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4th April 2013 Archive

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  • Google forks WebKit, promises faster, leaner Chrome engine

    Says 'large-scale architectural changes' coming

    Google has announced that its Chrome browser is dropping the popular WebKit browser engine in favor of Blink, a new fork of the code that the Chocolate Factory says will make Chrome faster, more powerful, and more secure. The internet ad giant announced the move on Wednesday via the official blog of the Chromium project, the …

    Developer 4 Apr 00:53

  • CloudSigma spins-up all-SSD storage cloud

    Flash, a-ah, saviour of the Euro-cloud

    Zurich-based infrastructure-as-a-service slinger CloudSigma has moved to all flash storage for the data center infrastructure running its cloud. Its migration to an all-SSD cloud is designed to deal with the randomized, multi-tenant access patterns of a public cloud, the company said in a statement announcing the move on …

    Cloud 4 Apr 00:56

  • Holden bakes Siri into Barinas

    'Siri, this doesn't look like Mildura'

    General Motors' antipodean outpost, Holden, is trying to put a bit of cool into its four-cylinder shopping trolley, the Barina, by integrating Siri into its electronics. Well, not just cool: with a suitable iPhone running iOS 6 connected to its electronic innards, Siri will let drivers make “eyes-free” calls, and to avoid …

    Phones 4 Apr 02:11

  • Kiwi boffins bid up Earth-like planet prediction

    A HUNDRED beeellion!

    We'll see your lousy 17 billion Earth-like planets, Smithsonian, and raise you 83 billion: that's the message coming out of a New Zealand group that's proposing a new detection technique in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The Japan-New Zealand collaboration proposes using gravitational micro-lensing in …

    Science 4 Apr 02:52

  • Swedish judge explains big obstacles to US Assange extradition

    Wikileaker's bizarre bonking behaviour revealed, along with likely legal escapes

    A senior judge from Sweden’s supreme court, Justice Stefan Lindskog, has told an Australian audience that Julian Assange’s argument he cannot stand trial in Sweden without being extradited to the USA is not as black and white as the wikileaker would have us believe. Lindskog yesterday told an audience at the University of …

    Law 4 Apr 03:14

  • STEC - sorry sTec - opens direct and channel sales with name change

    Sales people who do customer support? Hmm

    What the Zeus is going on? STEC has changed to sTec and it's bragging about its new direct and channel sales program. What's happened is that STEC - sorry, sTec - is adding both direct sales and channel sales alongside its mainstream OEM sales organisation. sTec reckons its enterprise customers will buy direct through OEMs, …

    Storage 4 Apr 04:33

  • RAF graduates first class of new groundbased 'pilots'

    Per ardua ad ... terra

    The Royal Air Force is chuffed this week to announce the graduation of its first class of "remotely piloted air system pilots", who have the job of piloting aircraft they are not actually in. 'Differ only slightly' from the normal ones. Visually, anyway As regular readers of these pages will know, the RAF (with some …

    Government 4 Apr 05:03

  • Boffins shine new light on dark matter

    Giant magnet in space shows 'existence of new physical phenomena'

    The LHC may have found the Higgs Boson, but overarching theories of everything have another hole: the observable universe weighs rather less than it ought if all those equations – and all the galaxies - are to hang together. The inconvenient absence of so much matter gave rise to a theory that all the energy and matter needed …

    Science 4 Apr 05:22

  • NetApp snoozing at the wheel of incumbency juggernaut, says chap

    Wake up and sniff those clouds for pity's sake

    Equity analyst firm William Blair thinks NetApp is failing to face up to the realities of being an incumbent storage supplier, and could even exit the hardware business. A research note from William Blair, dated March 17th, has fluttered its way to the storage desk at El Reg. It says: "We sense a company grappling with …

    Storage 4 Apr 06:07

  • ‘Unstoppable WEEE Tsunami’ staunched by PPP plan

    Governments, ITU, want to transform waste electrical and electronic equipment

    The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and several Central American Governments have decided waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) is both a threat to and an opportunity for the region. A dictionary’s worth of lengthily-be-acronymed groups convened for the ITU/United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) …

