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27th July 2012 Archive

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  • Australian government wants IT apprentices

    Get thee to Canberra, young geeks

    Australia's Federal Government has opened its 2013 ICT Apprenticeship Program, and hopes bright young people who can spell HTML and pass a security clearance will jump at the chance to earn up a wage of around AUD$40k (actual pay varies by agency and seniority) slaving away amid crushing bureaucracy advancing the cause of the …

    Jobs 27 Jul 00:24

  • IT departments are BRATTY TEENAGERS

    Submit to tough love from ITSM father figure, says BMC process wonk

    IT Departments behave like bratty teenagers by insisting they know best and must always figure out their own way to get anything done, according to Doug Mueller, a Corporate Architect at BMC Software. Such behaviour, he believes, is not very helpful to businesses and syadmins should therefore remember think back to the time in …

    Business 27 Jul 00:51

  • Baidu opens R&D lab in Singapore

    Chinese answer to Google gets into speech recognition

    China’s search giant Baidu is following Google's polyglot path by opening its first tech lab in Singapore. The lab, branded the Baidu-I²R Research Centre (BIRC) is a joint venture with Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) and will create new technologies to deploy through the Southeast Asian region …

    Business 27 Jul 02:43

  • Lawyers try to seize Chinese IPAD trademark

    Proview's unpaid lawyers try to grab name to force payment

    Apple may be waiting some time yet before it gets the rights to use the IPAD name in China after reports from the region suggested that lawyers of its court room opponent Proview are requesting temporary seizure of the trademark until they are paid. A report on technology news portal Sina Tech (via Marbridge Daily) claimed …

    Business 27 Jul 03:12

  • Why one storage admin fears Justin Bieber

    HINT: He works for two girls schools

    What are storage admins afraid of? We imagine failed backups, wee-hours SMS alerts and vendor maintenance bills are high on the list, with rampant data growth a constant low-level worry. Warbling teen pop idols? Probably not so much. Unless the storage admin is Dean Downes, the Chief Information Officer for St Aidans Anglican …

    Storage 27 Jul 04:06

  • Nokia set to axe China R&D jobs

    Belt-tightening hits Beijing

    Nokia’s woes in the world’s biggest mobile market are set to continue after reports emerged that the ailing Finnish firm has been forced to purge some of its Chinese R&D team as part of the 10,000 lay-offs announced last month. The mobile phone giant has been having a tough time of it recently. It’s struggling to make an …

    Business 27 Jul 06:03

  • Apple disappoints at first Black Hat briefing

    Black Hat 2012 Rehashes old info and scarpers before question time

    Apple's first Black Hat presentation was one of the most highly anticipated talks at this year's infosec gathering in Las Vegas, but many delegates were left feeling more than a little short-changed. The conference space for the presentation began filling up early, before the day's keynote with Neal Stephenson had even …

    Security 27 Jul 06:07

  • China denies US chopper tech espionage claim

    Says US Courts handed out US$75m fine in error

    The Chinese government has hit back at claims that technology used in its first fleet of attack helicopters was illegally sold to it by a US defence contractor. In a well-publicised case in the States, United Technologies and its two subsidiaries Pratt & Whitney Canada (PWC) and Hamilton Sundstrand admitted earlier this month …

    Policy 27 Jul 06:25

  • HP Envy 4-1010ea 14in Ultrabook review

    Cost-effective compromise?

    HP made quite a fuss when it launched its Spectre Ultrabook back in May, and whilst we praised its gleaming, glass design we also noted that the Spectre was a bit on the porky side for what was meant to be an ‘ultraportable’ laptop. It was also burdened by a £1200 price-tag that might make even Apple blush. Surprisingly nifty …

    reghardware 27 Jul 07:00

  • Microsoft bundles BlueHat finalist tech into anti-exploit tool

    Give 'em enough ROPe

    Microsoft has beefed up one of its anti-exploit tools with technology from a $200K contest finalist. Technology from a BlueHat Prize finalist Ivan Fratric, designed to mitigate attacks that leverage Return Oriented Programming (ROP), has already been incorporated into Redmond's Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) 3.5 …

    Security 27 Jul 07:33

  • 'We asked firms if they were looking at Windows 8, most laughed'

    QuoTW Plus: 'Stop being evil and we'll give your products a chance'

    This was the week when Microsoft's latest operating system Windows 8 got what can only be described as a bashing from the folks over at Gartner. Reviewer and research director Gunnar Berger didn't seem to think that the OS was all that good. In fact, when it's not on a touch device, he reckons the software is: In a word: Bad …

    Bootnotes 27 Jul 08:02

  • BOFH: Shove your project managementry up your mailbox!

