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18th March 2013 Archive

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  • Virnetx loses Cisco case: VPNs not its property

    The Borg as great big billy-goat gruff

    Non-practising entity VirnetX has had its patent case against Cisco dumped by a Texas jury, meaning it won't be seeing any of the $US258 million it had demanded of the networking giant. The low-profile company with links to the national security community via Science Applications International Corp issued its demands in 2010, …

    Law 18 Mar 00:49

  • Windows Phone 8 support to end in 2014

    Sign of Win Phone update or death knell?

    If you're shopping for a new mobe on a two year contract and like the look of a Windows Phone, chances are you'll be compelled to undergo an OS upgrade or face using a handset that's not supported by the end of your deal. The Reg offers this advice with a tip of the hat to Italian site Plaffo, which pointed out a Microsoft …

    Operating Systems 18 Mar 02:15

  • Are your servers PETS or CATTLE?

    Update Cloudy metaphor separates the sheep from the goats

    The word “cloud” has become horribly over-used. Your correspondent has even heard hosted PABXs referred to as “cloud telephony”. There's far worse abuse of the language going on among those attempting to describe highly virtualised and/or abstracted server fleets straddling on-premises servers and servers resident in third- …

    Cloud 18 Mar 03:38

  • Alibaba! could! hand! back! Yahoo! China! to Yahoo! in! May!

    Report claims Chinese web bazaar wants to offload ailing portal

    Chinese web and e-commerce giant Alibaba Group could return Yahoo! China to its parent company as early as May, as its partnership with the US internet pioneer continues to wind down. Sources told Chinese tech news portal Sina Tech that the deal may be done through a share swap, speculating that it could happen in or around 10 …

    Business 18 Mar 04:54

  • Celebrity conspiracy as Apple attacked over customer service

    '8:20 Party' of Chinese celebs all posted anti-Apple comments at same time

    Eagle-eyed weibo fans in China have uncovered what appears to be a pre-meditated and co-ordinated attempt to smear Apple following a high profile consumer rights programme on national TV which slammed the firm for its customer service. The broadcast on state-run CCTV – a hugely popular and influential consumer rights programme …

    Networks 18 Mar 05:29

  • Bottomless, unsatisfied Xbox widow cuffed after boyf flees nookie

    Pantless woman arrested by rubbish bin 'anticipated sex'

    A Pennsylvania woman whose boyfriend was keener on his Xbox than a roll in the hay faces charges of indecent exposure, simple assault, open lewdness, and harassment after allegedly assaulting the gaming aficionado, then giving pursuit naked from the waist down as he made for a nearby convenience store to call 911. Heather …

    Bootnotes 18 Mar 06:00

  • Freeview suddenly UNWATCHABLE dross? It may just be a 4G test

    Mobe broadband fired up to stress telly transmissions rather than show quality

    AT800 - the guys tasked with stamping out radio interference caused by 4G mobile broadband - will switch on 4G transmissions near Dudley to see if Freeview survives the experience. It's feared national 4G deployment at 800MHz will disrupt terrestrial telly viewing for about two million homes, but exactly how many and what …

    Mobile 18 Mar 07:02

  • Capita IT Services healing Hands make mark on biz

    Restructure to cut role duplication and bureaucracy

    Chairs on good ship Capita IT Services (CITS) are being re-arranged under the say so of chief executive Peter Hands. Staff were told via email - seen by El Chan - that Gordon Ellen, director of IT Services at Capita is set to leave the business at the end of May to take on a new "challenge". And in typical Capita fashion it …

    The Channel 18 Mar 08:02

  • Britain's passport and ID service seeks facial recog tech suppliers

    Contract worth up to £16m over five years

    The Home Office plans to spend up to £16m on facial recognition technology for the Identity and Passport Service. A tender notice in the European Union's Official Journal (OJEU) popped up this week that showed that Theresa May's department was now on the hunt for providers of a Facial Recognition Engine and a Facial …

