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9th October 2012 Archive

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  • Surprise! Microsoft patches latest IE10 Flash vulns on time

    Issues fixes same day as Adobe's patch

    Microsoft surprised Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 users on Monday by issuing a patch that fixes 25 security vulnerabilities found in the Adobe Flash Player component of Internet Explorer 10, mere hours after Adobe issued its own patch for the Flash Player plug-in used by other browsers. Unlike earlier versions of Internet …

    Security 9 Oct 00:04

  • USAF declassifies ‘flying saucer’ design

    Spiked 1950s project had high hopes

    If it had ever got off the ground, the US Air Force’s 1950s flying saucer would have gone a long way off the ground: all the way to 100,000 feet. A paper recently declassified and made public at America’s National Archives details the project: a few million spent assessing the design feasibility of a flying saucer. The USAF' …

    Science 9 Oct 01:15

  • HP doubles up SAP hard-hearted HANA appliances

    Scaling out and adding failover clustering

    Everybody – especially server makers without much of a software business – wants to peddle SAP HANA in-memory databases, and HP is no exception: they're taking its AppSystem for SAP up another notch with a disaster-tolerant configuration for supporting HANA. In a blog posting, Mary Kwan, global business manager for SAP …

    Servers 9 Oct 01:45

  • iOS 6 Alarms bug hits Australia

    USA, UK, seemingly spared daylight savings SNAFU

    An iOS 6 bug that added an extra instance of 3:00AM and 3:00PM to Australians' iDevices seems not to be something users in other nations need to worry about. The bug in question, first spotted by an an alert Gizmodo Australia reader, saw iDevices running iOS6 decide that 3:00AM happened twice on October 7th. That day is …

    Software 9 Oct 02:00

  • Fossil reveals spider in mid-strike

    Predator and prey, together forever

    A hundred million years ago, an amber flow spoiled a spider’s day: it had waited, possibly for hours, to ambush a wasp in its web, and just as it decided to strike, spider, wasp and web were all trapped forever. The good news for us is that it’s turned up at a dig in Myanmar's Hukawng Valley, and here's what it looks like: …

    Science 9 Oct 03:09

  • AMD unveils 'sweet spot' processor for 'sexy' tablets

    Z-60 aims between Atom and Core i3 for Windows 8 fondleslabs

    AMD has released its new Z-60 microprocessor – called in company parlance an APU, for accelerated processing unit – which it aims to squeeze into the Windows 8 tablet market above Intel's Atom line and below Chipzilla's lowest-power Core processor, the i3. The Austin, Texas, chip designers just might have a solid offering for …

    Hardware 9 Oct 04:01

  • Patent troll targets ZTE

    Legal hit lands after US congress adds ZTE, Huawei, to security risk list

    Chinese telecoms kit maker ZTE was hit with more bad news on Monday when intellectual property firm Vringo announced it was suing the firm’s UK subsidiary over patent infringement. Vringo, which claims it has an IP portfolio of over 500 patents and patent applications in the telecoms space, said it had asked ZTE in September …

    Business 9 Oct 04:21

  • NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson expects toothbrush commerce

    Also says Big Data is really about Little Data

    Toothbrushes will go online and encourage you to buy new ones once their bristles wear out, according to Zach Nelson, CEO of software-as-a-service outfit NetSuite. Speaking at an event in Sydney today, Nelson occasionally suggested he and NetSuite's founders may be a candidate for consideration as a “genius visionary.” He wasn …

    Business 9 Oct 04:36

  • Pakistan blocks 20,000 sites in wake of anti-Islam vid

    YouTube just the start for anxious censors

    Pakistani authorities have revealed that a whopping 20,000 web sites have been taken offline as part of a nationwide crackdown on “objectionable” content. The purge took places as part of government efforts across the Muslim world in the wake of widespread anger at “Innocence of Muslims” – a film ridiculing the Prophet …

    Policy 9 Oct 04:59

  • New Zealand issues Hobbit money

    Previousss coins have horrible exchange rate

    New Zealand has issued coins, all legal tender, marked with ElvenDwarven runes and bearing images of scenes and characters from the new Hobbit film trilogy. The coins are of course collectibles, but New Zealand Post describes them as “legal tender commemorative coins.” That means you could plonk them down on a Kiwi bar and …

    Bootnotes 9 Oct 05:08

  • Huawei says US probe had 'predetermined outcome'

    Argues Congress found no “clear information or evidence” of security risk

    Huawei has hit back at the US Congress'House intelligence Committee report labelling it a business US companies should avoid if they value their privacy and security. In a canned statement, the company says “... despite our best effort, the Committee appears to have been committed to a predetermined outcome.” The company says …

