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4th December 2012 Archive

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  • Halfbrick takes gaming to another level

    Switches on multi-language analytics

    Australian game developer Halfbrick Studios has partnered with mobile analytics outfit OtherLevels to accelerate its global mobile gaming strategy across 13 languages and markets. Following the success of Halfbrick’s Fruit Ninja game which has been downloaded over 300 million times, the studio sought a partner to amplify the …

    Business 4 Dec 00:27

  • MySQL gains new batch of vulns

    Overruns, privileges, DoS and more

    A series of posts on ExploitDB by an author signing as “King Cope” reveal a new set of MySQL vulnerabilities – along with one issue that could just be a configuration issue. The vulnerabilities, which emerged on Saturday, include a denial-of-service demonstration, a Windows remote root attack, two overrun attacks that work on …

    Security 4 Dec 02:00

  • Facebook invites users to vote away voting rights, some privacy

    Deadline of December 10 for ballots

    Voting has officially opened for users of Facebook to decide if they agree with the proposed changes Zuckerberg and his crew want to make to the site's terms and conditions. On November 21, the company announced that it wanted to change its rules to get rid of the system of user voting and instead have a complaints page, which …

    Business 4 Dec 02:27

  • Autonomy founder attacks HP fraud charges with new website

    Claims to represent former management team

    British software entrepreneur and Autonomy founder Mike Lynch has launched a new website dedicated to airing his ongoing grievances with HP, which has accused him and other former Autonomy execs of misrepresenting the company's finances. The site, which is hosted at AutonomyAccounts.org, says it aims to provide "relevant …

    Business 4 Dec 02:34

  • Internet shut-down easier, in more countries, than you think

    A look at Renesys’ ‘could it happen to you?’ analysis

    Given Syria’s recent “have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again?” Internet experience, analysing what other countries this might happen to is a good idea. It’s a particularly pertinent question given the current America-Versus-The-Black-Helicopters scenario currently playing out at WCIT, as countries line up …

    Networks 4 Dec 02:41

  • Assange: Google, Facebook run 'side projects' for US spooks

    Labels Facebook 'undreamt of even by the worst'

    WikiMartyr-in-waiting Julian Assange has emitted another screed in which he shares his belief that democracy is being dangerously undermined by government monitoring of the internet, and that Facebook and Google are helping those efforts. Chatting with RT, Assange has outlined his belief that nations now conduct surveillance …

    Security 4 Dec 02:42

  • China Mobile squares up to Siri with voice portal

    How do you rate your chances in China now, Siri?

    China Mobile, is set to launch its own Siri-like voice assistant service on Wednesday, a move which will provide more unwelcome local competition for Apple in the world’s biggest smartphone market. The carrier, which is the world’s largest by subscribers, will unveil its “intelligent voice portal” at its global developers …

    Networks 4 Dec 05:10

  • Voyager 1 arrives on ‘magnetic highway for charged particles’

    Next exit: interstellar space

    Venerable spacecraft Voyager 1 has arrived in the most distant part of space that can be considered part of the solar system. NASA has labelled this region of space “a magnetic highway for charged particles” because it contains particles radiating out from the sun along with interstellar particles zipping into our …

    Science 4 Dec 05:48

  • Chinese student fails job interview because of iPhone

    Fruity phone seen as symbol of pampered and decadent youth

    An incensed university student in China’s Jilin province has taken to the web to vent his frustration at being rejected during a job interview after his interviewer spotted that he owned an iPhone. The unlucky fourth year student, surnamed Gao, attended the interview at the tail end of November in Changchun city, only to be …

    Jobs 4 Dec 05:57

  • UK.gov: 'Foreign cyber reconnaissance' underway in UK

    Eyes on tentacles peer from network pipes around YOU

    Foreign states may already have used malware to map the networks that support the UK's critical infrastructure systems, the government admitted. The admission by government officials came in the run-up to a parliamentary statement by Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude, marking the first anniversary of the UK's government's …

    Security 4 Dec 06:02

  • LG ramps up fabless chip plans - report

    CES debut predicted for smart TV with tweaked ARM designs

    LG could be set to take its first major leap towards carving out a new role as a fabless chipmaker next month when it debuts its H13 processor inside a smart TV at CES in Las Vegas. The Korean electronics giant revealed back in April 2011 that it had struck a deal with British chip designer ARM to license its Cortex processor …

