees the first of our Rocketry Experimental High Altitude Barosimulator (REHAB) experiments, meaning we'll finally find out if solid rocket motors will fire under simulated high-altitude conditions. After months of head-scratching, faffing and garden shed jiggery-pokery, the Low Orbit …

    SPB 9 Jul 10:09

  • Ex-Nokia staffers team up to revive MeeGo

    Jolla on a rolla?

    A number of former Nokia employees have banded together to maintain the MeeGo smartphone OS and even release new hardware running the software. Formally launched this weekend - though its LinkedIn page says it has been around since 2011 - Jolla "will design, develop and sell new MeeGo based smartphones", the company pledged. …

    Phones 9 Jul 10:20

  • Boston flexes its own ARM server muscle

    Pics Green 'green' tech from Brit IT biz

    UK IT supplier Boston is not waiting for ARM-powered servers to take off before jumping into the racket - instead it's getting out there on the bleeding edge and will within weeks start shipping the first of its "Viridis" energy-efficient servers. Viridis is a Latin-ish name that is derived from "green" and is meant to signify …

    Servers 9 Jul 10:26

  • Microsoft quietly bangs Bing's big bucks drum

    Startups paid to bet on Redmond's loss-maker

    Microsoft has created an angel investment fund for startups using its Bing.com search and ads platform. The Bing Fund is described in a Microsoft job posting for a creative director as “a small team working with start-ups and accelerators to bring a wave of innovation to OSD”. OSD is Microsoft’s Online Services Division. The …

    Business 9 Jul 10:42

  • Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society on Blu-ray

    Review Section 9 regroups for one more case

    First released in its native Japan in 2006, GITS:SAC:Solid State Society (to contract its convoluted full title) was not created for cinemas but as a feature-length original video animation (OVA) destined for TV broadcast and DVD sales. GITS:SAC:Solid State Society gets the Blu-ray brush-up Unquestionably the least-known …

    Hardware 9 Jul 11:00

  • Google plants rainbow flag in anti-gay countries

    Ads giant wants homophobic nations to 'legalise love'

    Longtime gay rights campaigner Google has kicked off a new effort to "legalise love" in countries that criminalise homosexuality. At a Global LGBT Workplace Summit in London late last week, the web giant's European head of diversity and inclusion, Mark Palmer-Edgecumbe, reportedly outlined the initiative. According to Gay …

    Law 9 Jul 11:22

  • CSC bundles NHS IT fiasco staff out the door

    Now to decide the fate of 640 staffers in round two

    CSC has binned about 100 workers involved in the disastrous National Programme for IT in the first wave of planned redundancies – with another 200 heads leaving voluntarily, company insiders have claimed. Altogether 500 techies – 30 per cent of those working on the botched NHS system – were put at risk of redundancy back in …

    The Channel 9 Jul 11:43

  • Twitter tool's tweet tweaks leaked to twits

    New iPhone app curates, tries not to crash

    Apple's App Store has accidentally whipped the covers off the new Twitter app for iPhone and revealed its features. From the list of the updates, it promises to cram more videos and pictures into streams of tweets; curate related messages around special events; and bring in a more hyperactive notification system that warns …

    Applications 9 Jul 12:03

  • Sony, Samsung trade body to push HbbTV to Brits

    Up yours, YouView

    UK trade association Intellect, which represents electronics companies and broadcast technology firms, has detailed how it believes the HbbTV standard should be implemented alongside Freeview - effectively sticking two fingers up at YouView, which launched last week. HbbTV - which stands for Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV - …

    Hardware 9 Jul 12:20

  • BlackBerry App World hits 3bn downloads, 27bn more to go

    Not quite up to Apple's App Store, but hey-ho

    BlackBerry's app store – BlackBerry App World – has notched up 3 billion downloads, parent company RIM boasted in a upbeat developers' blog post. There are now over 90,000 apps in the store, the post says. Apple's App Store has seen 30 billion downloads as of June and has about half-a-million apps on its books, but the 3 …

    Applications 9 Jul 12:24

  • Schools IT biz RM back in black after caning from UK gov

    Mega-cuts taught supplier a lesson it won't forget

    RM is back in the black following the recent cost-cutting activity that saw it offload multiple business units and axe 17 per cent of its workforce. The education IT supplier made profit before tax of £600,000 in the six months to 31 March compared to a loss of £1.4m in the same first half year period a year earlier. Turnover …

    The Channel 9 Jul 12:45

  • Facebook! and! Yahoo! kiss! and! make! up! with! tasty! ad! juice!

    Time to bury that patent lawsuit... bitch

    Facebook and Yahoo! are friends again after their lawyers cobbled together a settlement in their shouting match over patents. The two internet outfits had been at loggerheads for much of 2012 following a sueball slung at Facebook from Yahoo! The Purple Palace had alleged that the dominant social network had infringed on 10 of …

    Business 9 Jul 13:02

  • British Gas bets you'll pay £150 for heating remote control

    The killer app for home automation?