    Policy 4 Apr 06:45

  • Hate being stalked by Facebook? Why not try Google+ stalking

    Offering ad guys that crucial Bieber-Beeber demographic

    Google is fattening up its single sign-in feature that was opened up to mobile and web apps in February. This is the feature that allows netizens to use their Google+ usernames and passwords to log into accounts on third-party systems. The web giant said developers who use "social infrastructure platforms" Janrain and Gigya - …

    Media 4 Apr 07:03

  • Universal Credit IT system could lead to MORE FRAUD, MPs warn

    Parliament snores slightly in sleep, rolls over

    The number of benefit cheats in the UK could rise thanks to yet more IT problems with the government's new Universal Credit system, MPs warn. A communities and local government committee report published on Wednesday cast more doubt over the "readiness" of the Department for Work and Pensions' Universal Credit system - which …

    Government 4 Apr 07:34

  • Bank card-slurp nasty 'infects tills, ATMs', corrupt staff fingered

    Internet hitman flogs account-snaffling malware to forgers

    Audacious crooks have infected hundreds of shopping tills and cash machines with malware to swipe sensitive debit and credit card data, we're told. Researchers at Russian security firm Group-IB said the software nasty is called Dump Memory Grabber, which targets computers running Microsoft Windows. It can swipe information …

    Security 4 Apr 07:58

  • Google offers Adwords deals - but you can't trust their numbers

    A load of balls from Mountain View's maths wizards

    Google's Adwords platform has always been something of a mystery, to put it mildly - the only certainty about it is that it makes a lot of money for Google - but nobody has caught it out using numbers which are definitely, verifiably untrue. Until now. Simples An eagle-eyed Reg reader has broken this long run of success. …

    Bootnotes 4 Apr 08:26

  • Review: Intel Next Unit of Computing barebones desktop PC

    Is Chipzilla's nano machine too polished to rival the rough'n'ready Raspberry Pi?

    Intel must really like the sound of its own ‘voice’. How else can you explain the fact that sliding open the box containing the chip giant’s latest desktop package plays the ding-da-ding-ding-ding jingle as soon as you open it. Amaze your friends! Irritate your colleagues! Keep opening and closing the box to replay the ditty …

    Hardware 4 Apr 09:03

  • Hostile Xyratex investors claim CEO's scalp in aggressive haircut

    Show us the money, says Baker Street

    Activist investors have forced out Xyratex CEO Steve Barber in their hunt for a bigger and faster return on their investment. Baker Street Capital Management has amassed a 23 per cent holding in Xyratex comprising 6.2 million shares, and believes that Xyratex's development of its ClusterStor HPC array product, following a …

    Storage 4 Apr 09:23

  • Wikileaker Manning peace gong petition backed by thousands

    Something to treasure while in military confinement

    Nearly 40,000 people have signed a petition calling for Wikileaker Bradley Manning to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Private First Class Manning, 25, is facing 20 years behind bars for divulging 250,000 classified US intelligence documents - a cache of which ended up on Julian Assange™'s Wikileaks website. But the private …

    Government 4 Apr 09:33

  • IBM: We have placed the Big Data moon on this stick

    Big BLU claims from Big Blue

    IBM Research has come up with a new package it calls BLU Acceleration, intended to speed up (big) data analysis and reporting of data held in DB2 and Informix databases, amongst others. The BLU Acceleration package includes these handy features: Data skipping - an ability to skip data that doesn't need analysing, such as …

    Storage 4 Apr 09:53

  • Cisco gobbles UK mobe mast maker - you know where this is going

    Tiny cells in your Wi-Fi router - checkmate, Huawei

    Swindon-based Ubiquisys will soon be part of Cisco in a $310m (£205m) buyout. The networking colossus has, in effect, snapped up more than 50 customers wanting small cellular base stations and the technology they want. Cisco will hand over cash and "retention-based incentives" to persuade key staff at the Brit biz to stay on. …

    Mobile 4 Apr 10:04

  • Disney shutters Star Wars game unit with 200 layoffs

    Incredibly appreciative and proud of the talented jobless

    Just a few months after snapping up George Lucas' Star Wars empire, Disney is shutting down its game unit LucasArts and laying off around 200 employees. All work has ceased on the two new games announced last year, Star Wars: 1313 and Star Wars: First Assault, although they could be revived if another game-maker takes over. …

    Games 4 Apr 10:17

  • LOHAN must suck juice while mounted on rigid rod - but HOW?

