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21st August 2012 Archive

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  • The Reg Live at CA Expo Australia

    Webcast How can CIOs remain agile when they're asked to do more every day? This webcast from CA Expo 2012 explains how

    CA Expo 2012 hits Sydney today, and at 10:309 AM you'll see Reg APC Editor Simon Sharwood in conversation with Endeavour Energy's CIO Ian Robinson, Justin Roche, Visa Australia's Director of eCommerce and CA's Trevor Bunker. Sorry - you need a browser which supports iFrames to view this content

    About 21 Aug 00:18

  • The cooler side of the Big Bang

    Can ‘Quantum graphity’ (not gravity) be tested?

    Quantum graphity – not gravity – is a fairly recent and, as far as I can tell, quite obscure angle on cosmology, but some University of Melbourne and RMIT researchers are proposing a test for the theory, and at the same time, proposing a different model for the formation of the universe. According to the group of theoretical …

    Science 21 Aug 00:30

  • Work for the military? Don't be evil, says ethicist

    Engineers should 'Just Say No' to working on drones, philosopher says

    Engineers should refuse to work on killer robots, says Australian ethicist Dr Robert Sparrow. Sparrow's definition of a killer robot includes the Predator drone, a weapon he finds objectionable because “Military robots are making it easier for governments to start wars, thinking that they won't incur any casualties on their …

    Jobs 21 Aug 01:00

  • Facebook sued by Chinese firm over Timeline

    Cubic Network got there three years sooner

    Chinese web firm Cubic Network is set to sue Facebook for nicking the idea and name behind its Timeline feature, after being prompted to do so by some friendly US lawyers. The Pinterest-like web start-up was founded four years ago by Harvard graduate Xiong Wanli, according to China Youth Daily (via MIC Gadget). <pXiong …

    Business 21 Aug 04:06

  • India shutters sites and social media accounts

    Pakistan suspected of spreading rumours inciting sectarian violence

    India's government is blocking up to 250 web sites and social media accounts as part of on-going efforts to arrest the spread of damaging rumours which it believes are designed to incite sectarian violence. Following violent clashes in Assam over the past month between ethnic Bodos and immigrant Muslims, rumours began to …

    Policy 21 Aug 04:37

  • Sharp to shunt two telly factories

    3,000 more jobs could be axed

    Ailing Japanese electronics giant Sharp is set to offload two of its manufacturing plants, shedding thousands more jobs than was originally feared, according to the latest reports from Tokyo. Sharp plans to eventually sell two of its TV production plants in Mexico and China to Foxconn parent company Hon Hai, according to Japan …

    Business 21 Aug 05:03

  • News Ltd's Australian chief demands copyright overhaul

    Wants anti-piracy role for National Broadband Network

    The head of News Ltd's Australian outpost has urged for an overhaul of copyright laws to take on the “copyright kleptomaniacs” and “digital suckers” that are robbing the Australian economy of AUD$1.37 billion annually in pirated film and TV content. Addressing the film industry at the Movie Convention, News Ltd CEO Kim …

    Networks 21 Aug 06:12

  • Darksiders II

    Review Cower, brief mortals

    Typically, the only death I have any time for in my life is Terry Prachett's characterisation of Death and his constant fascination with humanity's foibles. Unsurprisingly, the Death of Darksiders II is a different incarnation altogether, a less bleak and more blood thirsty kinda guy. Purple blaze Life's not easy for the …

    Games 21 Aug 07:00

  • 'SEX and the FEMALE BRAIN are CONNECTED' - shock discovery

    Sperm chemical, NOT cars or money, rules ladies' hormones

    In a discovery sure to stir intense discussion, scientists in Canada say they have discovered a powerful chemical signal embedded in semen which acts directly upon the brains of female mammals - apparently including humans. In a just-released announcement arrestingly headlined "Team unlocks link between sex and the female …

    Science 21 Aug 07:28

  • Netflix puts end to fumbling, penetrates Scandinavia

    Actually working in its own interest for a change

    For the first time in a while Netflix has said something that has not crashed its share price, and has lifted it instead: it plans to launch its online movie service in the fourth quarter in the four countries of Scandinavia – Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland. It confirmed that the cost of doing so will mean that it makes a …

    Media 21 Aug 07:59

  • NetApp: Flash as a STORAGE tier? You must be joking

    Reselling Fusion-io hardware

    Completing its array-to-the-server flash vision, NetApp is rolling out server flash caching software, reselling Fusion-io server flash cards, and validating seven third-party server flash products with its ONTAP arrays. The company emphatically disagrees with flash as a storage tier, saying it is both simpler and more …

