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20th December 2012 Archive

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  • After Sandy Hook, Senator calls for violent video game probe

    Here we go again

    Gun control remains a politically fraught issue in the US, even after such events as the December 14 mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, but one top lawmaker has proposed legislation that could lead to tighter restrictions on firearms – at least the imaginary kind. On Wednesday, Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat from West …

    Games 20 Dec 00:45

  • Report: US government plans legal assault on foreign hackers

    'So Mr Bond, you have a writ for me?'

    The US is planning a legal assault on the international hacking community and the companies – and governments – that use IP stolen from America. John Carlin, the principal deputy assistant attorney general in the US Department of Justice’s national security division told Defense News that the DOJ was training over 100 special …

    Law 20 Dec 00:50

  • Valve hauls down The War Z, offers refunds

    Top-selling game on Steam (and most hated)

    Valve has performed a humiliating climb-down over zombie game The War Z, pulling the game from Steam and offering refunds to players. The game launched to two huge customer responses: it became simultaneously the top-selling game on Steam, and the most hated. This Reddit thread will give you the flavour. After first defending …

    Games 20 Dec 01:05

  • AWS stops some EC2 servers without warning

    ‘Retirement’ notifications not entirely accurate or reliable

    If you’re thinking about heading to the cloud for über-reliability and an environment in which anything that happens to hardware is someone else’s problem, think again: Amazon Web Services sometimes replaces the hardware virtual servers run on and switches those servers off without elegant or accurate notifications of what’s …

    Cloud 20 Dec 01:07

  • Yahoo! China! kills! music! search! service!

    Plans to sink pirates’ deep links

    Yahoo! China has finally decided to follow the lead of rival Google and shut its online music service, ostensibly as part of an overall strategy change but in a move which will also remove a service known for deep linking to pirated content. Yahoo! China said in a brief message on its Music site that the service would end on …

    Networks 20 Dec 01:42

  • Apache plug-in doles out Zeus attack

    Points victims to ‘Sweet Orange’ exploit server, slurps banking credentials

    Anti-virus outfit Eset has discovered a malicious Apache module in the wild that serves up malware designed to steal banking credentials. As the company states in this post, the module, dubbed Linux/Chapro, is already being used to inject a version of Win32/Zbot (Zeus) into content served by the compromised Web servers. The …

    Security 20 Dec 02:26

  • Former Windows boss Sinofsky lands Harvard teaching gig

    After Microsoft, time for a 'sabbatical'

    Former Microsoft Windows boss Steven Sinofsky is leaving corporate life behind – at least for a while – for a new gig teaching product development at Harvard Business School. The former exec, who stepped down from his position at Microsoft in November, dished the news in a Twitter post on Wednesday, in which he described his …

    Business 20 Dec 02:30

  • Windows Vista woes killed MS Pinball

    There's no Pinball in Win 8 either, and look how well it's going

    Pinball, the popular game shipped with desktop versions of Windows from 32-bit Windows 95 to XP, didn’t make it into Windows Vista because Microsoft just didn’t have the time to port its code into a 64-bit version. So says Raymond Chen, author of MSDN Blog The Old New Thing and a long-time member of the Windows Development …

    Operating Systems 20 Dec 03:54

  • University of Western Sydney hands out 11k iPads

    All students and staff to fondle slabs in ‘blended learning’ plan

    Every new student at Australia’s University of Western Sydney (UWS) will be given an iPad next year. Founded in 1989, UWS has six campuses spread across Western Sydney, a sprawling region characterised as the working-class heart of the city, as opposed to the more affluent coastal suburbs. The university is probably not many …

    Tablets 20 Dec 04:27

  • Japanese firm lifts lid on Android-controlled toilet

    Vid iOS fanbois must cross their legs and wait

    Japan has been at the cutting edge of toilet design for decades and has one of the highest rates of smartphone penetration on the planet, so it’s perhaps fitting that it has now combined the two by introducing a hi-tech Android-powered loo which enables hands-free toilet action. Japanese lav-maker Lixil has unveiled the Satis …

    Bootnotes 20 Dec 05:30

  • 'NAND flash killer now up to 10,000 times MORE efficient'

