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20th March 2013 Archive

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  • Adobe reports great re$ult$ but loses CTO Kevin Lynch to Apple

    Harry Potter and the Contract of Cupertino

    It's been a mixed day for Adobe – exceeding analyst's expectations for its first quarter financial results but having this overshadowed by the news that its long-standing CTO Kevin Lynch handed in his notice on Monday and will gone by the end of the week . "Kevin Lynch resigned from his position as Executive Vice President, …

    Business 20 Mar 01:42

  • Report: BlackBerry BYOD-ware doesn't pass UK.gov security test

    Update But is 'likely' to in future, says GCHQ

    BlackBerry Balance, the new feature in BB10 aimed at meeting demand for bring-your-own-device regimes, has been found insufficiently secure for that purpose by Britain's Communications Electronics Security Group (CESG). The CESG, an offshoot of the British signals and electronic intelligence agency GCHQ, describes itself as " …

    Mobile 20 Mar 01:44

  • Google adds validation to DNSSEC

    One small step by one giant foot

    Worldwide, the rollout of DNSSEC can comfortably be described as “glacial”, but Google valiantly continues to try to give it profile. Having launched its own DNSSEC service three years ago, Mountain View has now added DNSSEC validation to its public DNS resolvers. Announced in this blog post, Google says the move means “we can …

    Networks 20 Mar 01:45

  • Breakneck star orbits black hole at record speed

    Vid Two million km/h SPEED DEMON

    The ESA's XMM-Newton has turned up a star and black hole, separated by around a million kilometres, orbiting each other in just 2.4 hours. The pair outstrips the previous record of 3.2 hours for an orbit, held by Swift J1753.5-0127. The speed at which each of the two objects move is pretty impressive. Since they orbit a common …

    Science 20 Mar 02:02

  • EMC2 is now EMC II, too

    "Aye aye", skipper, it be time for a name change

    EMC has made a telling change to its brand.The company's full name, “EMC2”, is now the master brand for Pivotal, VMware and EMC II. Here's a slide that shows the distinction. The new scheme seemingly means EMC, the purveyor of storage hardware and associated software, is now called “EMC Information Infrastructure”, which …

    Storage 20 Mar 04:22

  • Kinky Android X-ray app laid bare as malware

    Symantec warns it'll try to extort victims

    Japanese mobile users are being warned not to download an Android app promising to allow them to see through clothes with the phone’s camera, as the malware hidden within will steal address book data and try to blackmail them to the tune of ¥29,000 (£202). The app's first manifestation is usually an SMS message appearing to …

    Security 20 Mar 05:16

  • Google turns Street View into Mountain View

    Takes camera up Everest way...

    Google has taken its Street View service to new heights after deciding to ditch the infamous car in favour of a simple tripod and camera as it unveiled new shots of some of the world’s tallest mountains. The Chocolate Factory’s obsessive bid to map every corner of the planet has now taken it up Mount Everest – or at least base …

    Networks 20 Mar 05:56

  • Dear gov cyber-ninjas, try NOT to KILL PEOPLE. Love from the lawyers

    Stick nuke plants and hospitals on no-go list too - war manual

    A NATO-backed manual that attempts to pull together all the bits of international law regarding the "hostile use" of the internet has prohibited attacks against civilian targets. According to the legal experts who helped draw up the manual, attacks in cyberspace should avoid anything that might affect civilian targets such as …

    Security 20 Mar 07:02

  • Virgin Media boss to Osbo: Bung city fibre cash into small biz

    Analysis ISP boss reckons UK.gov should spend £75m getting offline firms online

    Virgin Media has said it before and it's saying it again: the cable company wants the UK government to take at least half of Blighty's £150m set aside for urban broadband rollouts and pump it into improving digital skills in small businesses. This time, in a well-spun missive to Chancellor George Osborne ahead of Budget Day, …

    Broadband 20 Mar 08:03

  • Bolshy Balch Hill blasts STEC bosses after talks break down

    Increase in ops spend = NO profits - activist investor

    Activist investor Balch Hill has told STEC's shareholders that they should consider putting up a For Sale sign on the fallen flash leader's lawn and booting out the CEO and former CEO, the Moshayedi brothers. Balch Hill, which holds 9 per cent of shares, and its partner Potomac Capital have issued a letter to STEC shareholders …

