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22nd March 2013 Archive

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  • Ubuntu tapped by China for national operating system

    Canonical to help government add "Chinese specific" features to OS

    Ubuntu is going to become the reference architecture for a Linux distribution, backed and developed by the Chinese government. The news means Ubuntu-stewards Canonical will work with China's National University of Defense Technology, and The China Software and Integrated Chip Promotions Center, to develop a Chinese-flavored …

    Operating Systems 22 Mar 01:23

  • Finland a haven for vulnerable SCADA systems

    Shodan vuln search, the gift that keeps on giving

    Security researchers in Finland have turned up thousands of unsecured Internet-facing SCADA systems in that country, using the Shodan search engine. The researchers, from Aalto University, ran their test in January, and found 2,915 exposed systems running functions from building automation to transport and water supply. Those …

    Security 22 Mar 01:25

  • Universe gains an extra hundred million years

    Planck also refines matter measurements

    Among the mysteries revealed by the first set of papers released out of the Planck telescope data is a new estimate for the age of the Universe: at 13.8 billion years, it's 100 million years older than previously calculated. As explained by The Register here, the space probe's mission is to give astronomers a better map of the …

    Science 22 Mar 02:06

  • Vietnamese high school kids can pass Google interview

    Google engineer makes shock discovery on fact-finder

    Google engineer Neil Fraser got a bit of a surprise when he visited Vietnam recently to see how schools teach ICT: kids in 11th grade are capable of passing the Chocolate Factory’s notoriously difficult interview process. Fraser blogged about his trip (via TNW), which ostensibly seems to have been a fact-finding mission …

    Jobs 22 Mar 03:02

  • Microsoft, Adobe, wilt during Australian price gouge grilling

    Local leaders struggle with 'price what the market bears' charge

    Adobe and Microsoft's Australia's managing directors have both struggled to answer hours of tough questions from Australia's Parliamentary inquiry into IT pricing. Apple's Tony King was the first witness to front members of parliament for ninety minutes today of MPs today, and acquitted himself well. Adobe's Paul Robson was …

    Government 22 Mar 04:26

  • Hong Kong plans cavernous underground data centres

    Going underground

    The Hong Kong government is looking at a novel way of creating new space in which to build data centres in the tiny Special Administrative Region (SAR): digging purpose-built caves. Speaking at the Datacentre Space Asia conference in the SARon Thursday, Hilary Cordell of local real estate law firm Cordells revealed that plans …

    Datacenter 22 Mar 04:42

  • Myanmar gets a taste of Chocolate Factory as Google search lands

    Play app store is also partially unblocked ahead of Eric Schmidt's visit

    Myanmar’s gradual re-integration with the rest of the world has taken another step forward after Google partially unblocked its Play app store and switched on a .mm search engine for the region, ahead of a visit by Chairperson Eric Schmidt. The executive chairman is set to round off a whistlestop tour of India with a visit to …

    Government 22 Mar 05:28

  • Victoria and Albert museum in narrow escape from Napalm Death

    Fragile London landmark dodges Brummie sonic weapon

    London's Victoria and Albert Museum has canned a planned performance tonight by Napalm Death, amid fears the Brummie grindcore outfit might literally bring the house down. The band were scheduled to play "a special live set through an experimental sculptural sound system" built by the V&A's resident ceramic artist Keith …

    Bootnotes 22 Mar 06:03

  • Wind farms make you sick … with worry and envy

    No one feels anything until the lobbyists show up, says public health boffin

    Professor Simon Chapman, the public health advocate behind the global push for ugly cigarette packets, has turned his attention to “wind turbine sickness”, the condition caused by infrasound vibrations from the turbines' colossal blades. Chapman believes the condition is bunk and has co-authored a paper, titled Spatio-temporal …

    Science 22 Mar 06:28

  • Experts finger disk-wiping badness used in S Korea megahack

    The long, dark teatime of the Seoul

    Antivirus firms have identified the main malware behind a major internet attack that hit corporate computer networks in South Korea on Wednesday afternoon. However the source and motives behind the attack remain a mystery. Researchers have dubbed it DarkSeoul. Computer networks at three South Korean TV stations and at least …

