The Week in Summary

1. Sunday, 19 May 2013

   I know who 'Satoshi Nakamoto' is, says Ted Nelson

   Coiner of 'hypertext' claims to identify the links

   Sociologist, philosopher, computer industry pioneer and inventor of the term “hypertext” Ted Nelson is claiming that he knows the identity of Bitcoin inventor “Satoshi Nakamoto”. In a rambling – and, let's face it, odd – 12-minute post on YouTube, Nelson spins out the suspense, throws in a dialogue with himself as Sherlock …

2. Saturday, 18 May 2013

   Google builds crowdsourcing into new Maps code stack

   Google I/O Wants a unique map for every user

   Google has been giving more details about how it has redesigned its Maps software by adding in crowd-sourced photographic and driving directions to its coding scheme. The new Maps package is a ground-up rewrite of the code and the algorithms it uses, with the aim of generating personalized maps for each user that are suitable …

   Google's Native Code browser tech goes cross-platform

   Google I/O Write web modules in C/C++ that run on both Intel and ARM

   At its annual I/O conference in San Francisco this week, Google unveiled a new version of its Native Client technology that allows developers to deploy binary code for web applications in an architecture-independent way. With the original version of Native Client (NaCl), developers could write modules in C or C++ and compile …

3. Friday, 17 May 2013

   Yahoo! to 'share something special' in New York on Monday

   Is hastily called event related to Tumblr rumblings?

   Yahoo! will hold a "product-related news event" this upcoming Monday with CEO Marissa Mayer in attendance to "share something special." Did you get your invitation yet? That's the word first tweeted by CNBC on Friday afternoon. Yahoo! later confirmed that it was holding a 5pm press event in New York City – "by invitation …

   Adobe's Creative Cloud fails at being a cloud

   Sync feature suspended by Adobe FOR TWO WEEKS

   The file-syncing part of Adobe's new Creative Cloud family of technologies has been intermittently broken for a week, taking the "cloud" part out of Adobe's "Creative Cloud" redesign of its products. Now Adobe is suspending it "for the next couple of weeks" to make updates. The sync feature, which means files being fiddled …

   NASA signs off on sampling mission to Earth-threatening asteroid

   2016 launch date set for OSIRIS-REx mission

   NASA has given final approval for a billion-dollar mission that will visit one of the most potentially dangerous asteroids to Earth, collect samples, and then bring it back home for analysis. Asteroid sampler to set off in 2016 The OSIRIS-REx* mission, proposed by the University of Arizona, will blast off in 2016 and visit …

   US military welcomes Apple iOS 6 kit onto its networks

   The battle with BlackBerry, Samsung marches into the cloud

   The US Department of Defense has welcomed Apple's iDevices into its secure networks, and has announced that that it is "taking bold steps to provide sound information and proper analysis as it fortifies its cloud computing, acquisition and data processes." On Firday, the DoD set the stage for a three-way smackdown among Apple …

   Jailed Romanian hacker repents, invents ATM security scheme

   Add-on device blocks card skimmers

   A Romanian man serving a five-year jail sentence for bank-machine fraud says he's come up with a device that can be attached to any ATM to make the machine invulnerable to card skimmers. Valentin Boanta was arrested in 2009 and charged with supplying ATM skimmers – devices that can be attached to ATMs to surreptitiously copy …

   Climate scientists agree: Humans cause global warming

   Of those who have an opinion, over 97% say we're to blame

   A major study of nearly 12,000 peer-reviewed papers in the climate-science literature has – again – proven that among climate scientists, an overwhelming percentage agree with the consensus view that human activity causes global warming. The study was led by John Cook, a post-doctoral fellow in the Global Change Institute at …

   MIT takes battery-powered robot cheetah for a gallop

   Video Biomimetic big cat needs no power cord, just a walker

   Fast, agile robots for reconnaissance and rescue have been under development for half a decade or more, but they all have needed to be tethered to a power cable. Now MIT thinks it has cut the leash with a battery powered "cheetah" capable of outrunning a human. The design, showed off at the International Conference on Robotics …

   Google research chief: 'Emergent artificial intelligence? Hogwash!'

   Google I/O 'We have to make it happen'

   If there's any company in the world that can bring true artificial intelligence into being, it's Google, but the company thinks SkyNet is unlikley to appear in the Googlenet without help from the Chocolate Factory. Though many science fiction writers and even some academics have put faith in the idea of emergent artificial …

   Nvidia opens pre-orders for handheld Shield console three days early

   Let the feeding frenzy commence

   Nvidia is now taking orders for its Shield handheld gaming console, three days early, though the Android-running Tegra-powered gadget won’t make its way into punters’ hands before the end of next month at the earliest. Shield, which incorporates a clamshell design to hold a flip-up 5-inch, 1280 x 720 “retinal quality” screen, …

   Yahoo! triumphs! in! $2.75bn! Mexican! standoff!

   Mighty award against it abruptly slashed to $172,500

   Yahoo! has said that a Mexican appeals court threw out a $2.75bn ruling against it and Yahoo! Mexico over contracts in the country. Worldwide Directories and Ideas Interactivas won the "non-final judgement" at the end of last year after alleging breach of contract, breach of promise and lost profits from a deal on a yellow …

   Tablet? Laptop? HP does the splits with Tegra-based SlateBook x2

   Netbook with removable screen, anyone?

