27th February 2013 Archive

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• Apple patents situational awareness for oblivious fanbois

  Get ready for a sensitive iPhone that responds to your surroundings

  Maintaining an awareness of sensory cues in the vicinity has just been patented by Apple – for portable electronic devices, anyway.

  Software 27 Feb 00:05

• Visa to devs: Please take contents of our wallet

  Make shopping fun like first-person-shooters to repel PayPal, Google

  Buying stuff online should be so fast and fun that it resembles the experience offered by first-person shooters, in which as soon as one acquires a tool it is possible to start using it.

  Business 27 Feb 00:46

• Adobe squashes TWO critical Flash vulnerabilities with emergency patches

  Two out of three threats are dangerous, being used in wild

  Adobe published a critical Flash Player update on Tuesday to fix three exploits, two of which are under active attack by hackers.

  Security 27 Feb 00:57

• Revolution weaves predictive analytics into Hortonworks Hadoop

  Teaching an elephant to prognosticate like a pirate – R!

  Revolution Analytics, the commercializer of the open source R statistical analysis programming language with proprietary extensions that are closed source, has come up with a bunch of ways to integrate the Hadoop big data muncher with R. And it is testing the integration of its R Enterprise ScaleR predicative algorithms in conjunction with Yahoo! spinoff Hortonworks, one of the big five – er, now six, including Intel – Hadoop disties.

  Cloud 27 Feb 01:22

• Outsourcing your own job much more common than first thought

  Verizon finds canny computer worker's business plan

  Computer programmers outsourcing their own jobs and pocketing the profit from salary differentials overseas is much more common than first thought.

  Security 27 Feb 01:42

• Yet more world+dog patent suits, this time over encryption

  Apple, Dell, HP, Toshiba, etcetera

  A hitherto little-known company called Maz Technologies has taken aim at seven major vendors, filing lawsuits claiming that they infringe its security patents.

  Law 27 Feb 02:48

• Networks go over the top to meet the enemy

  For those in the communications industry a lesson: talk to each other

  One of the things mobile network operators complain about most is how they have to invest in infrastructure while over the top (OTT) players are making all the money. So it takes a brave man to take part in a keynote when he’s one of those OTT pariahs. At the “Future of Communication” keynote that man was Talmon Marco, co-founder of Viber. He took to the stage with Deutsche Telekom CEO René Obermann, Ericsson boss Hans Vestberg and Suk-Chae Lee from Korea Telcom.

  MWC 27 Feb 03:54

• New social network is for DEAD PEOPLE

  'Immortalize the loved ones who are no longer with you'

  Not content with worming their way into every aspect of daily life, a new Indian social network has decided to do the same for the afterlife.

  Networks 27 Feb 06:02

• World+Dog don't care about climate change, never have done

  It's the economy, stupid - and it always was

  Seventeen years of continuous surveys covering countries around the world show that people not only do not care about climate change today - understandably prioritising economic misery - they also did not care about climate change even back when times were good.

  Science 27 Feb 06:14

• Microwaves thrash fibre on speed... if you like two-nines uptime

  Radio network between stock exchanges hits 357 million MPH

  “Time? They ain’t making any more of it, so you gotta get in and get out, or you’ll get your f*****g face ripped off,” screamed an old Chicago Merc floor trader at my grad school class during a field trip.

  Data Networking 27 Feb 07:02

• Google: Our 'freedom of expression' should trump punters' privacy

  'Right to be forgotten' is overrated, huffs search giant

  Google has called on the EU's highest court to uphold its right to display links to published "valid legal material" in the face of calls from Spain's data protection authority to remove links on the grounds of privacy.

  Law 27 Feb 08:02

• EU web chief: Europe's slow on 4G, but 5G GLORY WILL BE OURS

  Steelie Neelie pledges €50m to design ultra-fast networks

  A top Euro politician has urged Europeans to get cracking on rolling out 5G networks after falling behind Asia and America in adopting 4G.

