21st January 2013 Archive

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Oracle reveals cloudy engineered systems

Living in your own private ~~Idaho~~ Larrycloud

Oracle is rolling out private infrastructure as a service clouds, with capacity-on-demand (CoD) pricing, based on its various "engineered systems" setups. Financial services organizations have very stringent – and significantly higher – capital requirements since the Great Recession. These days every million counts and any …

Cloud 21 Jan 01:08
Global mercury ban to hit electronics, plastics, power prices

Minamata Convention will mean mercury runs away by 2020

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has signed off on the Minamata Convention, a new global agreement that will ban mercury from most uses by 2020. UNEP's Mercury: Time to Act book says the substance “damages the central nervous system, thyroid, kidneys, lungs, immune system, eyes, gums and skin” and can result in …

Science 21 Jan 02:55
W3C steps up China outreach with Beijing centre

Standards body wants to tap Sino innovation boom

The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) has established a new centre for its activities in China with the aim of encouraging more local developers and companies to get involved in the global debate to shape the future of the web. The science and tech-centric Beihang University in Beijing will join MIT, Tokyo’s Keio Uni and the …

Networks 21 Jan 04:28
Martian 'lake' said to hint at 'deep biosphere'

McLaughlin crater deposits suggested as proof of life-friendly groundwater

While the Curiosity rover faffs about sending its earthbound doppelganger to help President Obama be inaugurated afresh, NASA's harder-working Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has spotted something interesting at the bottom of a crater, namely clays and other rocks associated with terrestrial lakes and perhaps, just perhaps, …

Science 21 Jan 05:08
Google pulls 'racist' Make Me Asian app

Thousands petitioned for removal of Android app

Google has responded to an online petition by removing an application from its Google Play app store after thousands of netizens suggested it was racist. “Make me Asian” was one of a series of face-changer apps by a developer calling him or herself “KimbereyDeiss”. The same developer offers a a native American version - “Make …

Software 21 Jan 05:38
SimCity to teach SimMaths and SimScience at school

Real Obama will like it, but what will a SimBoss make of a SimCV?

Hot on the heels of news that a Swedish school has decided Minecraft is a great way to teach its kids town planning, games giant Electronic Arts (EA) has does the same by announcing SimCityEDU, a version of the game that embeds the USA's Common Core standards for school curricula in the game. EA’s clearly aware of President …

Games 21 Jan 06:08
Engineers are cold and dead inside, research shows

Unable to care or love, claims Swedish trick-cyclist

A study carried out by psychology researchers in Sweden has shown that people who go into engineering are less caring and empathetic than those who enter professions such as medicine. Trick-cyclist Chato Rasoal and his colleagues determined this by surveying 200 students from six different study programs, using a "well- …

Science 21 Jan 06:58
'End of passwords' predictions are premature - Cambridge boffin

Nice fresh well-salted hash will keep them healthy

Advances in the power of computers won't automatically make passwords obsolete, according to a top computer science researcher. Joseph Bonneau, a postgrad researcher at Cambridge University, looked into the perceived wisdom that runs along these lines: "Since computers are getting exponentially faster, yet the human brain is …

Security 21 Jan 07:58
‘Anonymous’ hacks Oz Uni’s email to protest bulk iPad buy

University of Western Sydney students spammed, made to endure anti-Apple rant

Email servers at the University of Western Sydney, which last year announced it would hand iPads to all staff and over 10,000 incoming students, have been hacked by someone using the name ‘Anonymous’. The University is known to use Microsoft’s live@edu hosted email service. The attacker has used the University’s servers to …

Security 21 Jan 08:18
Mozilla picks JavaScript titan Eich to lead charge against 'Droid, iOS

Must race Ubuntu, Tizen and Sailfish onto the battlefield

JavaScript daddy and Mozilla chief technology officer Brendan Eich is taking over Firefox’s dive into mobile as the open-source shop hits an important juncture. He’s taking over as Mozilla fights for the hearts and minds of devs who might once have defaulted to Firefox, but are now being dazzled with open-source choices. As …

