The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Feeds

3rd April 2013 Archive

Browse by publication date, or search the site.

  • Copyright troll Prenda refuses to explain legal strategy

    Principals invoke Fifth Amendment right to silence

    Notorious copyright troll Prenda Law was seemingly dealt a fatal blow on Tuesday, when the company's top attorneys invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to avoid answering questions from a federal judge. US District Judge Otis Wright II of the Central District of California had summoned the Prenda …

    Law 3 Apr 00:23

  • Obama seeks $100m to unlock your BRAIN's secrets

    Forward-thinking investment or government boondoggle? We report, you decide

    The Obama administration has announced a major new effort to study what the president referred to as "the mystery of the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears." Details of the White House's 'Grand Challenge' (click to enlarge – substantially) The private-public partnership, comprised of what Obama called "some …

    Science 3 Apr 00:29

  • FTC splits $50,000 robocall killing tech prize

    Mobile apps and cloud checks to silence spammers

    The Federal Trade Commission is awarding $25,000 apiece to two inventors who have come up with methods to defeat the hated robocaller, and has tipped its hat to Google for also putting in a good suggestion. Last October, the FTC announced it would offer $50,000 for workable solutions from individuals or companies with less …

    Developer 3 Apr 00:52

  • Microsoft releases Exchange 2013 update

    Update arrives late after compatibility problems with Exchange 2010 resolved

    Exchange admins rejoice: Microsoft has released the first big update for the 2013 version of the mail server and it's ready for you to download and install. What could possibly go wrong? Lots, actually, as Microsoft planned the release of “Exchange Server 2013 RTM Cumulative Update 1” for the first quarter of this year. By …

    Software 3 Apr 01:02

  • US funds Europa mission

    ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS HERE … the money's just for planning

    A mission to explore Jovian moon Europa, considered one of the solar system's better candidates to host life thanks to its possession of a liquid water ocean, is now in NASA's sights after the US government last week signed off $US75m in funds to scope a future visit. The money was allocated in the “Consolidated and Further …

    Science 3 Apr 02:05

  • Microsoft gives away Windows 8 to Mac devs

    Sells out in hours

    Microsoft has decided the best way to get Mac-using developers to use Windows 8 for web compatibility testing is to give it away. Redmond today launched an offer to developers whereby they'd get Windows 8, Parallels desktop virtualisation software and a USB containing both if they make a $US25 donation to a charity through a …

    Operating Systems 3 Apr 03:33

  • Why does our galaxy spiral?

    Video Spread your arms out wide, Milky Way

    A group of astrophysicists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the University of Wisconsin-Madison say they've resolved a long-standing question: how long do spiral arms in galaxies like our own last? The boffins aren't just thinking about our very own Milky Way: the paper, published in The Astrophysical …

    Science 3 Apr 04:23

  • Monkey poo probe reveals secrets of middle-management brains

    If you have any, fling it now

    It might be tough at the top, or at the bottom - but it's even tougher in the middle. That's the claim made by boffins from Liverpool and Manchester universities who say their study of monkeys proves that middle managers suffer more stress than anyone else. 'If you could go ahead and remember to do that from now on' Katie …

    Science 3 Apr 04:58

  • China's Beidou satnav will open to mobe-makers

    Meanwhile in Europe, Galileo gets a firm fix

    China will shortly open its Beidou satnav system to mobile phone makers. Yang Qiangwen, billed by China's official press agnecy Xinhua as “a leading scientist with the China Satellite Navigation Office”, let it be known that the agency is "… seeking favorable policies and attracting investment to promote the technology for …

    Policy 3 Apr 05:11

  • Bahrain 4G auction founders under deluge of legal action

    When we said 'new', we meant 'incumbent'. Freudian

    The Kingdom of Bahrain should have completed its 4G auction by now, but instead the process has been kicked into touch following legal action from an excluded operator. The auction, cleverly titled "Post 3G" (PDF, slide deck with plenty of visuals), was announced last November and initally open to all, but lobbying from the …

    Mobile 3 Apr 06:02

  • USA's H-1B skilled worker visa applications open

    Unemployment at 7.7 per cent, but tech workers still wanted

    Fancy a few years working in the US of A? If you possess a Bachelor's degree in computing or engineering, can prove skills and experience in the field and have found a stateside employer who wants your talents, get typing, dear reader, because for the next couple of days the USA is taking applications for the H-1B visa. The H- …

