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17th August 2012 Archive

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  • Verizon wins approval for $3.6bn cable spectrum swap

    Modified terms allay regulators' objections

    Verizon looks to have the green light to acquire around 20MHz of wireless spectrum from a consortium of four of the US's largest cable companies, with two government agencies having voiced approval of the deal, albeit in modified form. The deal, which would see Verizon spending $3.6bn to acquire spectrum licenses from Bright …

    Broadband 17 Aug 00:10

  • Scientists find safer way to store hydrogen

    Non-morons defuse potential H-bomb

    Australian scientists have come up with a clever way of storing hydrogen that they feel could make it a viable portable fuel source. Hydrogen is abundant: pass a current through water and you'll make some. Hydrogen-powered fuel cells have therefore been advanced as a potential replacement for the internal combustion engine and …

    Science 17 Aug 00:53

  • Raspberry Pi now comes in Firefox OS flavour

    Nokia engineer adapts Pi recipe with HTML-5-infused handset goodness

    The little computer that can, the Raspberry Pi, has successfully run the imminent Firefox OS, thanks to the efforts of a Nokia employee named Oleg Romashin. Firefox OS, also and/or formerly known as Boot to Gecko (B2G), is the Mozilla foundation’s attempt at providing an HTML-5 powered OS that will free punters from the …

    Data Center 17 Aug 02:52

  • Fujifilm X-Pro1 16Mp compact system camera review

    Visual virtuoso

    For Fujifilm, the fixed-lens retro-styled FinePix X100 camera turned out to be a huge and rather unexpected success. It was only a matter of time to see the company to bank on its popularity and release an interchangeable lens system loosely based on this model. Yet this CSC is no rehash, as it features a new 16Mp sensor design …

    reghardware 17 Aug 07:00

  • What to do with 110,000 Magstar tapes and 11PB of data

    Too big for VTL and fading fast amid Indian heat and dust

    What do you do with 110,000 IBM 3590 cartridges? That’s the problem an Indian resources company faced last year. The cartridges, which IBM introduced way back in 1995 under the Magstar name offered a 60 gigabyte capacity that then seemed capacious, and collectively contained around 11 petabytes of geospatial data. But with …

    Storage 17 Aug 07:05

  • Gov splashed £98k through CloudStore in July

    A third of it on a little-known SME called Microsoft

    Public sector organisations spent just over £98,000 through the government CloudStore framework in July, mainly on software. The biggest spenders were the following: The Student Loans Company, which spend nearly £32,000 on consultancy with Quo Imus. The Cabinet Office spent £24,500 with software developer Apto Solutions. …

    Channel Register 17 Aug 07:34

  • Human rights group: Nintendo tops conflict minerals baddies list

    HTC, Sharp, Nikon also not doing enough to dodge use of war-sourced kit

    A human rights group has said that Nintendo, HTC and Sharp are among companies that don't do enough to ensure conflict minerals do not end up in their products. The Enough Project, a part of the Centre for American Progress, put Nintendo at the bottom of its conflict minerals ranking in a report on sourcing minerals that are …

    Business 17 Aug 08:02

  • Ready to patent that 'new' invention? Google is here to dash your hopes

    Prior Art Finder trawls through data in search for replication

    The technology giant has created a new 'Prior Art Finder' which enables users to search "multiple sources" in order to review whether ideas they hope to patent are in fact novel. The tool, which "instantly pulls together information relevant" to patent applications, will enable inventors to review documents submitted with both …

    Law 17 Aug 08:17

  • Flash slash Skyhawk smells blood, hunts disk array prey

    Skyera touts Ferrari speed for banger prices

    As makers of flash-disk hybrid arrays try to undercut all-flash array vendors, Skyera's Skyhawk scents blood and swoops down on them all with its $2.99-per-GB NAND-tipped talons. OK, all right, is it just another all-flash array startup? Sure, but this one was founded by ex-SandForce guys. Their company was bought by LSI and …