    Exit amps and enter volts

    MeRAM has the potential to succeed NAND flash as the best non-volatile sold state memory with DRAM-like speed, better-than-NAND endurance and density, and now it has taken a step forward, with UCLA research making the stuff 10 to 10,000 times more energy-efficient. UCLA boffins - led by Raytheon professor of electrical …

    Storage 20 Dec 06:03

  • Euro Commission abandons ACTA court request

    No point in flogging the dead horse

    ACTA is completely, finally, no-turning-back dead-and-buried in Europe, with the European Commission admitting that there is “no realistic chance” of the treaty being adopted in Europe. The frank assessment of the future of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement was made as the EC withdrew its request that the European Court …

    Policy 20 Dec 06:30

  • High-powered luvvies given new radio home: 'But DON'T disturb the neighbours'

    Stars on the ground outrank stars in the sky

    Production companies will be allowed to operate 10-watt radio links in Channel 38, now that Ofcom has established it won't annoy the radio telescopes operated by nearby countries. Having shuffled the rest of the Programme Makers and Special Effects (PMSE) out of their existing home in Channel 69, in preparation for flogging …

    Networks 20 Dec 07:02

  • Dell slurps BYOD protector firm

    Exploiting the Lose Your Own Device phenomenon

    Dell is buying BYOD and end-point data protection specialist Credant Technologies for an undisclosed sum, but we make a stab at calculating it below. Privately held Credant was founded in 2001 in Addison, near Dallas, Texas - not too far away from Dell near Austin, and has offices elsewhere in the USA, the UK, and Sydney, …

    Storage 20 Dec 08:03

  • Little spider makes big-spider-puppet CLONE of itself out of dirt

    There are no strings attached

    Meet the adroit arachnid that makes a decoy “spider” in its web to mislead predators – and jiggles the strands like a puppet master to make the miniature marionette move. No, really, that's according to conservation biologist Phil Torres, anyway. His full story is here, the spider is apparently alive and well in the Amazon, …

    Science 20 Dec 08:26

  • Wikipedia doesn't need your money - so why does it keep pestering you?

    Special Report 'Excuse me, just a second. Excuse me. Yes you, sir. Excuse me'

    It's that time of year again. As the Christmas lights go up, Wikipedia's donation drive kicks off. Wikipedia claims that the donations are needed to keep the site online. Guilt-tripped journalists including Heather Brooke and Toby Young have contributed to Wikipedia in the belief that donations help fund operating costs. …

    Media 20 Dec 09:02

  • Muppets launch app store guide for little fingers

    Big Bird's tips: Less interactivity is more

    App stores from Apple, Google and Microsoft are choked with hundreds of thousands of apps, with the most popular being free games. The App Store debate is shaped by techies and entrepreneurial types. As such, it mostly breaks down into choice of technology - HTML5 versus native – and, for the VC types, finance - specifically …

    Applications 20 Dec 09:33

  • Boffins cook raw numbers, hope to bake PERFECT kilogram

    Say watt? Pass the foil, my balances don't balance....

    A “recipe” to deliver the perfect kilogram as a mass standard that the world can trust is coming closer to completion as the physicists behind the project bake their raw numbers. International scientists met in late November and pushed forward a 21-page document that'll eventually instruct boffins responsible for managing …

    Science 20 Dec 10:02

  • How many VMs can you stuff in that box? How to get into the VDI biz

    All-flash-array start-ups on getting their virtual desktop gigs

    Greenbytes and Pure Storage are both start-ups well under way with fast and ground-up designed all-flash arrays. Both have a strong VDI focus and say that serving virtual desktop images from their flash arrays is consistently and reliably fast, affordable and secure, and makes hard disk drive arrays look like sluggards. They …

    Virtualization 20 Dec 10:29

  • Sharp-elbowed BT dives into 4G spectrum auction

    Oi, mobile players, gerroff

    BT is among the bidders in the 4G auction, communications regulator Ofcom confirmed today. It's not just mobile operators that are jockeying to get their hands on the spectrum by June 2013. Managed network outfits and the nation's fixed line provider are also in the running. The auction process kicks off next month. Ofcom …