    Security 22 Mar 07:03

  • Cop an eyeful of that: Moto bungs 5-megapixel cam into plod radio

    No suggestion an Instagram app expected imminently

    Motorola Solutions' MTP6750 is a police radio with a difference: it sports a five-megapixel camera that not only takes pictures but autographs them to stop bent or bungling coppers tampering with the evidence. The handset isn't just for the plod: it uses the TETRA telephony standard common to the police, security and emergency …

    Mobile 22 Mar 08:02

  • Swiss boffins unleash power of graphene on flash mem

    Chow down on tasty molybdenite sandwich

    A Swiss government research lab has reinvented flash memory using graphene and molybdenite in a way that should be faster, scale smaller, use less energy and yet more flexible than boring old NAND. Molybdenite is MoS2, molybdenum disulfide, which is similar to graphite and also has a lubricating effect. Atomically it is a …

    Storage 22 Mar 08:27

  • Stephen Fry explains… Alan Turing's amazing computer

    Universal Machine upgrade needed, where can I find the parts?

    It's been almost two years* since Stephen Fry last put his foot in his mouth - but the boy has gone and done it again. The nation's most cherished TV advertisement voiceover artist is cherished here, too, at El Reg - for his technical wisdom. After his attempt to explain how the internet works (it needs atomic clocks), we …

    Media 22 Mar 09:02

  • Tech distie Tech Data tears up last THREE years of profit numbers

    Errors in UK arm's accounts wipe £21m off net profit

    IT distribution giant Tech Data has ripped up its financial results for the last three years after discovering errors in its UK subsidiary's accounts. The company revealed this morning it will recalculate the figures and publish new reports as a result of uncovering mistakes in "vendor accounting" by its Brit biz Computer 2000 …

    The Channel 22 Mar 09:44

  • Review: Renault Zoe electric car

    At last, an affordable, practical, decent looking e-car. WOOT

    To argue that the electric car has already failed is farcical. To date only one mass-market EV from an established car maker has been launched in the UK: the Nissan Leaf. Even I’m not fully convinced by the Leaf. I think it’s too big, too ugly and too expensive. A revised, cheaper, longer-range Sunderland-built model will …

    Hardware 22 Mar 10:00

  • How to survive a UEFI BOOT-OF-DEATH on Samsung laptops

    Matthew Garrett reveals the software surgery needed

    Former Red Hatter Matthew Garrett, who cleared Linux's name when the open-source kernel appeared to cause shiny new Samsung laptops to destroy themselves, has offered a survival guide to avoid similar catastrophes. Nebula programmer Garrett this week warned that Samsung laptops may brick themselves if the computer's UEFI …

    Operating Systems 22 Mar 10:33

  • Nvidia unveils Minority Report-style face-bot tech

    GTC 2013 Keeping it real takes two trillion calculations a second

    Accurately modeling and rendering the ocean is highly complex from a computational perspective – but it’s considerably harder to portray accurately an artificial simulation of the human face, according to Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang in his opening keynote address at the GTC 2013 conference in San Jose. Human faces contain a …

    Applications 22 Mar 11:03

  • UK biz ISP Entanet goes titsup, 'broke' a bit of Blighty's internet

    'Resilient national network? Not tonight!'

    Brit internet and communications provider Entanet is slowing bringing its systems back to life today after they metaphorically keeled over last night. The Shropshire-based supplier of broadband, leased lines, telecoms and more has offered scant detail about its network outage, much to the chagrin of some of its biz and ISP …

    Broadband 22 Mar 11:25

  • LOHAN fans drawn to magnetic coupling

    Neodymium solution for spaceplane heater disconnect?

    Earlier this week, we published results of some tests on the proposed heater for our Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) rocket motor heater, designed to keep the Vulture 2 spaceplane's powerplant toasty at altitude. We also invited our tech-savvy ballocket mission fans to suggest just how we might link the heater to …

    SPB 22 Mar 11:44

  • Oi, Microsoft, where's my effin' toolbar gone?