   HP is to follow its Windows 8-based tablet keyboard combo, the Envy x2, with an Android Jelly Bean version - the computer giant’s take on Asus’ popular Transformer series. Set to ship in August - in the US at least; the UK release is less certain - the SlateBook x2 will be built around a 10.1-inch, 1920 x 1200 IPS LCD screen …

   Lonely-heart Maltese techie vs Bonnie Tyler for Eurovision crown

   Eurovision 2013 32 years since that Bucks Fizz feelin'

   A hopelessly sweet song about a ruthlessly organised techie who gets the girl will fight with the ballad from rock vixen Bonnie Tyler and 24 other acts to lift the Eurovision Song Contest crown Saturday night. Gianluca Bezzina will represent not just his home land of Malta but carry the misty eyed wishes of girl-shy geeks …

   Breaking news, LITERALLY: Financial Times vandalized by hackers

   Stiff Pink 'Un left swinging in the wind

   The Financial Times website and its Twitter accounts were this afternoon hijacked by pro-government hackers from the "Syrian Electronic Army". The posh broadsheet's Tech Blog - at http://blogs.FT.com/beyond-brics - was compromised to run stories headlined "Syrian Electronic Army Was Here" and "Hacked by the Syrian Electronic …

   Hey, Teflon Ballmer. Look, isn't it time? You know, time to quit?

   Analysis Microsoft chief defies pundits by hanging on - we reveal how

   Those who upgraded to Windows 8 aren't the only ones unhappy with the new touch-driven operating system - Wall Street is too. Just don't expect any of the criticism hurled at Steve "Teflon" Ballmer, Microsoft's shy and retiring boss, to stick. The chief executive is under fire from money men who responded to tech reporters …

   Tech Data suspends four amid accountancy probe

   Channel shocked as auditors rummage through books

   Four middle managers in the finance function at Computer 2000 have been suspended as the distributor continues to investigate improprieties into vendor accounting errors. Back in March Tech Data, parent of UK arm C2000, revealed it would restate results for fiscal 2011, '12 and some or all of '13 that could wipe out between $ …

   Who is the mystery sixth member of LulzSec?

   Analysis And, hang on, what happened to all the loot...

   Thursday's sentencing of three core members of hacktivist crew LulzSec and an accomplice hacker who gave them access to a botnet closes an important chapter in the history of activism. But it also leaves a number of questions unanswered. One of the most interesting of these puzzlers is the identity of the mysterious sixth …

   Murdoch Facebook gloat: You're like my $580m, 'CRAPPY' MySpace

   Billionaire media tyrant has a Ratner moment

   Rupert Murdoch had a Gerald Ratner moment on Twitter earlier today when, in a warning to Facebook, he labelled MySpace - a website he once owned - as "crappy". The media tycoon, who bought MySpace in 2005 for $580m and then copped a $254m loss when he sold the drain-circling website six years later, was responding to reports …

   CSI coughs for K3's SAP biz

   Roll up, roll up

   Private-equity-backed Computer Systems Integration (CSI) has acquired the customer list of K3 BTG's SAP Business Objects Maintenance division for an undisclosed sum. Venture capitalist Blackhawk Capital, one-time owner of Microsoft LAR Teksys - which it sold to Di Data in 2009, bought CSI last October as the first in a roll-up …

   That $1,000 the lad in Lagos needed? Just email it with Google Wallet

   Be afraid, PayPal - be very afraid

   Google has integrated its payment Wallet with Gmail, enabling PayPal-style transactions from within the Gmail interface, and to any over-18 American with an email address and a Google Wallet account. Google Wallet has also spread to another couple of handsets, including the Samsung flagships (S4 & Note II) and the HTC One, all …

   El Reg drills in Office 365: See the evidence

   Vid Trevor goes visual

   This week, Trevor Pott kicked off his exploration of Office 365 with this overview. Trevor and his team-mate Josh Folland have also produced four hands-on videos for Office 365. We will broadcast these over the next week or so – all free, all on demand. Here is the first, an Office 365 tutorial. Watch Video ®

   I said ‘no’ to a million-pound Tech City empire

   Something for the Weekend, Sir? Handed on a plate, thrown back in your face

   I have been propositioned in a toilet by a 72-year-old man. He wants me to move in with him and do the business. Ah, it’s possible that I may have phrased this poorly. What I really meant to say is that he is looking to me to arise and provide him with a youthful injection to keep him in the game. No, no, you’re getting the …

   Apple chief Cook: You - senators. Get in here and redo this tax law

   Listen up, Popeye, fix it if you don't like it

   Apple supremo Tim Cook will dare US senators to rewrite tax laws seeing as the politicians are so upset about tech giants' tiny contributions to America's public coffers. At a Senate hearing on Tuesday, the chief exec will suggest ways to persuade firms to bank their profits at home rather than in offshore accounts, a move …

   Congress: It's not the Glass that's scary - It's the GOOGLE

   Comment On-head TV, fine - but you can't skip the ads on this one

   Google Glass is wrapped around the faces of only a few thousand people right now. The company says the device is in very early beta mode. And yet lawmakers in the US have already pounced on the company demanding answers about how the privacy of netizens using the gizmo will be protected. But it would seem that Congress has …

   Hunt: I'll barcode sick Brits and rip up NHS's paper prescriptions

   'Fell asleep in the hospital and woke up as a one-armed woman!'