Operating Systems 21 Jan 08:27
X-IO plumps up ISE Station rack to tempt biz barons

Quadruples rackery for cloud, large data centres

X-IO, the sealed SSD/disk drive enclosure supplier, has quadrupled the rack number in its ISE Station product line with an XL model offering 1PB capacity and a million-plus IOPS. X-IO is targeting large data centres and cloud service providers with this big data-eating 4-rack beast. The ISE Station XL comes in four racks …

Storage 21 Jan 08:59
China turns to no-name handsets: Android - without the Google-iness

Thanks for coughing up for development, G

There could be trouble on the horizon for Google. Consumers in the world's biggest mobile phone market appear to be shunning big-name Android handsets for no-name Androids - with Google stripped out. That's the trend identified by Enders analyst Ben Evans in a must-read blog post here. The dataset is mobile traffic to Baidu …

Mobile 21 Jan 09:29
Tech giants don't invent the future, they package it

Open ... and Shut Sanding down the rough edges of progress

Enterprise technology vendors have a serious case of "not invented here" syndrome, and it may be challenging the value that they claim to bring to their customers. After all, none of the big technology trends of the past two decades emerged from the bowels of legacy tech vendors, despite their outsized R&D budgets. Open source …

Management 21 Jan 10:03
We trust computers to fly jets... why not trust them with our petabytes?

Storagebod blog Wait, hold on, software-defined storage ain't so crazy

Listening to The Register's latest Speaking In Tech podcast got me thinking a bit more about the craze of software-defined networking, storage and whatever next. I wondered if it is a real thing as opposed to a load of hype. For the time being I’ve decided to treat software-defined stuff as a real thing, or at least as …

Storage 21 Jan 10:19
Oz library finds Lance Armstrong books a new home: The fiction section

Literary quippery reclassifies disgraced cyclist

An Australian library has announced it will reclassify books by Lance Armstrong as fiction, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. Book browsers at Manly Library in Sydney wishing to draw inspiration from Lance Armstrong: World's Greatest Champion and other titles by the disgraced cyclist were pointed in the right direction by a …

Bootnotes 21 Jan 10:42
Good news, everyone! KDE cookie-scoffing bug smashed after 10 YEARS

Some sort of record? Let us know

A bug in the KDE Linux desktop that made penguin-powered computers spill their cookie jars has been resolved after more than a decade. The flaw in the free-software environment is best described as a glitch or irritant rather than anything serious, but it did cause some systems to forget their web cookies after a reboot or …

Developer 21 Jan 11:05
This week's BBC MELTDOWN: Savile puppet haunts kids' TV

Parents choke on cornflakes at Tweenies shocker

The BBC has apologised for airing an episode of kiddies show The Tweenies featuring a puppet "impersonating Jimmy Savile". Outraged parents choked on their cornflakes on Sunday morning as the offending programme, filmed back in 2001, exposed wide-eyed nippers to "Max" - a character "in a blonde wig, wearing Savile's trademark …

Media 21 Jan 11:23
Web is turning us into kid-ults with no 'private identities' - report

'Hyper-connectivity' is re-defining who we are

Britons' willingness to post every little detail of their lives online is changing the way their identities are constructed, according to a report from the UK’s chief scientific advisor. The web is having a profound effect on how Brits see themselves and how they relate that identity to the world around them, Professor Sir …

Networks 21 Jan 11:51
Forget bonking, now mobes can buy stuff using pay-by-SQUEAK

Chinese spurn NFC, go for acoustic-coupled modem look

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has launched a mobile wallet app with a more-than-passing resemblance to Apple's Passbook. It enables fandroids to pay each other over the air and squeaks every time it's used. The new wallet comes from Alipay, the financial arm of Alibaba, which already processes 8.5 million transactions a day …

