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24th August 2012 Archive

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  • Coming to a cloud near you: dirty laundry

    Panasonic Android app will control whitegoods

    Panasonic has announced an Android application to control home appliances. The only catch: users also have to be prepared to shuffle their data through a cloud service for it all to work. The Panasonic Smart App will be available from September, and the company says it will be able to control devices as diverse as air …

    Cloud 24 Aug 00:02

  • Technology tops Forbes list of 100 most powerful women

    The need for a list shows its own problems

    The latest list from Forbes of the 100 most powerful women on the planet suggests that the technology industry is leading the way in promoting sexual equality, contributing 15 per cent of the spots overall and a quarter of the top 20 positions. The technology industry contributed more names to the list (see below) than any …

    Jobs 24 Aug 00:32

  • Angry Sunfish in piscene boss battles

    Princeton turns fish into gamers

    Princeton University researchers investigating the behaviours of predatory fish have developed a kind of “video game” testing the feeding preferences of the bluegill sunfish. Describing their research target as “famously ravenous”, the researchers projected simulated prey onto one side of a tank – either as a single target, or …

    Science 24 Aug 01:00

  • Reagan slams webmail providers for liberal bias

    Claims free email helps line Obama's coffers

    The adopted son of former US President Ronald Reagan has taken to Fox News to remind American conservatives that when they use free email services they are helping the liberals win. In an editorial published on the right-leaning news website on Wednesday, Michael Reagan, a radio host and Republican strategist, reminds …

    Business 24 Aug 02:08

  • Indian censors media, Twitter critics

    Riot response overkill alert!

    The Indian government has blacklisted media reports and social media accounts as part of its ongoing attempts to prevent the spread of rumours and calm simmering sectarian tensions. The rumours concern clashes between the indigenous Bodo community and Muslim settlers in Assam earlier this month. The clashes left scores dead …

    Policy 24 Aug 06:27

  • China could penetrate US with new huge missile

    Uh oh...

    It might be time to sweep the cobwebs out of that old nuclear bunker at the bottom of the garden after reports in state-run Chinese media confirmed that the People’s Liberation Army is actively developing an intercontinental missile capable of penetrating US defences. News first emerged of the planned ‘super missile’ from …

    Policy 24 Aug 06:38

  • Global slowdown bites Japan's semiconductor crowd

    Revenue fell by 7.5 per cent over past year

    There was more bad news for Japan’s beleaguered semiconductor industry on Thursday as it emerged the country’s big name chip suppliers were hit hard by a global slow down in the second quarter which saw worldwide sales plunge by over $2bn from the previous year, according to analysts. Bean counters at IHS iSuppli said global …

    Business 24 Aug 06:44

  • Sony NSZ-GS7 Google TV internet player review

    Second sight

    Google and hardware BFF Sony will be hoping the second time’s the charm for their latest joint foray into the living room. The first Google television adventure floundered in the States, scuppered by hardware complexity and inadequate software. This time around we have a simpler set top box proposal, the NSZ-GS7, and the Google …

    reghardware 24 Aug 07:00

  • E-criminals nicked £205m from UK retailers last year

    Twice as bad for shops as thefts and fraud in meatspace – study

    Online fraud and other 'e-crimes' have cost British retailers operating over the internet at least £205m in a year according to the first comprehensive study of the make-up and scale of crimes affecting e-commerce. According to figures (8-page / 590KB PDF) published by the British Retail Consortium (BRC), the direct and …

    Financial News 24 Aug 07:28

  • Only 3% of UK's TV oglers want more sex

    Ofcom study finds smut, violence and swearing all in fine fettle

    Ofcom has been polling viewers about television standards, finding that most seem happy with how things are, even if they aren't entirely clear how the current state of play is maintained. The figures come from Ofcom (PDF, lots of numbers), which asked 1,700 people their opinions, then repeated the process with another 1,700 …

    Media 24 Aug 08:02

  • 'United States must renounce its witch-hunt against WikiLeaks'

    Quotw Plus: 'We are frankly shocked' – Vodafone clutches pearls over EE's 4G monopoly

