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4th March 2013 Archive

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  • Evernote joins the notably hackable club

    Password reset, so sorry, no customer data at risk

    Evernote has joined the growing list of companies whose cloud-based services have suffered a serious security breach, announcing over the weekend that it had implemented a service-wide password reset after attackers accessed user information. Happily, the company's announcement notes, the passwords accessed were salted hashes …

    Security 4 Mar 01:54

  • Apple 'insider' explains why vid adapter hides ARM computer

    Cable might actually be worth $49 price tag

    Mac applications developer Panic has found something interesting inside an Apple video adapter: a computer. While trying to figure out why video output from some iDevices was so poor, the company cracked open a Lightning AV Adapter, a $US49 accessory that is sold as allowing Apple devices to send video to HDMI devices in …

    Hardware 4 Mar 02:22

  • Google revs Motorola innovation with Guy Kawasaki hire

    'Apple Fellow' to provide excitement lessons for staid mobes unit

    Although its Android platform is now streaking up the charts courtesy of Samsung's success in the smartphone business, Google's own mobiles turn in consistently less-than-stellar performances. So the Chocolate Factory has hired former Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki to try and breathe some life into the brand. Of course, …

    Business 4 Mar 03:30

  • Huawei CEOs are 'migratory birds'

    Three of them flapping about is better than one

    Huawei's current CEO Guo Ping has explained why the company rotates its chief executives. We say “current CEO” because Huawei has a panel of three CEOs, each of which takes a turn to lead the company for six months before handing over to a colleague. The company has in the past said this structure will help it to cope with the …

    Business 4 Mar 04:29

  • Japanese govt: Use operator-run app stores, not Google Play

    Info-stealing sexy wallpaper app was downloaded 500,000 times on official site

    Google’s security credentials have taken another hit after the Japanese government warned local Android users to download their apps from third party operator-run stores, and not Google's own Play, following the discovery of a prolific info-stealing app on the official site. The Tokyo-based Information Technology Promotion …

    Policy 4 Mar 05:08

  • 'Google Maps' of US White Space spectrum goes LIVE

    Mountain view trials database now - before 16Mbps devices are EVERYWHERE...

    Today is the day that Google opens up its database of US White Space spectrum, starting the mandatory 45-day trial in readiness to start giving away another thing everyone else is charging for. The trial is public, and ready to go live, and will map out which of the TV broadcast frequencies aren't being used in any specific …

    Mobile 4 Mar 06:01

  • SpaceX Dragon eventually snared by ISS

    Time to call in the roadies

    In a development almost as significant as getting off the ground, the Dragon capsule hoisted atop SpaceX has reached the ISS in spite of the “glitches” (to use Elon Musk's expression) that had delayed it. The ISS's robotic arm was used to grab and secure the capsule at 0531 EST on 3 March, at which time according to Reuters …

    Science 4 Mar 06:37

  • O2 pops out vital new feature: Making phone calls from phones

    TU Go VoIP app goes live

    O2 has launched TU Go, the awaited VoIP service allowing customers to make and receive calls from five devices at the same time. The move is no surprise: O2 has been promising TU Go for a while, but its now available to all contract customers who can sign up and download the apps for iOS, Android and Windows 7. Calls are …

    Phones 4 Mar 07:07

  • New Japanese craze: Knickers for iPhones' nether regions

    iFronts, anyone?

    Ever worried that your smartphone is putting just a little bit too much of itself on show? Well worry no more, thanks to SmartPants, the latest eccentric invention from Japan. Available in several different colours and designs, these iPhone “pants” are the brainchild of Japanese video game maker Bandai and are being marketed …

    Phones 4 Mar 07:10

  • NTT Docomo leads 5G push with 10Gbps uplink tests

    Ultra-super-fast mobile data services on the way

    Japanese operator NTT Docomo has successfully tested uplink packet transmissions at an uber-fast 10Gbps, hundreds of times quicker than the 4G services only just beginning to roll out across North America and Europe. The outdoor experiment was conducted in collaboration with the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Okinawa’s …

