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12th February 2013 Archive

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  • US company aims patent-gun at Australia’s e-health system

    All your personal health records are belong to us

    The Australian government’s long and often troubled effort to introduce a personal electronic health record system has run into a patent snag, with Delaware-based MMRGlobal asserting both state and federal governments are infringing its patents. Its announcement, here, says NEHTA (the National E-Health Transition Authority) “ …

    Business 12 Feb 00:35

  • Amazon cloud spin-off 'inevitable,' says Oppenheimer

    Analysis You've got to segregate to accumulate – or do you?

    Amazon Web Services must be spun-off from its mothership to prevent it losing out on cloud customers, one analyst has argued – but a break-up could render AWS toothless, says The Reg. The spin-off was recommended by Oppenheimer analyst Tim Horan in a report published on Monday. "In our view, we believe an ultimate spin-off of …

    Cloud 12 Feb 00:55

  • Watchdog casts an eye over ‘throttling’

    Net neutrality a competition issue

    The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is taking an interest in the “net neutrality” debate in Australia, according to the Australian Financial Review. The discussion was revived by the announcement that Telstra is trialling “traffic management” technologies. This prompted accusations that it was either already …

    Networks 12 Feb 01:03

  • F5 Networks scarfs up LineRate Systems for SDN smarts

    Homegrown OS is the secret to network acceleration

    Another software-defined networking startup has been scarfed up before it got rolling very far on its own. In this case, network-acceleration and load-balancing juggernaut F5 Networks has acquired LineRate Systems, whose founders have spent the better part of the last decade figuring out how to shape traffic way up in the stack …

    Data Networking 12 Feb 01:04

  • Apple releases fix for iPhone 4S iOS 6.1 connectivity cockup

    'Battery problems? What battery problems?'

    If you're an iPhone 4S owner experiencing 3G connectivity problems since updating to iOS 6.1, Apple says it has a fix. On Monday, Apple released iOS 6.1.1 for iPhone 4S to address the difficulties that owners of those smartphones have had since upgrading to iOS 6.1 on January 28. iPhone 4S owners may understandably hope that …

    Operating Systems 12 Feb 01:45

  • Not done yet: Oracle to ship revised Java fix on February 19

    Addresses flaws left open after February 1 patch

    If at first you don't succeed, and all that... Oracle now says the emergency Java Critical Patch Update it rushed out the door on February 1 didn't fix all of the issues it had originally intended to address, and that a revised patch including fixes for the remaining flaws will ship on February 19. February 19 had been the …

    Security 12 Feb 01:56

  • Twitter translated to LOLCATZ: Strangely this had not been done

    THNX ... I canz make conversashun with el cat

    If you've got nothing better to do than faff around on Twitter, you're likely to be the sort who will enjoy having your Twitter account translated into Lolcatz, the language. Not your actual tweets, nor the tweets of anyone else, but just the various commands and buttons that furnish the page around the tweets. Read Twitter …

    Bootnotes 12 Feb 06:02

  • Shocked jocks' O2 calls crossed with Brummies, now everyone's cross

    No crappy crossbar to blame either

    O2 customers in Birmingham have been listening in to callers in Scotland with the kind of crossed lines not usually experienced on a telephone network for decades. The problem isn't widespread, but O2 has confirmed that customers around Birmingham have found themselves lurking on Scottish calls in an unrequested party line, …

    Mobile 12 Feb 07:03

  • Rogue Squadron: Unit of X-wings Kickstarts in response to Death Star

    Not long ago, on a website one click away

    A duo of Empire-hating rebels have realised the Kickstarter Death Star is a threat to the Rebel Alliance and they're looking for all like-minded galactic citizens to chip in for a fleet of $11m X-Wings. Mechanical engineer Simon and his startup-founding buddy Ed reckon gnut.co.uk, the unnamed folks behind the crowdsourcing …

    Bootnotes 12 Feb 08:02

  • Mind out, Apple: Ericsson leads charge against the SIM

    Gemalto pitches in to manage the machines

    Gemalto and Ericsson have partnered to create SIM-less mobile phones aimed at machines rather than people - though the technology and techniques developed will be well-received in Cupertino. The partnership will create a provisioning system to allow things (cars, electricity meters, etc) to be fitted with an embedded mobile …