    Episode 7 An anecdotely informationing for anyone sick of IT's jargoneering

    "So it's agreed then. You'll codify the project and I'll reach out to the developers for the SDK that you need?" the latest IT project manager asks. "By 'codify' you mean I'll write the program and by 'reach out' you mean email?" I respond. "Yes." "Why not just say email?" "I... because I might phone them." "So why not …

    BOFH 27 Jul 08:19

  • UK's HECToR supercomputer in 27PB MEGA-storage boost

    Disks, tapes and GPFS

    HECToR, the Edinburgh-based supercomputer used by UK researchers to tackle science's more thorny mathematical problems, is having petabytes of disk and tape storage installed in a massive storage expansion. HECToR stands for the High End Computing Terra Scale Resource and has been built in several phases. It is a Cray-built …

    Storage 27 Jul 08:42

  • How do you measure up at the Olympics?

    Lane-watchers, touch pads, stop watches and time triggers

    In Rome in 1960, a very strange thing happened in the men’s 100m freestyle Olympic swimming final: the man who recorded the fastest time was given the silver medal. In the absence of touch pads to record a swimmer’s finishing time, the method of determining the winner was complex in the extreme. Firstly, there were finishing …

    Jobs 27 Jul 09:01

  • Hidden Grand Canyon-sized ICE-HOLE hastens Antarctic melt

    Vid Huge chasm explains rapidly thinning Western ice sheets

    A geoboffin and glacioboffin team have discovered a Grand-Canyon-sized chasm hidden under the ice in West Antarctica that they believe is helping the ice to melt. The University of Aberdeen and British Antarctic Survey (BAS) scientists returned to the Ferrigno Ice Stream, a region of the frozen continent only visited once …

    Science 27 Jul 09:24

  • Natwest freezes debit cards, online banking in fresh cock-up

    Hardware death blamed

    Another IT cock-up at Natwest halted customers' debit card transactions last night and took down online services. The RBS-owned bank reckons its latest screw-up was fixed at 9.40am, some 16 hours after it first admitted things had gone to pot at 4.30pm. Customers complained that debit payments couldn't be made, sparking major …

    Business 27 Jul 09:53

  • Gobble gabblers: 'Seagate will put up $1 BEEELION for OCZ'

    If you believe biz rumours, OCZ buy is ON

    Reports that HHD Seagate is going to buy OCZ have been around for weeks, but now there's a price tag of a billion bucks being floated around. This comes after last week's rumours sent OCZ stock into overdrive, adding about $68m to the company's share value, according to Reuters. Seagate itself is worth $11bn. Seagate is one of …

    Storage 27 Jul 10:05

  • Chip and PIN keypads 'easily fooled' with counterfeit cards

    Black Hat 2012 Blighty researchers head to Vegas to show 'em how

    Retail Chip and PIN devices might easily be attacked using a specially prepared chip-based credit card, according to security researchers. Researchers from British IT security company MWR InfoSecurity demonstrated the attack at a session during the Black Hat Security Conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday. MWR purchased the …

    Security 27 Jul 10:21

  • Twitter airport bomb joke conviction binned in common-sense WIN

    Obviously, you must be having a laff, says High Court

    A bloke found guilty of tweeting a "menacing" joke about blowing up a UK airport has had his conviction quashed by the High Court today. A collective sigh of relief was heard moments later from comedians addicted to the micro-blogging website. Paul Chambers, 28, was waiting to fly from Doncaster's Robin Hood airport to Belfast …

    Law 27 Jul 10:56

  • IT support bod? Whatever you earn, it's not enough

    Something for the weekend, Sir? Betwixt chair and keyboard sits the problem of which you speak

    It might amuse you to read that one of the senior IT support managers at one of my client workplaces confessed this week that his experience of IT support 'from the other side' was disappointing. By 'from the other side', of course, I mean as a user: my colleague is not a spectral secret shopper from beyond the grave. "You …

    reghardware 27 Jul 11:00

  • Wall Street gives LSI 16% fist-bump for quadrupling flash revenues

    Solid second quarter after flashy boost

    Integrated circuits and storage systems biz LSI scored $622m in revenues in its second 2012 quarter, 26 per cent higher than a year ago and 6 per cent higher than the first quarter after "better-than-expected growth". Profits were $59m, 11 per cent up on the year-ago profit number but $16m less than the first quarter. But the …

    Storage 27 Jul 11:23

  • World's biggest distie Ingram admits it can't keep up growth in UK

    We're hot, but not that hot

    Ingram Micro reckons the double-digit sales growth it filed for the UK and Germany in Q2 – helping soften the top line declines across Europe – is not sustainable. The world's largest IT distributor reported group numbers last night, with sales flat globally at $8.78bn and profit up 2.5 per cent to $61.2m. "It continues to be …