    Storage 20 Mar 08:27

  • SCADA honeypots attract swarm of international hackers

    'Industrial control systems' faced attacks from US, China...and, er, Laos

    Vulnerable internet-facing industrial systems controlling crucial equipment used by power plants, airports, factories and other critical systems are subjected to sustained attacks within hours of appearing online, according to new honeypot-based research by Trend Micro. The security weaknesses of SCADA (supervisory control and …

    Security 20 Mar 09:03

  • Speaking in Tech: Smash that Kickstarter piggy bank and MAKE IT RAIN

    Podcast We chat to Google-style storage startup man about how to, er, crowdfund

    It's another recap of the week in tech at El Reg's coolest (and only) podcast. Join your your hosts, Greg Knieriemen, Ed Saipetch and - fresh from Austin nerdfest SXSW - Sarah Vela for everything you need to know about the business of tech. This week, the whole gang is together for the first time in over a month. Their very …

    Small Biz 20 Mar 09:34

  • Whatever happened to telepresence? From $2.5m deals to free iPad apps

    Feature It's the tech that made Microsoft feel the love for open standards

    Cast your mind back nearly 10 years and high-end videoconferencing with its eye-watering price was being touted as the substitute for the corporate jet. At the time, having remote video streams to view your conference room was a big deal that involved an awful lot of looking after and a continuous investment each month for the …

    Management 20 Mar 10:03

  • The Register Guide to Windows Server 2012: Holistic storage

    A short extract from our ebook

    In February we published the The Register Guide to Windows Server 2012 as a free ebook. (You can get it here via our ebooks page.) To date there has been about 7,000 downloads, To give you a flavour of the book, co-written by Trevor Pott and Liam Proven, we are republishing our second of two extracts. This short extract acts …

    Datacenter 20 Mar 10:14

  • ICO clamps down on nuisance calls, slaps £90k fine on Glasgow firm

    Ring, ring. Ring, ring. Give us a roast spud

    A Glasgow company that deliberately nagged households with nuisance calls has been fined £90,000 by Britain's data protection watchdog. DM Design had annoyed the hell out of thousands of people by making nuisance marketing calls to their home telephone numbers. The Information Commissioner's Office said that the regulator and …

    Government 20 Mar 10:36

  • Reg live natter with GNOME superstar Miguel de Icaza

    Live Chat Let your fingers do the talking ...

    If anyone is a paid-up member of the open source club, surely it is Miguel de Icaza. He helped found the GNOME UI and desktop beloved by millions and claimed to be the most popular desktop environment for GNU/Linux and UNIX-type operating systems. For GNOME, De Icaza earned the MIT Innovators under-35 award in 1999, beating …

    Operating Systems 20 Mar 11:03

  • Feds cuff ex-NASA boffin at airport amid state-secret leak scare

    Bloke allegedly had one-way ticket to China with a bag full of disks

    An ex-NASA scientist was arrested as he tried to board a plane to Beijing amid claims of a security breach at the space agency. Chinese national Bo Jiang, 31, who had been working for the National Institute of Aeronautics at NASA's Langley Research Centre, was cuffed by the FBI at Dulles airport in Washington. The Feds pounced …

    Government 20 Mar 11:23

  • Another MYSTERY evacuation: Google UK empties swanky offices

    Picture Gather round kids, no nipping off for a pint

    Googlers have been chucked out of their central London office behind Tottenham Court Road station for the second time in about a month. There's no word yet on the reason for the latest evacuation, during which the entire plush building - home to various tech and media companies - was cleared out. Go on give us a Google wave. …

    Developer 20 Mar 11:43

  • That Osbo bloke - he's on your Twitters. 'What a c**k'

    Budget Day 2013 Thin-lipped chancellor joins blabber site ahead of bleak budget

    Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne has joined the swelled ranks of politicos and media bods on Twitter today, ahead of his Budget Statement at lunchtime - which is expected to be one of the bleakest in years. 'This is what they call a selfie, right?' The Register suspects that Osbo is too busy with his abacus today …

    Government 20 Mar 11:57

  • The Lynx effect: The story of Camputers' mighty micro

    Feature The cat from Cambridge that clawed its way to the top... almost

    Not all of the early 1980s British home computers were fated to be as successful as Sinclair’s ZX series or Acorn's BBC Micro. Many were destined instead to be loved solely by keen but small communities of owners. For all these users’ enthusiasm, there were too few of them to sustain the cost of developing, manufacturing, …