    Business 4 Dec 06:15

  • Littlest pirate’s Winnie-the-Pooh laptop on the way home

    10-year-old Finnish girl’s Dad settles with Big Content

    The ten-year-old girl accused of piracy in Finland will probably still find it hard to stay off Santa’s naughty list, but has at least cost her family only €300 after attempting to pinch a Finnish pop song. Big Content, in the form of the Finnish Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Centre (CIAPC), was last week revealed to …

    Security 4 Dec 06:30

  • Xboxes stay on sale but may cost Microsoft money in Google case

    We have a patent governing those pants you're wearing

    Google-owned Motorola won't be granted an injunction against Microsoft's Xbox games console, but only on the grounds that Redmond will cough up the readies if necessary. Motorola had mooted the injunction in response to Microsoft's suit claiming patent infringements on Android handsets. But a federal judge in Seattle has …

    Law 4 Dec 07:02

  • Adobe demands 7,000 years a day from humankind

    Feature It's all in the EULA fine print

    I'm not a very good liar, I haven't got the memory for it, which is why it always pricks my conscience whenever I tick the yes box to the prompt "I have read and understood…" when installing software. I am, of course, fibbing. I never read a word. In fact, even though we all tick yes to these agreements every day, unless you're …

    Software 4 Dec 08:00

  • AMD finishes its 'Piledriver' Opteron server chip rollout

    Looking ahead to 'Steamroller' and 'Excavator', presumably

    AMD has had a wrenching couple of years, and its executives are wrestling with so many transitions in the processor market and inside AMD that they are just punting out the new Opteron 4300 and 3300 CPUs for entry servers without making a fuss with the press or analyst communities. No briefings, no fuss, no muss, here's the …

    Servers 4 Dec 08:02

  • How to find what you need when you need it

    Archiving advice from Reg readers

    When the bell tolls, you really want to be sure that you can find the relevant documents and emails you need to support your case. For most of us, that bell rarely tolls and we live in hope that the ad-hoc measures we’ve cobbled together will see us through when it does. For others that bell doesn’t just toll, it’s like Tinnitus …

    Business 4 Dec 09:04

  • Hero Playmonaut lost at sea as SPEARS ditches in Channel

    MYSTERY of balloon's unpredictable strato-lunge

    It's with heavy hearts that we report the loss of the Special Project Bureau's heroic playmonaut, after the Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) balloon launch on Saturday ended in the English Channel off the coast of Sussex. The flight was intended to test the Special Project Electronic Altitude Release System (SPEARS …

    SPB 4 Dec 09:26

  • Nutanix server-storage half-bloods armed with Xeon E5s

    Adds KVM alongside ESXi for virty server slicing

    Nutanix, which uncloaked last year peddling a virtualisation-driven all-in-one compute-and-storage appliance, is updating its server iron to keep pace with the rest of the tier-one players while also tweaking its underlying systems software. And the startup hopes to tweak its NX series of converged appliances to cope with a …

    Storage 4 Dec 10:03

  • Lovefilm does a Wii after rival gets loaded on new Nintendo

    Wii U version coming to compete with Netflix 'soon'

    Britain’s eight million Nintendo Wii owners now have a reason to blow the dust off their console and power it up once more. Well, at least those of them who also happen to be Lovefilm subscribers do. According to the Amazon-owned streamer of films and TV shows, it has just released a free app on the console’s online shop. The …

    Media 4 Dec 10:10

  • Is it all over for UK.gov's G-Cloud 3.0? A footnote in history awaits

    At least you tried

    The clock is ticking on G-Cloud, the UK government's IT shopping catalogue for the public sector. A year in, those running the programme are already dreaming of life after the project and admit significant cultural hurdles stand in the way of their success. G-Cloud is the Cabinet Office’s plan to make government IT more …

    Government 4 Dec 10:23

  • Rumble in the Tumblr: Troll-worm infected thousands of blogs

    Infamous crew unleashed JavaScript nasty on trendy journals

    A worm spread like wildfire across Tumblr on Monday, defacing pages on the blogging website with an abusive message penned by a notorious trolling crew. The outbreak was triggered by the GNAA, a group of anonymous troublemakers who get their kicks from winding up bloggers with offensive posts. Tumblr temporarily halted the …

    Security 4 Dec 10:38

  • WD to crash down five terabyte desktop job, mutterings suggest

    Table-shattering monster sighted in Russia

    A Russian tech website has revealed what appears to be Western Digital's roadmap for 5TB desktop and NAS drives. Always More Digital has images of what it claims are two WD presentation slides for its Green desktop and Red NAS 3.5-inch drives, which show 5TB models coming in the fourth quarter of 2013. WD Green desktop drive …