    Possible hot coupling for Vulture 2

    Over the past couple of weeks, the Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) team has been chewing the fat with readers over just how to hook up the Vulture 2 spaceplane's rocket motor heater. There's more on the current state of play with the heater right here, and a roundup here of your suggestions for connecting the …

    SPB 4 Apr 10:38

  • Provider of FIFA goal line tech chosen, tracks ball in space and time

    Strangely a German firm, not one in Qatar

    Football governing body FIFA has selected goal-line technology from German firm GoalControl as its preferred option in trials ahead of the 2014 World Cup. The GoalControl-4D system features 14 high-speed cameras around a football pitch focused on both goal mouths to help match officials determine whether or not the ball has …

    Science 4 Apr 10:54

  • Building the actual real internet simply doesn't pay

    Analysis Those fat pipes and extra Gs don't come cheap

    It isn’t unicorns that keep the internets running, but eye-watering amounts of capital investment by infrastructure operators. However a substantial chunk of that investment never pays for itself and most of it barely repays the cost of the capital, reckons consultancy PwC. The telco industry as a whole spends $320bn on …

    Cloud Infrastructure 4 Apr 11:16

  • Ancient website from 1999: By Mark Zuckerberg aged 15¾

    I will put you on The Web and link you ... bitch

    A website that might just have been created by a 15-year-old Mark Zuckerberg way back in 1999 has been uncovered by Hacker News. If the Angelfire site set up by a New York-based teen carrying the handle mez51 does indeed belong to the flame-haired Facebook CEO, then it offers early insights into his concept of stalking people …

    Media 4 Apr 11:36

  • Advanced Persistent Threats get more advanced, persistent and threatening

    What it says on the security biz tin

    Organisations are getting hit with a malicious email attachment or web link designed to evade legacy defences up to once every three minutes, according to a report by security biz FireEye. FireEye's latest advanced threat report states tech businesses are at the forefront of cyber-espionage malfeasance, with one event per …

    Security 4 Apr 11:57

  • Bitcoin briefly soars to record $147 high, driven by Cyprus bank flap

    Attraction of non-gov currency draws punters

    Virtual currency Bitcoin soared to a record high of nearly $147 yesterday as Euro-spurred interest continued to boost its exchange rate. The e-cash fell back later in the day to $117, but the value of all Bitcoins in circulation is still well on its way to $1.4bn. The online dosh has rocketed from just $10 last November as …

    Financial News 4 Apr 12:26

  • Google goes on the Blink in WebKit fork FURORE

    Comment Diversity be damned: The view from Mountain View

    When Opera Software killed its web browser's rendering engine Presto, and announced it will instead use WebKit, the company did so with the best intentions. WebKit was a surefire bet: by mainlining the brain juice of Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari - the top dogs on the web and on smartphones - Opera hoped to break out of …

    Software 4 Apr 12:49

  • Mars to go offline for a month as vast nuclear furnace gets in the way

    Ha ha, chuckle Martians, time to play!

    Spacecraft exploring and orbiting Mars will be left alone for the next month as the red planet slips behind our nearest star for a bit of a spring break. The Sun will block radio signals for a month or so, something familiar to old hands such as Mars Express, which has been happily orbiting Mars for almost a decade. It is, …

    Science 4 Apr 13:04

  • Big Data’s booming. So why hasn't the channel caught on yet?