    This was the week when the UK's telecoms regulator Ofcom decided it totally wouldn't make any difference to competition if it just went ahead and gave Everything Everywhere a 4G monopoly. Plus the fact that Britain wants to be seen as a modern country worthy of bucketloads of investment even though it still doesn't have an up to …

    Bootnotes 24 Aug 08:19

  • Former Gov.UK sweetheart Logica evaporates after CGI swills it down

    London Stock Exchange to rub out its name this week

    CGI's completion of its acquisition of Logica will see the departure of the company from the Stock Exchange at the end of this week and effectively the end of the Logica brand. CGI recently announced that it has completed the £1.7bn acquisition after Logica shareholders voted 99.54% in favour of CGI's offer at a shareholders …

    The Channel 24 Aug 08:37

  • Post-pub nosh deathmatch: Pierogi versus patatas revolconas

    Polish pastry squares up to Spanish spuds

    Now that the dust has settled on the ultimate sliced-pork butty controversy - a furious debate prompted by our Bauernfrühstück v bacon sarnie deathmatch - we feel it's time to crack a few cold ones and head out into the sunshine for another culinary clash of titans. We've been enjoying a particularly fine summer over here at …

    SPB 24 Aug 09:00

  • Teflon slips smoothly over LOHAN's mighty rod

    Ice proves no impediment to Vulture 2 launch

    Our audacious Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) project is advancing rapidly on multiple fronts, and as well as mission control boards and fantastical flying trusses, we've been able to dedicate some time to the icy issue of the controversial Vulture 2 launch rod. Our proposal is to suspend the spaceplane under the …

    SPB 24 Aug 09:29

  • Has cash corrupted open source?

    Open ... and Shut Money for nothing, hacks for free

    There once was a time when open source was all about peace, love, and Linux, a bottom-up community of self-selecting hackers that chummed together for the love of good code. As soon as Linux hit pay dirt, the nature of the open-source community changed forever. Today it is virtually impossible for a successful open-source …

    Developer 24 Aug 09:58

  • South Korea bans Apple's AND Samsung's ageing phones, tabs

    Patent court dishes out pocket-change fines too

    Both Apple and Samsung got teeny fines and had some of their products banned in South Korea, after a court in Seoul found they infringed on each other's patents. The South Korean court said that Apple had infringed two of Samsung's wireless patents, while Sammy had infringed on a fruity firm patent related to a "bounce-back" …

    Law 24 Aug 10:19

  • Facebook updates iOS app, still poking around for mobile dollars

    Time to speed things up... bitch

    Facebook is yet to crack the mobile revenue conundrum as its stock continues to be hammered on Wall Street, but in the meantime the company has finally updated its dog of an iOS app. Shares hardly rallied following Facebook's announcement yesterday that the Apple mobile version of its network had now been updated – instead …

    Networks 24 Aug 10:39

  • Mr Bank Manager, help yourself to my smartphone contents

    Something for the Weekend, Sir? Bend over for a thorough digital rogering

    Hacking through the 1,100 press releases waiting for me upon my return from vacation has been a daunting task and has, as yet, revealed few surprises. Once I disposed of the misdirected (“I thought you might be interested in a case study from Golfbreaks.com...”) and semi-literate (“Hi hope your well?”) missives, most of the …

    reghardware 24 Aug 11:00

  • Groupon loses second top sales bod in a week

    Voucher bazaar can't hang onto execs

    Groupon is losing its US sales boss Lee Brown, who followed other senior execs who scarpered off earlier this year. Brown, senior vice president of national sales, has decided to leave the voucher bazaar, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters. Groupon in the UK said it couldn't confirm or deny that Brown had resigned …

    Business 24 Aug 11:22

  • News Corp's digi boss departs ahead of Murdoch's biz split

    Jonathan Miller exits

    News Corp's digital chief, Jonathan Miller, has resigned from Rupert Murdoch's media company ahead of its planned split into two "distinct" firms. Miller had served as chief digital officer since 2009. The company confirmed he would be leaving his job at the end of September, but added Miller will serve as an outside advisor …