    Storage 4 Dec 11:12

  • Oracle suffers premature remuneration: Spaffs $900m on shareholders

    Year's worth of dividends dished out early to avoid tax hike

    Oracle is paying shareholders $867m in quarterly dividends early to beat a possible 2013 US tax hike. The company declared on Monday an accelerated second, third and fourth quarter cash dividend of $0.18 per share of outstanding common stock. The bonanza will be paid on 21 December 2012 instead of quarterly in 2013. Oracle’s …

    Financial News 4 Dec 11:35

  • Irish data-cops 'fooled' by Facebook, claims Austrian privacy group

    Needs 'astronomical' funds for planned court campaign

    Skint campaigners fighting against proposed changes to Facebook's privacy policy are threatening to force the Irish Data Commissioner's office to defend its decisions in court. Austrian student group europe-v-facebook has accused the Irish DPC of being "fooled" by Mark Zuckerberg's free-content ad network, which boasts 1 …

    Law 4 Dec 11:53

  • Motörheadphönes Overkill earphones review

    Only way to feel the noise is when it's good'n'loud

    I like Motörheadphönes’ cans, but when I’m out and about I’d prefer a pair of ‘phones that are a little more discreet and, yes, easier to stash when not in use. Enter the band’s in-canal cans: Overkill. And Trigger too, since both sets sport identical business ends. Only price and the presence of a microphone/remote control …

    Hardware 4 Dec 12:02

  • Quantum axes one in ten workers, insists it was not investor's idea

    Backup biz tries to pull out of tape nosedive

    Troubled tape'n'disk biz Quantum has laid off roughly 10 per cent of its workforce. Quantum has struggling to rebuild its business since the tape backup market declined in the wake of disk-to-disk backup. It has made investments and acquisitions in the software data management area, the latest bringing Amplidata object storage …

    Storage 4 Dec 12:24

  • Qualcomm throws Sharp a $120m bone for IGZO display tech

    Old school tech firms still have a trick or two left

    US chip designer Qualcomm will take a bite out of Sharp for up to 9.9bn yen ($121m), and plug its mobile display subsidiary Pixtronix into the Japanese telly biz. Qualcomm is interested in Sharp's new indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO) screen technology which doesn't draw as much power as regular LCDs and has better resolution, …

    Financial News 4 Dec 13:02

  • Operation Hunt the Hunter: Anonymous targets 'revenge porn' man

    The unidentifiable in pursuit of the unpalatable

    Hacktivist collective Anonymous has set its sights on the former owner of a "revenge porn" website. Hunter Moore gained internet infamy by posting sexually revealing images of men and women without their permission, alongside links to their social networking profiles. The images were normally submitted by aggrieved ex- …

    Security 4 Dec 13:26

  • The Times offers subsidised Nexus 7s to get subscribers

    Or Google offers subsidised Times to sell 'slabs

    One day on from the announced closure of The Daily - which was Rupert Murdoch's first attempt at a fondleslab-only newspaper - his British broadsheet the Times is flogging cheap Nexus 7 tablets to those who subscribe to the paper. The Google tablet normally retails at around £199, but Times and Sunday Times readers who sign-up …

    Tablets 4 Dec 13:52

  • Yahoo! comes! out! guns! blazing! to! end! $2.7bn! Mexican! standoff!

    Don't panic! Don't panic!

    Yahoo! isn't worrying about a Mexico City civil court's $2.7bn preliminary judgment against it because it has loads of grounds for appeal, a source insisted. According to those in the know, there were errors in court procedures and in the application of the law that the web firm could use to get the initial ruling overturned …

    Law 4 Dec 14:28

  • Windows 8 fails to revive world CPU biz

    Forecasts scaled back as analysts, trade see continued decline

    IHS iSuppli, a market watcher, has admitted that its expects world PC sales to fall this year even further than it previously thought they would. Whatever the degree of decline, it will mark the first time global personal computer shipments have fallen in 11 years. In a discussion of world chip sales posted yesterday, iSuppli …