   UK Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt wants to tear up the NHS's clumsy system of printed prescriptions - and instead use "unique barcodes" to dish out medication straight to the poorly. Under the proposals to hopefully reduce human error, paperwork listing medicines and drugs will be sent directly from doctors' surgeries to …

   IT bloke publishes comprehensive maps of CALL CENTRE menu HELL

   Seven year mission in the touch-tone catacombs

   Most people can't bear to use automated call centre phone lines for even a few minutes. But one former IT manager has spent seven years on the phone in a bid to produce a map of Britain's phone menus. Nigel Clarke, a self-confessed "call centre menu enthusiast", released details of his project today on a site called www. …

   Trying to kill undead Pushdo zombies? Hard luck, Trojan is EVOLVING

   Malware remains undead, adds double-sneaky stealth mode

   The crooks behind the Pushdo botnet agent have developed variants of the malware that are more resistant to take-down attempts or hijacking by rival hackers. Dell SecureWorks and Damballa warned (PDF) on Wednesday that the latest variant of Pushdo comes packed with a fallback mechanism for cases where zombie clients are unable …

   TOO GOOD! Groupon ex-boss to drop, er, 'motivational business album'

   Andrew Mason to share 'wisdom' through music

   Ex-Groupon chief Andrew Mason is moving to San Francisco to start a new company, after of course, he releases an album of "motivational business music". Mason has been keeping himself busy since he was ousted from the voucher bazaar he helped found, doing all those things that (really, really rich) people do when they're …

   Half of youngsters would swap PRIVACY for... cheaper insurance

   Only old fogies care who knows where they were last summer

   More than half of UK youngsters think being tracked is a small price to pay for cheaper car insurance, and 26 per cent will be actively seeking a pay-by-the-mile policy in the hope  of saving a few quid. The numbers come from by YouGov and O2, who asked 2,000 drivers how they felt about being spied on every day - only to …

   'I think you DO do evil, using smoke and mirrors to avoid tax'

   Quotw Plus: 'What's next? Will they ask for my inside leg measurement?'

   This was the week when someone kicked Blighty's tax ant-hill and sent MPs and multinationals scurrying in all directions. The Public Accounts Committee called Google and its auditor Ernst & Young back to give more evidence about their British tax dealings, after a Reuters report suggested there might be "inconsistencies" in …

   What IS the difference between Virt and Cloud?

   Pin your ears back and we'll tell you

   There's a lot of talk – some might say hot air – about cloud computing, what it is and what it is not. Ask 10 people and you will probably get 15 answers. Take the formal definition of cloud put forward by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the section of the US Department of Commerce that for more than …

   Prankster 'Superhero' takes on robot traffic warden AND WINS

   'We are unable to accept your claim of super powers'

   A blogger claiming to have superpowers has exposed a flaw in a parking company's vehicle recognition system which could see innocent drivers wrongly hit with fines. Going under the name Parking Prankster, the activist set out to discover whether he could trick automated systems used by private parking companies into issuing …

   The quest continues for a fondleslab that fondles you back

   British vibro pioneers say: Anything can be a speaker

   HiWave, the haptics company which emerged from Brit hi-fi consortium NXT with a mission to make our fondleslabs fondle us back, has fragmented into a part which makes money and the more-interesting Redux. HiWave owned, and still owns, the technology developed by NXT to drive flat-panel speakers, but the executives were always …

   Surface Pro to hit Blighty priced 25% up on top-o-the-range iPad

   'That's cos it replaces your current laptop+iPad combo'

   Microsoft has confirmed prices for the Surface Pro: the 128GB model will cost punters 25 per cent more than a top of the range iPad. The laptop-cum-tablet, which Redmond says is "designed to showcase Windows 8 Pro", will land in the UK on 23 May, Microsoft revealed today. The estimated retail price for the 64GB version is £ …

   Microsoft conceals job ad in Bing homepage

   Use Internet Explorer with debug on? You're our kinda guy

   Microsoft are looking for a new Bing developer - but you'll need to be pretty smart to apply. Oh, and you can only use Internet Explorer, which rules a fair number of applicants out. Visitors to the Bing homepage are currently greeted with a weird blue environment of some sort as the background to the search bar. But rich …

   Have your users managed to force iOS devices on you?

   Check this, it might stop them losing all the data

   NetApp has used its acquired IonGrid technology to provide iOS mobile devices with access to file data stored on its FAS arrays, along with browser access to business apps. Apple iPad and iPhone users will have an App Store app they can use to log into their corporate system, using Active Directory or a multi-factor …

   US government wants security research on car-to-car nets

   Car crashed? Have you topped up its anti-virus or turned it off and on again?