    Networks 4 Mar 07:20

  • World spent $3.6 TREEELLION on ICT in 2012 - analyst

    Hardware bods should watch out though, there's CANNIBALS about

    International Data Corporation (IDC) said that the figure included what businesses had spent on telecoms services and that total expenditure on hardware, software and IT services alone had topped $2 trillion on its own. The latter figure represented a 5.9 per cent increase from the total IT expenditure in 2011 and was recorded …

    Management 4 Mar 07:34

  • Queen of Tech City says she will decide what Tech City does soon now

    It's not a place, it's a movement. No, not a bowel one

    CEO of Tech City Joanna Shields says that the "woolly" objectives of London's (in)famous Tech City predated her, but she isn't giving much more clarity on what the government initiative should achieve. Challenged on the vagueness of the organisation's remit at an event on Friday, the former Facebook VP distanced herself from …

    Government 4 Mar 07:53

  • Belgian boffins find colossal meteorite

    18kg rock is largest Antarctic meteorite find since 1988

    Belgian meteorite hunters scooting about Antarctica on skidoos have described what they say is the largest meteorite find on the frozen continent since 1988. Geologist Vinciane Debaille of the Université Libre de Bruxelles told the International Polar Foundation that she and her colleagues on an international meteorite-hunting …

    Science 4 Mar 08:14

  • Hey, PCIe flash makers. Look behind you - it's Samsung

    South Korean giant fancies a wodge of NAND cache action

    Samsung is stalking PCIe flash companies and aims to meet them head-to-head. Yes, the South Korean giant is going to enter the PCIe flash card game. According to Peyman Blumstengel, a strategic business development man at Samsung Electronics, the company has PCIe flash cards on its roadmap and products should appear in the …

    Storage 4 Mar 08:36

  • Microsoft parts clouds over Bing Maps with massive sat pic upgrade

    Adds ocean floor detail too

    Microsoft has jazzed up Bing Maps with an extra 13 million square kilometers of high-res satellite shots and ocean floor imagery. Oahu, Hawaii before and after Maps update Ballmer and co have sourced data about the ocean's bathymetry - the underwater equivalent of topography - from Scripps Institution of Oceanography as …

    Applications 4 Mar 08:57

  • New class of industrial-scale super-phishing emails threatens biz

    Bulk messages are highly targeted and able to slip past defences

    Security watchers are warning of a surge of highly convincing spear-phishing emails sent in bulk. More than one in 10 recipients of these so-called longlining* messages click on links to compromised websites because the phishing email look utterly plausible, according to cloud-based security services firm Proofpoint. The …

    Security 4 Mar 09:31

  • Logicalis coughs up €24m for 2e2's Euro ops

    Rescue deal for the bit that didn't go titsup

    Logicalis Group has coughed €24m for 2e2's European operations, it confirmed in a stock market statement this morning. The deal includes the IBM system integration biz in Spain - which is still trading under the Morse brand; the NetApp and HP enterprise reselling outfit in Ireland; a managed service operation in the Channel …

    The Channel 4 Mar 10:04

  • NetApp could use Microsoft to beat off VMware's virtual tool

    Blocks and Files You're not the only one with a VSA, you know

    Let's think about putting some storage Lego bricks together in a new combination. The bricks are labelled NetApp, DataONTAP, ONTAP EDGE, VSA, VMware and Hyper-V. A VSA is a virtual storage appliance - with storage array controller software running as a virtual machine and turning the host server's local disks into a shared …

    Storage 4 Mar 10:19

  • Need an army of killer zombies? Yours for just $25 per 1,000 PCs

    Bring out your dead - there's a price per botnet head

    As little as $25 will buy you access to a thousand malware-infected PCs, neatly packaged as a botnet army to control or spy on. That's according to a security researcher studying underground souks of zombie computers. But the prices increase steeply for the more discerning crook who only wants to use compromised machines in …

    Security 4 Mar 10:39

  • BlackBerry Z10: Prices pruned despite eager iPunter interest

    Are enough iPhone and Android fans hopping on board to revive the former RIM?