    Channel Register 27 Jul 11:34

  • Watch Smarter: video guide to... SSD installation

    Smarter Storage Speedy storage transplant made easy

    An SSD is arguably the best hardware upgrade you can instal on any laptop or desktop PC. These hard drive replacements come in a range of capacities and prices delivering instantly noticeable improvements in performance along with enhanced reliability. Our exclusive video has all the info you need to go about the installation …

    reghardware 27 Jul 11:47

  • Twitter titsup: Our failover was actually just FAIL ALL OVER

    Double trouble after data centre double-whammy

    Twitter fell offline last night for several hours because - the company has now confirmed - redundancy in the micro-blogging site's data centres failed to kick in. The result was a catastrophic system collapse, Twitter's engineering veep Mazen Rawashdeh explained: The cause of today’s outage came from within our data centers …

    Servers 27 Jul 11:48

  • Samsung plonks universal search BACK into Galaxy S IIIs

    Us, scared of Apple? Pah!

    Samsung today conceded it was wrong to remove the universal search function from Galaxy S III phones in its latest software update - and has promised punters in the UK another firmware patch will restore the functionality. “The most recent software upgrade for the Galaxy S III in the UK included the inadvertent removal of the …

    reghardware 27 Jul 12:05

  • Surface slab WILL rub our PC-making pals the wrong way – Microsoft

    Redmond admits 'jeopardising' friendships with Windows 8

    Microsoft’s tablet-like-laptop Surface will compete with machines from PC partners, thus jeopardising manufacturers’ commitment to Windows 8. That’s the bottom line revealed in Microsoft’s latest SEC filing for Wall St’s moneymen. Under the Risk Factors section in Microsoft’s 10-K, here, the company states: “Our Surface …

    Windows 8 27 Jul 12:22

  • Twitter impostors stop at NOTHING to drag athletes through mud

    Analysis @UsainBoltt: fanks 4 teh pr0n link lmao!!1

    Malware-slingers and mischief-makers are ramping up the creation of fake celebrity profiles on social networks in time for the start of the Olympics on Friday. El Reg spoke to "reputation managers" of the stars about the problem. Some of the fake profiles are harmless while others link to pictures of strippers and escorts and …

    Security 27 Jul 12:43

  • Money can't buy open-source love... only code can

    Open ... and Shut Linus Torvalds started with nothing

    Money can't buy you happiness, but Meteor, a web-apps startup focused on enterprise app development, seems to think it can buy it an open-source community. Instead of the standard startup funding announcement, proclaiming that the company will use its funding for product development, marketing and so on, Meteor says it "will …

    Developer 27 Jul 13:02

  • Samsung snubs slump, slurps stunning smartmobe sales

    Slow down? What economic slow down?

    Strong smartphone sales banked Samsung a $4.56bn profit in the three months to 30 June, according to its latest bean counting exercise. The South Korean giant posted a 48 per cent year-on-year rise in net income in preliminary results announced last night [PDF]. Despite the economic chill that has seen even Apple's growth hit …

    Channel Register 27 Jul 13:18

  • Samsung: 'Apple's proto-iPhone Jony is a Sony phone phoney'

    Mobe design rip-off allegation emerges in court battle

    Samsung is pulling out all the stops in its patent battle with Apple. The latest allegation, which emerged in a court filing submitted yesterday, is that Apple based its iPhone 4 design on some early sketches that appear to borrow from a Sony design. The South Korean firm presented prototype Apple CAD drawings [PDF] which even …

    reghardware 27 Jul 13:50

  • Gov unveils plans for 2013 launch of ANOTHER software framework

    Plans at an early stage but it WILL happen

    Government Procurement Services has opened up on the development of yet another mega public-sector software framework. As revealed last week, suppliers on Lot 3 of the existing Commodity IT Hardware & Software (CITHS) agreement met with GPS to thrash out details for a standalone software procurement mechanism. The length and …

    Channel Register 27 Jul 14:07

  • Zuckerberg: Facebook phone "makes no sense"

    Hardware rumours rumpled

    Whispers of a dedicated Facebook phone have been crushed by head honcho Mark Zuckerberg, who says it "wouldn't make much sense". The Facebook handset rumours have been circulating for years, with HTC the latest hardware producer touted for the phone's manufacturing process. Such word of mouth should always be taken with a …

    reghardware 27 Jul 14:25

  • Google: Oops, we've STILL got Street View's slurped Wi-Fi data

    'Fesses up to UK info watchdog, other authorities

    Google has apologised after discovering it still has some payload data slurped from unsecured Wi-Fi networks via its controversial Street View spycars. It had earlier vowed to delete this sensitive information after worldwide outcry against the wireless packet hoarding. However, the ad giant's global privacy counsel Peter …