   David Strickland, Administrator of the USA's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), has told that nation's Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation that he plans to research the security requirements of automated cars and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) networks. Strickland appeared before the …

   Foxconn still flogging iWorkers, but more lightly

   Fair Labor Association finds better safety, more loos, but also overwork

   The Fair Labor Association's (FLA's) latest report on workers at Chinese manufacturer Foxconn, Apple's preferred source for many iThings, has found many staff are still working longer hours than is allowed under Chinese law. The report (PDF) is based on audits of Foxconn plants in Guanlan, Longhua and Chengdu. The report was …

   Honey, I BLEW UP the International SPACE STATION - in full 3D

   CTO's radical rig blasts Sandra Bullock into Spaaace

   A few years ago the idea of accelerating a BlueArc filer would have seemed bizarre; it's got its own hardware acceleration. But now media special effects processing can be so mind-blowingly intensive that the hardware accelerated filer itself needs accelerating. The case that's illustrating this point is the new George Clooney …

   Yahoo! May! Buy! Tumblr! For! One! BEELLION! Bucks!

   Hipster favourite could make Yahoo! cool again

   Yahoo! has reportedly opened its chequebook, pencilled in nine zeroes with a one in front, and waved it around in the general direction of blogging site Tumblr. Adweek says Yahoo! is willing to write the billion-dollar cheque because Tumblr is so cool it will excite advertisers. The Wall Street Journal quotes Yahoo! officials …

   Australia's net filter sneaks into operation through back door

   Regulator's ban on dodgy shares site wipes out hundreds, exposes censorship mechanism

   Australia's national internet filter has re-emerged as an incompetence-powered zombie, after the nation's corporate regulator mistakenly blocked access to hundreds of sites. The regulator in question is the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), which says its role is “ensuring that Australia’s financial …

   Nine-year-old Opportunity Mars rover sets NASA distance record

   All-time champ, however, remains 40-year-old Russki

   The never-say-die little rover that could, Opportunity, has set a new distance record for extraterrestrial NASA vehicles. Opportunity has bested larger and faster rovers (click to enlarge) On Thursday, Opportunity's handlers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, received confirmation that the li'l …

   Congress asks Google to explain Glass privacy policies

   Pesky laws and governments interfering yet again

   The pilot phase of Google Glass is barely off the ground, but the Chocolate Factory's high-tech specs have already drawn the scrutiny of the US Congress over concerns that they could infringe individual privacy. In a letter addressed to Google CEO Larry Page, eight members of the Bipartisan Congressional Privacy Caucus called …

   Mac malware found with valid developer ID at freedom conference

   Angolan activist targeted for screenshot spying

   The annual Oslo Freedom Conference, where activists meet to share tips on advancing human rights, has thrown up an unusual piece of Apple OS X malware. At a workshop covering how to secure your hardware against government intrusion, security researcher Jacob Applebaum discovered the code on a laptop owned by an Angolan human …

4. Thursday, 16 May 2013

   Dell's server, net bizzes do well, but PCs slammed as expected

   Wannabe software unit loses money in fiscal Q1

   If Michael Dell and his partners had hoped to turn in a bad quarter to help justify the relatively low price the Dell & Friends consortium wants to pay to take the IT giant private, Dell's sales force in the enterprise server, networking, and services units did not do their part to help. The PC business did – but not as much as …

   Boffins find world's oldest virgin water trapped in Earth's crust

   Billion-plus-year discovery gives hope for life on Mars

   A team of British and Canadian scientists think they've found the oldest water sealed off from the Earth's atmosphere hidden deep in the Earth's crust, and estimate it is between 1.5 and 2.67 billion years old. How long before Perrier tries to flog this? The researchers analyzed water welling up from boreholes drilled 1.5 …

   Google may chuck Spanner into Datastore

   Google I/O Needs to pretty it up or 'people would freak out'

   Google may make its globally-distributed Spanner database available as a cloud service as the company tries to let developers fiddle with its innards. The Spanner database* is the successor to the BigTable/Megastore architecture on which Google's just-announced Cloud Datastore is built, and has some more-advanced features, …

   Dell uncloaks novel workstation trio, plops one into cloud

   Versatile rack mount, entry-level minitower, itsy-bitsy cutie

   Dell has filled out its workstation line with three new machines: a versatile, virtualizable 2U rack-mountable big boy, an entry-level minitower, and the minitower's little brother – which, if a workstation could ever be called "cute", would be a leading candidate for that designation. Speaking at a pre-briefing earlier this …

   Pirate Bay cofounder to run for European Parliament

   Seeks freetard vote for 'solutions we're in dire need of'

   Peter Sunde, one of four cofounders of notorious BitTorrent search site The Pirate Bay, says he plans to run in next year's European Parliament elections, despite his impending incarceration for copyright violation. Sunde, along with partners Carl Lundström, Frederik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, were convicted of " …

   NASA and Google team up to buy into quantumish computing

   Hoping to crack machine-learning conundrum

   A consortium of researchers from Google and NASA are planning to crack the issue of machine learning with a $15m quantum computer that will form the basis of a new Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab. The new facility, which will be sited at Silicon Valley's NASA Ames Research Center, will host a 10 square meter shielded room …

   Amazon slashes DynamoDB cost to counter Google Datastore

   'Datastore? Cute. Here's a 4X price reduction on big reads.'