    Following a trial run in the homes of 10,000 of its customers, British Gas has now launched its home-automation play: the Remote Heating Control, which will set you back £150. But for kit-provider AlertMe, the RHC could be more Trojan Horse than money-saving tech. The Remote Heating product connects wirelessly to the …

    Science 9 Jul 13:27

  • DARPA aiming for Mach-20 hypersonic rocketplane 'by 2016'

    Blazing hot booming sky-spear 'is the new Stealth'

    Pentagon wild-card warboffin agency DARPA has plunged back into the hypersonics fray with a vengeance, announcing plans to build a "recoverable" rocket plane capable of Mach 20 speeds within four years. A bit like this, but with its own rocket The new project appears under the banner "Integrated Hypersonics", acknowledging …

    Science 9 Jul 14:01

  • Live long and prosper: Spaceflight 'slows ageing process'

    Lifespan boost for tiny astronauts

    Microscopic worms live longer in space, scientists have revealed in research that has implications for human ageing. By blasting a bunch of Caenorhabditis elegans worms into orbit on the International Space Station, and comparing them with a set of developmentally-matched worms back on Earth, boffins found that the astro- …

    Science 9 Jul 14:17

  • Microsoft sets October date for Windows 8 release

    WPC 2012 Gotta wait until 2013 for Intel's Win 8 Surface tablets

    Microsoft has set the date for the release of Windows 8: the operating system will be released to manufacturers in August ahead of a general release at the end of October. "The wait is almost over," said Tami Reller, chief marketing officer of Microsoft's Windows division. "Windows 8 is on track to be released to manufacturing …

    Windows 8 9 Jul 14:50

  • In the red corner: TV star and prof in Beijing blogger brawl

    Molybdenum copper plant row boils over into real life

    Two prominent Chinese micro-bloggers decided to settle their differences offline on Friday, after a Sina Weibo spat between a female regional TV presenter and a pro-government academic ended up in fisticuffs in a Beijing park. The stand-off in Chaoyang Park, a transcript of which has been provided by Beijing Cream, pitted – …

    Bootnotes 9 Jul 15:13

  • OpenFlow takes networks in a different direction

    An easier route

    As network topologies and data access patterns have evolved, load profiles can change so quickly that a completely new approach to networking is required. That approach is OpenFlow. According to Renato Recio, IBM Fellow and system networking CTO, life before the advent of x86 virtualisation was simple: client computers did …

    Network Futures 9 Jul 15:32

  • HP's faster-than-flash memristor at least TWO years away

    Kavli Foundation Roundtable Plus: Storage boffins discuss photonic chip comms

    HP memristor-meister Stan Williams has revealed a product launch delay – saying commercial kit would be available by 2014 at the earliest – and said processor chips would eventually use nanoscale light networking. He was speaking at a Kavli Foundation Roundtable – the Kavli Foundation being one of those US charitable thingies …

    Storage 9 Jul 15:38

  • US networks: Political donations by text? Rlly nt a gud idea

    We'll be on the hook for profiteering, moan operators

    American cellular networks are unhappy with a Federal Election Commission decision to permit political donations by text message, despite the fact that such a facility could change politics entirely. The decision was made by unanimous vote of the FEC last month, and will allow political parties and candidates to accept up to $ …

    Mobile 9 Jul 16:04

  • ISPs step in to supply DNSChanger safety net

    Not going dark, after all

    The DNSChanger Working Group's replacement DNS servers were taken offline as scheduled on Monday, 9 July. However, rather than leaving an estimated 300,000 machines without internet services it seems that many ISP have configured their own substitute DNS servers, so that at least some pox-ridden machines still have a safety …

    Security 9 Jul 16:40

  • Lookout mulls flagging privacy-invading phone apps as adware

    Free virus detector considers crackdown on freebies

    Lookout Mobile Security has taken steps towards classifying privacy-eroding phone apps as malign and ripe for removal from devices by its antivirus software. Many free mobile applications generate revenue by using advertising networks and exchanges to show in-app ads, and in most cases everything is ethical and above board. …

    Applications 9 Jul 16:52

  • Apple cracks down on black market in iOS beta passes

    Psst, activate your UDID with us, bitchez

    Apple has forced several sites selling access to beta versions of its iOS operating system to shut down after filing DMCA requests with their hosters. Developers are given access to beta versions of iOS so they can test out their apps, but Apple sells devs a batch of passes for 100 iOS devices for $99. Generally dev companies …

    Developer 9 Jul 17:33

  • LSI lures IT vendors with Nytro blast for flash storage

    Mega EMC deal not enough... we want more

    LSI appears to be making a determined push into flash storage. But is this a smart business move by a company that flitted about somewhat when it came to flogging various storage technologies? LSI is very successful with controller silicon for disk drives and SAS interfaces and much more technology at that level. After Abhi …

