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21st February 2013 Archive

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  • Boffins use DVD burner to scale graphene supercapacitors

    LightScribe becomes capacitor creator

    One of the challenges in shrinking electronics is that some parts, like capacitors, stubbornly resist being minaturised. The charge-carrying capacity of a conventional capacitor is, after all, partly a function of the surface area of its plates. Graphene is known to have properties that make it attractive as a “supercapacitor …

    Science 21 Feb 00:30

  • Seagate joins OpenStack foundation and Open Compute Project

    Drive giant revs involvement in open source tech

    In an effort to stay relevant in the new cloudy world Seagate is loading money into OpenStack and joining the Open Compute Project. The storage specialist "will help cloud builders to develop more scalable, customizable solutions using open platforms," it said in a statement on Wednesday, announcing its involvement. "Seagate …

    Storage 21 Feb 01:07

  • Curiosity drills into Mars

    Innocent exploration or first shot in INTERPLANETARY BIO-WAR?

    Nuclear-powered, laser-equipped space tank Curiosity has unveiled another of its weapons: a 2.3mm drill bit that it has used to gouge a hole 6.4 cm deep into the Martian soil. NASA has kindly furnished world+dog with the image of the drill bit below. Behold its fearsome bluntness if you dare! Curiosity's drill bit. Are you …

    Science 21 Feb 01:25

  • Mobile dev site: We never knew about Facebook, Apple hacks

    First read about own role in Wednesday's news

    Mobile developer website iPhoneDevSDK says it was completely unaware of its own involvement in a recent online attack that compromised Macs at Facebook, Apple, and other companies – that is, not until its admins read about it in the tech press on Wednesday morning. "As the most widely read dedicated iOS developer forum, we're …

    Security 21 Feb 01:47

  • FCC proposes freeing up massive chunk of wireless spectrum

    Cell signal boosters also get revamp

    The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is proposing to increase the amount of unlicensed spectrum available by 35 per cent in the biggest opening up of the airwaves in a decade. The FCC voted unanimously to open 195 megahertz of extra spectrum in the 5 GHz band for use with accredited equipment, but also to allow some of …

    Policy 21 Feb 01:51

  • Samsung under fire over copy-paste bricking

    Simple bug unfixed for months

    Users of a variety of Android-based Samsung smartphones are becoming restive at the mobo’s apparent inability to fix a simple bug that has catastrophic consequences. According to this Samsung forum thread, the copy-paste bug bricks the phone, requiring a factory reset or, if the owner has root access, to empty the contents of …

    Phones 21 Feb 02:08

  • Sexual harassment case costs Oracle $AUD18,000

    Things better left unsaid

    A former employee of Oracle's Australian outpost has been awarded $AUD18,000 in damages after winning a sexual harassment claim against a colleague. Rebecca Richardson alleged colleague Randol Tucker made numerous inappropriate comments to her over several months. Oracle, as Mr Tucker's employer, is vicariously liable for his …

    Law 21 Feb 03:54

  • Jerry Yang hired as fly on the wall at Lenovo

    Hired for 'proven entrepreneurial spirit' to help PC company grow

    Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang is set to join the board of Lenovo. Yang, who infamously turned down Microsoft’s $40bn buy-out offer back in 2009, will attend board meetings but only as an “observer” – in other words, he’ll have no voting rights. Yang said in a statement that he would be sharing his experience as tech …

    Business 21 Feb 04:48

  • Boffins spot Luna-sized exoplanet

    Tiny 'Kepler-37b' is smaller than Mercury and very nasty

    Exoplanet hunters have made their smallest find ever, Kepler-37b, which is only fractionally larger than Earth's moon and rather smaller than Mercury. The planet and its star are about 210 light-years from Earth in the constellation Lyra. In a Letter to Nature, over 50 co-authors explain how the Kepler spacecraft helped them …