   Amazon has overhauled its DynamoDB NoSQL datastore following Google's unveiling of a price-competitive service. The changes to the row-based DynamoDB were announced on Wednesday, hours after Google launched its Cloud Datastore – a standalone version of App Engine's columnar storage underlay. The Amazon changes let users scan …

   London Olympics site to become digital mega-hub

   'Gizmos that I barely understand' will power my city, says mayor

   Flamboyant London mayor Boris Johnson has formally inked a deal which will see the enormous press centre built for the 2012 Olympics turned into a "colossal super hangar" crammed with thousands of "digital and creative" workers who won't have needed to be "brilliant at school". The London Legacy Development Corporation and …

   HP preps Project Kraken for monster HANA in-memory jobs

   Sixteen Ivy Bridge-EX sockets and 12TB in a single image

   HP has revealed a little more about its "Project Kraken" in-memory system that it is cooking up in conjunction with the engineers at SAP. It's talking about a future in which there are lots of scale-out servers like its Project Moonshot systems and big-memory systems like Kraken on the other end of the spectrum – with not as …

   BlackBerry Messenger unleashed: Look out Twitter and Facebook

   Analysis Ignorant tech pundits just aren't down with the kids

   BlackBerry announced this week that its flagship messenger service, BBM, will no longer be tied to its proprietary handsets, potentially opening up a lucrative licensing stream which could rescue the beleaguered mobe-maker. Fan forums have been in meltdown after the announcement. From some, the pain appears to be personal. Odd …

   British LulzSec hackers hear jail doors slam shut for years

   'Latter day pirates' cop hefty servings of porridge

   Three British members of the notorious LulzSec hacktivist crew and a hacker affiliate were sentenced today for a series of attacks against targets including Sony, News International, the CIA and the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency. The youngest of the four accused avoided jail with a suspended sentence while the other three …

   Google 'DOES DO EVIL', thunders British politician

   Parliamentary tax probe has leaked documents, say MPs

   Even as its I/O shindig in San Francisco dominated the headlines, Google was today accused of lying over its claims last year that it makes no sales in the UK - in order to justify its tiny UK corporation tax bill. The web giant keeps its vast UK ad revenues out of reach of Blighty's taxmen by insisting that a team in Ireland …

   Software AG attempts to barge aboard crowded Cloud bandwagon

   Vorsprung durch folgende, nicht wahr?

   Software AG is late to the cloud computing party - but Europe’s second largest maker of on-premises enterprise software has vowed to “get it right”. Daren Roos, chief operating officer at the German giant, told The Reg: “We will deliver something that works. We are committed to doing a proper cloud.” And to prove it, he …

   Things that cost the same as coffee with Tim Cook - and are WAY more fun

   A force of heavily armed au pairs, for instance

   A coffee date with Tim Cook has sold for the whopping price of $610,000 to an anonymous bidder. The spendthrift Apple fan* will get half an hour with the fruity firm's CEO, during which tête-à-tête he or she will no doubt want to ask Mr Cook why Cupertino charges 65 quid for a Macbook power charger or perhaps explore the …

   Mobile tech destroys the case for the HS2 £multi-beellion train set

   Comment And robot cars will mean no need for new roads, too

   Finally people seem to be waking up to the dog's breakfast which is the economic case for the proposed High Speed Two London-Birmingham rail link. You know, this lovely train set that the politicians want to plonk down in the middle of England. I've never quite been sure why it is that politicians love such train sets: most of …

   Biz email slinger Mimecast tumbles over

   'Makes me look a tool for recommending them' sniffs bloke

   Mimecast, which touts webmail for businesses, has toppled over in Blighty, leaving its customers unable to send or receive emails. Our readers told us the service wasn't delivering mails, and the web portal was inaccessible for users. And peeps on Twitter reckoned the service went down sometime around 11am this morning. …

   Senators: You - Cook. Apple guy. Get in here and bring your tax books

   No, don't sit down. Where's all our damn money?

   Apple head honcho Tim Cook looks set to be hauled in front of a Senate committee to explain why his firm dodges taxes by keeping its cash overseas. Cook is expected to appear in front of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to explain why Apple has failed to repatriate up to $100bn in cash stashed in foreign …

   Reg careers Live Chat: Upgrade or go home with Dominic Connor

   Live Chat Our man gives it to you straight at 2pm, May 23

   Are you looking to switch jobs, skill-up or go back to college - then join The Register’s Careers’ Live Chat on May 23, at 2pm UK time. City headhunter and Reg contributor Dominic Connor and the Reg’s group editor Joe Fay will host an hour's worth of career-enhancing discussion to help your next steps. Dominic has been …

   Steve JOBS finally DEFEATS the PC - from BEYOND THE GRAVE

   Slablets hurtle off UK shelves as PC mountains moulder

   So it's official - the lifelong battle of legendary Apple CEO Steve Jobs is finally won, now that he has toppled the PC platform from beyond the grave: well, in the UK, at least. During Q1 this year more slablets were shipped into consumer and business channels than PCs - that's notebooks AND desktops COMBINED. Beancounting …

   Life on Mars means subsisting on grim diet of turd-garden spinach

   Space yokel shit-kickers needed to colonise Red Planet

   Farmers are often heard singing about their desire for a brand new combine harvester, but they might not even need one if they fancy going to Mars. NASA bods have said the valuable skills of growing veggies and nurturing plantlife are vital to any Mars colonisation. Indeed, according to a talk given at the Human 2 Mars …

   Copyright minister: Google has better access to No. 10 than me

   Downing Street overrun with whispering Oompa-Loompas

   Google has greater access to No. 10 Downing Street than the government's own ministers, one such minister has admitted. Viscount Younger of Leckie, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Intellectual Property - the third copyright minister in a year - made the candid confession before the Media, Culture and Sport …

