10th September 2012 Archive

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Spammers, phishers escape proper punishment

Little guidance for judges on how to set cyber-crims straight

Australia has no data describing the sentences imposed upon criminals convicted of crimes enabled by phishing and similar scams and no guidelines for sentencing such crimes, leaving Judges with little guidance to fashion effective and appropriate punishments. That's the thrust of a paper from the Institute of Criminology, …

Security 10 Sep 00:37
Office 365 turns Lotus eater

Microsoft licenses migration tool

Microsoft has licensed Lotus-to-anything migration software from Binary Tree, and plans to use its partner's wares to lure Lotus customers away from IBM and into the cloud. Kevin Allison, Microsoft's general manager of Office 365. has declared the deal a tremendous idea as it “... helps simplify the onboarding process and …

Software 10 Sep 02:17
Oz cinema chain to stream new releases

If you can't beat them, stream them

Australian cinema chain Hoyts will launch its own video-on-demand streaming service in the first quarter of the New Year. Hoyts Stream, as the new venture will be called, will support multi-device access and offer consumers a pay-as-you-go model for new release as well as classic movies and TV content. Hoyts Stream will …

Networks 10 Sep 02:48
Taobao shoots pirates on Hollywood's orders

China's eBay signs deal to hunt down dodgy content

Digital piracy just got another kicking after China’s largest e-commerce marketplace Taobao struck a deal with the Motion Picture Association (MPA) designed to cut the number of copyright infringing goods sold on the site. Taobao is often described as the eBay of China, offering a C2C environment where small firms and …

Media 10 Sep 03:44
Curiosity clears things up

Removes dust cover to produce sharpest images to date

Curiosity has dusted off the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) to take new snaps of the red planet's surface. MAHLI is described as being analogous to the small magnifiers geologists like to wear about their necks. NASA describes it thusly: “The self-focusing, roughly 4-centimeter-wide (1.5-inch-wide) camera will take color …

Science 10 Sep 04:02
Fanboi beats 'e-trespassing' rap after using GPS to find stolen iPad

'Find my fondleslab' to track thief is legal, court rules

An Australian magistrate has ruled that an iPad owner acted lawfully when he used Apple's Find my iPad app to locate his stolen fondleslab in a private home. ABC News and the Canberra Times report that when a Canberra man's iPad mysteriously disappeared he fired up the Find my iPad App. Doing so revealed, thanks to the …

Security 10 Sep 05:40
China pushes green PCs to punters

Meanwhile APEC agrees green tech import cut

It’s been a good few days for the green tech brigade as China announced a whopping 14bn yuan (£1.4bn) subsidy to encourage households to purchase energy-saving electrical appliances including PCs, while members of the APEC bloc agreed to slash import duties on over 50 green technologies. The surprise announcement from China on …

Science 10 Sep 05:48
Apple chatting up labels for Fanboi Radio: Pandora, boxed?

Hmm, there's a thing, let's own it ALL

Apple top brass have been chatting up music execs in efforts to get their backing - and tunes - for an Apple branded radio station, says the Wall Street Journal, also confirmed by the New York Times. The putative Apple radio station would stream music related to a song initially chosen by the user - with song choice decided by …

Media 10 Sep 07:02
Germany leads global enterprise social push

It's all in the process, Mein Herr

German firms were hailed as the surprise global leaders in social business, according to a panel of industry experts who emphasised the importance of process, measurement and cultural fit in enterprise social programs. IBM’s VP of social business evangelism, Sandy Carter, told attendees at the Social Media Matters conference …

Business 10 Sep 07:15
Pasty munchers scoff at £300m council deal with comms kingpins

BT and CSC in bid to reduce Cornish costs by £5m a year

Cornwall Council says it remains committed to a £300m strategic partnership proposal with either BT or CSC that it insists will help it protect frontline services and reduce costs by at least £5m a year. It follows a council debate earlier this week at which the partnership plans were criticised by elected councillors. Now, …

Government 10 Sep 07:35
Was Russia Today hacked - or did it just forget to renew rt.com?

State-owned web pravda bunked off for days

The website of government-owned news service Russia Today suffered intermittent downtime for two days in what some suspect is a hack. Visitors to the rt.com homepage were surprised to find a generic placeholder for Network Solutions, rather than news articles - and for about a day links to the site seemed to be broken. …

Hosting 10 Sep 08:01
EMC's big kahuna Tucci threatens to cling on until 2015

Who will prise the CEO from his desk?