    Science 21 Feb 05:05

  • Mobes with monster 72-core GPU to debut in China

    ZTE says handsets packing Tegra 4 system-on-chip will land before July

    Nvidia’s supercharged quad-core Tegra 4 SoC, which packs a mighty 72 GPU cores, has finally found a mobile home after handset maker ZTE announced new smartphones featuring the chip will debut in China in the first half of 2013. The Tegra 4 was unveiled last month at CES but has so far been left to stand at the altar by the …

    Phones 21 Feb 05:48

  • Perfect sex minx calculated from 'deep' probe of X-rated flicks

    10,000 web smut stars analysed, vital statistics checked and double-checked

    Hardcore data analysis of hardcore web filth has produced a surprise finding: the average female porn star is NOT blonde nor does she sport oversized Bulgarian airbags. Investigative writer Jon Millward dedicated six months of his life to the task of crunching through vital statistics in the largest database of adult …

    Bootnotes 21 Feb 06:02

  • How private biz can link YOU to 'anonymised' medical data

    And all without your consent, FOI request reveals

    Private sector businesses could obtain "identifiable" information about patients without their consent under a new scheme that will see medical data made commercially accessible, according to information disclosed by the government. Under plans previously unveiled by the government, a new research body, the Clinical Practice …

    Policy 21 Feb 07:02

  • This 320-gigapixel snap of London is size of Buckingham Palace

    BT's 360° panorama has its own unit of measure

    In a final squeeze of Olympics juice from London's triumphant summer of sport last year, British Telecom has released a world record-breaking panoramic photo of the city taken from the top of the BT Tower. Click to view the map The 320 gigapixel snap is made up of 48,640 individual frames shot over three days using four …

    Bootnotes 21 Feb 08:03

  • Quit the 2D internet, flee your cave, and GET LAID, barks rock star

    Jack White's charming message for Record Store Day

    Rock star Jack White, formerly of The White Stripes and The Dead Weather, has told fans to switch off the "two-dimensional" internet, get out of their "cave" and start experiencing something in "the real world". Recently appointed as an ambassador for the world's official Record Store Day, the musician has been getting into …

    Broadband 21 Feb 08:24

  • Just what does BT have planned for its 4G licence: We drill into UK LTE

    Analysis Auctions hands telco space to run national hotspot network

    So, the UK's 4G auction is over, but questions remain: who bought what exactly, why did they pay so little, and, most importantly, when can we expect some 4G goodness? The hammer has fallen on Blighty's airwaves, but the exact frequency allocations haven't yet been decided: winning bids were for blocks of spectrum within …

    Mobile 21 Feb 09:03

  • Brit robot programmers banged up for £500,000 tax evasion

    Biz pair lived life of Riley on cash hidden offshore

    Two robot programmers have been jailed for income tax evasion after hiding their company's sales in offshore accounts. Roderick Smith, of Duddon Close, Standish, Wigan, and Stephen Howarth, of Gee Cross, Hyde, Cheshire, managed to evade about £500,000 in UK income tax over six years by diverting most of their firm's balance …

    Law 21 Feb 09:32

  • We've slashed account hijackings by 99.7% - Google

    120-variable security checks + 2-factor auth = zapped interwebs pond scum

    Google appears to be making strides in the war against account hijacking. The ads, search and webmail giant recently announced that it had reduced takeovers by 99.7 per cent since introducing tighter security procedures. Improved spam filtering meant spammers switched to more aggressive account takeover tactics over the last …

    Security 21 Feb 09:58

  • Sony promises PC-based PlayStation 4 for Christmas

    AMD x86 tech helps console break out of Cell

    Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the Sony PlayStation 4 - or, as we say in the trade, a PC. Yes, the PS4 will indeed be based on an octo-core x86-compatible processor, incorporate 8GB of GDDR 5 and will be equipped with a PC-centric GPU. It’ll have a hard drive too, plus the inevitable Blu-ray drive. It will incorporate …

    Games 21 Feb 10:27

  • Hey, cloudy channel bods: Vendors have problems too...