    Some resellers failing to think outside the box shift

    There’s a funny thing happening in the channel at the moment. Big Data solutions are absolutely booming, driven by a perfect storm of mobile computing, 4G connectivity, vast quantities of user generated content, cheaper storage, 10GbE networking, and next gen data management technologies like Hadoop. Yet despite flogging loads …

    The Channel 4 Apr 13:51

  • Got a Sophos Web Protection box? Make sure it's up to date

    Scary vuln left keys to your kingdom up for grabs

    Sophos has plugged security holes in its Web Protection Appliance that could place its customers' internet connections in the hands of eavesdroppers. The equipment is supposed to filter out suspicious or harmful web traffic for businesses. But the flaws allowed any unauthenticated user to access sensitive configuration files …

    Security 4 Apr 13:58

  • Guide man Frommer buys his name back from Google, plans eBooks

    Presumably nobody will seek the content in Google+

    Google has handed the rights to the Frommer brand of travel guides back to Arthur Frommer, after the Chocolate Factory snapped it up from publisher Wiley just last year. The Choc Factory said that it had picked out the bits of Frommer it wanted for its own services and was now giving the brand back to Arthur for an undisclosed …

    Media 4 Apr 14:29

  • Anonymous joins forces with arch-enemy The Jester against Norks

    If you're where that Venn diagram overlaps ... question yourself

    Hacktivist collective Anonymous and - unusually - some of its enemies have all turned their ire against government websites, propaganda outlets and social media profiles linked to the North Korean regime. DDoS attacks were launched on Nork government websites and Air Koryo, the country's airline, after North Korea threatened …

    Security 4 Apr 14:36

  • Sci/Tech quango promises an end to 'events with no women'

    Except when its own management get together

    Sci-tech quango Nesta has announced a ban on all-male panels at its events in a bid to challenge the blokeyness endemic in the fields it covers. The quango, nowadays officially a charity but one which spends lottery money on "innovation" (more here) promised to actively seek out women to chair public meetings and debates. It …

    Government 4 Apr 14:57

  • If only enterprise IT worked like my iPad ... or at least my car

    Opinion Architects and biz chiefs still not talking

    Do you remember when computers were hard to use? Not so long ago our collective opinion was neatly summarized by the apocryphal GM press release which asserted that if they developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars that for no reason at all, would crash twice a day, shut down and refuse to restart. …

    Management 4 Apr 15:29

  • OpenStack 'Grizzly' control freak puffs up clouds of vastness

    Parity support across hypervisors, broader networking, other goodies

    The OpenStack community is keeping faithful to its six-month spring-fall cadence for software releases: today, the world receives an OpenStack update codenamed Grizzly. The project's update cycle allows the cloud controller to be improved at a fairly rapid clip, and is roughly in sync with upgrades for popular Linux operating …

    Cloud 4 Apr 15:52

  • Shark-tooth war cutlery reveals tale of fishy extinction in Pacific

    A story with real bite emerges from chomp-cutlasses

    They are the sort of weapons that could be worth hundreds to your average tooth fairy. But a cache of weapons made from shark teeth is also valuable to scientists because they have revealed the localised extinction of two species of shark. The swords, with a certain resemblance to ceremonial Klingon cleavers, were made by the …

    Science 4 Apr 16:13

  • Has Europe finally passed Peak Disk?

    Tablets, cloud, THAT Thai flood mentioned as platters spin down

    Disk drive sales in the EMEA region have showed falls in both units and capacity according to research from Futuresource Consulting. HDD unit sales peaked in 2010 at 28.06 million units, falling to 25.91 million in 2011 and 21.48 million in 2012, a 17 per cent decrease between the latter two years. Mats Larsson, a senior …

    Storage 4 Apr 16:27

  • Leaked memo: Apple's iMessage crypto has DEA outfoxed

    Analysis Feds want more back-door access

    An investigation by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in February was temporarily thwarted when the surveillance targets began using Apple's encrypted iMessage system, according to a document leaked to Cnet. The intelligence note entitled "Apple's iMessages: A Challenge For DEA Intercept," reported on an investigation …

    Security 4 Apr 19:11

  • Facebook skins Android with Facebook Home

    Zuck on this, unless you care about privacy

    Facebook has taken over Android with an application named Facebook Home that slaps a social façade on top of Google's operating system. As expected, the app turns a phone's lock screen into a rolling news feed, implements a new form of social messaging named "chat heads", and sees an entire social-oriented user interface take …

    Mobile 4 Apr 19:17

  • WebKit devs on Blink fork: 'Two can play that game'

    Purge of Chrome-related code planned

    Now that Google has announced that it will migrate its Chrome browser from the WebKit rendering engine to a homegrown fork called Blink, WebKit developers have already begun discussing how to remove Chrome-specific code from the project. Streamlining the code of its browser engine was one of the top reasons cited by Google for …

    Developer 4 Apr 20:06

  • Steve Jobs' 'spaceship' threatened by massive cost overruns

    Comment Will shareholders balk at $5bn price tag? Stay tuned...