    Jobs 3 Apr 06:49

  • 'Proactive Wellness' rebranded as 'Infosight' by Nimble

    So much better than Reactive Sickness, Late and Ill etc

    A proposal document we've seen from a Nimble Storage reseller has shown that Nimble is branding its Proactive Wellness feature as Infosight. What it means: Nimble Storage uses its customer array sensor data to predict, amongst others: when a storage array will fill up; when a drive may fail, complete with an automatically- …

    Storage 3 Apr 07:04

  • Card skimmers targeting more than ATMs, says EU

    Crooks claw cash creatively, con consumers

    Crooks are branching out beyond bank ATMs by installing card skimming devices on a payment terminals ranging from train ticket kiosks to parking meters, according to European anti-fraud experts. At least five countries have logged skimming attacks against railway, bus or metro ticket machines, the European ATM Security Team ( …

    Security 3 Apr 07:36

  • Hungry Six Degrees swallows data centre biz BIS

    Thirteenth buy in less than two years

    Hungry mid-market managed voice and data hosting specialist Six Degrees has swallowed London-based colo data centre operator BIS. This is the thirteenth buy racked up by the management team led by CEO Alastair Mills since it launched in the summer of 2011, with £50m backing from private equity house Penta Capital. Previously …

    The Channel 3 Apr 08:03

  • If Google got a haircut, a tie and a suit, would it be Microsoft?

    Nobody ever got fired for downloading Chrome. Hmm

    Prepare yourself. It's a new month, and that can only mean a tsunami of articles on the popularity of Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox will flood the globe's news aggregators. For non-mobile computers, March followed the trend emerging over the past 12 months: growth for Chrome, a drop in use of IE and Firefox stuck in a …

    Cloud 3 Apr 08:28

  • Why do they even call it a backup appliance? Just call it an EMC

    It's a one horse race in the kingdom of the blind

    In the purpose-built backup appliance market, IDC numbers show EMC reigning supreme in revenue share terms while everybody else basically sucks. Only one rival, Symantec, has a greater than 10 per cent share. Here are the bald revenue share per cent numbers for the fourth 2012 quarter as tracked by IDC's number-crunchers: - …

    Storage 3 Apr 09:06

  • Speaking in Tech: Forget BYOD, now there's Bring Your Own CODE

    Podcast Our panel of IT bods pass judgement on PaaS

    For this latest Speaking in Tech podcast, Ed Saipetch is flying solo: his co-hosts Greg Knieriemen and Sarah Vela are away this week. But fear not, Ed has plenty lined up and has recorded today's session live from DeployCon at CloudConnect in Santa Clara, California. The main topic up for discussion is platform-as-a-service …

    Cloud 3 Apr 09:26

  • Hey app developers, here's a way to monitor your users for free!

    Also we can offer you an excellent deal on used souls

    Compuware's latest foray into mobility is a free bundle of cloudy code for dropping into mobile apps, which it will then monitor and measure for developers' (and Compuware's) benefit. Compuware's Application Performance Management (APM) lurks quietly in the corner of an app, reporting back every now and then but mostly …

    Developer 3 Apr 10:03

  • ANCIENT CURSED RING known to TOLKIEN goes on display

    In the land of Hampshire where the Shadows lie

    A supposedly cursed gold ring that may have been the inspiration for the One Ring in JRR Tolkien's Middle Earth fantasies has gone on display at The Vyne house in Hampshire. Unusually complex disposal and recycling guidelines on this exhibit The National Trust and the Tolkien Society have put the Roman ring on display in a …

    Bootnotes 3 Apr 10:44

  • Tech is the biggest problem facing archiving

    Blocks and Files Mountains of unreadable obsolete magnetic tapes!