    Storage 17 Aug 08:38

  • Ofcom shoves video-on-demand regulation onto ATVOD's plate

    Watchdog tosses bone to offspring, stops overseeing every ruling

    Ofcom has decided ATVOD can keep monitoring video-on-demand services, and with less oversight from the parent regulator, following five months of consultation. ATVOD is a commercial operation which has been looking after video services for the last two years, following up complaints and ensuring suitable levels of decency, but …

    Media 17 Aug 09:02

  • Olympics TV HQ future: Catwalk beauties elbowed out by IT bods

    Web 2.0 hipsters to sashay through new 55MW data centre

    The building that piped footage of Usain Bolt's double gold to the world will be turned into a data centre with a 55MW power capacity. Data centre operator Infinity and real estate biz Delancey together won the bid to transform the Olympic Park's broadcast headquarters into a meaty server warehouse. The pair of companies …

    Media 17 Aug 09:18

  • 'G-Cloud is nothing more than a suppliers' website'

    Quotw Plus: 'It's time for peace, Apple and Samsung'

    This was the week when the US patent trial between Apple and Samsung was still happening and the pair of them were as snide as ever. Documents released in court revealed various tidbits about the companies and their ongoing tiff, including that the fruity firm offered Samsung a licensing deal at one point, though not a very …

    Small Biz 17 Aug 09:43

  • TalkTalk pitches cut-price mobes to own customers

    Are you local?

    ISP TalkTalk has hopped on the mobile bandwagon pitching a pay monthly package for just a fiver. The catch: you have to be an existing customer - it's metaphorically flipping the finger at everyone else: "You must be an existing TalkTalk customer to be eligible for mobile services" - and you have to be happy to take Samsung's …

    reghardware 17 Aug 09:47

  • Brocade CEO Michael Klayko quits - just as his biz perks up

    Quarterly results overshadowed by leader about to leg it

    Brocade has turned in an adequately solid quarter, with better-than-expected sales and profit after a string of weak and flat quarters, so why would CEO Michael Klayko choose to resign now? The company makes and sells storage area networking switches and director boxes running Fibre Channel, and has a line of Ethernet switches …

    Business 17 Aug 10:02

  • Samsung: 'You want $2.5bn? WRONG, Apple, you OWE us $420m!'

    iFruit biz 'overstated' damages bill in patent trial

    An accountant on the stand for Samsung in its epic patent trial has said Apple overstated Sammy's mobile gadget margins, effectively inflating a potential payout for the iPhone maker. Michael Wagner claimed that, if the jury finds against Samsung, its US profits from April 2011 should be taken into account for damages and that …

    Mobile 17 Aug 10:21

  • Twitter API outrage: Break our rules and we'll break app kneecaps

    New limits on tweet software likened to North Korean regime

    Twitter is tightening the rules for building applications that use its messaging platform, sparking outrage from twits and developers. Director of consumer product Michael Sippey blogged about changes to version 1.1 of the Twitter software interface that gives the social networking site greater control over how and where …

    Developer 17 Aug 10:42

  • Nokia S40 budget blowers bunged Zynga doodle, poker games

    Draw Something on something more basic

    Two of Zynga's top titles, Draw Something and Zynga Poker, are coming to Nokia's Asha range of budget blowers, showing that there's life in the old platform yet. Draw Something, a mobile Pictionary game with added bits, was flavour of the month when Zynga acquired the game, and its developer, for $180m in March this year ( …

    Mobile 17 Aug 11:03

  • Apple to bring YouView approach to Apple TV

    Set to unify broadcast, catch-up and streaming services?

    The Wall Street Journal continues to fly a kite - to use an old journalistic expression - for the Apple TV, following up a story on the set-top box's possible integration of cable and digital TV decoders with a second piece, this time suggesting Apple will turn the product into a kind of YouView for the US. Citing "people …

    reghardware 17 Aug 11:19

  • Apple axes loyal store staff in Essex, Milton Keynes

    Blueshirts get the blues, Olympic Park shop disappoints

    Apple is cutting down on UK retail staff at its stores in Milton Keynes and Essex: blueshirted fanbois on short-term contracts will get the heave-ho, sources in the Mac channel claim. Industry talk of layoffs in Apple's shops surfaced in MacRumours earlier this week. Apple has refused to officially comment though a …