    How well is the Z10 from BlackBerry - née RIM - faring? Reports on the handset’s retail success, on which BlackBerry’s recovery as a business is riding, are mixed. Late last week, Carphone Warehouse and Vodafone separately pruned the price of the handset, not a good sign for a premium device that has been on sale for less than …

    Phones 4 Mar 10:59

  • Dell slaps back at HP after Meg's 'uncertainty' diss: You're flip-floppers

    IT firms swap insults in effort to woo partners

    Dell's global channel boss has accused HP of flip-flopping on its direct sales strategy, claiming its archrival has failed to create a stable platform where partners can feel secure investing their resources. The war of words erupted after HP CEO Meg Whitman recently told resellers at its Global Partner Conference (GPC) that …

    The Channel 4 Mar 11:18

  • Seagate takes 7.2k notebook drives out back - and shoots them

    Disk-only gear killed, clears way for flashy mutants

    A momentous moment: Seagate will end production of its Momentus 7,200rpm 2.5in disk-only drives. The storage giant will stop making the gear by the end of this year to focus on drives mixed with flash memory, although it will continue to pump out 5,400rpm disks for cheap laptops. “We are going stop building our notebook 7, …

    Laptops 4 Mar 11:31

  • Pricey mainframes, hyperscale boxes boost Q4 server sales

    Unix machinery, er, not so much

    For the first time in five quarters, the server business saw an uptick in revenues in the final quarter of 2012, mostly thanks to burgeoning sales of dense boxes used by hyperscale web operators and a sharp appetite in IBM's mainframe shops for its new System zEnterprise EC12 boxes. Windows and Linux boxes (about half of the …

    Servers 4 Mar 11:43

  • WHY would survey-slingers give YOU a free $1,500 Google Glass?

    34bangbang_fun@imail.ru wants sir/madam as a beta tester. Oh ok, carry on then

    Credulous punters' desire to get their hands on Google's new Project Glass head-mounted display is already being used against them by cyberscammers. The Chocolate Factory's augmented reality glasses may be still at the prototype stage, but cybercrooks have latched onto the recent release of a demo video with their own cyber- …

    Security 4 Mar 12:04

  • EMC touts screeching Hawq SQL performance for Hadoop

    With Hive in one claw and an Impala in the other

    EMC's Pivotal Initiative division made a big splash last week with the launch of its Pivotal HD distribution of Hadoop. This is not a normal Hadoop distribution, but one that takes the parallel guts of the Greenplum database and reworks them to transform the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) into something that speaks …

    HPC 4 Mar 12:19

  • Ubuntu 13.04 beta touts search privacy - before it hooks in eBay, IMDb etc

    Review Um Bongo boss Shuttleworth offers 'incognito' mode for your desktop PC

    Linux distro Ubuntu 13.04, which hit its first beta today, is already showing promise: there are small but very useful usability tweaks planned for Ubuntu's Unity user interface. Assuming you've managed to get past last year’s privacy fiasco, either by being comfortable with Canonical sending your search queries to Amazon and …

    Operating Systems 4 Mar 12:44

  • US gov cash slash threatens manned trips to asteroids and Mars

    NASA chief warns budget cuts could stall space exploration

    NASA overcame the glitches that plagued the SpaceX Dragon's most recent berthing with the International Space Station - but it still has other worries, according to the space agency's administrator Charles Bolden. Plenty of sun, sea and sulphur here on Mars Bolden has said that recent political events in the US forcing the …

    Science 4 Mar 13:13

  • Violin Memory fires PCIe server card salvoes at rival Fusion-io

    Tag teams Toshiba in data-centre storage rumble

    Flash storage array shipper Violin Memory is bringing out a Velocity line of PCIe server flash cards and strengthening its relationship with investor Toshiba, which owns NAND chip fabs. Violin Memory ships 3000 and 6000 models of its networked all-flash array technology. They can have PCIe connections but the array's primary …