   'Momentous year' for TalkTalk as it surges from 3rd place to, er, 4th

   This is 'fundamentally better', insists Harding

   TalkTalk has reported a slight fall in revenue and pre-tax profit for the full financial year. The budget telco told the City that sales for the 12 months to 31 March had slipped by one per cent to £1.67bn compared with £1.68bn a year earlier. Profit before tax dipped four per cent to £122m, the company added. TalkTalk CEO …

   Dixons feasts on corpse of Comet, chortles over 'slab bonanza

   Pixmania and southern EU remain sore boils on bottom line

   PC World and Currys helped steer sales growth at Dixons Retail in fiscal '13 ended 28 April against the background of a land grab for fallen Comet's trade and a boom in slablets. In a trading statement today - preliminary numbers are filed on 20 June - the retail mammoth said like-for-like Q4 sales climbed seven per cent on a …

   Fusion-io turns up wick on its product development cycle

   Something new to drool over every year

   Take note competitors; under new management Fusion-io is going to introduce major product developments every 12-14 months with mid-life kickers every 6-7 months. This is a bit like Intel's tick-tock cadence, with a Fusion tick being a basic product architecture change, and a tock being a mid-life kicker or refresh. In the …

   Wannabe hacker, you're hired: Brit bosses mull cyber-apprenticeships

   Just put on this white hat

   Britain's biggest businesses are draughting up cyber-security apprenticeships to train the online samurais of the future. According to digital knowhow spreader e-Skills, just seven per cent of all computer security professionals are aged between 20 and 29. The employer-led quango sees apprenticeships as a vital way of …

   Quantum lurches Starboard: Vigorous investor comes aboard

   Blocks and Files Tape-slinger invites 3 new directors to boardroom table

   Struggling storage biz Quantum has been in a quandary about how to react to aggressive shareholder Starboard Value. Now the tape and disk data protection vendor has decided to play nice and invite three Starboard nominees onto its board. It works like this: the board goes up from eight seats to nine. Jeffrey Smith, Starboard' …

   Dark blue side of the Force used to quell Star Wars nerd clash

   Dr Who are you looking at, mate?

   It was a conflict that didn't take place in a galaxy far, far away, but a little known corner of Norwich University. Organisers of a sci-fi convention held in Alan Partridge's home town had to use the power of the (police) force after a barney erupted between two groups of furious nerds. Officers were called after the …

   Acorn founder: SIXTH WAVE of tech will wash away Apple, Intel

   'Violent event' to finally dethrone dead genius overlord Jobs

   Acorn co-founder Hermann Hauser has claimed the world is entering a new "sixth wave" of computing, driven by the arrival of omnipresent computers and machine-learning. Speaking at a Software East event this week, the celebrated computer whiz said we are entering an era where computers are everywhere and often undetectable - …

   Telly apocalypse foretold for 4G arrival fails to hit London: Brighton next

   Good frequency fences make good neighbours, seemingly

   Freeview-watching Londoners are safe from 4G interference, with trials failing to elicit even a single complaint - thanks to the capital's comprehensive coverage and its use of a Freeview band well clear of invading 4G signals. The tests were carried out by at800, the body charged with spending £180m in mobile-network cash to …

   Gartner chap slams gov-funded IT education boosts

   IT is not a beautiful or unique snowflake and does not deserve help

   Government spending to develop folks with the IT skills business wants is a waste of time and money, according to Gartner analyst Rolf Jester. Australia-based Jester popped out a blog post carrying that opinion today, in response to the release of Australia's annual federal Budget. The release of that document is always a cue …

   Verizon starts selling VMware's split personality phones

   Bring your own device provided it's one of these two Androids

   VMware has notched up a significant achievement in its quest to reduce its dependence on server virtualisation - by striking a partnership with Verizon Enterprise that gives its BYOD-ware Horizon Suite a better chance of finding its way into users' hands. VMware is mad for what it calls end-user computing, largely because …

   My god, what's that STENCH belching from your iPhone?

   I love the smell of freshly squashed pig in the mornin'

   A new prototype iPhone peripheral pumps out smells based on user interaction, allowing devs to add an aromatic dimension to games and messaging as long as users keep their reservoir stocked. ChatPerf slips onto the bottom of an iPhone and comes with an SDK allowing anyone to scent-enable their application. Some variation in …

   TUANZ: don't risk mobile competition

   New Zealand plots spectrum future

   New Zealand has kicked off the consultation period for its planned 700 MHz spectrum auction, to take place in 2013. That country's Radio Spectrum Management Agency has adopted the Asia Pacific Telecommunity (APT) band plan, in which 45 MHz of paired spectrum will be made available in nine 5 MHz blocks. The government is …

   Hemp used to make graphene-like supercapacitors

   Pass de battery on de left-hand-side

   A group of scientists from the University of Alberta have created a process that makes graphene-like nanomaterials out of hemp waste, suitable for use in supercapacitors. While graphene is already known to be a good energy store, it's also expensive, so commercial supercapacitors use activated carbon electrodes. According to …

   Tech startups, Silicon Valley, not all they're cracked up to be

   Business think tank finds $100m companies more likely to emerge in other places, sectors