    Government 18 Mar 08:29

  • IT contractors lose thousands as 2e2 collapse hits recruiter

    Populo Resourcing shuts up shop

    Tech-sector freelancers are thousands of pounds out of pocket after the collapse of IT integrator 2e2 wiped out recruitment agency Populo Resourcing, The Channel can reveal. The contractors, recruited by Populo to work on various IT projects for 2e2, had their work cancelled days after the integrator crashed. Some say they are …

    The Channel 18 Mar 09:03

  • Cloudfather Tucci meets with EMC clan, analysts to talk strategy

    Storage control, SDN, flash and cloud editions

    EMC and VMware held their so-called Strategic Forum - aka analysts' day - in New York yesterday with capo di Famiglia Joe Tucci setting out the overall stall and his lieutenants setting out their own strategic imperatives. We saw David Goulden for EMC - now called EMC II - and Pat Gelsinger for the cloud and software-defined- …

    Storage 18 Mar 09:32

  • Flooding market with cheap antivirus kit isn't going to help ANYONE

    Not the reseller, not the vendor and especially not the user

    There has been a lot of talk in information security circles over the past few weeks about the revelations of advanced persistent cyber attacks on several big name US newspapers including the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. The attacks, which are suspected to have been launched by Chinese hackers, were highly …

    The Channel 18 Mar 10:03

  • BlackBerry CEO: Our vibrating devices will satisfy most needs

    You'll soon tire of hefty laptops 'n' slabs

    BlackBerry CEO and President Thorsten Heins has declared the organisation he leads is “not a phone company” but a mobile computing company whose networks and operating system can be used to connect a wide range of devices. Speaking in Sydney, Australia, at the formal local launch of the new Z10 handset, Heins bridled at …

    Phones 18 Mar 10:33

  • How Fusion-io redlined its PCIe flash motor to hit 9.6 MEEELION IOPS

    64-byte writes ought to be enough for anybody

    In its latest party trick, Fusion-io ramps up its ioDrive2 server card - a slab of 365GB MLC flash storage on a PCIe board - to gobble 9.6 million writes a second. The feat works by mapping the PCIe card's NAND capacity into an application's memory space and writing 64 bytes - quite likely the PCI backbone's cache line size - …

    Storage 18 Mar 11:03

  • SanDisk cops to malfunctioning Micro SDs in Galaxy S3s

    Offers fix for fandroids' fried flash cards

    Certain Samsung Galaxy S3 users will barely have noticed the rollout of the S4 uberphone, they've been too busy concentrating on the flash card problems in their current smartmobes. Flash-card shuffler SanDisk, meanwhile, has told El Reg that it has issued a fix. User paulnptld talked about this on the Android Central Samsung …

    Phones 18 Mar 11:23

  • Microsoft issues manual on Brits to Cambridge exports

    No guns, dead dogs, or realtors allowed. Welcome to the Third World

    The US Army prints one to acclimatise troops serving in Britain instructing corn-fed GIs on how to avoid going about insulting HM The Queen. Now, Microsoft has produced a field manual for US staff serving at its Cambridge research facility on the etiquette, foibles and slang found in our British Isles. Redmond is reported to …

    Operating Systems 18 Mar 11:43

  • Build a BONKERS gaming PC

    Feature Money to burn? Put it to use building a monstrously powerful games rig

    There is a select band of gamers who will only be satisfied by a huge amount of graphics and processing power. For them, the only thing to do is build a bonkers gaming PC. In my opinion, the tricky part of the job is organising the pile of parts that you’ll use for the build. While we ‘Build a Bonkers...’ writers don’t worry …

    Hardware 18 Mar 12:03

  • Rackspace: Why we're designing our own cloud servers

    Exclusive Just what will it take to compete with Amazon and Google

    Any cloud computing provider that wants to operate at scale and compete against its peers is under pressure to build some kind of custom hardware. It may, in fact, be necessary to compete at all. That is what Rackspace, which is making the transition from website hosting to cloud systems, believes. And that's why the San …