    Mobile 20 Dec 11:10

  • Windows Firefox stiffs Adobe Flash, plays H.264 YouTube vids

    Any HTML5 site using patent-heavy codec welcomed

    Users of the Firefox web browser on Windows can now dump Adobe Flash and still watch H.264-encoded videos online. Fresh overnight builds of Firefox 20 will now play footage found on HTML5 websites, such as YouTube and Vimeo, that use the patent-encumbered video codec - without the need for Adobe's oft-criticised plugin, which …

    Applications 20 Dec 11:23

  • There’s more to selling email than meets the eye

    Providers, set out your stalls

    Cloud is a broad term for several different approaches to delivering IT services. There is currently much discussion about the role of managed service providers (MSPs) in delivering this type of offering to business customers. MSPs could be pivotal to the long-term adoption of such IT solutions since most are acquired from …

    Cloud 20 Dec 11:45

  • US patent office: Nice try Apple, but pinch-to-zoom is NOT a new invention

    MMMM...How'd that rounded corners thing get through?

    The US Patent and Trademark Office has rejected Apple's pinch-to-zoom patent because prior patents covered the invention. Samsung filed the USPTO's preliminary ruling against Apple in court on Wednesday in the US as part of its attempts to get a new trial, rather than letting Apple's $1bn win stand. The pinch-to-zoom patent is …

    Mobile 20 Dec 12:02

  • Samsung spaffs $3.9bn on chip factory in TEXAS

    200 new jobs, expansion starts 2013

    Samsung's has announced that it will be spending $3.9bn upgrading its iPhone chip-making factory in Austin. The South Korean firm said it had finalised the deal after talks with state government officials in Texas. Samsung announced the plans last week, and got the governmental go-ahead last night, according to a report from …

    Business 20 Dec 12:29

  • Cameron defends U-turn on web filth ban, leaves filtering to parents

    'Crude' ISP-level censorship WON'T work, says PM

    Prime Minister David Cameron today reminded British families that they will be nudged by ISPs to consider blocking online pornography, self-harm websites and similar material at home. Crucially, he stopped short of installing the on-by-default "crude system" of network-level web filters promised earlier this year. The top …

    Broadband 20 Dec 13:04

  • Will we still love the data centre seven years from now?

    Readers peer into the crystal ball

    It seems there has never been a clearer understanding of how rapidly business is changing and IT technologies are evolving. With this in mind, we recently ran an online survey to ask readers of The Register how they thought data centres would develop between now and 2020. This is long enough for significant things to happen, …

    Datacenter 20 Dec 13:25

  • Wheee....CRUNCH: Google chucks Moto's set-top box biz out window

    Gets rid of manufacturing facilities at the same time

    Google has sold Motorola Mobility's set-top box business to Arris Group for $2.35bn in cash and stock, in a deal that will go through next year. The internet giant is offloading Motorola Home and getting a 15.7 per cent or so stake in broadband technology firm Arris plus $2.05bn in cash at the same time, Moto announced. Arris …

    Media 20 Dec 13:31

  • PGP, TrueCrypt-encrypted files CRACKED by £300 tool

    Plod at the door? Better yank out that power cable

    ElcomSoft has built a utility that forages for encryption keys in snapshots of a PC's memory to decrypt PGP and TrueCrypt-protected data. Forensic Disk Decryptor attempts to unlock information stored in disks and volumes encrypted by BitLocker, PGP or TrueCrypt. The tool is designed for criminal investigators, IT security bods …

    Security 20 Dec 14:02

  • US: We'll drag cyber-spies into COURT from their hideouts

    'And Iran to prosecute American programmers for Stuxnet?'