   Technology startups are not quite the growth engine they're assumed to be, according to a 30-year study by economic think-tank the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. The Kaufmann Foundation, to give the organisation its commonly-used short name, happily describes itself as “the world's largest foundation devoted to …

   Google forges BigTable-based NoSQL datastore

   Google I/O Takes out BigTable, thwacks Amazon DynamoDB over the head

   If you're Google, building cloud services for the public must be frustrating – after spending a decade crafting and stitching together software systems for use internally, when you try and sell them to the outside world you need to unpick them from one another. It seems more like butchery than creation, but that's the name of …

   Google tells Microsoft to yank its new WinPhone YouTube app

   Says it's deliberately ripping off content creators

   No sooner has Microsoft managed to get a full-featured YouTube app running on Windows Phone 8 – something it long maintained was impossible – than an irate Google has asked it to immediately remove the app from the Windows Phone Store. The Verge, which editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky has described as "a news site which covers …

5. Wednesday, 15 May 2013

   Cisco boosts sales and profits despite softness in switching and routing

   Servers and video help fill in the gaps

   Cisco Systems took a big bet more than four years ago when it jumped into the server market with its Unified Computing System blade and rack servers and started peddling converged Nexus switches at the same time. Those bets have paid off, and rising sales of these products are filling in the revenue gaps in the quarter ended in …

   NASA: Our ALIEN HUNTING star-scan 'scope is KNACKERED

   Planet-spotter not spinning its wheels in space

   In a press conference on Wednesday, NASA warned that its Kepler orbital telescope, which has had much success in spotting Earth-sized planets, may be on its last legs after a serious equipment failure. The telescope relies on four spinning reaction wheels to keep it aligned on target, and one failed last year. Now another has …

   Analyst warns NetApp is prepping layoffs

   1,300 pink slips prepared

   According to a private Piper Jaffray note to its clients, NetApp is preparing to announce a 10 per cent work force reduction, about 1,300 people, in under-performing areas of its business such as Engenio, the acquired LSI disk array business. The idea is, according to Piper Jaffray, for NetApp to maintain a solid operating …

   Australia downloads a limping 13 Mbps, says Ookla

   Looking under the data, it's not so simple

   There are, it seems, 44 countries in the world with better broadband download speeds than Australia, according to the latest Netindex release by Ookla. This has brought a predictable round of soul-searching, particularly as Mongolia appears higher on the list than Australia (it scored an average speed of 13.79 Mbps, while …

   Google takes on AWS, Azure virty servers with micro billing and fat disks

   Google I/O Compute Engine open for all

   Google is done dabbling with raw compute and storage infrastructure and has thrown the doors wide open on its Compute Engine services, while at the same time offering finer-grained pricing and fatter persistent storage for its virtual machines than is available from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Windows Azure, and other public …

   Oracle updates Java versioning to allow more security fixes

   New scheme skips numbers to leave room for emergencies

   Seemingly borrowing a page from the old, line-numbered BASIC programs of the 1980s, Oracle has adopted a new version numbering strategy for the Java Development Kit (JDK) – one that skips numbers, in case Oracle has to go back and plunk in new code later. Traditionally, Oracle has issued new patches for the JDK on a …

   Overland Storage may acquire Tandberg

   Cripple plus walking wounded equals able-bodied entity

   Overland Storage may be about to acquire Tandberg Data. A crippled tape and disk data protection and NAS storage supplier bleeding cash, Overland Storage is looking for respite from its financial woes by acquiring, on a basis of equals, the newly recovered Tandberg Data. The news is laid out in an SEC form SC 13D/A filing …

   Google platform cloud now takes PHP apps

   Google I/O Google closes gap with cloud competitors

   Google is adding PHP to Google App Engine as the company tries to appeal to developers of the widely-used language. The addition was announced on Wednesday at Google's developer jamboree Google I/O. It means GAE now supports three widely used web languages – Python, Java, and PHP – and Go, a Google-sponsored language designed …

   Biological chips go analog to boost efficiency

   Analog chips run rings around digital ones at tiny scale

   MIT boffins have figured out how to create synthetic analog organic circuits that can perform useful tasks without needing the sophistication that digital methods demand, which could lead to more efficient gloopy circuits and even more precise drug manufacture. The advance, which could create technology for carefully managing …

   Fujitsu peddles three-way hybrid super to Nagoya University

   Mash up to push up above 3.66 petaflops – eventually

   Nagoya University is the latest academic institute in Japan to take a slice of the K supercomputer design - and put it on its campus to run applications on a monstrous 10.51 petaflops box. In theory. And in an interesting twist, the new machine is a hybrid Sparc64-Xeon-Xeon Phi cluster that will eventually push up into the …

   Android device? Ooohhhh, you mean a Samsung phone

   Koreans nabbed nearly all the Q1 profits – more even than Google

   Android may now be the bestselling smartphone OS in the world, as Google pointed out in its Wednesday morning I/O conference keynote, but a new report says most handset vendors aren't actually making much money off Android – with one notable exception. According to a study by market research firm Strategy Analytics, the global …