    Channel Register 17 Aug 11:28

  • Anti-gay Uganda's premier backs pride march in protest hack

    Websites defaced by Anonymous chums

    Gay-rights activists have vandalised the Ugandan prime minister's website in a protest against the African country's discriminatory laws. The site was rewritten to announce that Premier Amama Mbabazi would back a gay pride march and apologise for the mistreatment of homosexuals in the nation. Screengrabs of the digital …

    Government 17 Aug 11:43

  • The problem with wireless: all those effin' wires

    Something for the Weekend, Sir? Recharge of the light brigade

    Those of you who choose to pursue the itinerant professional life will be familiar with the need to carry one's tools of the trade everywhere, usually in a heavy bag slung over one shoulder. Like me, you may have found that the number of devices you have to carry around has increased, for a variety of reasons that I have moaned …

    reghardware 17 Aug 11:55

  • Beck's open-source challenge to freetards: play it yourself!

    Album as sheet music is a brilliant gambit

    Fans of the artist Beck must wait until December for his new album - and if they want to hear it, they can play it themselves. As you may have heard, Beck has said he'll issue his next album Song Reader as sheet music, rather than as a performed and produced sound recording. "The songs here are as unfailingly exciting as you’d …

    Media 17 Aug 12:01

  • Surfing ROBO-shark hunter stalks great whites along US coast

    iOS app will warn fanbois of attacks, fandroids not so lucky

    A wave-gliding robot has been deployed off the coast of San Francisco to stealthily keep an eye on great white sharks in the Pacific Ocean. The surfbot is part of an arsenal of ocean-tracking tech that's receiving data from acoustic tags on the predators and transmitting it back to shore. Fixed buoys also pick up the sharks' …

    Science 17 Aug 12:19

  • Acer: Windows 8 'uncertainty' deflates Wang's big growth aim

    After Surface slag-off fest, CEO risks Redmond wrath again

    Acer Inc reckons the "uncertainty" surrounding the Windows 8 ecosystem will translate into lower-than-expected sales for the second half of 2012. The admonition was made as the Taiwanese PC company reported Q2 numbers for the period ended 30 June that showed sales fell 8.3 per cent year-on-year and 2.2 per cent sequentially to …

    Channel Register 17 Aug 12:40

  • Nominet 'sought govt protection from takeover by domain hawkers'

    'Plan G' revealed at ex-policy chief's tribunal

    Nominet, the .uk address registry, sought government help to protect its board of directors from a takeover by domain name speculators, according to its former policy chief. The claims, which Nominet denies, are documented in the findings of an employment tribunal, which found the company guilty of constructive dismissal and …

    Hosting 17 Aug 13:13

  • No way Moto: Chinese workers protest Google job cuts

    Employees claim Motorola violated their contracts

    Motorola employees in Beijing and Nanjing were out this morning protesting the job cuts announced by Google earlier this week. More than 150 people demonstrated outside the Motorola company office in the Chinese capital, after Googorola said that it would be slashing 20 per cent of its workforce, Chinese news website Sina …

    Mobile 17 Aug 14:01

  • McIntyre: Climate policy crippled by pointless feel-good gestures

    CO2 is rising, so let's get busy with cheaper-than-coal low-carbon energy

    Leading climate blogger Steve McIntyre says policy makers are failing to prepare the public for climate change and have become obsessed with "petty acts of virtuous behaviour" instead. He also told The Register that computer scientists should form "tiger teams" to produce engineering-grade analysis of climate models, to counter …

    Science 17 Aug 14:23

  • Watch out, PC disk drive floggers: Cloud will rust up those spinners

    Blocks and Files Reliable cloudy service could put them out of business

    The cloud is going to impact disk drive manufacturers' bottom line, big time. Think about it: if Dropbox, iCloud and SkyDrive succeed, people won't need disk drives on their PCs. Are you listening Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital? The biggest ever threat to their consumer computer disk drive business is cloud-based file 'n …