    Management 18 Mar 12:16

  • Doxer who? Toxic site drops offline after exposing Paris Hilton's privates

    Major US credit agency Equifax confirms fraud

    A rogue website that published the financial details on US celebs, politicians and other public figures was taken offline over the weekend - but not before it published the supposed credit reports of Bill Gates and CIA Director John Brennan. Meanwhile, all three of the major US credit agencies confirmed that fraudulent activity …

    Media 18 Mar 12:37

  • Fujitsu pulls a muscle, drops out of race for £530m broadband pot

    BT now ONLY bidder for UK taxpayer-funded fibre jobs

    Fujitsu has admitted it will no longer bid for money from a £530m pot of taxpayer cash to roll-out broadband in Britain's countryside - effectively leaving the lot up for grabs by BT. The national telco has to date been the only preferred bidder to bag any of the dosh, dished out by the government's Ministry of Fun through its …

    Broadband 18 Mar 12:45

  • Nvidia, Continuum team up to sling Python at GPU coprocessors

    GTC 2013 Teaching snakes to speak CUDA with forked tongue, but not forked code

    The Tesla GPU coprocessor and its peers inside your Nvidia graphics cards will soon speak with a forked tongue. Continuum Analytics has been working with the GPU-maker to create the NumbaPro Python-to-GPU compiler. We all call it the LAMP stack, but it should really be called LAMPPP or LAMP3 or some such because it is Linux, …

    HPC 18 Mar 13:04

  • STEC CEO on crappy Q4: 'Obviously, we’re kind of bottoming out'

    Fallen flash star seeks hope in channel, OEM upswing

    STEC must be glad to say farewell to a year of poor results, which is what 2012 represented, but 2013's first quarter is going to slump further, according to the firm's projections at a recent earnings call. STEC's OEM business is not doing so well, and its replacement direct sales biz is off to a slow start. Negotiations with …

    Financial News 18 Mar 13:23

  • Lenovo: Windows 8 is so good, everyone wants Windows 7

    We'll just leave Redmond's latest OS on this DVD, over here. When you want it

    You don't notch up 15 consecutive quarters of growth in a declining market without doing something right - so what's PC maker Lenovo doing right? Well, many things. But it can't do any harm that Lenovo is protecting enterprises from the waterboarding torture of the Microsoft Windows 8 operating system. The majority of Lenovo's …

    The Channel 18 Mar 13:43

  • SwiftStack sucks up $6.1m, leaps through curtains with 'Amazon S3-in-a-box'

    Comes out of stealth with OpenStack-based object storage system

    Software-defined storage upstart Swiftstack has been given a fresh cash injection of $6.1m and has spoken out on its software-as-a-service offering, Swift. Software defined storage (SDN) is akin to the fabless semiconductor firm concept, except that in this case the firms provide software instead of chip designs. With software …

    Storage 18 Mar 14:17

  • The reshaping of Apple-cored Square: Leaving high street is a GOOD sign

    Feature Retail? We've heard of it

    It's a well-worn phrase that appearances can be deceptive, but when a flagship business disappears from public view after years on London's premier high street, most people would assume this isn't a sign of progress. Square Group's new premises brings its three former buildings into one Yet when talking to Darren King, CEO …

    The Channel 18 Mar 15:06

  • Microsoft cuts to core on BizTalk Server price hike

    April changes slip loose

    Some Microsoft customers running the latest version of BizTalk Server can expect a massive hike in their bill under a licensing change being ushered in on 1 April. Redmond is scrapping its per-processor license for BizTalk Server 2013 and will instead begin charging users according to the number of cores running on their …

    The Channel 18 Mar 16:03

  • Google Drive goes titsup for MILLIONS of users

    Steered into ditch, wheels still spinning

    Google Drive has been titsup for the last few hours with many users being greeted by 502 error messages when they attempt to access the online storage service. For many, it remains stubbornly offline for now. Google confirmed that there was a problem with Drive about two hours ago after users complained about service …

    Applications 18 Mar 16:08

  • UK's 'Nobel prize for engineering' given to 'inventors of the interwebs'