    Storage 21 Aug 08:17

  • North Tyneside: Mega-outsourcing deal will SAVE jobs

    No really

    North Tyneside council is to outsource all its ICT services, along with finance, procurement, revenues and benefits, customer services and human resources to mega-services provider Balfour Beatty. The company has been named preferred bidder for a contract which is intended to help the north east council to cut its costs. North …

    Government 21 Aug 08:38

  • Everything Everywhere bags 4G monopoly in UK - for now

    Competition? What competition?

    Everything Everywhere, the UK's largest mobile operator, will get a monopoly on 4G services in the UK, starting on 11 September and lasting at least until next year's spectrum mega-auction. EE, which owns the Orange and T-Mobile networks, has been lobbying hard for the decision, over which Ofcom has been faffing for nine …

    Broadband 21 Aug 09:00

  • PayPal drops into McDonalds, begs meat-guzzlers to give it a bonk

    Would you like NFC with that?

    Thirty McDonalds outlets* in France will be accepting PayPal, using the eBay-owned processor's mobile client, as companies race to become the default mobile payment platform whether customers want it or not. The deployment is only a trial, and Reuters notes that (in common with McDonalds branches around Europe) the sites are …

    Broadband 21 Aug 09:17

  • ICO has yet to begin probing cookie violators

    UPDATED FOI request reveals privacy watchdog still not ready to deal with complaints

    According to a freedom of information (FOI) request submitted by PC Pro magazine, 320 websites have been reported to the privacy watchdog through its online submission tool since a year's 'grace period' ended on 26 May. However, none of those sites have been investigated. "At present the information has not yet been analysed …

    Law 21 Aug 09:39

  • Channel survey: Biz in 2012 LOADS better than last year

    Freeform Dynamics research on how the channel is making its money

    Back in late spring, we ran a survey of channel players looking at how business has been developing and the outlook for the future. Well the results are in and make for some interesting reading. First up, the obligatory health warning on the limitations of the exercise we carried out - our survey sample of 116 respondents was …

    The Channel 21 Aug 10:01

  • How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love IPv6

    Stob You make my heart go Ping

    IPv4 addresses are a rapidly dwindling commodity [...] ICANN distributed the last big chunks of available IPv4 addresses to the five continental Regional Internet Registries earlier this year. The RIRs in turn are running out of supplies to allocate to ISPs and other network operators - El Reg Somewhere in the near future... …

    Verity Stob 21 Aug 10:01

  • Apple, Samsung brass hats' patent spat chitchat falls flat

    Cook and Kwon agree to disagree, place fate in jury's hands

    Apple and Samsung's chief execs have discussed their US patent trial but they weren't able to sort out their differences, a lawyer for the South Korean chaebol said yesterday. District Judge Lucy Koh asked the pair of warring firms to consider negotiations one more time before the jury gets down to decision-making this week. …

    Business 21 Aug 10:19

  • Morning stampede of workers lulled by 'new' virty shiny box

    GreenBytes waves wand, turns flash array into cloudy kit

    GreenBytes has turned its Solidarity flash array into what it's called an IO Offload Engine: a bit of gear purpose-built for weathering storms on storage networks caused by thousands of virtual desktops booting up and such like. Sitting in front of a storage array, taking care of the heavy IO lifting, it is sold to service …

    Storage 21 Aug 10:41

  • UK watchdog snaps on glove to probe Tesco's 'security fails'

    Every little helps, starting with hash("sha256", ...)

    The UK's privacy watchdog has opened a tentative probe into the alleged security shortcomings of Tesco's website. The global supermarket behemoth, which sends out password reminders to Tesco.com customers in plaintext, was accused by security researcher Troy Hunt of storing punters' credentials in an unsafe manner, as reported …

    Security 21 Aug 11:03

  • Ageing star sucked retinue member to death, evidence indicates

    Engorged with telltale chemical after swallowing

    Astroboffins have spotted the first evidence of a happily digesting red giant star that recently devoured one of its planets, one of the many apocalyptic fates that could happen here on Earth. Researchers peering through the Hobby-Eberly Telescope realised what the greedy star, known as BD+48 740, had done when they saw a …