    Technology is the biggest problem facing archiving. Archives grow bigger and bigger. The amount of data to be kept grows ever bigger and threatens to overflow an archive installation. So, let's use LTO-6 tapes instead of LTO-5 ones because they hold twice as much data in the same physical space. That's logical but there is an …

    Storage 3 Apr 11:02

  • Got a BlackBerry? It may be telling your friends when you watch pr0n

    Show what I'm listening to: 'I have come to clean your pool'

    Using a Blackberry Z10 for a little one-handed surfing might be more public than desired, as the social-sharing baked into the OS likes to share, um, everything. Blackberry OS10, used on the Z10 handset, integrates social sharing deep into the OS and many users opt in to alerting Blackberry Messenger contacts about their …

    Mobile 3 Apr 11:30

  • Zombie apocalypse survivors frozen in terror by hacker raid

    The War Z's horrific hash haemorrhage

    Controversial online zombie-blasting video game The War Z is on pause after hackers raided its forum and its database of players. Publisher OP Productions has advised survivors - what it calls its 600,000 or so gamers - to change their passwords: the as-yet unidentified infiltrators of its computer systems accessed players' …

    Science 3 Apr 11:42

  • MuleSoft kicks out app integration platform

    Births enterprise service bus suite, slurps VC cash

    After a long gestation, MuleSoft has kicked out an application integration software platform it calls Anypoint. The suite, announced on Wednesday, sees enterprise service bus-specialist MuleSoft arming enterprises with tech that lets them deal with the cats-cradle of interdependencies created by sprawling IT estates. Anypoint …

    Software 3 Apr 12:06

  • Zynga bets the farm (ville) on UK poker, roulette web den

    Like being 007, if he was alone in pants in his bedroom

    FarmVille maker Zynga has announced it will run poker tournaments and other casino games online in the UK. Brits will be the first on the planet to gamble actual cash with the internet gaming biz, we're told. The e-gambling den will be run in partnership with operator bwin.party under a Gibraltar gaming licence. Desktop and …

    Media 3 Apr 12:27

  • Yahoo! drops! size! limit! on! email! attachments! with aid from Dropbox

    Get a 'load of this

    Size is everything in the world of email attachments and with a limit of just 25MB, Yahoo! wasn't measuring up - until now. The would-be ad giant has belatedly dropped its size limit with the announcement of a partnership with Dropbox which will allow users to attach huge files to their emails. Both Google and Microsoft have …

    Cloud 3 Apr 12:53

  • Major blow for Apple: 'Bounce back' patent bounced back by USPTO

    Finality isn't final, art wasn't prior, wails Apple

    The infamous "bounce-back" Apple patent has been mostly rejected by the US Patent Office, a decision that will have a major impact on the fruity firm's legal battles with Samsung. Sammy was quick to point out the ruling on the patent to the court, as the jury in the recent billion-dollar Californian case ruled that 21 accused …

    Law 3 Apr 13:27

  • Behold: Ten storage chieftains whose products hold humanity's data

    Biz lords who rule the collective memory of the race

    Who are the ten most influential storage bosses? It should be an easy list to make but what do we mean by influential and should they be currently in post? "Influential" means more than that just "our customers have bought boatloads of our kit!" An influential company's competitors have had to react to its products and …

    Storage 3 Apr 13:58

  • Prime Ministerial exploding cheese expert to become 'entrepreneur'

    'Visionary' who gave us the Magic Silicon Roundabout

    Rohan Silva, the Downing Street wonk behind the fabulous soaraway Silicon Roundabout, is leaving politics to join a venture-capital firm closely associated with his biggest initiative. As the Prime Minister's 33-year-old special policy advisor, Silva branded the name Tech City on the cluster of small businesses huddled around …

    Media 3 Apr 14:42

  • US to chat again with Campaigners Against Stuff on mobile health regs

    Finding proof of a thing not happening: Rather hard

    The FCC has launched an official enquiry into the rules around cellphone radiation, and has invited world+dog to pitch in and have their say on the brain-melting devices. Most of the FCC's suggestions are amendments to the rules on handsets which haven't been updated since 1996. Those ageing rules don't reflect the latest …

    Mobile 3 Apr 14:55

  • Firefox: Use new stealth window to satisfy your wife, suggests Mozilla

    Need to splash some money while on the job?

    Porn-lovers and prezzie shoppers alike are celebrating today after Mozilla announced the release of the privacy-minded version 20 of Firefox. According to the Mozilla blog, the new iteration of the browser allows users to launch a private browsing window whilst keeping other sessions open. "You can shop for a birthday gift in …

    Applications 3 Apr 15:27

  • Flash to the future: Memristors, photonics, MLC-y tsunami

    Is your mouth watering yet? Huh?