    Media 24 Aug 11:41

  • Shove off Prince Harry, now Norway's teen royal in fresh photo uproar

    Blue-blood's Instagram splurge sparks tabloid row

    Blighty's playboy Prince Harry isn't the only royal hitting tabloid headlines for inappropriate snaps: Norway's monarchy has defended one of its own blue-blooded teens after his web photo uploading spree supposedly sparked a security scare. Marius Borg Høiby, 15, took photographs while on holiday and published them using a …

    Security 24 Aug 12:00

  • Nokia's WinPho 8 double date announced

    Flagship waving

    Nokia will unveil Windows 8 phones during its joint event with Microsoft this September, sources stating the bleedin' obvious revealed. The two handsets – codenamed Arrow and Phi – will form part of the firm's Lumia range, with the former joining the mid-range party and the latter succeeding the Lumia 800 and 900 as its …

    reghardware 24 Aug 12:13

  • Three beds Samsung for its own LTE mobe broadband kit

    Huawei's advance misses a beat

    Samsung will be supplying Three's 4G network, squashing ideas that the network-sharing deal with EE would simply be extended and giving Samsung a significant foothold in an increasingly competitive market. Samsung will provide the Radio Access Network, and the core infrastructure, for Three's LTE (4G) network. That includes …

    Mobile 24 Aug 12:22

  • 'Will cloud murder the channel?' and other stupid questions

    Why you shouldn't believe the hype....

    During a recent cloud computing webcast in which I was participating, a solution provider asked: “How much time do we have left before cloud computing completely disrupts the channel?” It’s a surprising question – as nonsensical as it is simple, much like the viral video produced by The Onion on Hewlett-Packard’s cloud …

    The Channel 24 Aug 12:28

  • Security biz U-turns on Gauss, Flame joint cyberspy hub claim

    FireEye mistook rival's sinkhole for command server

    Computer security biz FireEye has withdrawn claims that the Gauss and Flame super-viruses may be linked. This is after it emerged that what FireEye had thought was a shared command-and-control server, used to send instructions to PCs compromised by the malware, was actually a "sinkhole" maintained by rival researchers at …

    Security 24 Aug 12:45

  • Vodafone phone and mobe biz service goes titsup

    Hello? Hello? Is anyone there?

    Vodafone's One Net service has gone down, leaving businesses with no working phones. The service, which merges landlines with mobiles so finger-on-the-pulse folk can pick up their calls anywhere no matter which number customers call in on, has been down for about an hour. A Reg reader told us that the outage had knackered …

    Broadband 24 Aug 12:52

  • iPhone's market share in China sliced in HALF

    Apple's mobe grabs just 10% of coveted millions of subscribers

    Apple's piece of China's smartphone market has almost halved to just 10 per cent in the second quarter as fanbois wait for the next iPhone model or even, gasp, switch brands. For the first time, more people in China were interested in buying smartphones than feature mobes, but Apple's iDevices were only the third favourite in …

    Financial News 24 Aug 13:29

  • Endangered aphid-stroking ants don wee radio backpacks

    1,000 beasties tagged to help probe insects' social network

    Boffins are fitting 1,000 northern hairy wood ants with teeny-tiny backpacks to track them in their habitat. The University of York researchers will take their ants from the National Trust's Longshaw Estate in Derbyshire, which is a hotspot for the protected beasties containing over 1,000 nests and 50 million worker ants. …

    Science 24 Aug 13:57

  • Hard-up Kodak selling consumer film biz

    Scanners and photo booths going

    Hard-up Kodak is selling its consumer film, scanner and photo kiosk businesses as part of a restructuring. Chief executive Antonio Perez announced the news on Thursday, saying Kodak was shedding its personalised imaging and document imaging units as part of restructuring to help the company exit US Chapter 11 bankruptcy …

    Business 24 Aug 14:28

  • HP storage unit battered as buyers dodge EVA, tape

    3PAR and StoreOnce stars shine bright

    HP's storage results sank 5 per cent year-on-year in its latest quarter due to declining EVA array and tape product revenues. CFO Cathy Lesjak said in the earnings call: "In Storage, the continued strong performance of 3PAR with more than 60 per cent growth and StoreOnce with double-digit growth did not offset the decline in …

    Storage 24 Aug 15:06

  • Hotel keycard firm issues fixes after Black Hat hacker breaks locks

    But want customers to pay for them...