    Vintage 20 Mar 12:19

  • LOHAN slips into tight rubber outfit

    Our spaceplane's rocket motor heater gets the heatshrink treatment

    Last week, the Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) team welcomed rocketeer Paul Shackleton aboard our audacious spaceplane mission. Accordingly, it's an opportune moment to report on progress on the Vulture 2 motor heater, which will hopefully prevent the aircraft's powerplant catching a nasty cold during its ascent to …

    SPB 20 Mar 12:37

  • South Korean TV and banks paralysed in disk-wipe cyber-blitz

    Too early to blame network meltdown on Norks

    Banks and TV stations in South Korea have been hit by a debilitating attack on their computer networks. Three financial institutions - Shinhan, Nonghyup and Jeju - and two insurance firms as well as broadcasters KBS, MBC and YTN have either been partially or completely crippled by malware, it appears, according to South Korean …

    Security 20 Mar 13:03

  • Corporate IT bod? Show 'em what it costs and management WILL pay

    Storagebod If you don't do it, pricy outsourced crew will

    Getting IT departments to start thinking like service providers is an uphill struggle; getting beyond cost-to-value seems to be a leap too far for many. I wonder if it is driven by fear of change or simply a fear of assessing value. How do you assess the value of a service? Well, arguably, it is quite simple ... it is worth …

    Jobs 20 Mar 13:25

  • Brit Bill Gates writes ANOTHER open letter to HP board

    Pleads for Big Reveal at AGM

    Former Autonomy mobster Mike Lynch wants HP to shine a light on the accusations of book-cooking made against him and his exec team when it holds the annual shareholder meeting later today. Good luck with that Mike, it's not the first time you've tried and been stonewalled by HP. In fact, when The Channel asked HP about its …

    The Channel 20 Mar 13:43

  • Twitter patents sending messages, promises not to sue everyone

    Do no evil - we've heard THAT one before

    Twitter has patented a messaging service in which users follow each other and send messages that don't have specific recipients - or in other words, Twitter. The approved patent, originally filed in 2007 but published this week, describes pretty much how Twitter and tweeting work, and lists Twitter founders Jack Dorsey and Biz …

    Law 20 Mar 14:03

  • Osborne slashes growth forecast by half in bleak economy statement

    Budget Day 2013 'I will be straight with the country, we're screwed'

    Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne "levelled" with the British public today by admitting that the economy remains in the toilet as he slashed growth estimates. "We've got to go on making difficult decisions so that Britain can live within its means," he told Parliament. But his grim statement to the House revealed …

    Government 20 Mar 14:33

  • Mobile kingpins to marketing mavens: Bonking is brilliant, wanna try?

    But first, let's loosen you up with a little jazz

    Vodafone, O2 and EE sent their respective CEOs to Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club this morning, hoping to seduce the UK's advertising industry with the promise of SMS and banner deliveries across networks, with bonking to follow. The event was part of Advertising Week Europe, and the operators were pushing their cross-network …

    Mobile 20 Mar 15:04

  • Riak cloud storage's secret sauce splashed all over the web

    NoSQL biz Basho attempts to woo developers with code

    Riak database stewards at Basho have released their multi-tenant high-availability cloud storage technology as open source under the Apache 2 licence - but to what end? Perhaps it's because new technologies need to experience widespread adoption before they can have much of an effect on the IT used by many companies, and …

    Applications 20 Mar 15:24

  • 1,600 to lose jobs during ST-Ericsson breakup

    Joint venture less joint, less venturous

    The joint venture which tried to challenge Qualcomm and Intel in the baseband chip market has collapsed, with the loss of 1,600 jobs and another 3,000 or so finding themselves working for someone else. ST-Ericsson was set up, back in 2009, by STMicroelectronics and Ericsson and has been bleeding money ever since. It did create …

    Mobile 20 Mar 16:04

  • One-time wannabe governor charged for Facebook share Ponzi scheme

    What's worse, real Facebook shares or pretend ones?