    Mobile 12 Feb 08:35

  • 3 million Freesat receivers now out there, and boxes to get YouTube

    I'm sick of this high value content, get me some CATS

    Freesat is celebrating the sale of three million reception-capable devices, and will be showcasing an HTML5 YouTube client on its new "<free time>" boxes really quite soon now. The free-to-air satellite provider hasn't got three million viewers: that's the number of devices sold and will include TVs with integrated Freesat and …

    Media 12 Feb 09:03

  • Seagate: We'll bring down HAMR in 2014 ... this year, you get shingles

    It's like all our storage Christmases came at once

    Seagate aims to ship enhanced capacity shingled magnetic recording (SMR) disk drives later this year and bring in Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology next year, a full two years earlier than supposed. Possibly this is its riposte to the helium gas attack mounted by WD subsidiary HGST. Shingled magnetic recording …

    Storage 12 Feb 09:33

  • Clash of the Titans: Which of you has the GREATEST HOME LAB?

    And is it in the cellar, the attic ... or the cloud?

    Last week's article about home labs and their career-enhancing powers produced some interesting comments from readers about their home labs. That got us thinking: in the spirit of our infamous Ventblockers series, in which readers sent in gut-wrenching photos of filth-laden IT kit, what about a servers'n'sofas challenge to …

    Datacenter 12 Feb 10:00

  • Montana TV warns of ZOMBIE ATTACK in epic prank hack

    Cops: 'Wait. What if ... ?'

    Pranksters managed to hack a TV emergency alert system in Montana on Monday to broadcast an on-air audio warning about the supposed start of a zombie apocalypse. Viewers of Great Falls, Montana, television station KRTC watching a Jerry Springer-style show (specifically the Teen Cheaters Take Lie Detectors segment of The Steve …

    Security 12 Feb 10:34

  • Is social networking good for anything more than cat pics?

    Sysadmin blog LinkedIn is useful... it makes you feel 'viewed'

    LinkedIn made money in 2012. By all accounts it has done better than it had the year before, and as a result its stock price has soared. Despite this, I have some serious questions about the service, even as my fellow technorati fall all over themselves to heap praise upon the company. I get why LinkedIn is attractive to …

    Management 12 Feb 11:04

  • BT copper-cable choppers cop 16 months in the cooler

    Thieves posed as workmen in raid that cut off hundreds

    Two men have been jailed for 16 months for nicking large volumes of copper cable from BT's network. The pair posed as workmen to swipe the metal, cutting off telephone and internet connections to hundreds of homes and businesses. Daryl Carslake, 30, and Gavin Marriott, 28, both of Epsom, Surrey, were sentenced at Southwark …

    Law 12 Feb 11:24

  • Turkey prepares to hand $5bn to US biz for intelligent electricity

    Cementing relationships and saving 'leccy

    Turkey will spend $5bn over the next two years creating a smart grid to cope with increased energy consumption, and buying plenty of American kit with which to do it. The US consulate in Istanbul put out the figure, Bloomberg notes, as it promotes a two-day conference on the subject. The conference itself is sponsored by the …

    Government 12 Feb 11:47

  • Cache 'n' carry: What's the best config for your SSD?

    Feature How to gain solid-state performance with out losing hard drive capacity

    The idea of using a low-capacity SSD to store the most frequently accessed files or parts of files in order to access them more quickly than a mechanical hard drive can serve them up - a technique called SSD caching - has been around for some time, but it wasn’t until the arrival of Intel’s Smart Response Technology with the …

    Laptops 12 Feb 12:04

  • Only way to stop the iPad: Flash-disk mutant SPEED FREAKS

    At least... until hybrids inhale helium

    With the rise of the iPad and the growing desire among consumers and enterprise for sexy and speedy gadgets, it seemed that flash gits were holding all the cards. The hard drive industry was holding its breath, wondering how to replicate the expensive experience. But what about hybrid disk drives, the ones that have a lump of …