  Mobile 27 Feb 08:32

• Commvault disgorges ginormous flood of biz data-furtling software

  After 2 years of silence, we heard a rumbling... then - OH MY GAAAAH

  One-trick software pony Commvault has finally pushed out a raft of updates with Simpana version 10.0 in the hopes of broadening its user base in the biz data backup, archive and search game.

  Storage 27 Feb 09:03

• Brit firm PinPlus flogs another password 'n' PIN killer

  Enter the matrix

  The inventor who co-founded visual PIN company GrIDsure has become involved with another pattern-based authentication start-up in the hopes that the shoulder-surfer proof technology could replace two-factor authentication.

  Security 27 Feb 09:27

• Wheeeee... CRUNCH: DDN pushes out monster Hadoop appliance for biz

  Big Data ingester and digester

  Supercomputer storage firm DataDirect Networks (DDN) has brought out a scale-out Hadoop storage array, the hScaler, to both ingest and digest Big Data using Hadoop, combining compute and storage in one platform.

  HPC 27 Feb 10:03

• Veteran distie Northamber swings to loss, sales dive by 22%

  Blames Comet demise, UK economy, IT vendors and bank interest rates

  LSE-listed Northamber blamed the economy and cost-cutting on the part of IT vendors for a massive slide in sales and the return to losses at the halfway stage in its fiscal 2013.

  The Channel 27 Feb 10:32

• Nokia wants to build the Google of human behaviour - and share it

  Really, really, really Big Data to work out who's doing what, when and why

  Nokia has a radical strategy to outflank some of the world’s biggest technology companies, including Google, and it shared some of the details with El Reg in Barcelona this week.

  Mobile 27 Feb 10:36

• Google squishes login-bypass bug that opened door to hijackers

  Two-step account authentication sidestepped

  Google has patched a flaw that allowed attackers to circumvent the web giant's two-factor login system and hijack victims' accounts.

  Security 27 Feb 11:03

• PayPal founder sets up mobile payment service verified by FACEBOOK

  2-click buy-now-pay-later system

  PayPal co-founder Max Levchin has launched his new payments startup, Affirm, to fight it out in the rapidly expanding arena of mobile payments.

  Mobile 27 Feb 11:23

• Brit biz stops coked-up moist pocketstrokers ruining your pub lunch

  Spray-on mobe coating coming to a store near you, probably

  Unlike digestive biscuits, mobile phones do not react well to being dunked. With perhaps this in mind, two companies at Mobile World Congress claim to have the best technologies for treating phones to make them waterproof.

  MWC 27 Feb 11:44

• Ten smartphones with tablet ambitions...

  ...or small tablets that want to be phones...

  How we all laughed when Samsung launched the Galaxy Note toward the end of 2011. Who could possibly want a phone with a 5.3-inch screen? It turned out rather a lot of people did, and the unqualified success of the 4.8-inch Galaxy S III and 5.6-inch Galaxy Note 2 proved that what many punters want is a phone with a really, really, really big screen. A tablet and phone in one, in other words.

  Mobile 27 Feb 12:03

• MasterCard tries to zap PayPal with own-brand mobe wallet

  MasterPass eyes lead in pay-by-mobe race

  Walk into any of Apple’s 400 shops, pick up an accessory, boxed software or any one of the other items the Mac maker’s stylish emporia have out on shelves, and, if you have an Apple ID and an iPhone, you can buy the products you want without having to interact with one of the firm’s happy-clappy minions.

  Mobile 27 Feb 12:17

• Investors fight off rivals to stuff money in Nexenta's pockets

  SDN is H.O.T.: 9 VCs join oversubscribed $24m funding round

  It seems software-defined storage is the storage world's "cloud", and Nexenta is bang on trend. The ZFS storage array software firm's CEO, Evan Powell, is now stepping aside to become chief strategy officer in the wake of a fourth funding round of $24m, and investors must be hoping the appointment of a seasoned CEO will take the company forward to the hoped-for IPO.