    A US financier has been charged with running a $13.2m Ponzi scheme, supposedly trading in Facebook and other social networks' pre-IPO shares despite the fact that he didn't have access to them. Craig Berkman, a former Oregon gubernatorial candidate now living in Florida, had allegedly promised his investors that he had insider …

    Law 20 Mar 16:25

  • Acer's tiny raft of profit smashed onto rocks by Gateway and co

    PC maker dives into the red thanks to $120m write-down

    The much touted recovery at PC maker Acer didn't show up in 2012: a write-down on its assets dragged its accounts into the red. The vendor said its sales in 2012 slid 9.6 per cent year on year to NT$429.5bn ($14.4bn, £9.53bn), bagging it a razor-thin operating profit of NT$1.03bn ($34.6m, £22.8m). But that was wiped out by an …

    The Channel 20 Mar 16:58

  • Amazon boss salvages Apollo engines from watery grave

    Bezos bags historic rockets from 3 miles down

    Amazon boss Jeff Bezos and his deep-sea salvage crew have successfully raised enough wreckage from the seabed off Florida to rebuild two of the massive F-1 rocket engines that once powered NASA's Apollo missions. A fixer-upper in mechanical terms "We found so much," Bezos said in a blog post. "We’ve seen an underwater …

    Science 20 Mar 18:40

  • Hadoop whisperer Concurrent slurps VC money

    'In crisis there is opportunity'

    Hadoop whisperer Concurrent has trousered $4m of VC money so the data analysis platform company can hire more people, extend its open source efforts and generally stay in business. The $4 million in funding from VC firms True Ventures and Rembrandt Venture Partners was announced on Wednesday. It also sees the company take on a …

    Business 20 Mar 19:07

  • Nvidia gets into the server biz with Visual Computing Appliance

    GTC 2013 Tier one server makers embrace Grid for their own appliances

    If you want to virtualize workstations and run them on shared infrastructure, or build a giant renderfarm to make the next blockbuster movie or video game, then Nvidia has a server for you. It's called the Visual Computing Appliance, and as the name suggests, it is aimed at important workloads such as running Crysis, at least …

    Servers 20 Mar 19:58

  • Nvidia welds together ARM-Kepler ceepie-geepie system for the impatient

    GTC 2013 Development board for CPU-GPU hybrid apps, or nodes in a parallel cluster perhaps

    Graphics chip maker Nvidia is also an ARM processor maker, and it wants hybrid ARM-GPU chips just as much as you want them. And in the meantime, if you just can't wait, the company is working with Italian electronics manufacturer Seco to kick out another ceepie-geepie card that can be used for software development or to build a …

    HPC 20 Mar 20:19

  • Microsoft starts to roll out Windows 8 in embedded flavors

    Full and cut-down Windows for dumber devices

    Microsoft has announced the general availability of two flavors of Windows 8 for embedded systems; the Standard and Pro editions. "Edge devices connected and working in unison with an enterprise's broader IT infrastructure unleash the potential of the Internet of Things by yielding the actionable data and operational …

    Operating Systems 20 Mar 21:30

  • Nvidia and ARM: It's a parallel, parallel, parallel world

    GTC 2013 Big changes coming to the CUDA programming model

    Nvidia envisions a future in which ARM processors and the GPU-maker's CUDA parallel-computing platform and programming model will work together in perfect harmony, and the company has a raft of planned CUDA enhancements to not only make that coexistence seamless, but to enhance that programming environment for discrete GPUs, as …

    Developer 20 Mar 21:34

  • Oracle's hardware wing keeps on bleeding

    Cloud blots out Sun

    Oracle's shares dropped 7 per cent in after-hours trading in response to an quarterly earnings report that showed muted adoption for its latest software offerings and a continued shrinkage in its troubled hardware division. The database giant reported on Wednesday third quarter earnings of $2.504bn on revenues of $8.958bn – …

    Financial News 20 Mar 22:25

  • Cisco slip puts hardware at risk

    Borg announces weak password feature

    Cisco has issued a security advisory revealing that it mis-coded the implementation of a new password hashing algorithm. Its “Type 4” password implementation was supposed to salt passwords and then run them through 1,000 iterations of SHA-256 for storage, following the Password-Based Key Derivation Function (PBKDF) version 2 …

    Security 20 Mar 22:46

  • Samsung: We're doing smart watches too

    Patent lawyers uncork the champagne world-wide

    It's Cupertino's turn to capture a flag planted by Samsung: while Apple has been content to allow leaks to fuel rumours about its “smart watch” plans, its Korean nemesis/rival/copycat has gone public with its project. In a discussion that will probably warm the hearts of patent lawyers worldwide, Samsung's Lee Young Hee, …

    Phones 20 Mar 23:15

  • Voyager goes off a (helio) cliff

    Tiny traveller still telling tales

    Probably the most-loved survivor of 1970s space optimism, Voyager, has sent back signals indicating that it's left the heliosphere. Scientists are now discussing whether they should consider the 35-year-old probe to be in interstellar space, or to have entered a new region of space that hasn't been previously described. The …

    SPB 20 Mar 23:47