    Storage 12 Feb 12:24

  • Still-living, unincarcerated Ted Nugent invited to Barack Obama gig

    Gun-loving rocker to attend State of the Union address

    Ted Nugent - the rocker famed for deploying Marshall stacks and hunting rifles to equally deadly effect - will attend Barack Obama's State of the Union address later today. Last year, the "conservative activist" guitarist got himself into a bit of bother with the Secret Service when he declared he'd be "dead or in jail" if …

    Bootnotes 12 Feb 12:44

  • New cunning linguist computer has got ancient tongues licked

    Boffins build system to reconstruct man's protolanguages

    Boffins have put together a new computer system that attempts to translate protolanguages, the ancient "parent" tongues from which modern languages evolved. The sophisticated Rosetta Stone-like system can quickly reconstruct the languages of yore from today's vocabularies with 85 per cent accuracy, we're told. The system's …

    Applications 12 Feb 13:04

  • #Forwhy: American Express lets you pay by tweet

    Taking your cash is bad enough... now vendor gets free ads too?

    Credit card company American Express has launched a service that lets customers buy things using Twitter. The new Card Sync service from American Express syncs customers' credit cards to their Twitter accounts and allows Twits to burn the plastic from the comfort of of their Twitter app. "You can turn a hashtag into more than …

    Applications 12 Feb 13:48

  • Dish boss on ad-skipping service: 'I don’t want to kill ads'

    We're the Indiana Jones of TV networks

    Dish reckons the legal action taken against its ad-skipping service only proves it's innovating in the right direction and is ahead of its time. That's according to Charlie Ergen, the Dish supremo who told an AllThingsD conference in California that Dish was like Indiana Jones - always getting itself into impossible scrapes …

    Media 12 Feb 14:24

  • UK doesn't have the SKILLS to save itself from cyber threats

    Report: Only schoolkids can protect us

    The National Audit Office (NAO) has published a report announcing that the UK doesn't have enough skilled workers to protect it against online attacks and asking Blighty's schoolkids to step into the breach. The number of cyber security professionals in the UK has not increased in line with internet growth, according to the …

    Security 12 Feb 14:59

  • Time to rid ourselves of the tech channel zombies

    Old Spice can't hide the stench of death on the High St

    One thing is certain, we’re all going to die at some point while encountering high and low points along the way. Life is a journey, with no guaranteed time of departure. And business is no different. The loss of names such as Woolworth, Clinton, Jessop, Comet, HMV and now Blockbuster may be sad, but it’s also part of the …

    The Channel 12 Feb 15:28

  • Billionaire baron Bill Gates still mourns Vista's stillborn WinFS

    Watching you sync your files with the cloud makes him cry (probably)

    Five years after he stepped down from day-to-day involvement in Microsoft, co-founder and chairman Bill Gates has revealed his frustration that Windows Vista's database-like file system never saw daylight. In a question'n'answers session on the wildly popular cat'n'chat board Reddit, the world's richest geek was asked: “What …

    Applications 12 Feb 16:03

  • Tesla vs Media AGAIN as Model S craps out on journo - on the highway

    'Car is shutting down'

    Californian electric car maker Tesla Motors - well known for tangling repeatedly with the BBC (and the Register) over coverage of battery vehicles which it did not deem positive enough - is now in a row with the New York Times after one of the paper's journalists wrote a stinging review of its new Model S. Still with range …

    Hardware 12 Feb 16:58

  • VMware pulls more control freakage into vSphere stack

    Ops management and VM archiving at a discount for SMBs

    Sometimes, it takes a bundle to make a bundle. Like most large software companies, VMware has two different customer sets: large companies that have enterprise licensing agreements with all kinds of deals, and SMBs who buy software occasionally and who don't usually get much of a deal. In its conference call with Wall Street …

    Servers 12 Feb 17:44

  • NASA melts mysterious 'metal Martian flower' myth

    It's just a load of wind doing its abrasive duty

    On Friday the internet was all a-flutter over a mysterious metallic-looking object that the Mars rover Curiosity snapped last month, but an analysis by NASA claims to have identified how it came to be. Curiosity snapped the picture in January using its MastCam camera mounted on the top of the rover, but the image only came to …

    Science 12 Feb 18:24

  • Apple CEO Cook: 'Bizarre' shareholder lawsuit a 'silly sideshow'