  Financial News 27 Feb 12:31

• It's the Peer 2.0: Martha Lane Fox now a crossbench baroness

  Arise, Baroness Dotcom. Fancy some peer-to-peer networking?

  "Dotcom dinosaur" and Whitehall's digerati darling Martha Lane Fox CBE has been made a crossbench peer in the House of Lords.

  Government 27 Feb 12:45

• iPhones, 'droids go to WAR: US soldiers invade TOP-SECRET cloud

  Chiefs stop short of letting BYOD tech onto classified networks

  Spooks and soldiers will get iPhones and Android kit after the top brass promised to open up its top-secret communication networks to handsets beyond BlackBerrys.

  Government 27 Feb 13:04

• Pro-Assad hackers break into AFP Photo wire Twitter feed

  #apicisworthapprox36tweets

  The Twitter feed of news agency AFP's photo department was hacked yesterday, apparently by supporters of embattled Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad.

  Security 27 Feb 13:17

• APT1, that scary cyber-Cold War gang: Not even China's best

  More B-team than elite team, say security experts

  Shanghai hackers APT1 - outed this month in a high-profile report that linked them to the Chinese military - may not be China's top cyber-espionage team despite its moniker. Security experts say the team is more prolific than leet.

  Security 27 Feb 13:47

• Microsoft unwraps sysadmin-friendly Office 365 for biz update

  Desktop Office apps included

  One month after lifting the curtain on the updated version of its Office 365 subscription service for home users, Microsoft has officially launched the equivalent service for business customers with three new offers for small and midsized companies.

  Cloud 27 Feb 14:03

• AVG holds first Partner Advisory Council in Blighty

  'We thought we were engaging with the channel, clearly we weren't'

  Small biz security specialist AVG has run its first Partner Advisory Council (PAC) in the UK after admitting it needs to brush up on channel comms, particularly in light of partners who are moving exclusively to the cloud.

  The Channel 27 Feb 14:23

• EyeSight tries to please MWC crowd with touch-free fingering

  Next-gen interface tech for TV, PC and mobe

  Israeli gesture tech specialist EyeSight is in Barcelona demonstrating how one finger can take control of a phone, TV or computer without so much as a caress, using the already-present camera.

  Mobile 27 Feb 14:32

• Colombian boffins reconstruct flight path of Russian meteor

  Trajectory apparently began in near-Earth asteroid group Apollo

  Astroboffins have figured out where the Chelaybinsk meteorite came from using the power of maths and videos shot by witnesses in Russia.

  Science 27 Feb 14:46

• Hey, software snobs: Hardware love can set your code free

  The two go hand in hand when scaling data-crunching systems

  In computing there are many, many different ways to run down other people’s work, not the least of which is: “OK, so they removed the bottleneck, but only by throwing faster hardware at it.”

  CIO 27 Feb 15:25

• Live from New York, it's Speaking in Tech

  'Proper' snapshots, backup bugbears and, um, Pretty Woman moments

  Storage 27 Feb 15:53

• Anonymous leaks 'Bank of America secrets' in spy revenge hack

  Hacktivists enraged by suggestion financial giant snooped on them

  Miscreants affiliated with hacking collective Anonymous have dumped online a huge cache of data supposedly lifted from insecure systems at a Bank of America contractor.

  Security 27 Feb 16:34

• Judge bins Apple's plea to slash $368m FaceTime patent damages

  iPhone maker told to spend face time with slighted VPN biz

  Apple has lost a bid to reduce its $368m damages bill owed after its video-call service FaceTime infringed VirnetX's VPN patents.

  Law 27 Feb 17:03

• Rackspace swallows ObjectRocket for MongoDB smarts

  Looking to scale up cloudy NoSQL database services

  If you are going to take on Amazon Web Services, like Rackspace Hosting is doing with its eponymous cloud, then you'll need a lot more than raw infrastructure services. Rackspace requires various platform services, and it also needs the expertise to run them.