    You can't cram a round cloud peg into a square channel hole

    The tech industry channel has faced a variety of challenges over the past year or so when it comes to cloud computing. Distributors in the channel have faced a battle over customers with telecommunications vendors, and some channel partners have found themselves unsure about outlining a cloud strategy. This time we're taking a …

    The Channel 21 Feb 10:30

  • VCE collective takes integrated systems battle down to the midrange

    Cisco-EMC-sometimes-VMware converged boxes take on the tier ones

    It is safe to say that the effort by Cisco Systems to break into the server racket with its Unified Computing System blade and rack servers nearly four years ago has succeeded much more than its rivals in the business had expected. And the Virtual Computer Environment partnership between Cisco, storage juggernaut EMC, and its …

    Servers 21 Feb 11:04

  • Oklahoma cops rake ashes of 'spontaneous combustion' victim

    Timber-framed house intact as owner goes up in flames

    Investigators in Oklahoma are attempting to determine just how a 65-year-old man was largely incinerated while his timber-framed house suffered minimal damage, in what the the local sheriff described as a possible case of spontaneous human combustion. Danny VanZandt was found burning on the kitchen floor in his home between …

    Bootnotes 21 Feb 11:24

  • PunkSPIDER project founder defends 'Google for web app vulns'

    Global bug scanner can be used 'for good or for evil'

    The founder of a project that aims to offer a global web application vulnerability scanner has defended the potentially controversial technology. The tech is a useful tool to check the security of websites you use for shopping, or to which you've submitted your personal data, but it could equally be a tool for budding VXers - …

    Security 21 Feb 11:44

  • Curiosity Mars rover flashes pics of GREY drilled powder sample

    Rock dust could hold key to Mars' wet past

    Mars rover Curiosity has beamed back pics of what lies beneath the surface of the Red Planet, whose rosy complexion turns out to be just skin-deep. The sample drilled out of Martian rock by the mobile science lab appears to be a blue-grey powder, visible in the robot arm's open scoop. "Seeing the powder from the drill in the …

    Science 21 Feb 11:53

  • Yahoo! 'OPTIMISES'! website! for! fondleslabs! AND Facebook!

    Please Sir, Mayer have some more Web2.0rhea?

    Yahoo! has once again redesigned its website as the ailing internet company attempts to squeeze more ad juice out of its online estate. The Purple Palace's CEO Marissa Mayer announced the latest makeover in a blog post on Wednesday that was peppered with words netizens might normally associate with Facebook. Mayer, who took …

    Applications 21 Feb 12:14

  • WTF is... Miracast?

    The AirPlay alternative for streaming video, games from your Android to your telly

    Less than six months ago, there were just a handful of Miracast-certified products listed in the Wi-Fi Alliance’s kit database. Now there are nearly 150. A spectacular improvement for a little known technology. So what is it? Miracast was formally launched in September 2012, but it was Google’s announcement a month and a half …

    Phones 21 Feb 12:28

  • Foxconn: Our hiring freeze has nothing to do with iPhone 5

    Insists its not about just one client

    Apple's main manufacturing buddy Foxconn has frozen hiring at a Shenzhen plant and other factories across China, but denies it has anything to do with the fruity firm in particular. The parts-manufacturer for tech firms ranging from Apple to Dell said today that it wasn't slowing down recruitment because of any particular …

    Media 21 Feb 12:46

  • Adobe punts fix for Reader, Acrobat holes battered by PC, Mac hackers

    Software biz praised for nine-day response

    Adobe has pushed out an emergency security update for its PDF viewing software Reader and Acrobat to plug zero-day vulnerabilities that emerged last week. The cross-platform update, issued yesterday, addresses flaws that were being actively exploited by miscreants to compromise and take over Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS …

    Security 21 Feb 13:03

  • So you won a 4G licence. The Freeview interference squad wants a word

    Next-gen mobe broadband threat to 2 MILLION tellies

    The team to turn to when high-speed mobile broadband knocks out your Freeview signal has kicked off negotiations with this week's 4G auction winners. It's hoped that Brits will get four weeks of notice before up to two million TV screens go dark. The recently established body managing interference from new 4G services is …