    Visiting an Apple retail store is 'like Prozac'

    Apple CEO Tim Cook has a low opinion of a lawsuit filed by Greenlight Capital hedge-fund honcho David Einhorn that seeks to prevent Apple from amending its charter to allow the issuance of preferred stock without the approval of its shareholders. "I find it bizarre we find ourselves being sued for doing something that's good …

    Business 12 Feb 19:53

  • Amazon adds DNS Failover to Route 53

    Intros dead man switch in case of site megafails

    Amazon has encroached further onto the turf of traditional web-hosters with a DNS Failover upgrade to its Route 53 DNS service. The free upgrade lets developers use the DNS Failover feature to automatically route traffic to a backup website hosted on Amazon S3, or to a site hosted in another AWS region if part of the Amazon …

    Cloud 12 Feb 19:57

  • DropBox seeks to woo IT admins with team data controls

    Wants to beat down Microsoft, Google, Apple, EMC threats

    Dropbox is changing its cloud storage service to reassure IT administrators that they can control their users and not have sensitive information taking wing out of their corporate servers. Last November the company claimed it had 100 million users, and that 95 per cent of Fortune 500 companies have at least one Dropbox user. …

    Cloud 12 Feb 21:24

  • Coming soon: Open source JavaFX for iOS, Android

    Will enable cross-platform Java-based UIs – but why?

    Oracle says it plans to open source the Android and iOS implementations of its JavaFX UI platform "over the next couple months," which it says will allow Java developers to use the technology to write cross-platform smartphone apps for the first time. "A majority of you said you'd contribute to an iOS / Android port (either …

    Developer 12 Feb 21:33

  • Adobe buckles, cuts prices ahead of Australian inquiry

    A side order of schadenfraude

    If only we’d all known it would be so easy: in the wake of being summonsed by the Australian parliament’s inquiry into IT pricing, Adobe has cut the price of its Creative Cloud suite to Australian users. The pricing inquiry kicked off last year to look at the practise of geographic price discrimination by international vendors …

    Business 12 Feb 22:04

  • Permafrost melt to boost atmospheric CO2 faster than thought

    The more CO2, the more global warming; the more global warming, the more CO2

    A new study has shown that melting Arctic permafrost will "release climate-warming carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere much faster than previously thought," the University of Michigan warns. "In this research, we provide the first evidence that the respiration of previously frozen soil carbon will be amplified by reactions …

    Science 12 Feb 22:25

  • Pertino uncloaks, fires 'cloud network engine' at Cisco

    If you take the work out of network, what you have left is net

    Plucky startup Pertino Networks has taken aim at Cisco's Meraki with the release of its new network-as-a-service, ummm, service. What Pertino is up to takes a bit of imagination. Imagine first that your email was your network address and out there on the cloud, and that some magical big virtual switch knew all of the devices …

    Cloud 12 Feb 22:44

  • Kiwi Coroner says Coca-Cola helped kill woman

    Cardiac arrhythmia followed nine litres a day habit

    New Zealand’s Coroner for Dunedin, David Cerar, has reportedly found excessive consumption of Coca-Cola helped to kill a woman. Natasha Harris, a 31-year old resident of the southern city Invercargill, died last year. The Coroner's report, which was sent to The Reg by the New Zealand Justice Department, says Harris’ partner …

    Bootnotes 12 Feb 22:45

  • Fire danger as iOS mislocates towns, again

    Making fun of Apple maps, #729

    The failings of Apple Maps are in the spotlight again, after an app that uses the service fell foul of its infamous inability to find decent-sized towns. Here’s the background: the Country Fire Authority (CFA) in the Australian state of Victoria decided it needed an app as a two-way channel between itself and citizens …

    Networks 12 Feb 22:48

  • Rackspace rides OpenStack, lassos chubby, cloudy cash cow

    'Open cloud and fanatical outcomes' – and that's fanatical in a good way

    Rackspace Hosting is doing something right – many things, actually – as proven by its latest financial report that revealed hefty increases in customers, revenues, and profits. The company started out small, and has only recently entered the ranks of large enterprises with its dedicated hosting and now cloud computing services …

    Cloud 12 Feb 23:53