    Security 9 Oct 06:14

  • Borderlands 2 review

    Smash and grab

    Loot and shoot, shoot and loot: Borderlands 2 in a proverbial nutshell. Thank goodness then that it’s looting and shooting of the highest order, as another intrepid gang of vault hunters get tooled up and head into the wastelands, with the lure of untold wealth at the forefront of their minds. Crash and carry Like its …

    reghardware 9 Oct 07:00

  • IBM wrestles controls, pulls midrange array sales out of death dive

    EMC strato-jet looks down as other flap wings, gasp

    IBM's move away from legacy DS3000/5000 storage arrays to newer XIV and StorWize midrange arrays is paying off with growing sales. A graph of vendors' external disk array revenues, drawn up by Stifel Nicolaus analyst Aaron Rakers, shows an IBM upturn in the last quarter. IBM and EMC are the only two enjoying a rise, everyone …

    Storage 9 Oct 07:29

  • Don't delete that email! Why you must keep biz docs for 6 YEARS

    Comment Don't be caught out when lawyers knock on the IT dept door

    Companies should retain project emails and documents in a central repository for more than six years before considering deleting the information, an expert in resolving IT disputes has said. Ian Birdsey of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com, said that organisations should consider retaining the information for …

    Business 9 Oct 08:00

  • Citrix XenServer 6.1 fires live VMs from cannon across servers

    Wanna avoid downtime? Well, just put this helmet on...

    Citrix Systems is still in the server virtualization hypervisor racket, although it doesn't make as much noise about it as it used to. The company has released XenServer 6.1 with a bunch of new features that make it competitive with VMware ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V, which is good for existing Xen customers but probably will not …

    Servers 9 Oct 08:19

  • HTC profits lobbed off a cliff by rivals Samsung and Apple

    And revenue plunges in Q3 as mobes fail to impress punters

    Troubled Taiwanese mobe maker HTC suffered another body blow on Monday as it announced a whopping 79 per cent drop in Q3 net profits year on year. The once proud smartphone giant admitted its net income tumbled from NT$18.64bn (£397m) in the third quarter of 2011 to just NT$3.9bn (£82.9m) in the same period this year. Revenue …

    Financial News 9 Oct 08:36

  • Face-recognising spy drone tech tapped up by... Quantum

    Storage giant jumps into live video processing game

    Quantum's StorNext file system could be used in the hunt for terrorist suspects in the near future. The storage giant has invested in video search tech biz NerVve so images and footage - such as material recorded from military surveillance drones - can be indexed and retrieved from StorNext vaults. StorNext is a suite of …

    Storage 9 Oct 09:02

  • Rover spots 'possibly artificial' MYSTERY SHINY OBJECT on Mars

    Might be a piece of Curiosity, speculates NASA

    Martian nuclear tank Curiosity has spotted a bright metallic-looking object sparkling on the planet's surface as it went in for its first soil sample, which could be a piece of the robot rover itself. The rover was scooping sand for the first time with its robotic arm when its camera picked up on the object. NASA boffins have …

    Science 9 Oct 09:20

  • SpaceX Falcon 9 flameout leaves commercial satellite in wrong orbit

    ISS cargo on track, private sector customer looking blue

    The Falcon 9 rocket from upstart rocket firm SpaceX, which lifted off yesterday with supplies for the International Space Station, will deliver those supplies successfully following loss of an engine during launch. However a commercial satellite which was also aboard the rocket has been placed into a lower orbit than planned as …

    Science 9 Oct 09:28

  • New British tax-cuts-for-patents scheme criticised

    Consultants and lawyers think it's just spiffing, though

    A new tax cut tied to the number of patents a business owns could lead to a wave of trivial patents being filed, favour big businesses over small businesses, and distort research priorities, speakers at the London Patent Summit warned today. Businesses have broadly welcomed the Patent Box tax scheme that will see them getting …

    Small Biz 9 Oct 09:38

  • Campaigners roll out political-correctness Voight-Kampff CAPTCHAs

    Works on (truthful) unrighteous - but not so well on bots

    Politically correct security experts have come up with a Voight-Kampff version of CAPTCHAs, the popular but sometimes irritating challenges designed to make sure that a human and not a bot is behind a request to sign-up for an online service or post a comment on an online forum. The Civil Rights Defenders CAPTCHA asks …

    Security 9 Oct 09:57

  • O2 flogs logs of mobe locations to anyone with a wallet

    This anonymised guy lives here, works there ...