Joe Tucci, the chairman and CEO of EMC, is staying on at least until 2015, dashing the hopes of company execs who have their eyes on the top job. Storage giant EMC filed an 8K form with the US Securities and Exchange Commission that states Tucci will remain the head honcho until at least February 2015. However, the company …

Storage 10 Sep 08:32
US job market sneezing, blowing nose: Will we catch cold too?

Consultancy up, manufacturing down. Talk, don't do

The way the US economy is adding jobs each month – or rather, not adding a sufficiently large number of new workers – Mitt Romney will be six months into his second term or Hillary Clinton will be a half-year into her first term before the unemployment rate comes back down to levels before the Great Recession hit in December …

Jobs 10 Sep 09:01
HP tempts EVA customers with low-end 3PAR array honeypot

EVA replacement gives them a 50% boost

HP is building a low-end 3PAR array with data migration software to convert the EVA customer base to a 3PAR customer base. We hear HP will use SAS disk drives instead of the more expensive 3.5-inch Fibre Channel drives. This will make it easier to substitute 3PAR's V-, T- and F-Class arrays s for the ageing EVA mid-range, dual …

Storage 10 Sep 09:14
Oracle hits reboot on Itanium software development

Back to HP-UX business

Software giant and systems player Oracle has restarted software development for Itanium-based machines. That sound you hear is a sigh of relief from HP-UX system customers the world over and from Hewlett-Packard, whose Integrity and Superdome servers fell off a cliff, in terms of sales, after Oracle pulled the plug on Itanium …

Servers 10 Sep 09:33
Google Aurora hackers AT LARGE, launch 0-day bazookas

Security snoopers back? They never left

Security researchers have traced a continuing run of zero-day attacks to the hackers who infamously hit Google and other hi-tech firms three years ago. Symantec has kept close tabs on the hackers behind the so-called Aurora attacks ever since. No other group has used more zero-day vulnerabilities – eight – to further their …

Security 10 Sep 09:46
Quanta leaps out in front with Centerton Atom microserver

Trying to get the jump on HP Gemini boxes

Quanta QCT is revving up an Atom-based microserver using the future "Centerton" processor from Intel at this week's Intel Developer Forum, and the company hopes it can get some interest in the boxes for webby workloads ahead of their shipment later this year. The US operations of Quanta QCT were set up in May of this year with …

Servers 10 Sep 10:01
Sysadmins: Your favourite tool's now ready for, er, fondling

The spice(works) must (re)flow

Spiceworks, the system-administrator's toolkit which thinks its a social network, now comes in a fondleslab-optimised flavour for BOFHs who like to oversee their empires from the pub. Spiceworks already comes in a handset version, for iOS and Android, but it loses some functionality in squeezing the layout. There's a web- …

Developer 10 Sep 10:17
Health minister warns ISPs: Block suicide websites or face regulation

Norman Lamb calls on 'proper controls' to protect kids

Telcos face being regulated by the government if they fail to block websites offering advice on suicide, the health minister Norman Lamb has warned. There are already calls for ISPs to cut off access to content that's inappropriate for children, such as pornography, by default – thus requiring smut oglers to opt in. This week …

Government 10 Sep 10:32
Lovefilm Germany goes titsup for a FORTNIGHT

Amazon-owned Dummkopf locks out movie fans

Lovefilm Germany's backend has been down for 14 days, leaving subscribers unable to access their accounts to rent films or use the video streaming service. Although lovefilm.de is alive, systems handling customer accounts are kaput. The Amazon-owned company admitted on 28 August that its servers had gone titsup in a corporate …

Media 10 Sep 10:46
Dragon Naturally Speaking Premium 12 voice recognition software review

Give your PC a hearing aid

Speech recognition has been a technology coming of age for an age. It got a shot in the arm recently with the launch of the iPhone 4S, where the S stands for Siri, the speech recognition company Apple bought. Siri may be trendy, but the most mature technology is on the PC and comes from the company Nuance bought. Voice …

reghardware 10 Sep 11:00
HP hires Youngjohns to head up Autonomy

Tries to counter cool winds blowing through HP's software biz

HP has filled the Mike Lynch-shaped hole at the top of its Autonomy business with another Brit, Robert Youngjohns, the boss of Microsoft's North America empire. Lynch left the organisation early in the summer in a phased restructure that will see a total of 27,000 HPers – or 7.7 per cent of the workforce – leave by the end of …

The Channel 10 Sep 11:13
Virus lab blogger collared by blundering copyright cop bot

Malware authors have rights too, says French legal droid

A malware researcher's website was nobbled last week by an automated bot that accused her of breaching copyright law. Web storage biz MediaFire, which is used by Mila Parkour to host dozens of downloads for her Contagio blog, pulled the plug on her account because it contained three files that were flagged up for copyright …

Security 10 Sep 11:32
Top dog EMC crushes whimpering rivals in storage pack

Is server storage cramping array sales?