    It appears that the late Steve Jobs' dream of new "spaceship" Apple headquarters is going to cost far more than the $3bn originally planned – that is, if it gets built at all. That price tag has ballooned to $5bn, Bloomberg reported on Thursday, citing "five people close to the project who were not authorized to speak on the …

    Business 4 Apr 20:10

  • Gates and Allen reshoot historic 1981 Microsoft photo

    Holding back the years

    One of the most iconic photos from the history of Microsoft, featuring a lanky young Bill Gates perched next to his coding mentor (the way he tells it) Paul Allen, has been recreated at Seattle's Living Computing Museum. Stand back ladies, form a line In a 1981 publicity shot for the then virtually unknown software company …

    Vintage 4 Apr 20:24

  • Oracle gussies up Xsigo switching as Virtual Networking and SDN

    Lashes new Sparc T5 and M5 servers to each other and storage

    Oracle is ratcheting up the virtual networking wars with the relaunch of its Xsigo line of I/O director switches. Sun Microsystems made it clear years ago that it thought the future of data center networking was InfiniBand, and Oracle has followed along on that path by investing in Mellanox Technologies, which makes InfiniBand …

    Data Networking 4 Apr 21:15

  • Google inflates infrastructure cloud

    Makes it easier to get on, trims prices

    Google has taken another step toward opening up its Amazon-competitor Google Compute Engine to the general public. The ad-slinger announced on Thursday that anyone who is paying the company $400 a month for "Gold" support for cloud services can now try out the GCE beta. "Now you can sign up online for Google Compute Engine …

    Cloud Infrastructure 4 Apr 22:04

  • Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 delivers modest improvements

    One bright spot: the IDE now comes in blue, too

    In keeping with its vow to ship updates for its flagship software development tools in "a regular cadence," Microsoft has delivered Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 just a little over four months after it shipped the last one. Like that first update package, which arrived around two months after VS2012's September 2012 launch, …

    Developer 4 Apr 22:09

  • Patch time for PostgreSQL

    Crashable and hackable

    The maintainers of the PostgreSQL database have released an urgent patch to cope with a vulnerability that allows remote users to crash servers, while authenticated users can execute arbitrary code. It's time for admins to get busy: the Shodan tool identifies around 170,000 servers that are visible from the Internet, here. As …

    Security 4 Apr 22:39

  • HP chairman Lane yields to 'here's you hat, what's your hurry?' pressure

    Two other beleaguered directors also exit, stage left

    Succumbing to pressure to shake up the board of directors of HP, chairman Ray Lane is stepping down from running the board. However, he said in a statement, he will remain on the HP board – even if he doesn't run it. Lane, a former hotshot at software giant Oracle and a managing partner at venture capitalist Kleiner Perkins …

    Management 4 Apr 22:44

  • Microsoft's developer conference sells out at $2,095 per head

    But get on the waitlist and you could still get lucky

    Proving that you don't have to be Google to generate frenzied hype around an otherwise staid and – to the layman – obscure tech event, Microsoft has announced that tickets for its annual Build developer conference have sold out. Microsoft's frenzy didn't quite match Google's, however. This year's Google I/O show sold out in …

    Developer 4 Apr 23:56

  • 60-inch Apple iTV to be controlled by iRing remote?

    You'll be able to buy it this year, fanbois, if analyst is correct

    You may have had it up to here with reports that Apple is juuust about to release a full-on big-screen television – such rumors have been clogging the interturbes since at least 2009 – but the most recent one has a wrinkle that you, dear Reg reader, might find of interest: you'll wear its remote on your finger. So wrote …

    Hardware 4 Apr 23:59