Mobile 21 Jan 12:15
AT&T 'violates net neutrality' by NOT charging twice for same data

FCC should probe femto financials foul-up - digital rights group

American telco giant AT&T doesn’t want to charge femtocell users twice for the same data, but exempting its customers from the second bill could fall foul of US Network Neutrality, says the Public Knowledge blog, which has demanded an FCC investigation into "data cap abuse". Femtocells are tiny base stations which route …

Mobile 21 Jan 12:31
Nokia Siemens Networks plans to flog bonds, raise €700m

VCs didn't want to cough cash, but maybe public will...

Nokia Siemens Networks is planning to go to the public markets to try to get some financing through high-yield bonds for up to €700m (£580m, $930m). The telecoms equipment firm will be hoping that there’s enough investor appetite to make its bonds a good buy, meaning that some folks reckon the company is worth betting on. …

Business 21 Jan 12:51
WTF is... Weightless?

Internet of Things enabler in the space between the TV signals

Weightless, the would-be world standard that allows devices to talk to devices without human intervention, reaches its first major release milestone this spring. Version 1.0 of the technology specification is set to be published in March or April and then it will be able to begin making the much-hyped but yet to be delivered ‘ …

Networks 21 Jan 13:02
IBM to pump Power Systems through Tech Data, Ingram Micro

Expanding channel coverage in the US, and maybe Canada

Big Blue is boosting the size of the Stateside distribution channel that sells its Power Systems servers and enterprise storage by inking master distributor agreements with Ingram Micro and Tech Data. With the new deal, IBM is hoping to boost its profile among small and midrange businesses in particular, a growing market which …

The Channel 21 Jan 13:42
Polish knights slay Virut, the brazen virus army that has its own EULA

Multi-headed zombie mob will be back for more

Security researchers have decapitated a spam-spewing network of hacked computers by pulling the plug on the central command-and-control servers. The compromised PCs were infected by the Virut virus and were being remotely controlled from these servers by miscreants. The takedown operation was coordinated by CERT Polska, the …

Security 21 Jan 14:17
Germany's RTL pulls free-to-air channels off terrestrial TV

It's like ITV leaving Freeview

Germany's largest commercial broadcaster is getting out of broadcasting, on Earth at least, citing spiralling costs and an uncertain future as mobile phone operators grab all the good spectrum. Broadcasting on Germany's terrestrial platform apparently costs "many times" what satellite transmissions do, and with satellite and …

Media 21 Jan 14:39
Holy classic car auction, Batman! They sold THE Batmobile!

Man called Rick Champagne coughs up $4m for original motor

The original Batmobile has been snapped up at auction for $4.2m (£2.6m, €3.2m) by a fan of the 1960s television series. The 1955 Lincoln Futura concept car was bought for just $1 in 1965 by customiser George Barris. He then spent $15,000 over 15 days turning it into the iconic vehicle for the Caped Crusader, played by Adam …

Hardware 21 Jan 15:02
Fraud cops collar two blokes accused of dodging bank's 2-factor auth

Online accounts raided in SMS scam

Indian police have arrested two men who allegedly circumvented a bank's two-factor authentication protection and looted online accounts. The pair are suspected of buying victims' personal details from other crooks and then tricking mobile phone companies into giving the duo replacement SIM cards. Anyone in possession of these …

Security 21 Jan 15:36
Game over for Atari? One life left as biz files for bankruptcy protection

Hey, anybody got a quarter?