IDC's Storage Tracker bloodhounds have tracked the vendors across the market in the second quarter and rated them, and it looks like not a lot has changed in the hierarchy of the storage pack. EMC's market share is rising, again. Most everybody else is down, again. For external disk storage compared to a year ago: Alpha dog …

Storage 10 Sep 11:44
Nokia flagellates self further to quell fake cam ad Twitterstorm

Pic Ethics? Isn't that somewhere north of London?

Nokia continues its efforts to defuse the Twitterstorm around its "fake" mobile phone camera ad. The handset maker had uploaded a YouTube video to illustrate the new image stabilisation technology in its Lumia 920, which was announced last week - but the advert was a simulation of the tech using a professional camera rig, and …

Mobile 10 Sep 12:02
Amazon: Pay more for Kindle Fire, smoke ads from slabs

Freedom to read in commercial-free land comes at a cost

Amazon, in a surprise U-turn, has decided to start selling a more expensive version of its Kindle Fire model that will not stalk its customers with ads. The giant online retailer said over the weekend that it had applied the switcheroo to its pricing policy. This is after it initially launched its Kindle Fire tablets with …

Hardware 10 Sep 12:18
German Pirate party punters 'don't pay their membership fees'

Yarrwohl!

The Pirate Party of Germany (Piratenpartei) achieved breakthrough success capturing the protest vote last autumn - but its appeal may be starting to wane. The anti-copyright party won 8.9 per cent of the Berlin vote and has been attempting to build a national party organisation. However, Der Spiegel reports that "almost half …

Media 10 Sep 12:43
Broadband minister's fibre cabinet gripe snub sparks revolt

Not in our ~~backyard~~ leafy historic streets

City of Westminster councillors are outraged by the new broadband minister's decision to cut red tape and hasten the arrival of on-street fibre-optic cable cabinets. The bureaucracy-slashing move means telcos can install faster broadband connections without approval from local councils, which can prevent the placing of large …

Broadband 10 Sep 12:59
Apache man disables Internet Explorer 10 privacy setting

Fielding: Windows 8's web window is 'standards abuse'

Apache HTTP daddy Roy Fielding has patched his popular server, telling it to ignore user privacy web settings in Internet Explorer 10. The Fielding patch will mean millions of web servers will ignore the Do Not Track header that's sent to them by users in IE 10, the browser for Windows 8. Apache is used by nearly 600 million …

Developer 10 Sep 13:33
Mars probably never wet enough for life, nuclear bomb crater indicates

Spoilsport boffins: Theorised aliens have feet of clay

Spoilsport French scientists probing unusual clay deposits discovered in an old nuclear bomb crater say they have found that the planet Mars has never been - as previous researchers have hoped/suggested - wet enough to support Earth-style life. Clays found on the red planet dating from its Noachian period (around four billion …

Science 10 Sep 13:38
Open IPTV joins HbbTV in connected telly love-in

A spec-test shared is a spec-test halved

The Open IPTV Forum and the HbbTV Consortium will be sharing the connected television device-testing burden, with a view towards reducing the cost and increasing the speed of getting both standards integrated as widely as possible. The two groups have worked together before: the Open IPTV Forum (OIPF) specifies support for …

Media 10 Sep 14:03
Microsoft to comply with Brussels over browser choice gaffe

Steve Ballmer recognises how VERY SERIOUS it is

Microsoft has reportedly agreed to comply with any sanctions laid down by competition officials in Brussels, who are currently probing the software giant's allegedly mistaken banishment of a "browser choice" screen, which would have allowed European customers to pick which browser they wanted to run on their Windows-based …

Applications 10 Sep 14:26
HP throws an extra 2,000 staff onto chopping block

29,000 bods at risk of redundancy, morale problematic

HP has added an extra two thousand workers to its mass redundancy programme, it confirmed today. Back in May the troubled US tech titan threatened to axe 27,000 jobs by the end of fiscal 2014 to cut overheads and use some of the savings to invest in R&D. However, in a 10Q form filed today with US financial watchdog SEC, HP …