    Hardware 4 Dec 14:40

  • Wi-Fi routers able to manage bandwidth by app are offered

    Keep the IT shack CoD fast by choking that vid conference

    The latest wi-fi routers know which applications are asking for wireless connectivity and can prioritise those that matter while still letting data trickle to those which don't. The technique, which maker Aruba calls "AppRF", looks at the packets to work out what each wi-fi client is doing, allowing the enterprise to decide …

    Networks 4 Dec 15:05

  • Brr, feeling cold? Galaxy is home to plenty of WARMER Earth twins

    More Sun-like systems could be teeming with life than previously thought

    Boffins believe terrestrial planets orbiting Sun-like stars in the galaxy are probably more hospitable to life than Earth, thanks to their balmy subsurface temperatures. Tectonic plates meet under the Atlantic Ocean From the stars found by the HARPS (High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher) spectrometer at the …

    Science 4 Dec 15:36

  • Revealed: The gift that keeps on giving to Oracle ... is dying

    Open ... and Shut How the deep well of enterprise licence cash will dry up

    Even as traditional enterprise IT vendors come under pressure from modern cloud and open-source applications, these old-school businesses have one strategy that is the gift that keeps on giving: Enterprise licence agreements. Not only do ELAs help to shield vendors from pricing pressure from open-source alternatives, they also …

    Management 4 Dec 16:06

  • EMC mashes up big data, clouds, coders into SECRET crack team

    Keeps schtum on mystery Pivotal Initiative

    The rumor mill has been buzzing that EMC and its virtualization and cloud minion VMware and its much smaller big data and programming sidekick Greenplum would be mashed up into some kind of new company group. And it turns out the rumors were right. In a blog post from Terry Anderson, vice-president of corporate communications …

    Virtualization 4 Dec 16:51

  • HP salivates over the future brontobyte digital universe

    Discover 2012 Peddling Vertica and Autonomy wares in the yottabyte era

    The amount of digital data that the world is creating and passing around is swelling a lot faster than revenues and profits at Hewlett-Packard and its peers in the traditional IT racket, but you can't blame them for getting excited about trying to capitalize on that data explosion. You can, however, blame them for overdoing it a …

    Software 4 Dec 18:16

  • US and UK spooks alerted over massive Swiss data leak

    Rogue IT admin plundered state secrets

    The Swiss intelligence agency (NDB) has been warning its US and UK counterparts that it may have lost terabytes of their secret information, thanks to one of its IT administrators pulling an inside job. The rogue administrator, whom a source described to Reuters as "very talented," had admin rights to most of the NBD's servers …

    Security 4 Dec 19:25

  • Half of all app store revenue goes to just 25 developers

    Top app earners carve up $60m pie

    Apple's App Store and the Google Play store each claim to offer over 700,000 apps to choose from, but only a tiny fraction of them bring in significant revenue for their developers, according to research from analyst firm Canalys. In fact, the company says, of the $120m in total revenue generated from paid app downloads and in …

    Business 4 Dec 20:59

  • Pioneering spidernaut snuffs it after short Smithsonian stay

    Orbital arachnid made giant leap for spiderkind

    America's first spacefaring jumping spider has died, three days after being delivered for display in her new home at the Smithsonian Museum’s Insect Zoo. The arachnid, a red-backed jumping spider (Phidippus johnsoni) nicknamed Neffi after the Egyptian queen Nefertiti, spent over 100 days in orbit on the International Space …

    Science 4 Dec 21:53

  • Whitman: HP '100 per cent committed' to Autonomy

    Discover 2012 Big, innovative, and profitable – excepting those massive writeoffs

    Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman kicked off the Discover 2012 customer and partner event today in Frankfurt with a keynote address meant to calm everyone down about HP and its future. And she trotted out her lieutenants in the enterprise hardware and software groups to help make her case. Whitman made no bones about the fact …

    Business 4 Dec 21:58

  • Removing the irrational from application rationalisation

    When porting to the cloud, only take those applications that make sense

    Are you hoping to forklift some of your applications over to the cloud, to take advantage of cost savings? By all means evaluate it, but understand all of the implications for the applications and the business processes that they support. Rationalisation is one of the most important steps in that understanding. Before deciding …

    ALM 4 Dec 22:30

  • Court slaps down Verizon, upholds FCC data roaming rule

    Carriers can like it or lump it

    A US federal appeals court has unanimously upheld a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rule that required wireless carriers to offer roaming data service at "reasonable" rates, rejecting a challenge by leading mobile telco Verizon Wireless. The FCC has long required carriers to offer roaming for voice calls, which allows …

    Mobile 4 Dec 22:47