    The US Department of Justice has floated a plan to advance criminal prosecutions against cyber-spies. This is after the department's agency, the Defense Security Service (DSS) reported* this week that the number of foreign cyberattacks aimed at snaffling US tech, intellectual property, trade secrets and classified information …

    Law 20 Dec 14:32

  • SPUDS ON A PLANE! Boeing boosts in-flight Wi-Fi with tater tech

    Vid And no sign of Samuel L. Jackson

    Boeing engineers have filled an aeroplane with potatoes to improve wireless internet coverage on flights. Substituting their passengers for approximately 20,000 pounds (9,000kg) of potatoes, engineers at Boeing's Test & Evaluation Laboratory are trying to work out how best to propagate Wi-Fi signals through a busy aeroplane …

    Networks 20 Dec 15:22

  • Outlook 2013 spurns your old Word and Excel documents

    No love for legacy .doc and .xls files

    Microsoft is cutting support for exporting and importing legacy Office documents in the latest version of its Outlook email client. Outlook 2013 won’t let you import or export data to or from .doc or .xls files for Word 1997 to 2003 and Excel versions 1997 to 2003, the company has revealed in a blog. Also getting canned are …

    Applications 20 Dec 15:49

  • Oracle's Ellison wanted an NBA team for Xmas - instead he got Eloqua

    Database giant slam-dunks $871m to win cloud biz

    Larry Ellison has made no secret that he wants to own a professional basketball team. Now he owns a company called Eloqua, which does the marketing for some NBA teams and about 1,200 large corporations. While that is not quite the same thing, Borg'ing small, nice software companies is certainly more Oracle's game than owning …

    Cloud 20 Dec 16:28

  • Dotcom titan funds 'Mark Cuban Chair To Eliminate Stupid Patents'

    Minecraft daddy also chucks in $250k as EFF makes patent law a charity case

    It's not like there's not enough money in the sector. Patent lawyers have been the main beneficiary of the global lawsuits created by the world's richest tech companies suing each other over patents such as "pinch to zoom", page scrolling and round-cornered rectangles. But that's why the reform of patent law has become a …

    Business 20 Dec 17:03

  • TSA agrees to review of perv scanner radiation risks

    Backscatter testing back under the microscope

    The US Transport Security Administration (TSA) has finally agreed to take another look at the potential side-effects of its backscatter Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) scanners, over a year after promising the Senate they'd be right on it. "Administrator Pistole has made a commitment to conduct the study and TSA is following …

    Government 20 Dec 20:04

  • Cheaper, slimmer Google Nexus 7 rumored for Q1 2013

    $99 rumors persist, despite denials

    Google may be readying a revamped model of the middle sibling in its Nexus line of Android devices for as early as the first quarter of 2013, if the supply-chain snoops at Taiwanese tech news site DigiTimes are correct. Sources in the tech manufacturing sector are whispering that the Chocolate Factory and its manufacturing …

    Tablets 20 Dec 20:55

  • Cloud Sherpas bags $40m for cloud consulting expansion

    Gearing up for high-altitude money-making

    The opportunity represented by cloud computing is not just in infrastructure hardware and virtualization, orchestration, and other kinds of software. There is also a services angle, and companies far and wide are scrambling to get in on the action so that the big IT suppliers and consultancies don't get to the top of the …

    Cloud 20 Dec 21:45

  • RIM tax break gives firm $14m profit for third quarter

    Increases cash reserves ahead of BlackBerry 10 launch

    A settlement of an outstanding tax issue, which netted $166m, has allowed RIM to declare a quarterly profit for the first time in many financial announcements. The company said that in its third fiscal quarter of 2013 – and no, that's not a typo – its revenues fell 5 per cent to $2.7bn, down 47 per cent from the same period …

    Financial News 20 Dec 22:55

  • Aussies in 'don't understand location services, just use them' shock!

    What, you can turn location off?

    The most frequent users of mobile location services are the most clueless, according to research conducted for Australia’s telecommunications and media regulator. The Australian Communications and Media Authority research found that “high frequency” users of the services “were less likely to display an understanding of the …

    Networks 20 Dec 23:21

  • Apple said to be testing 46, 55-inch big-screen TVs

    To be shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in January? Wait a minute...

    Apple's much-rumored big-screen TV effort – the one that CEO Tim Cook recently called "an area of intense interest" – is merrily cranking along in a Foxconn factory. So says a source at Hon Hai Precision Industry, Foxconn's parent company, according to Focus Taiwan. The scuttlebutt is that tests of "several designs" of the …

    Hardware 20 Dec 23:33