    Storage 17 Aug 14:43

  • GPS trigger will light LOHAN's fire

    Custom mission control board to fire Vulture 2 rocket motor

    There's been a veritable jetstream of activity at the SPB's mountaintop headquarters this week as our quest to find a method to fire our Vulture 2 spaceplane's solid rocket motor at altitude nears its end. Followers of our audacious Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) mission will recall that reader Neil Barnes gamely …

    SPB 17 Aug 15:02

  • WikiLeaks haters launch DDoS assault on Russia Today

    In support of the Pussy Riot 3

    An anti-WikiLeaks group has admitted responsibility for a sustained DDoS attack that made the Russia Today website intermittently unavailable on Friday. The Kremlin-funded channel features a talk show hosted by Julian Assange but posts by AntiLeaks, the group which launched the attack, suggest the assault has more to do with …

    Security 17 Aug 15:20

  • IEEE admits its MS-DOS history revisionist is in Microsoft's pay

    CP/M, QDOS diff man is Redmond 'expert witness'

    The IEEE's Spectrum magazine has admitted that a recent contributor, who wrote an eyebrow-raising revisionist history of MS-DOS, is paid by Microsoft. Eagle-eyed readers have spotted that the notorious article about the development of Microsoft's early operating system, which we discussed here, is now prefaced with the …

    Operating Systems 17 Aug 15:46

  • Breaking news, literally: Reuters hacked third time this MONTH

    Buggy blog blamed

    Reuters websites were hacked for third time in a fortnight when hackers posted a bogus article falsely claiming that Saudi Arabia's foreign minister Saud al-Faisal was dead. The planting of the false report follows two similar attacks earlier this month. First, a bogus piece stating that the Syrian rebels were retreating …

    Security 17 Aug 16:02

  • Apple deal points to NFC iPhone - eventually

    But new pay-by-bonk kit probably won't need fingering first

    SEC filings from Apple-acquisition AuthenTec state that fingerprint and secure-element technology is coming to Apple devices, and soon, but it still might be too early to call the NFC iPhone, and probably wrong to imagine the pay-by-bonk tech will use digit-scanning for authentication. The Next Web doesn’t think so, presenting …

    Mobile 17 Aug 16:29

  • Becoming Red Hat: Cloudera and Hortonworks' Big-Data death match

    Open ... and Shut 'In a world of tissue when you're Kleenex, you've won'

    In the Big Data market, Hadoop is clearly the team to beat. What is less clear is which of the Hadoop vendors will claim the spoils of that victory. Because open source tends to be winner-take-all, we are almost certainly going to see a "Red Hat" of Hadoop, with the second place vendor left to clean up the crumbs. As ever …

    Developer 17 Aug 17:00

  • eBay invites mystic wrath over ban on spells, potions and lotions

    Bet the psychics didn't see that coming

    The ire of the world's witches, warlocks, and other practicers of the psychic arts will be focused on eBay shortly, after the company banned a range of intangible mystic items from its site. According to the Fall Seller Update, from September "advice; spells; curses; hexing; conjuring; magic; prayers; blessing services; magic …

    Business 17 Aug 18:43

  • Hipstamatic axes most of staff to focus on art, creativity

    Wasn't really into having employees anyway

    Hipstamatic, the company behind the $1.99 iPhone app that allows jaded scenesters to stylize their digital photos so that they look like snaps recovered from shoeboxes found in their grandmothers' attics, has laid off most of its employees. The Next Web was first to report that the firm has let go all but five of its core …

    Business 17 Aug 20:21

  • Exhibitionist Shamoon virus blows PCs' minds

    Malware targets some energy sector

    While most malware these days tries to work under the radar to avoid detection, a new species has been reported that wipes the drives of the systems it infects. The Shamoon software carries out a two stage attack, according to an analysis by Israeli security firm Seculert. Once a system on a network is infected, the code …

    Security 17 Aug 20:51

  • Oracle: Google impurifying media's precious bodily fluids

    Political groups, trade associations all in on it

    Oracle says it would never give money to any outside blogger or journalist who writes about its ongoing litigation against Google – except Florian Mueller, that is. On the other hand, the database giant says Google employs an insidious "network of influencers" that it uses to "shape public perceptions" about the suit. Oracle …

    Law 17 Aug 22:42