  Financial News 27 Feb 17:34

• cPanel: Reset your root passwords! Hackers broke into our system

  Website tools biz hits red alert after help-desk server pwned

  Website administration firm cPanel has told The Reg that one of its proxy servers was hacked, potentially exposing customers' administrator-level passwords.

  Security 27 Feb 18:06

• Apprenda adds Java to its .Net PaaS

  Touts single- to multi-tenant conversion features

  Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider Apprenda has come up with a way to morph single-tenant Java applications into multi-tenant hydras without developers having to do much legwork.

  Cloud 27 Feb 18:30

• MiniDuke miscreants whip out old-school tricks to spy on world+dog

  The '90s called... they want their malware back

  A new strain of malware designed to spy on multiple government entities and institutions across the world has been discovered by anti-virus firm Kaspersky Lab.

  Security 27 Feb 19:03

• Samsung Wallet slavishly copies inspired by Apple Passbook

  Iconic imitation: The surest form of flattery

  Samsung has unveiled a developer preview of its upcoming Wallet app, and to say that it was inspired by Apple's iOS Passbook app may be a gross understatement.

  Applications 27 Feb 19:19

• Spook-clouds ahoy! Panzura cloud storage cleared for restricted data

  Goal: Help government agencies trim IT staff

  Panzura's global cloud-storage controller has been cleared to handle restricted data, which should make it easier for the US government to move to private clouds and get rid of IT staff.

  Cloud 27 Feb 19:58

• The server racket recovers from the Great Recession

  Hyperscale data center vigor makes up for enterprise skittishness

  Sales and shipments of servers are both approaching levels seen in the run-up ahead of the Great Recession in late 2007.

  Servers 27 Feb 20:26

• Sony lifts skirt on Firefox OS with developer ROM for Xperia E

  Ubuntu's not the only half-baked mobile OS around

  The Mozilla Foundation doesn't expect the first phones running its Firefox OS to appear until this summer – and even then, only in select markets – but developers can start tinkering with the platform on real hardware today, thanks to Sony Mobile.

  Developer 27 Feb 20:44

• Music industry raises NBN fears as legal digital sales take off

  Fast broadband will kill us

  As Australians turn from freetards into digital music buyers, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) (IPFI) and Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) have responded by bleating that the National Broadband Network will destroy them unless the government revises copyright law in their favour.

  Business 27 Feb 23:07

• Apple, Facebook, Google: Same-sex marriage 'a business imperative'

  HP's Whitman and top GOPpers also prod Supremes on marriage equality

  Apple, Facebook, Intel, Google, Oracle, Cisco, Verizon, eBay, and Qualcomm are among at least 60 top US companies that will file a brief with the US Supreme Court in support of the plaintiffs in a case that seeks to invalidate as unconstitutional laws banning same-sex marriages.

  Law 27 Feb 23:12

• Canonical scraps in-person Ubuntu planning, heads for cloud

  Future developer meetings to be held on Google+

  Ubuntu Linux maintainer Canonical has canceled its semiannual Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) conferences in favor of a new, more-frequent series of events to be conducted online only.

  Operating Systems 27 Feb 23:15

• 'New' Canadian BlackBerry security scare emerged in 2011

  Hypegasm points to crisis for democratic process, not deadly new flaw

  Reports that Canada has just awakened to the perils of BlackBerry PIN-to-PIN messaging in government should be taken with a pinch of salt – the nation knew about the problem back in 2011.

  Mobile 27 Feb 23:32

• Vint Cerf: 'The internet of things needs to be locked down'

  Your air conditioner is a national security threat

  Device manufacturers who are sticking internet connections into everything from TVs to toasters need to lock down their systems with strong authentication, Google's chief internet evangelist Vint Cerf warned the RSA keynote audience.

  Security 27 Feb 23:58

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• 28th February 2013 →