The Channel 10 Sep 15:01
Foxconn: We're not FORCING interns to make iPhone 5

They are making it of their own free will

The production line turning out iPhone 5s at Foxconn will be manned by willing interns only, said the Chinese company in a statement, rebutting stories last week that the new mobe was being pieced together by conscripted work experience kids. Newspaper China Daily had alleged last week that trainee primary school teachers and …

Hardware 10 Sep 15:39
Everything Everywhere 'to stuff Santa's sack' with 4G Lumia 920s

Crimbo window opens for high-speed mobe monopoly

Industry sources expect mobile network Everything Everywhere to tie up an exclusive deal with Nokia's new flagship Lumia 920 phone - providing EE can make a volume commitment to the fallen Finnish giant. The FT reports today that discussions giving the merged Deutsche Telekom-France Telecom-owned operator an exclusive are …

Mobile 10 Sep 16:01
Infosys gobbles Lodestone for £218m

Indian outsourcer sups SAP sap

Indian outsourcer Infosys has coughed CHF330 (£218m) in cash for SAP consultancy Lodestone. The management consultancy is headquartered in Switzerland, but it has global operations including a burgeoning footprint in the UK. "A key plank of our Infosys 3.0 strategy is to expand our Consulting & Systems Integration (C&SI) …

The Channel 10 Sep 16:16
Stratus girds fault-tolerant servers with Xeon E5s

Virtualization that won't go down on you

When it comes to hardware-based fault-tolerant computing on x86 iron, there's really only two games in town: NEC and Stratus Technologies. For the past several generations of machines, these two companies have partnered, with Stratus essentially taking NEC's iron and weaving in its own system tools, packaging and pricing. …

Servers 10 Sep 16:37
HP preps designer desktops for Windows 8

Claims world's slimmest all-in-one PC

HP has announced the world's thinnest all-in-one desktop PC and remains prepared for Windows 8 with the addition a touchscreen model too. The HP Spectre One, so the company claims, is the slimmest AIO machine on the planet, at a mere 11.5mm thick. The slim beast features a 23.6in flush-glass display, runs on the latest Ivy …

Windows 8 10 Sep 16:57
Riverbed sucks in more data for cloud gateway deluge

Four times bigger gut too

Riverbed has quadrupled the amount of data its Whitewater appliance can store in the cloud, and is gulping it in faster. Whitewater is a cloud storage gateway, a box that sits at the logical edge of a data centre and sends data to either private or public storage clouds. Supported private clouds use EMC Atmos or OpenStack …

Storage 10 Sep 16:59
HTC's 4G patent beef could get iPhone 5 BANNED in US

Judge tells Apple: 'I have to be pretty darn certain a US patent is invalid'

Apple may be banned from importing its new iPhone into the United States if the International Trade Commission in Washington DC finds that Cupertino has violated an HTC patent for connecting to the 4G network. Apple is subject to an ongoing investigation by the the International Trade Commission under Judge Thomas Pender, …

Law 10 Sep 17:14
NEC speeds up Gemini FT chipset, adds in Xeon E5s

Fault tolerance, cheaper ESXi trumps VMware HA

Whenever Stratus Technologies touts a new fault-tolerant ftServer - as it did earlier today - partner Japanese server-maker NEC follows suit. After all, Stratus is just reselling the NEC boxes with its own pricing, packaging, and add-on software. With the new Express5800/R320c fault tolerant boxes, NEC is adding the latest …

Servers 10 Sep 17:29
King Coyne snaps chains, escapes Western Digital

Hitachi GST's top man replaces departing CEO

Under CEO John Coyne, Western Digital bought Hitachi GST and has become the world's number-one disk drive manufacturer. Now, leaving on a high note, Coyne is going to transfer the reins to HGST's ex-boss man Steve Milligan. The transfer of power will take place on 2 January, 2013. Milligan is now president of WD and will keep …

Storage 10 Sep 17:44
Intel hints at weaving network fabric into Xeons, Atoms

IDF 2012 Time for controllers and processors to share the bed

If it wasn't immediately obvious to you, Intel thinks the future of the systems business is weaving interconnection fabrics onto server processors - thus consolidating yet another component of the data center onto the processor and bringing to bear Chipzilla's wafer etching process advantages on that unified chip. And, if Intel …

Servers 10 Sep 18:00
Windows 8 to grab iPad market share wrested back from Android

Google, watch out for MS not Apple, says analyst

Windows 8 will dent Apple's dominance of the tablet market, but it's biggest impact will be to hold Android's growth back. So says market watcher Canalys, which reckons some 207m tablets will ship in 2016, around half of them iPads of one size or another. In that year, tablets will account for almost a third of all personal …