    Storage 9 Jul 18:06

  • Finland beefs up HPC oomph with Cray 'Cascade' super

    Stuffs old paper warehouse with gobs o' flops and bushels o' bytes

    Finland's main academic supercomputing center, the IT Center for Science (CSC), has been embiggening its number-crunching and data storage capacity throughout 2012, and is at it again this week with the acquisition of a future "Cascade" supercomputer from Cray. CSC is managed by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture, …

    HPC 9 Jul 18:11

  • UN deploys ITU to seek FRAND patent peace treaty

    Takes time off from world-domination plans

    The International Telecommunications Union – the communications arm of the United Nations – has convened a round-table meeting to talk about patents, why they aren't working and what might be done to solve this. The ITU sets international standards, and so has an interest in making them work, though the organisation hasn't …

    Broadband 9 Jul 18:54

  • UK judge hands Samsung win for being 'not as cool' as iPad

    Apple's 'understated and extreme simplicity' works against it

    A UK judge has handed Samsung a victory in its court battle with Apple over design similarities between its Galaxy Tab line and the Cupertinian iPad – but for a reason sure to rankle the Korean manufacturer's design department. Speaking of Samsung's fondleslabs, UK High Court Judge Colin Birss ruled, "They do not have the same …

    Mobile 9 Jul 19:05

  • Facebook shuts down face recognition APIs after all

    Never mind what we said three weeks ago

    Less than a month after it was acquired by Facebook, face-recognition startup Face.com is shutting down its developer APIs and killing off its iOS app, in a dramatic about-face from earlier statements by its founder. As of July 9, a notice on the Face.com homepage reads, "Face.com has been acquired by Facebook, and as part of …

    Developer 9 Jul 19:24

  • Perceptive Pixel buy to make Microsoft more touchy-feely

    WPC 2012 As with Yammer, Redmond is buying friends

    At the end of the opening keynote at its Worldwide Partners Conference in Toronto Microsoft announced yet another purchase: touchable display creator Perceptive Pixel. Perceptive Pixel is looking to improve on the analogue whiteboard with 27-, 55-, and 82-inch LCD displays that allow the user to manipulate images by touch, …

    Business 9 Jul 19:44

  • Global IT spending wrapped in caution tape

    Hazmat suits not required like in the Great Recession

    What's black and yellow and stings? Nope, not a bee: the global IT spending budget, tightly wrapped in crime-scene caution tape – that's the continuing prognosis from the economists and IT market watchers at Gartner. "While the challenges facing global economic growth persist – the eurozone crisis, weaker US recovery, a …

    Business 9 Jul 20:58

  • AMD smacked by channel slump in Q2

    Nearly 10 per cent drop

    The bean counters at AMD have done a first pass on the company's second quarter, and it is not looking so good. The company said in a statement after Wall Street called it a day on Monday that revenues in the second quarter ended in June would fall by approximately 11 per cent sequentially from the first quarter. AMD had …

    Financial News 9 Jul 21:52

  • Cyberoam pushes fix for SSL vuln

    Users’ snooped packets safe again

    Deep packet inspection company Cyberoam has issued a hotfix to its devices, after earlier asserting that its technology “followed industry best practices for SSL bridging”. The issue emerged when Tor Project researchers asserted that Cyberoam devices used the same skeleton certificate on all of its devices. This, the …

    Security 9 Jul 22:49

  • Magnetic cells put biologists in a spin

    Trout's nose might hold secret to homing sense

    Scientists have long believed that some kind of magnetic sense lies behind some animals’ navigation ability, which in the case of some fish and birds seems to operate without the need for obvious landmarks. Now, a German researcher believes he has tagged individual cells that respond to magnetic fields. Doing so needs a fair …

    Science 9 Jul 23:15

  • Microsoft lures resellers with Office 365 perks and payments

    WPC 2012 Bigger rewards and single-point billing

    Microsoft is rejiggering its commercial platform to woo resellers with bigger discounts and finder's fees, as well as adding a simplified billing system for Office 365 that some resellers have been awaiting for years In terms of rewards, Redmond is upping the upfront payment it makes to resellers as an advisor's fee to 18 per …

    Business 9 Jul 23:21

  • Is the Higgs boson an imposter?

    Signature could be forged, suggest Argonne boffins

    A group of Argonne National Laboratory researchers has suggested that last week’s CERN data, fanfared to the world as the discovery of the elusive Higgs-Boson, might actually point to even more exotic creatures. Their Arxiv-posted paper suggests that CERN’s data could have identified either “a generic Higgs doublet” or a “ …

    Science 9 Jul 23:33

  • US law enforcement phone snooping on the rise

    John Law made 1.3 million rat-on requests in 2011

    An inquiry by Congressional Representative Edward Markey (D-Mass) has revealed that the number of requests wireless carriers receive from US law enforcement for information about their customers has increased steadily, but just how often the police use mobile phones to track individuals' whereabouts remains unclear. Markey, …

    Law 9 Jul 23:34