    Broadband 27 Jul 14:27

  • Tony Blair bod's Gmail hack teen gets 6 months

    'TriCK' also sentenced for anti-terror hotline prank

    Teen hacker Junaid Hussain was sentenced to six months in a youth detention lock-up today for breaking into an email account linked to Tony Blair among other attacks. His defence barrister had attempted to pass his actions off as no worse than anything Prime Minister David Cameron or London Mayor Boris Johnson might have done …

    Security 27 Jul 14:43

  • QLogic: We can't flog adapters when no one's buying servers

    Pins hopes on ASICs, mystery server-based products after dire results

    QLogic, in the stagnant and low-growth adapter businesses, has announced weak quarterly results, and is pinning its hopes on ASICs and soon-to-be-revealed new server-based products unlike anything it has produced before. Q primarily sells adapters that connect servers to networks such as the Fibre Channel HBAs (Host Bus …

    Servers 27 Jul 15:02

  • Capita IT Services second-in-command Hewitt leaves today

    Man in charge of Unity transformation programme exits

    Capita IT Services has told its workforce that operations director Russ Hewitt – the man in charge of the Unity cost cutting and change programme – is leaving today. Unity was designed to help the integrator-cum-reseller navigate the perilous economic situation in the UK during 2012 including freezing bonuses and pay, …

    Channel Register 27 Jul 15:31

  • Fujitsu: We'll go on the 'offensive' in fight for IT dollars

    Conglomerate ready to grow as Japan starts recovery

    Japanese tech conglomerate Fujitsu had exactly as bad a first quarter of fiscal 2012 as it expected when it warned investors back in April. The company says it will be more aggressive in its pursuit of growth now that its home country is on the mend after of last year's earthquake and tsunami – and despite the uncertainties in …

    Financial News 27 Jul 16:02

  • Ouya Android console gets OnLive onboard

    Cloud cover forecast

    The much hyped Ouya Android console has attracted the attention of cloud-gaming outfit OnLive, which confirmed it will be available on the Rubik's Cube-sized box from launch. The Ouya is still seeking funds through its Kickstarter page and has 12 days to run. It has however surpassed the required figure with ease and had …

    reghardware 27 Jul 16:27

  • Oracle cans IBM attack ad after ticking off from watchdog

    Big Blue shed big blue tears

    Oracle has pulled an attack advert that claimed its Exadata system is twenty times faster than IBM Power systems - because it isn't, and an advertising watchdog wasn't impressed. The ad compared an IBM Power system database performance at a European retailer with the same databases running on Exadata. The retailer found they …

    Servers 27 Jul 17:01

  • Paying by iPad, sir? Apple buys US security firm for $350m

    Could be a move to attract enterprise-grade fondlers

    Apple has forked out about $350m in cash for a security company that makes embedded security solutions for mobile devices, according to an SEC filing. The buyout of AuthenTec drops a few hints about where Apple might take its fondleslab and mini fondleslab ranges in the future. AuthenTec is a public company so the buyout was …

    Security 27 Jul 17:33

  • Google taking orders for Kansas City gigabit fiber network

    But they have to really, really want it

    Google is ready to flip the switch on its new gigabit residential fiber network in Kansas City – that is, provided the locals can rally enough of their neighbors to pre-register to justify wiring up the houses. The Chocolate Factory has been hanging fiber optic cables on Kansas City utility poles since March, in a project that …

    Networks 27 Jul 19:11

  • World celebrates System Administrator Appreciation Day

    Time to buy your BOFH a drink

    In a tradition started twelve years ago, the IT community is celebrating another global System Administrator Appreciation Day (SAAD), a time to recognize the talents for your favorite BOFH. "Let's be honest, sometimes we don't know our System Administrators as well as they know us. Remember, this is one day to recognize your …

    Bootnotes 27 Jul 19:31

  • Google adds handwriting to mobile search site

    For budding fingersmiths

    Fondleslab not getting enough love? Google has unveiled a new way to tickle your favorite shiny object, in the form of handwriting recognition for its search homepage. With the new Handwrite feature enabled, punters who visit Google.com with their mobiles can draw with their fingers anywhere on their device screens and have …

    Applications 27 Jul 20:48

  • Skype denies system upgrade enables in-call spying

    No snooping going on, company insists

    Skype has issued a formal denial to reports that it has been allowing law enforcement to listen in on users' calls following a change in its system architecture. "Some media stories recently have suggested Skype may be acting improperly or based on ulterior motives against our users' interests. Nothing could be more contrary …

    Security 27 Jul 22:41