    Science 21 Aug 11:12

  • Dell speeds EqualLogic arrays: Stuff spindles, let's add some flash

    Flash-enhanced storage up against Tintri, Nimble Data

    Spindles are clearly not speedy enough, as Dell is adding flash to two mid-range EqualLogic arrays to speed up VDI, data warehousing and OLTP data access. The EquaLogic arrays provide iSCSI data access for medium and large enterprises and come in four varieties: PS4100 entry-level PS6100 mid-range PS6500 virtualised and …

    Storage 21 Aug 11:29

  • Pure makes rugged radio Move

    Long player for the great outdoors

    Pure toughened up its radio range for travel-minded music fans this week, unveiling the Move 400D, a compact rugged digital and FM radio with an emphasis on enduring battery life. The Move 400D - which supports all current European and Australian digital radio standards - packs standard travel companion features, including …

    Hardware 21 Aug 11:41

  • PayPal co-founder sells out of foundering Facebook at VAST profit

    Thiel leaps overboard, squeaking and lashing tail

    One of Facebook's earliest investors has sold around $400m worth of shares in the company – which has seen its value halved since going public in May this year. PayPal co-founder and Facebook director Peter Thiel and his venture capital firm, Founders Fund, cashed out most of his stock (about 20 million shares) in the dominant …

    Financial News 21 Aug 11:42

  • Amazon tries to freeze out tape with cheap 'n' cloudy Glacier

    Cloud giant rolls over earthly archives

    Amazon is digging deeper into the enterprise with a data back-up and archival service designed to help kill off tape. The cloud provider has just launched Glacier, which it says takes the headache out of digital archiving and delivers “extremely low” cost storage. Glacier has been built on the Amazon storage, management and …

    Storage 21 Aug 12:01

  • Cloud engineering could SAVE HUMANITY, suggests boffin

    Actual clouds in the sky, not IT ones, sorry

    Experiments should be carried out into creating artificial clouds to fight global warming, scientists have argued. Clouds generated by special ships at sea would reflect solar heat back into space, so serving to cool the planet. Atmospheric physicist Rob Wood and his colleagues think that the idea of artificial cumulo-mirrors …

    Science 21 Aug 12:08

  • McAfee puts Barnaby Jack on car-jacking hackers' case

    Security whiz to thwart actual crashes

    McAfee has put together an elite team of researchers to investigate how to go about protecting car systems from next-generation hacking attacks. Members of the team include Barnaby Jack, the security researcher best known for demonstrating ways that crooks can force ATMs to spit out cash and for highlighting security …

    Security 21 Aug 12:38

  • Samsung spends $4bn tarting up Texas factory

    Austin plant to spit out extra-large orders of chips

    Samsung has said it will invest around $4bn to renovate its US chip factory so it can increase production of the semiconductors used in smartphones and tablets. The Korean firm will plough the money into the plant in Austin, Texas, the only factory it has outside of Korea. Samsung said the cash will be used to renovate …

    Hardware 21 Aug 13:18

  • SimpliVity: Your legacy IT stack sucks, wanna switch it for our box?

    Migrating from the mess is good, but can Kempel pull it off?

    What would you say about a start-up that wants to junk all the complex, multi-layered stack clutter of today's data centres and start again with one basic scale-out OmniCube building block. Nuts right? Only it's Doron Kempel and he co-founded and sold Diligent to IBM for $200m in 2008 – so we're paying attention. The start-up …

    Storage 21 Aug 13:42

  • QLogic to launch Transformers-style adapter cards: They're also flash caches

    Robot-car-plane-style tech promises more virtual machines, faster applications

    QLogic is adding flash storage to its server adapter cards so they become PCIe-connected flash caches, speeding up SAN I/O-bound applications in the servers with read I/O acceleration. The company makes a line of Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) and Ethernet-based Converged Network Adapters (CNAs) that can run the FCoE …

    Storage 21 Aug 14:01

  • Huawei: Half a million IOPS? Pah, we can do better

    SPC-1 speedster now fastest ever all-flash array

    Huawei has captured the SPC-1 crown for disk drive and flash arrays with a 600,000-plus IOPS result for its Dorado5100 all-flash array. The SPC-1 benchmark tests how networked storage arrays serve data requests from servers in a business environment. IBM's StorWize V7000 headed up the SPC-1 charts with a 520,043.99 result …