    Telefonica, the owner of the O2 brand, has set up a new division to exploit its massive heap of customer data. This means selling punters' movement patterns and the number of people ambling through a particular spot to anyone with the cash. Telefónica Dynamic Insights will sift through the data to see what's worth selling, …

    Mobile 9 Oct 10:19

  • That horrendous iPhone empurplement - you're holding it wrong

    'Grip your digital tool correctly, all will be well'

    ALL iPhones put a purple flare on photos they take, Apple has admitted, but only if they are held incorrectly. The tech giant has responded to complaints that snaps are marred by a thistle-tinted haze - but blamed incompetent fanbois rather than coughing to a hardware fault. Punters experiencing purple flares, hazes and spots …

    Hardware 9 Oct 10:36

  • 'Apps are replacing people everywhere', says Canalys chief

    Channel Forums But not Channel guys delivering apps, so be one of them!

    Forget the recession - the reseller channel is in rude heath and there are a raft of biz opportunities coming into sharp focus, according to the chief at bean counter Canalys. At Canalys' Channel Forum 2012, CEO Steve Brazier said times were tough in the first half of this year, but distributors and the top 12 vendors - …

    The Channel 9 Oct 10:58

  • 'Small' upheaval at McAfee, not many fired

    The guy who knows how many, we already sacked him

    Intel-owned security firm McAfee is planning to lay off some of its 7,000-strong global workforce, a company spokesman in the US has said. The No 2 maker of antivirus software would not give any further details about the planned redundancies, only admitting that a "small percentage" of staff would be axed. The US spokesman …

    Security 9 Oct 11:43

  • HP: PC industry has forgotten how to innovate

    Windows 8? Oh, that. Listen, check out this 'sleekbook'

    HP told a meeting of dealers and distributors today that the PC industry has itself to blame for a lack of growth over the last five years due to a paucity of innovation. Eric Cador, Senior Vice President and General Manager, EMEA for HP, took to the stage at the Canalys Channels Forum in Barcelona to lift the sheets on the …

    The Channel 9 Oct 11:58

  • Red Hatters seal chumship with Zend on OpenShift PHP cloud

    Now you can Zend it like Beckham

    Red Hat is still only previewing its OpenShift platform cloud, and one of the reasons why is because it had not yet inked a deal with Zend Technologies, the commercial entity that is to the PHP programming language as Linux Torvalds and Red Hat together are to the Linux operating system. But that is all going to be fixed now …

    Developer 9 Oct 12:15

  • VMware crams more cloudy calories in vCloud Suite's cakehole

    VMworld Europe Chubby control freak now with more to grab hold of

    VMware's vCloud Suite is not even two months old and just started shipping a month ago - yet the virtualisation titan is already stuffing more wares into its cloudy tool suite, which does not have the vRAM memory tax but rather simple per-socket pricing. At the VMworld Europe shindig in Barcelona, Spain today, the updated …

    Virtualization 9 Oct 12:30

  • iPad Mini pics spied on Twitter

    Mock-up or real deal?

    We don’t who Sonny Dickson is - a “tech enthusiast” and “9to5Mac researcher”, apparently - but he’s just posted a small set of iPad Mini pictures on his Twitter feed. Alas, there isn’t a shot of the device working, so the unit on his desk may simply by one of the many mock-ups that have been doing the rounds of late. Certainly …

    reghardware 9 Oct 12:44

  • BT Infinity customers hit by outages at 'third party peering network'

    Telco cops to five-day-long 'major packet loss'

    BT Infinity customers have been complaining about peering issues that have prevented some of them from accessing popular websites for nearly five days. And now, after some haranguing, the national telco has said sorry for the service disruptions its punters have been moaning about. BT said in a statement to The Register: We …

    Broadband 9 Oct 12:51

  • Natwest's Get Cash app pulled, but NOTHING to do with frauds

    Yes there were frauds, yes it is pulled, but NO NO NO

    Natwest has pulled a feature on its banking app that lets users get cash without a bank card. The removal of "Get Cash" from the app comes two days after reports that a fraudster used the feature to "get cash" - from another person's account. The BBC reported that a Natwest customer had been diddled out of £900 through a thief …

    Security 9 Oct 13:21

  • 'It's not a post-PC world: Just a post Windows one, maybe'

    Channels Forum Redmond is like Apple - it makes distributors cross too

    Channel watchers Canalys celebrated the launch of Windows 8 this month by declaring we are now in the "post Windows" era. Canalys CEO Steve Brazier kicked off the Channels Forum conference with a state of the industry keynote which questioned how much success Redmond could expect on the back of the Win8 launch, particularly as …