    For a non-volatile storage medium flash development sure is volatile, as attendees at a distributor conference found out. Aaron Rakers, managing director of analysts Stifel Nicolaus, attended the conference and sent out a despatch from it that contained a mouth-watering array of tit-bits. The distributor had suppliers of …

    Cloud Infrastructure 3 Apr 16:04

  • Twitter, the new stock ticker tape - and the SEC is OK with this

    Investors: Tune into tweets or Facebook for biz info

    Financial watchdog the SEC has ruled that listed companies can make key announcements and publish financial info on Facebook and Twitter. The decision follows an investigation sparked by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. Hastings posted on Facebook in June that subscribers to video-on-demand biz Netflix had watched more than a …

    Financial News 3 Apr 16:36

  • Scottish SF master Iain M Banks reveals he has less than a year to live

    Asks partner to do him the honour of being his widow

    One of Britain's most popular fiction and science fiction authors Iain Banks, or Iain M Banks for lovers of his science fiction, has revealed that he has cancer and is unlikely to live longer than a year. "The bottom line, now, I'm afraid, is that as a late stage gall bladder cancer patient, I'm expected to live for 'several …

    Media 3 Apr 18:06

  • ARM, TSMC tape out 64-bit Cortex-A57 chip on 16 nanometers

    We have big ol' fat gates, too, Chipzilla

    ARM looks set to take its high-end PC and sever chip down to 16 nanometers according to the latest tape-out, which should give it a boost against rival Chipzilla. If the ARM collective is to compete against Intel in the server and in whatever might remain of the personal computer, then it is going to have to do more than beef …

    Servers 3 Apr 18:31

  • Amazon cuts S3 storage prices AGAIN

    How low can other clouds let their margins go?

    Cloud titan Amazon Web Services has cut the cost of getting data out of its storage service, putting pressure on rivals Google and Microsoft. Request pricing for S3 GET operations across the company's nine globe-spanning data center hubs have been reduced by 60 per cent, and prices for PUT, LIST, COPY, and POST requests have …

    Cloud 3 Apr 18:51

  • Chinese search king Baidu testing Google Glass competitor

    'Baidu Eye' is watching you

    Baidu, the search firm that handles the requests of over three quarters of China's internet users, is trying out a wearable headset of its own – but it's hardly the svelte headset Sergey Brin's so fond of showing off. Sophisticated it ain't The first photos of the prototype on Sina Tech show a clunky system using a small …

    Hardware 3 Apr 21:03

  • Samsung teams with Mozilla on next-gen browser engine

    Mobe-maker will help port future Firefox tech to ARM

    The Mozilla Foundations is bringing its experimental, next-generation web browser engine to ARM chips and the Android platform, thanks to a partnership with South Korean mobe-maker Samsung. For the last few years, Mozilla has been working on a new browser engine called Servo, which is being written from the ground up to take …

    Developer 3 Apr 21:28

  • Australia to reveal tech giants' tax tricks

    Opening up the Dutch sandwich to reveal the shameful ingredients

    Australia's assistant treasurer David Bradbury has outlined a plan to make the ingredients of the infamous “Double Irish Dutch Sandwich” – a recipe for tax minimisation used by tech giants - known to all, so that the public can understand just what the likes of Apple, Microsoft and Google are up to. Bradbury yesterday released …

    Policy 3 Apr 22:51

  • PaaS Heroku's misleading of customers poisons the cloud

    Comment If you can't trust providers, then why outsource in the first place?

    Platform-as-a-service Heroku spent two years misleading customers because it was so focused on building a new product that it didn't bother to update old documentation – this is unacceptable. The Salesforce-owned company admitted on Wednesday that customers using its 'Bamboo" application automation technology could have spent …

    Cloud 3 Apr 23:25

  • IBM readies PureData Hadoop appliance for the summer

    Bolts Big SQL query onto its BigInsights Hadoop distro

    IBM wants to make it easier for companies to consume and use Hadoop, just like everyone else who is chasing that yellow elephant that likes to munch big data. Big Blue hosted a big data shindig at its Almaden Research Center in San Jose, the home of the RAMAC disk drive (really a disk drum) from 1956 and also the place where …

    Cloud Infrastructure 3 Apr 23:46

  • Is NBN Co about to pay for 80 years of power pole access?

    Historical prices for HFC access suggest NSW Government overcharging massively

    According to the NSW State Government, NBN Co is being completely unreasonable in declining to fork over in the order of $400 million for access to electricity poles in that state. In response, NBN Co is, as it warned it would in October 2012, invoking the Telecommunications Act and using the poles without electricity authority …

    Broadband 3 Apr 23:52