    Storage 4 Mar 13:47

  • FoundationDB uncloaks ACID-compliant NoSQL beta

    Lets developers have infinite cake and eat it in ACID-compliant bites

    Skeptical developers can now get their hands on a NoSQL database that supports ACID-compliant transactions, a handy tech for web applications that expect their usage to take off like a rocket. A beta version of the FoundationDB NoSQL database became available for download on Monday. It differs from other NoSQL systems in that …

    Software 4 Mar 14:00

  • Tech Data pops champers, aims to rinse nasty FY '13 aftertaste

    Bottle slips from nerveless hands after financials seen

    The CEO of Tech Data won't be sad to kiss goodbye to a "challenging" fiscal 2013 disrupted by falling enterprise kit sales, an SAP upgrade and a shift in the way it reports services turnover. The broadline behemoth today reported a four per cent fall in revenues for the year ended 31 January to $25.3bn - down ten per cent in …

    The Channel 4 Mar 14:17

  • 4G operators move into new homes in the spectrum 'hood

    Another £27m changes hands

    Bidders in the UK's spectrum auction have now sorted out who's going where, and who's going to knock out our TV reception once the 4G networks get switched on. There were two bits of spectrum auctioned off: the low-frequency 800MHz band, which was freed up when analogue terrestrial TV was switched off, and the higher-frequency …

    Mobile 4 Mar 14:39

  • Banged-up Brit hacker hacks into his OWN PRISON'S 'MAINFRAME'

    Packet lag signed up for IT classes in the clink

    A UK hacker behind bars for computer fraud hacked into his prison's computer system during an IT lesson. Nicholas Webber, 21, of Southsea, Hampshire, was able to access the network after being allowed to join the jail's technology classes. Webber was sent down for five years in May 2011 for masterminding the infamous …

    Security 4 Mar 14:59

  • Inside Lord Sugar's 'you're fired' YouView bust-up with TV baron

    Apprentice head honcho quits telly box biz

    YouView has announced that Lord Alan Sugar will leave the consortium two years after he headed up the organisation. It was reported over the weekend that he stepped down after an especially animated Apprentice-style boardroom bust-up between the peer and Richard Desmond, owner of Channel 5. Lord Sugar was apparently told "you' …

    Media 4 Mar 15:29

  • Sony: Can't beat Apple and Samsung, so let's be the Other Guy

    C'mon. We could totally take on Huawei

    Sony's head of mobile has said today that the company is aiming to be the third most loved smartphone maker over rivals like Huawei, ZTE and Motorola. The Japanese firm has no illusions of being able to knock Apple or Samsung out of the top two spots, but it's hoping to at least get onto the podium for a bronze medal, Kunimasa …

    Phones 4 Mar 16:03

  • Apple: OK, we tracked your every move... but let's call it a caching bug, m'kay?

    It's a T&C question, not privacy invasion - Apple tells court

    Apple's lawyers have asked a Californian judge to dismiss a case against the company on the basis that no harm was caused by Apple storing detailed maps of users' movements. Apple has already redefined the case as a question of information storage rather than a privacy invasion. The iPhone users who sued Apple can't prove …

    Phones 4 Mar 16:32

  • EMC: No need to swallow an array - just breathe in our storage cloud

    Storagebod VMAX more about pricing than tech

    So EMC has finally announced the VMAX Cloud Edition: which according to this blogger is an iteration that has little to do with technology and everything to do with the way that EMC wants us to consume storage. Firstly, let's discuss the cost model - in many ways the most important part of the announcement. EMC has now moved …

    Cloud Infrastructure 4 Mar 17:06

  • MapR smashes MinuteSort benchmark on Google Compute

    Puts Hadoop Big Data muncher back on top of Microsoft

    While supercomputers and workstations have Linpack to rank their number-crunching performance, when it comes to sorting algorithms to rank Big Data systems, there is a collection of tests known as the Sort Benchmarks. And this year it looks like Hadoop is back on top after commercial distie MapR Technologies beat the MinuteSort …

    HPC 4 Mar 17:31

  • Mellanox to open up its Ethernet networking stack

    Time for Ethernet to steal something else – open source – from InfiniBand

    Switch and adapter maker Mellanox Technologies will take its own switching and management software open source, and allow companies to run their own open switching and routing code atop its physical switches. Why? Simple: Mellanox is trying to differentiate itself from its competitors in the Ethernet switch and router rackets …

    Data Networking 4 Mar 18:24

  • AWS promotes Trusted Advisor, its Clippy-in-the-cloud

    'It looks like you're spinning up an instance, need any help with that?'