    Something for the Weekend, Sir? How the browser buggered up application UIs

    Half-life Wife is angry. She has begun swearing loudly through gritted teeth and is shaking her fist in a threatening manner. This, believe it or not, is a relief. Mrs D tends to not so much experience emotions as perform them, so the shaking fist is less a warning of intention, more the art of expression. And while I probably …

    Applications 22 Mar 12:00

  • Software glitch WIPES OUT listings of 10,000 eBay sellers

    Sales histories are history (maybe)

    eBay has confessed to The Register that a software bug destroyed the listings of 10,000 merchants in Britain, the US, Germany and Australia. The online tat bazaar said it was restoring the listings, but it was unable to tell us if traders would be able to recover their sales histories - an important component for eBay sellers …

    Small Biz 22 Mar 12:19

  • Quantum tries to attract HOT TV stars ... by adding object storage to archive

    If that doesn't convince 'em, maybe trip to Vegas will

    Quantum is introducing a 2-tier archive inside its StorNext data management product for TV biz types. The new gear has disk-based object storage front-ending a tape library, providing both nearline and long-term archive stores with automated movement between them. Details are sparse, but it will demo the object storage product …

    Storage 22 Mar 12:45

  • China Mobile spaffs £4.4bn on 4G 'trial'... before it even has a licence

    If we build it, the iPhone will come

    China Mobile will build 200,000 LTE base stations, covering 500 million people and costing 41.7 billion yuan, despite the fact that 4G licences won't be awarded until the end of 2013. The world's largest mobile operator is obviously confident it will get a 4G licence, though until it does the rollout is officially just a " …

    Mobile 22 Mar 13:04

  • Calm a CARMA drama chameleon: Barça super waves ARMs, GPUs

    GTC 2013 Cluster perks up with low-power CPUs bossing graphics chips

    Over the last few years, we’ve seen a steadily growing buzz surrounding the use of ARM processors in PCs, servers and supercomputers. Here, at this year's GPU Technology Conference in California, that buzz is even more pronounced. This is due to Nvidia's upcoming 64-bit "Project Denver" ARM cores, and advances in its graphics …

    HPC 22 Mar 13:26

  • Adware-flinging Yontoo yahoos target Mac users: You like trailers, right fanboi?

    Browser add-on threat bites Apple boxes

    Miscreants are coining it by infecting fanbois beloved Apple boxes with a well-known ad-injecting Trojan previously only found on Windows machines. Trojan.Yontoo.1, the specially crafted Mac OS X version, penetrates computers running OS X by offering what purports to be a browser plugin necessary to view content, but is …

    Security 22 Mar 14:04

  • Goblinproofing One's Chicken Coop hailed oddest book title

    Anti-fairy guide wins prestigious literary award

    The splendidly titled Goblinproofing One's Chicken Coop has won The Bookseller's Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year. Reginald Bakeley's winning tome, which also offers "Other Practical Advice In Our Campaign Against The Fairy Kingdom", took 38 per cent of an online public vote. Loani Prior's How Tea Cosies Changed …

    Bootnotes 22 Mar 14:27

  • MasterCard stings PayPal with payment fee hike

    Secrecy comes at a price

    PayPal, Google Wallet and other online payment systems face higher transaction fees from MasterCard in retaliation for their refusal to share data on what people are spending. Visa is likely to follow suit. The amount that PayPal has to pay MasterCard for every transaction will go up as the latter introduces new charges for …

    Financial News 22 Mar 15:04

  • ARM's new CEO: You'll get no 'glorious new strategy' from me

    Past performance no guarantee of future success, though

    ARM Holdings is the kind of quiet success story Britain excels at, and really the sort of thing the data-fiddlers of Silicon Roundabout should aspire to be doing. ARM doesn’t wrangle data and pass it off as a business model. It designs patentable processor technology that has turned US, Japanese and South Korean electronics …