    Hotel lockmaker Onity has developed fixes to safeguard millions of hotel keycard locks against an attack demonstrated at the Black Hat conference last month. But the most comprehensive of the two approaches involves a partial hardware replacement that will cost hotels a substantial amount of cash to apply. Mozilla software …

    Security 24 Aug 15:32

  • Salesforce losses swell, despite rise in sales

    Soz about the SaaS ...

    Software-as-a-Service pin-up Salesforce.com reported growing losses despite increased sales. The hosted CRM provider reported a loss of $9.82m on a 34 per cent increase in net sales to $73.6m for the three-month period to 31 July. Loss per share also increased, up 4 cents to $0.07 on a diluted GAAP basis. The company used …

    Financial News 24 Aug 16:00

  • Going viral 9,500 years ago: 'English descended from ancient Turkey'

    Cunning linguists back Indo-European chat theory

    Linguiboffins have traced the origins of Indo-European languages to Turkey using the same methods developed to track bird flu, HIV and other viruses. "If you know how viruses are related to one another you can trace back through their ancestry and find out where they originated,” said lead researcher Dr Quentin Atkinson of the …

    Science 24 Aug 16:31

  • Storage crumblies, newbies race to push out flashiest gear

    HDS, NexGen and Pure Storage announce new kit

    The flash storm among storage vendors is becoming more frenzied with a major announcement from HDS, the addition of iSCSI support by Pure Storage's flash arrays, and a performance guarantee from flash/disk hybrid iSCSI array startup NexGen, along with Veeam and vCenter support. HDS has developed its own flash storage …

    Storage 24 Aug 17:33

  • Court confirms $675,000 fine for sharing 30 songs

    Tenenbaum is toast in haggle with big media

    Joel Tenenbaum has lost his request for a mistrial in his long-running case against the music industry over sharing music and now faces financial ruin. The Massachusetts court declined his request for a mistrial and confirmed he will have to pay $675,000 in fines after being found guilty of sharing 30 songs on the Kazaa …

    Media 24 Aug 19:07

  • Google crafts algorithms to get more women in more positions

    And keep them coming back, too

    Google has fine-tuned its search algorithms to hone in on many things, from web pages to stock quotes and flight times, but its latest challenge may be its most ambitious yet. It's hoping its vaunted data-crunching prowess can help it bring in more women. By most accounts, geeks worldwide are falling all over themselves to …

    Jobs 24 Aug 20:24

  • Police mistake reveals plan for Assange's Embassy capture

    That policeman's lot is not a happy one

    A fairly basic security slip has showed just how far the British police are preparing to go to make sure Julian Assange doesn't leaving the UK without getting his collar felt. Police plan caught by snapper (click to enlarge) Credit: PA "Action required – Assange to be arrested under all circumstances," reads a handwritten …

    Law 24 Aug 22:05

  • Google names names in amended 'shills' list

    Employees, consultants, trade groups outed

    As ordered by the court, Google has submitted a new and longer list of bloggers and other commentators who have written about its ongoing patent litigation with Oracle, even as it continues to insist that it has never paid anyone to report or comment on the case. On Monday, Judge William Alsup gave the online ad giant five …

    Law 24 Aug 22:06

  • Jury awards Apple $1bn damages in Samsung patent case

    Updated Zero for Samsung's counter-claims

    The nine-member jury in the closely watched patent litigation between Apple and Samsung has returned a verdict decidedly in Apple's favor, awarding the fruity firm a whopping total of $1.05bn in damages. The jury took less than three days to reach its verdict, something that apparently startled even Apple's legal team, as …

    Law 24 Aug 23:58