    Update Nothing more important has been done lately

    The would-be British based "Nobel Prize of engineering" - aka the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, whose recipients can be of any nationality - has been awarded for the first time. The winners are described as the "five engineers who created the internet and the World Wide Web". According to the official announcement: …

    Government 18 Mar 16:35

  • Intel and pals shrink their semis by $600m as demand droops

    PC processor stocks cut, 4G mobile chips soar

    Semiconductor factories hit the brakes to avoid heaps of unwanted chips piling up after demand for components shrank. Bean counter iSuppli reckons the major manufacturers acted swiftly to prevent expensive backlogs of baked silicon forming: the average number of days between producing inventory and selling it declined five per …

    The Channel 18 Mar 16:57

  • Facebook promotes engineering veep to CTO

    'Unique and important' bloke kicked upstairs

    Facebook has promoted its engineering veep Mike Schroepfer to the job of chief technology officer. The role had been left vacant since June 2012 when Bret Taylor quit the free content ad network within weeks of the company's public debut on Wall Street to do his own biz thing. Schroepfer now steps into Taylor's shoes, after …

    Applications 18 Mar 17:15

  • BlackBerry CEO: iPhone past its prime

    Aging user interface deserves 'respect' – just like your granddaddy

    From BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins' point of view, Apple's iPhone is growing rather long in the tooth. "The user interface on the iPhone, with all due respect for what this invention was all about, is now five years old," Heins told The Australian Financial Review. Not that Heins has no respect for the iPhone – it's more that …

    Phones 18 Mar 17:56

  • Weev gets 41 months in prison for exposing iPad strokers' privates

    'Internet will topple governments,' defendant proclaims

    Andrew Auernheimer, a member of the grey-hat hacking collective Goatse Security, has been sent down for three years and five months in the slammer after he helped leak users' private email addresses via a flaw in AT&T's servers. Auernheimer, known online as Weev, received his sentence wearing shackles after he tried to bring a …

    Security 18 Mar 18:17

  • SimCity owners get free game, EA will get A NEW CEO

    Updated Maxis/EA 'we're sorry' giveaway includes SimCity 4

    Maxis has published the list of the games it's offering free miffed 'Mayors' to compensate for SimCity's disastrous launch. The offer was announced by Maxis on Sunday and lets existing customers and those who register before March 25 to get a free game along with their copy of SimCity as compensation. The downloads start on …

    Games 18 Mar 20:42

  • Has the ACCC tripped up in its ADSL declaration?

    Virtual circuits for ADSL are way too expensive: The Register tallies up the numbers

    Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) declarations are always news, and with good reason: The ACCC's regulated prices set the floor underneath a host of retail services – mobile, broadband, telephony, business data and so on. New declarations are always accompanied by lobbying, both in media outlets and in the …

    Broadband 18 Mar 21:48

  • Microsoft begins automatic Windows 7 SP1 rollout

    You will be assimilated

    Microsoft will start the automatic rollout of Windows 7 Service Pack on Tuesday. The extensive software update will be handled via Windows Update, and will make its way onto PCs whose users have Automatic Update enabled. "Updating customers to Windows 7 SP1 is part of our ongoing effort to ensure continued support and …

    Operating Systems 18 Mar 23:13

  • Supreme Court silence seals Thomas-Rasset's file sharing fate

    $220,000 slap for 24 songs shared stands

    The Supreme Court has once again declined to hear a file-sharing case appeal, leaving Jammie Thomas-Rasset facing a $220,000 fine for sharing 24 MP3 files nearly a decade ago. Thomas-Rasset, a Minnesotan single mother of four, was the first person to challenge a legal claim by the Recording Industry Ass. of America back in …

    Law 18 Mar 23:23

  • Hadoop distie MapR trousers another $30m to take on big data rivals

    Working towards that eventual IPO, if it isn't eaten first

    MapR Technologies, one of the commercializers of the Hadoop big data muncher, has pocketed another $30m to help it ramp up its business and keep it on track for what the company hopes will be an initial public offering.. While Cloudera was out of the gate early commercializing the Hadoop big data muncher, MapR was close behind …

    Cloud Infrastructure 18 Mar 23:39