    Hardware 22 Mar 15:24

  • Ex-state attorney general probes Tech Data CEO's sale of $2m shares

    Vast distie investigated over profit bungle

    A firm of legal eagles is investigating whether distie giant Tech Data violated state or federal laws by making accounting errors that will wipe millions off its bottom line from recent years. Kahn Swick & Foti (KSF) is also probing CEO Bob Dutkvsky's offloading of $2m in his firm's shares earlier this month The US logistics …

    The Channel 22 Mar 16:04

  • GE puts new Nvidia tech through its paces, ponders HPC future

    GTC 2013 Hybrid CPU-GPU chips plus RDMA and PCI-Express make for screamin' iron

    A top General Electric techie gave a presentation at the GPU Technology Conference this week in San José, California, and discussed the benefits of Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) for InfiniBand and its companion GPUDirect method of linking GPU memories to each other across InfiniBand networks. And just for fun, the GE tech …

    HPC 22 Mar 16:27

  • Reliant on Dell for PCs? Start looking around, says Gartner ball-gazer

    Mr D may bail on computers before you do, says man

    Can it really be that enterprise customers should make sure they have an emergency raft ready to head to the shores of rival PC makers should Dell jettison its desktop and notebook portfolio when it goes private? Yes indeed, says Gartner research director Adrien O'Connell, who reckons Dell will not quit this year but may do …

    The Channel 22 Mar 16:28

  • Brussels 'mulling probe' into brutal Apple negotiations with networks

    Or so the mobile operators evidently hope, anyway

    The EU is examining Apple's deals with network operators, to ensure it's playing fair - but hasn't yet opened an official investigation. Citing the ubiquitous "people familiar with the matter" the New York Times tells us that various mobile network operators have been sharing their Apple contracts with the commission after the …

    Mobile 22 Mar 16:51

  • News scraper Meltwater loses US court case

    Paltry traffic ruled no compensation for lost fees

    Headline-scraper Meltwater has lost another court case, this time in the US. The Associated Press brought the case in a federal court, with Judge Denise Cote arguing that the service had stolen an unfair advantage over its rivals by refusing to take out a license for headlines and excerpts. In 2011 the aggregator lost a case …

    Media 22 Mar 18:04

  • Apple debuts two-step verification for Apple IDs

    Something you know, and something you ought to lock in a cupboard

    Apple is now offering two-factor authentication to Apple ID users. The move, which follows similar moves by Google, will make it far harder for hackers to steal Apple ID login credentials. These credentials are important because they are used in conjunction with iCloud to store content, and in downloading apps from the App …

    Security 22 Mar 18:24

  • FCC Chairman Genachowski to step down

    Why? He didn't say – yet

    Julius Genachowski, chairman of the US Federal Communications Commission, announced at a Friday-morning meeting that he will step down from his position as referee in a number of ongoing telecommunication battles, one of the hottest being internet control versus internet freedom. "I called this all-hands meeting of FCC …

    Government 22 Mar 19:26

  • Hoboken CTO admits bugging boss for political leverage

    Faction-fighting among Bridge and Tunnelers

    The IT boss for the city of Hoboken, New Jersey – one of New York's closest and most underrated neighbors – is facing 15 years in the Big House after pleading guilty to harvesting the emails of the mayor and her staff to inform their political rivals. In 2009, Peter J. Cammarano III was elected major of Hoboken, beating his …

    Security 22 Mar 19:39

  • Google patent filing suggests Glass will be ULTIMATE REMOTE

    Headset computing to control your life

    Google's Project Glass computing specs could solve one of technology's most enduring problems – finding where you put the remote control. A patent filing from the Chocolate Factory shows that the firm wants to build control of everyday objects into its head-mounted hardware so that the wearer can use voice commands to order …

    Hardware 22 Mar 23:39

  • Dongle smut Twitstorm claims second scalp

    Possible blokey jokey sees cross woman in pink slip

    Life can imitate a Charlie Brooker drama, after all. A programmer who made a "dongle" joke at a Python developers' conference has been fired, unleashing a Twitter lynch mob. His feminist accuser has also been fired after her employer suffered a DDoS attack. "Women in technology need consistant [sic] messaging from birth …

    Bootnotes 22 Mar 23:45