Windows 8 10 Sep 18:16
Vesa to enable backlight arrays on laptops, tablets

DisplayPort updated to preserve power

Display standards body Vesa has announced a new version of its Embedded DisplayPort (eDP) specification that paves the way for laptop screens and tablet panels with TV-like array backlighting. It's all done in the name of power conservation, of course, and the eDP 1.4 specification includes a number of technologies designed to …

reghardware 10 Sep 18:23
Google declares success for Kansas City gigabit broadband

80% buy into Fiberhood fold

After an intensive six-week registration drive, Google is reporting 180 out of a possible 202 districts of Kansas City have signed up for its 1Gb/s fiber network project. "This number has blown us away – and it's not even the final tally," said Google Access general manager Kevin Lo. "We're still processing some final address …

Networks 10 Sep 19:36
Coding may not make national curriculum

Ministerial decision coming in August, but Ministers mostly oblivious

Software development may not be taught in Australia's high schools, as it is not a core part of the nation's new national “Technologies” curriculum. The national curriculum is a new project, founded in 2009, aimed at developing a national curriculum for all schools from kindergarten to year 12. The project is run by the …

Policy 10 Sep 20:30
Valve puts Steam on the TV

Big Picture UI turns a PC into a console

Valve will today update its Steam software to add a new, secondary UI for TV-connected Macs and PCs. Dubbed "Big Picture", the UI provides a console-style front-end for the otherwise standard Steam client. Big Picture can be operated with a mouse and keyboard, or a generic games controller. Big Picture also includes a TV- …

reghardware 10 Sep 20:45
Dolby sets Digital Plus to shine in UltraViolet

Online movie tech gets sonic boon

Cloud-based movie library UltraViolet is to gain Dolby Digital Plus sound technology, the audio specialist said today. The move will see DDP added to UV's Common File Format (CFF) specification, and Dolby has a development kit available to allow content providers to add DDP audio into their UV assets. How soon - or, indeed, …

reghardware 10 Sep 21:12
GoDaddy stopped by massive DDoS attack

Millions of sites may be affected – not by Anonymous, it appears

A lone hacker has claimed responsibility for an ongoing denial-of-service attack that may have knocked out millions of websites hosted by world's largest domain registrar GoDaddy. The attack began at around 10.00 Pacific time (17.00 GMT/18.00 BST) and appears to affect the registrar's DNS servers. Any site that is hosted with …

Security 10 Sep 21:43
Microsoft to open 32 pop-up retail stores for the holidays

Take that, Apple Store

Whenever Apple opens a new retail store, it's a major event with fanbois lining up to be the first to grace its stone tile floors. By comparison, Microsoft's foray into the retail market will be a quiet affair – almost tentative – beginning with 32 pop-up stores to open in the US and Canada for the holiday season. Microsoft …

Windows 8 10 Sep 21:57
E-publisher 'fesses up: 'Apple UDIDs were ours'

BlueToad clears FBI of device data collection

It seems both Apple and the FBI were telling the truth: the Apple UDIDs published last week didn’t come from either organization, with an American e-publisher posting a statement that the data was stolen from its systems. The five-year-old BlueToad, based in Orlando, Florida, says the UDIDs that were posted to Pastebin matched …

Security 10 Sep 22:14
NZ software giants join patent bill protest

Updated: govt says "no" Petitioning against patent trolls

New Zealand’s largest software exporters, Jade and Orion Healthcare, have lined up with the NZ Open Source Society, InternetNZ, and local industry lobby NZRise to ask the government to revise its proposed patent laws. The bill is designed to remove software from patent protection in New Zealand. At the same time, however, …

Software 10 Sep 22:45
Scientists provide a measure of uncertainty

What would Heisenberg’s position be?

A group of Canadian PhD researchers claim to have obtained information beyond the “Heisenberg limit” using a technique called “weak measurement”. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle limits the amount of information that can be known at the quantum level: the more you know about the position of an object, the less you can know …

Science 10 Sep 23:16
Intel contextual awareness: 'We know what your wife is up to'

IDF 2012 Knows when its best to call, text, or just leave her alone

Intel Labs is working on a technology that uses what it calls "contextual awareness" to advise you of the best method to use when contacting others. "I want to call my wife or text my wife during the workday," Intel research engineer Philip Muse told The Reg during a pre-show technology showcase on Monday at the Intel …

Mobile 10 Sep 23:38