    Media 21 Feb 13:32

  • New blow for Microsoft Surface: Touch Chromebooks 'on sale in 2013'

    New blow for Google stablemate Android, too

    Google has developed a new touchscreen Chromebook that will be out this year, claim industry sources. It's the latest story to surface about a touch-driven netbook powered by Google's Chrome operating system, which is based on open-source Linux. A video leaked earlier this month appeared to be an advert for a touchscreen …

    Laptops 21 Feb 14:07

  • John Sweeney: Why Church of Scientology's gravest threat is the 'net

    Updated A beautiful machine for free speech, says BBC reporter

    Back in 1995, when the net was still young, the late Robert Vaughn Young, an ex-scientologist, said the internet would be to Scientology what Vietnam was to the US: an unwinnable war. Vaughn Young, a former spokesman for the controversial organisation, believed that the internet would create the first place where Scientology …

    Media 21 Feb 14:34

  • Which Linux admin tools and tricks would YOU stake your career on?

    Sysadmin blog Sort the signal from the noise - tell us your top utils, books, IRC chans, the lot

    Those seeking to enter the rewarding world of Linux system administration can be scared off by the platform's sometimes outright hostility towards the concept of "administrator friendliness". Linux – and the community that surrounds the open-source OS – can seem intimidating to the uninitiated, but it does not have to be so. …

    Operating Systems 21 Feb 15:04

  • Xamarin chucks Apple fruit at Microsoft mobe wobblers

    Apple iOS development extended to Visual Studio

    Microsoft wobblers tempted by the fruit of Apple's mobes can now indulge themselves from the comfort of their preferred development platform. Cross-platform development start-up Xamarin has updated its development framework allowing Microsoft devs to build native iOS apps using Visual Studio. You could already build apps for …

    Developer 21 Feb 15:35

  • Chromebook app launcher touted to Chrome browser users

    Google ports offline app box to Windows

    Further blurring the line between desktop computers, laptops and mobile gadgets, Google has stuffed the app launcher from its Chromebook into its desktop Chrome web browser. Ta-da. That's it. The program launcher, basically a little window to run packaged JavaScript apps within the browser, looks just like a phone home …

    Applications 21 Feb 16:03

  • NetApp flashifies ONTAP high-end boxen

    Bigger disks, flash pools, more memory

    While flash arrays were the main focus of yesterday's NetApp announcements the company also uprated its high-end FAS6200 arrays with bigger disks, flash pools, more memory and the latest ONTAP software. We can update the table we produced when we first wrote about these new FAS arrays and here is our new quick take on the spec …

    Storage 21 Feb 16:26

  • Twitter opens ad API... awaits cash TSUNAMI from ad-slingers

    #Widens revenue stream

    Ads will be creeping into Twitter clients as the social network has opened up an advertising API allowing advertisers to create more complex, targeted advertising using Promoted Tweets and Promoted Account campaigns on the social network. Along with the API, Twitter has named five partners as the first to sign up: Adobe, …

    Media 21 Feb 17:03

  • Obama's new cyber-security tactics finger corrupt staff, China

    Hackers or the guy with root? Trouble is closer to home, warns White House

    The White House has unveiled a fresh strategy for combating the theft of American trade secrets - days after a high-profile Chinese cyber-espionage campaign against US corporate giants was exposed. The strategy, outlined in a 141-page report [PDF] published on Wednesday, focuses on a five-part plan featuring diplomatic efforts …

    Security 21 Feb 17:24

  • Apple files 'iWatch' patent application

    Flexible video display to slap onto your 'appendage'

    The US Patent and Trademark Office has published a patent application that juices rumors Apple is working on a bit of wrist-wearable kit that hardware hypothesizers have dubbed the "iWatch". "Bi-stable Spring with Flexible Display" was revealed in the USPTO's weekly Thursday-morning application dump, and describes a snap-on …