    The Channel 9 Oct 13:54

  • Google finds MORE slurped Street View data down under

    Ad giant unearths two more disks down back of sofa

    The Australian wing of Google has found yet more disks containing slurped payload data - including emails and passwords - its Street View spycars gobbled from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks across the globe. The advertising giant wrote to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner on Monday confessing that it had …

    Media 9 Oct 14:37

  • Edge-of-space skydiver grounded by ANOTHER bout of bad wind

    Updated Baumgartner's mission still on hold

    Skydiving Felix Baumgartner, his mind filled with dreams of reaching supersonic speeds in the highest-ever free fall attempted by a human being... is still sitting in the desert twiddling his thumbs. Adverse winds over New Mexico, where he will attempt to land after his death-defying plummet from the edge of space, have once …

    Science 9 Oct 14:45

  • Integrated storage hardware is DEAD, software firm says

    VMworld It's the food and the service that count, not the plates

    Nexenta, the ZFS-based storage software company, is successfully avoiding becoming a storage hardware supplier - although that could make life easier. But it believes hardware storage companies are doomed in the long run. The future is open storage software running in servers that abstracts and commoditises storage hardware. …

    Storage 9 Oct 14:58

  • STONEHENGE: Attack of the RAYGUN HISTORIANS

    Hmm, just as we thought. No sign of aliens after all

    Laser-toting historians have found that Stonehenge was architecturally rigged to show off the solstices. The UK government's adviser on the historic environment, English Heritage, used 3D laser scanning tech to analyse the pillars of Stonehenge, with results that back up the idea that the monument is all about the winter and …

    Science 9 Oct 15:32

  • Quantum computer boffin 'had to sit down' on getting Nobel Prize call

    Deserved glory, trouserfuls of cash for French/US pair

    The Nobel Prize for physics has gone to French and US boffins for their work quantum manipulation. Serge Haroche of Collège de France and David Wineland at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the University of Colorado will share the prize and the £744,000 winnings that go with it for work on single photons …

    Science 9 Oct 16:01

  • ARM upstart Calxeda pours $55m into server chip war chest

    Hints at future 64-bit processors

    ARM chip upstart Calxeda is lining its coffers as it prepares to do battle with its 32-bit EnergyCore ECX-1000 processors, and two more cores in its roadmap, to conquer some corner of the server world. Calxeda now has more than 100 employees, who work in its Austin, Texas headquarters as well as in development labs in Silicon …

    Servers 9 Oct 17:04

  • ZTE slams Congress spying claims, doubles down on sales ban

    'Ban all Chinese hardware and see where it gets you'

    ZTE has defended itself against claims that its hardware is a security risk and has suggested that if Congress is that concerned, it should recommend not buying any Chinese-manufactured equipment, which would include tech sold by Western companies who have outsourced their manufacturing. On Monday the US House of …

    Networks 9 Oct 19:55

  • Mobile phone downloads now a blip on the radar: ABS

    From miniscule to a little less miniscule

    Downloads to handsets are growing fast in Australia – albeit off a tiny base – but still failing to make a dent in the Great Australian Fixed Broadband Data Slurp. The latest Internet Use, Australia report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics1 seems to demonstrate not a fixed-mobile substitution, but a change in mobile …

    Networks 9 Oct 21:31

  • Judge goes postal on Kim Dotcom extradition appeal

    US court rejects the 'I never got that letter' defence

    Kim Dotcom’s attempts to escape US prosecution on the grounds that his company Megaupload was not based in the country has been thrown out of US District Court. Judge Liam O'Grady deemed Megaupload's dismissal demands to be "extreme" and denied the request. Federal prosecutors argued that team Megaupload’s line of reasoning “ …

    Policy 9 Oct 22:28

  • MIT team sketches nanotubes with special pencil

    This should put the lead in

    Researchers from MIT have demonstrated a technique that allows them to draw a line of carbon nanotubes – with a mechanical pencil. Their aim is to develop a production technique for nanotube-based sensors for detecting hazardous chemicals in the environment. Nanotubes are good at this, but expensive and difficult to produce …

    Science 9 Oct 23:10

  • Kernel crimps make Windows 8 a hacker hassle

    The kernel is the new battleground, says ReactOS and iOS co-author Alex Ionescu

    Windows 8 will make hackers' lives hard, says Windows internals expert, security researcher and co-author of Apple's iOS and the open source Windows XP clone ReactOS, Alex Ionescu. Now chief architect at CrowdStrike, a security company focused on nation-state adversaries, Ionescu says Windows 8 builds on the usermode exploit …

    Security 9 Oct 23:48