Atari Interactive Inc has sought protection from US creditors, 41 years after Nolan Bushnell’s gaming legend was born with Pong. Atari has entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, a provision in US law that’ll enable the struggling biz to operate and potentially restructure without those it owes calling in their debts. The …

Games 21 Jan 16:05
Backers: What's this, another cloud storage upstart? Here, have $20m

VCs seem dead sure that companies will bin their arrays

Another day, another cloud storage startup. This one's Axcient, which is in the cloud backup game and has just scored itself $20m in Series D funding. That seems surprising. It's already Axcient's fourth funding round and it's a lot of greenbacks. What's taking the company so long and why does it need so much money to get off …

Storage 21 Jan 16:57
Kim Dotcom's locker may be full, but the cupboard is bare

Comment Reduce the value of creative work to the value of its storage? That's not smart

Do you fancy your chances with Kim "Dotcom" Schmitz's new online file locker? It's staggeringly unoriginal in every respect - it's even called Mega, like his last one - but I'll propose we think about it in a new way. So I haven't come to mock the rotund self-promoter, but rather to talk about what might happen if its users were …

Media 21 Jan 18:02
First Google wants to know all about you, now it wants a RING on your finger

For those who've always wanted to give the web giant the finger

Top Google bods are mulling over using cryptographic finger-ring gadgets and other ways for users to securely log into websites and other services. The ad giant's security veep Eric Grosse and engineer Mayank Upadhyay have submitted the paper Authentication at Scale to the IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine; their central …

Security 21 Jan 19:02
Time Warner Cable to Netflix: We want your 3D films, not your network

Vid service: You want our content, you'll need our CDN

Internet video service Netflix is apparently refusing to provide HD content - which includes its 3D and Super HD movies - to networks which refuse to be a part of its Open Connect content delivery network, prompting cries of partiality as private networks spread. Netflix doesn't charge for interconnection of Open Connect; …

Media 21 Jan 19:27
DataStax cranks up Facebook NoSQL to 3.0 with enterprise features

Weaving in the latest Hadoop data muncher and Solr search

DataStax, the company that was founded to take the Cassandra NoSQL data store created by Facebook commercial and therefore usable by mere enterprise data centers, is keeping to its cadence and is rolling up a new release of its DataStax Enterprise Edition. The company has also put out an update to its Community Edition, which …

Cloud 21 Jan 19:55
Student claims code flaw spotting got him expelled from college

Canadian college denies overreacting

A Canadian computer science student is claiming he was expelled after identifying a gaping security hole in administrative software his college was using. Ahmed Al-Khabaz, a 20 year-old student at Dawson College in Montreal, told the National Post that he and a friend had been developing a mobile app for students to access …

Security 21 Jan 20:42
Australian spooks want mobile dev to build ... something

ASIO changes IT hiring policy to bring more specialists aboard

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) seems set to equip Australian spooks with mobile apps. The Reg is happy to make that assertion on the back of this job ad seeking a “Mobile Applications Developer” with “Development experience with iOS and/or Android (desirable).” We asked ASIO why it needs a mobile …

Government 21 Jan 21:12
Telstra inks 4G roaming deal for Hong Kong travelers

Biz travelers will benefit from faster speeds

Australian business travellers to Asia received a boost at the tail end of last week after telco giant Telstra announced the availability of 4G international roaming in Hong Kong courtesy of operator CSL. The deal with CSL, which Telstra bought back in 2002, will give users access to the company’s 4G network at the same prices …

Mobile 21 Jan 21:30
ACCC spikes gadget price-fix

Australian regulator rebuffs retailers' request over competition concerns

Australia’s competition regulator, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), has politely declined a request by a retail buying group to set minimum prices on a bunch of electrical and electronic gadgets. In a draft decision issued late last week (January 17), the watchdog told National Associated Retail …

Policy 21 Jan 21:43
Rackspace to build custom servers, storage for cloud biz

Open Compute 2013 What's good for the Zuck is good for the Rackers

Rackspace Hosting is getting into custom server design, and it is working with manufacturing partners with the Open Compute Project to get its tweaked versions of servers, storage arrays, and racks created by Facebook to run the social network manufactured by multiple suppliers. The hosting giant and cloud contender has made …

Servers 21 Jan 23:04