    Hardware 21 Feb 18:43

  • Oracle plans deep integration of Eloqua marketing tech

    Promises to support Microsoft and Salesforce systems as well

    Oracle will make sure its recently acquired Eloqua marketing cloud plays along with Microsoft and Salesforce systems, though it plans to closely link the marketing suite with its own sales technology as well. Describing Eloqua as "the centerpiece for Oracle's cloud," Oracle's president Mark Hurd said in a webcast on Thursday …

    Cloud 21 Feb 18:47

  • Google takes Chromebook upmarket with touchy-feely Pixel

    Pricey touchscreen kit for the cloud warrior with money to burn

    Chromebooks have traditionally been priced for the low end of the market, but Google has decided to go for the well-heeled cloud warrior with the Chromebook Pixel, a touchscreen laptop with a super-high resolution screen and a price tag to match. "We've designed this for people who live in the cloud, even if they're like my …

    Laptops 21 Feb 19:03

  • Red Hat nips, tucks RHEL 6.4 ahead of RHEL 7 later this year

    Shadowman getting ready to be ARMed and dangerous

    Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat may be getting ready to start the Enterprise Linux 7 cycle later this year, but the pace of updates to the current RHEL 6 stack continues apace with the rollout of RHEL 6.4. Enterprise Linux 6.4 went into beta back in December and is now ready for prime time, according to Shadowman, so if …

    Operating Systems 21 Feb 19:26

  • Nvidia plans new 'reptile HQ' to match its IT aggressiveness

    Keplersaurus Rex to stomp into Silicon Valley

    Move over Apple. Nvidia cofounder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang wants to build his own futuristic space-station campus – and as you might expect, the Nvidia design is black and green and built from triangles, the basic building block of the mathematics around graphics processing. And, as it turns out, the strongest shape in …

    Business 21 Feb 19:31

  • Twitter adds email security to help block phishing attempts

    Too late for Burger King, but maybe not for you

    Following a recent spate of incidents in which high-profile accounts have been compromised by hackers, Twitter has implemented a security protocol designed to make it harder for fraudsters to send out emails that appear to come from Twitter.com addresses. "We send out lots of emails every day to our users letting them know …

    Security 21 Feb 21:47

  • Over 100,000 sign White House petition for handset unlocking

    Let freedom ring

    The Obama administration is going to have to answer to mobile phone users after more than 100,000 people signed a petition calling for the unlocking of handsets to be made legal again. The protest was sparked by the decision by the Librarian of Congress last October to ban the unlocking of handsets under the latest …

    Policy 21 Feb 22:06

  • Newvem fluffs up penny-pinching control freak for AWS cloud

    Ex-Sunners give away freebie Cloud Care as loss leader

    Startup Newvem uncloaked from stealth last November with Cloud Care, a control freak that reaches into CloudWatch and other Amazon Web Services management APIs to help companies figure out what they are spending and where they might be wasting resources and money. The service has tracked over 125,000 EC2 instances over the past …

    Cloud 21 Feb 22:19

  • Google in cloud-support price war with Amazon, Microsoft

    Intros revolutionary 'how much can you afford?' model

    Google has updated its cloud support packages, and in doing so has opened up another front in its cloud pricing war with Amazon and Microsoft. The four support packages across the Google Cloud Platform — which comprises App Engine, Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, BigQuery, and other public-facing services — let …

    Cloud 21 Feb 23:02

  • Buyer's Guide de-hassling flash array purchase

    DCIG strikes again

    Storage buying guides publisher DCIG has cast its beady eye across flash arrays and come up with the best of the bunch, not quite so good but still Recommended flashy boxes, and plain old Excellent, less plain Good and then the Basic category of suppliers. DCIG specialises in publishing storage buyers' guides, using published …

    Storage 21 Feb 23:03

  • Ride Riverbed's Whitewater all the way to Glacier

    Cold data storage in Amazon's icy vaults

    Use Riverbed's Whitewater gateway product to send your data centre's cold but still wanted data up into Amazon's glacial archive storage vaults where entry is cheap, stays long, and restores cheap as chips unless you get lost in Amazon's pricing jungle. Riverbed has its Whitewater cloud storage gateway product which squirts …

    Storage 21 Feb 23:05