    Amazon is promoting its AWS Trusted Advisor cloud diagnostics service, giving absent-minded developers a Microsoft Clippy-style companion to help them save money and tighten security in their cloud applications. The promo will give all Amazon customers free access to Trusted Advisor throughout March, Amazon announced on Sunday …

    Cloud 4 Mar 19:13

  • Global smartphones sales set to outpace standard handsets in 2013

    Some Western vendors living in interesting times

    While the lion's share of the world's six billion mobile phone users are still on plain-old feature phones, sales of those handsets' smarter successors will become the majority in 2013, according to the latest predictions from IDC. The analyst house reports that for the first time, 50.1 per cent of all mobile sales are …

    Phones 4 Mar 20:06

  • Apple iWatch: Coming soon, runs iOS, to earn mucho mazuma

    Rumor mill spins at light speed

    Reminiscent of the hypegasm that preceded the releases of the iPhone in 2007 and iPad in 2010, rumors of Apple's impending "iWatch" are flooding the intertubes, with the latest being that it will be released this year, will run iOS, and will rake in gobs and gobs of cash for a company that has seen its stock take a relentless …

    Hardware 4 Mar 21:49

  • IBM builds next-gen cloud control freak on OpenStack

    Riding out of Folsom on a Grizzly to a Smart(er)Cloud

    The handwriting was on the wall that IBM would be choosing OpenStack as its cloud control freak of choice when Big Blue joined the OpenStack Foundation last April. The IT giant has been quiet about its intentions for OpenStack, but at the Pulse 2013 event for its Tivoli systems management brand in Las Vegas, the company's top …

    Cloud 4 Mar 21:54

  • Opposition leader raises ‘your Internet will cost you more’ spook

    NBN will be ‘three times the current price’: Tony Abbott

    With opposition leader Tony Abbott declaring unchallenged that the NBN is going to “triple the costs” of access to broadband over the weekend, The Register decided to do some plan searching and come up with a comparison. The quote that got us busy can be found here: “Malcolm [Turnbull] is the Shadow Minister for …

    Government 4 Mar 21:57

  • Microsoft offers developer tools for its lonely Office Store

    Visual Studio kit for building Office add-ons exits preview

    Microsoft really wants developers to build apps for the new version of its Office productivity suite – both standalone and subscription – and to that end it has released a new set of tools for Visual Studio 2012 designed to make it easier to develop, test, and deploy Office add-ons. "The Office Developer Tools for Visual …

    Developer 4 Mar 22:03

  • White House comes out in favor of legal mobe unlocking

    FCC: Lockdown 'doesn't pass the common sense test'

    President Obama's idea for a petition system has come in for a lot of criticism – some of it deserved – but if the latest response to a petition on mobile phone unlocking is anything to go by, the system has definite benefits. The petition was created following the decision by the Librarian of Congress to review the remit of …

    Policy 4 Mar 22:05

  • Australia ratifies cybercrime convention

    Think of the children - and the IP owners

    Australia's Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus has announced that the government has formally signed the European Convention on Cybercrime. Doing so was the final step in becoming party to the convention, after the Cybercrime Amendment Bill passed through Australia's Parliament in 2012. The A-G said the move will “will help combat …

    Government 4 Mar 22:06

  • Pirate Bay 'seeks asylum' in, er, 'North Korea'

    Updated Digital backwater an unlikely home for bandwidth-hungry site

    The Pirate Bay says it is relocating to either North Korea (the Democratic People's Republic of Korea) - if you go by the flag in its sails on its homepage - or South Korea (the Republic of Korea), if you go by its statement.* If the file-sharing site's claim relates to the former, it certainly looks spurious given the nation's …

    Networks 4 Mar 23:59