    Storage 21 Aug 14:28

  • Merde! French Prez palace blueprints nicked from cable layer

    USB stick held sensitive govt building plans

    An unlucky cable worker lost the ground plans for France's most important government buildings when his USB stick was nicked. According to a report in Le Parisien, translated by Le Reg foreign desk, thieves grabbed the unnamed man's flash drive and other possessions from a car after he parked up to meet someone in the Gare de …

    Government 21 Aug 15:00

  • Creepy skull find proves Man penetrated Asia 60,000 years ago

    Pic Modern humans invaded continent earlier than thought

    Bone-bothering boffins have stumbled across an ancient skull in a Laos cave that puts modern human migration through Southeast Asia 20,000 years sooner than previously thought. The oldest human skull to be found in Asia, estimated at around 63,000 years old, was found in a cave in the Annamite Mountains in northern Laos in …

    Science 21 Aug 15:31

  • Drilling into Amazon's tape-killing Glacier cloud archive

    Blocks and Files It could devastate the industry

    Amazon Glacier is a series of cloud vaults holding customer archive data that isn't based on tape libraries. Instead it appears to use object storage and is set to be the largest object storage implementation in history in a very short time. Amazon Web Services team member James Hamilton blogged about the new product, writing …

    Storage 21 Aug 16:09

  • Sony PlayStation Vita sales crawl

    Don't wanna hold your handheld

    Sony has suffered significantly disappointing sales of its PlayStation Vita since launch, flogging a mere 2.2m units, a third of the number Nintendo's 3DS achieved at the same point in its lifecycle. Although Sony did shift a commendable 1.2m Vita units by February 2012 following the console's European and US release. Yet, the …

    Games 21 Aug 16:15

  • RIM reshuffles UK and European team ahead of new OS

    Could lose government monopoly position

    RIM is reshuffling its European management team ahead of the launch of BlackBerry 10, with a new UK boss and the creation of a new, EU-wide managing director. Stephen Bates, who had headed up RIM in the UK, is being shifted to a new role as regional managing director of Europe. Rob Orr, a vice president with the company's …

    Business 21 Aug 18:37

  • Google launches Octane JavaScript benchmark suite

    Shocker: Chrome leads the the pack in new tests

    Always in search of new ways to show off the work they've done to improve performance of the Chrome browser, Google's Chrome team has unveiled a new JavaScript benchmark suite, called Octane. The new suite includes all of the tests that were part of the Chocolate Factory's earlier V8 Benchmark Suite but adds a new set of …

    Developer 21 Aug 20:02

  • Dell quarterly revenues down 8% on poor desktop performance

    Market share crashing in fastest-growing zones

    Wall Street analysts were expecting a drop off in Dell's business and they won’t be disappointed, with the company reporting revenues down 8 per cent for the second quarter of the year. Dell blamed the drop on poor performance in its PC and mobile divisions, saying that its consumer PC lines were down 22 per cent on the year …

    Financial News 21 Aug 20:43

  • Do Telstra’s call centre cuts add up?

    Analyst says web self-service doesn’t always mean fewer calls

    Telstra has announced it will close call centres in Lismore and downsize another in Townsville, and cut other jobs around the nation. The carrier has said the call centre jobs will go because call volumes have fallen 20% in the last 12 months. 30 per cent of customers, the company says, now use online customer service …

    Business 21 Aug 22:00

  • Sex rating Facebook page publishers jailed

    'Root rates' deemed offensive by Australian court

    Two men who erected a Facebook page which allowed users to rate the sexual prowess of women have been jailed. The page in question was called “Bendaz Root Rate”. “Bendaz” is a proper noun and “root” is, in Australia, a slang term a little coarser than “shag” is the UK, but still a fair way short of the F-word. The two men in …

    Policy 21 Aug 22:30

  • Greens launch anti-TPP Internationale

    Oz, Canada, New Zealand strike cross-border coalition against ACTA-like trade pact

    The increasingly-unpopular Trans-Pacific Partnership – saviour of all that’s right and good in American IP protection or, if you prefer, a mandate for the US to extend its plain-silly intellectual property regimes to pastures new – is under renewed pressure from Green parties in Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The three …

    Policy 21 Aug 23:08

  • Dell expects slow Windows 8 demand in enterprise

    Surface won’t be more than 2% of market

    Microsoft is betting big that Windows 8 will revive its flagging fortunes, but the feedback from Dell is that the new operating system will be a consumer release, and it's not expecting too much impact from Redmond's Surface tablets either. In the earnings call to discuss its latest financial results, Dell's CFO Brian Gladden …

    Windows 8 21 Aug 23:21