   Atlantis raises 20 million greenbacks to flog virty desktop software

   D-round takes pot up to $30m total

   Privately-owned Atlantis Computing has just raised $20m to flog its Atlantis ILIO desktop virtualisation software around the world. ILIO – In Line Image Optimisation - has virtual machines running inside a server's RAM and delivers virtual desktops at less than $300 per desktop. The company's second CEO, Bernard Harguindeguy …

   Alleged CIA spook cuffed by Russians: US Gmail 'spycraft' revealed

   Cloak and blather, sniffs ex-FBI bod

   A US diplomat accused of attempting to recruit a Russian security services staffer as a double agent used a comical "spy arsenal" of equipment, it is claimed. Ryan Fogle - third secretary of the political department of the US Embassy in Moscow - was allegedly caught redhanded by Russia's counterintelligence agency, the FSB, …

   Skyera hires flashy Western Digital veep as chief architect

   WD potentially challenging the big SSD boys

   Flash array startup Skyera, which counts Western Digital among its investors, has recruited a WD flash product exec as its new chief architect. According to a story in the Sacramento Bee, Skyera recruited Andy Tomlin as its chief architect. Tomlin was WD's vice presidnt of SSD Development responsible for all firmware, software …

   Feds stamp on cash pipeline to Mt Gox, Bitcoin's Wall Street

   Warrant served on account used to transfer crypto-dosh

   The Department of Homeland Security has frozen an online trade route between US citizens and Mt. Gox - the world's largest exchange of crypto-currency Bitcoin. The move will be interpreted as an opening skirmish in a battle to control the electronic cash, which has exploded in popularity and so far avoided regulation by …

   Live Blog: Google I/O keynote

   Google I/O Chocolate Factory shows off the new goodies

   At 7am this morning, the streets of San Francisco were thronged with developers lining up to get into Google's annual I/O conference. Over 6,000 delegates have signed up for the show and they all want the best seats for the opening keynote presentation that will lay out Google's plans for the next year's developments in …

   Apple: ebook price fixing? Nooo, nothing to do with us, no siree

   Maybe you should ask the publishers

   Apple has told a US court it certainly wasn't involved in any conspiracy to rig the prices of ebooks. The fruity firm said that it was neither involved in nor knew of any meetings or conversations between the publishing houses that "allegedly formed the basis of the purported conspiracy". "Apple did not conspire to fix e-book …

   Euro PC shipments plummet into bottomless pit of DOOOOM

   11th quarter of decline, 20pc drop on last year - Gartner

   PC shipments in Western Europe declined for the 11th quarter in a row, and suffered the steepest drop on record in the first three months of 2013. That's according to market watchers at Gartner. Some 12.3 million desktops and notebooks found a home during Q1 of this year - those platforms are not completely dead - but this …

   Virident tempts EMC flash boss over, creeps up on Fusion-io

   Intrigues all round in the flash supplier world

   Server flash card upstart Virident has recruited Ken Grohe, EMC's flash business general manager, to run its worldwide customer operations, while it strengthens its position against flash supremos Fusion-io The recruitment is open for anyone to see on Grohe's LinkedIn page. Concurrent with Grohe's hire, Virident, which used …

   Murdoch hate sparks mass bitchin', rapid evacuation from O2, BE

   1 in 3 polled punters will quit ISP gobbled by Sky

   Boycotting Rupert Murdoch-owned stuff - such as the media baron's newspapers - is nothing new. But now that Telefónica UK has sold its O2 and BE home broadband businesses to BSkyB, customers are either fleeing the networks or moaning bitterly about who they perceive to be their looming "nasty old" overlord. O2 and BE punters …

   All aboard the patch wagon! Next stop: Microsoft, Adobe, Mozilla

   Come on, those security bugs won't fix themselves

   Today, right on schedule, Microsoft's monthly security patch bandwagon rolled into town with updates for Internet Explorer, Office and Windows - with Adobe bringing up the rear. This latest instalment of Patch Tuesday addresses 33 bugs in a range of Redmond software, as revealed late last week. The flaws have been grouped into …

   Will customers buy into Oracle's modern-day mainframes?

   How about that stack, Larry...

   Oracle is making a big play to cash in on the simplification of enterprise IT environments with "engineered systems," the collection of vertically integrated appliances that debuted five years ago with Exadata. While Oracle insists customers who enter into the Big Red cocoon will reap all kinds of benefits, some may be …

   Datatec pours mixed cocktail of fiscal '13 numbers

   Logicalis went bananas, sez Montanana

   Tech group Datatec was not yet ready to call an end to market uncertainty across the globe following a mixed turnout for its distribution and integration units in fiscal '13 ended February. Group sales at South Africa-listed Datatec climbed four per cent to $5.25bn including $185m from acquisitions, but operating profit fell …

   Euro trade chief snaps on glove, goes it alone in Huawei, ZTE probe

   But first, he'll have a little word with China

   European Union trade chief Karel De Gucht will investigate allegations that Chinese telecoms hardware makers are undermining their Euro rivals. The China-based electronics goliaths are accused of unfairly gaining an advantage by trousering state subsidies from the communist regime and dumping cheap networking kit on the …

   Dell will drop the F-bomb FIVE days early in epic power struggle

   That's F for financials, and perhaps a D for performance

   Dell has pulled forward the reporting of its fiscal Q1 financials by five days amid a battle between Michael Dell and activist investor Carl Icahn over the future ownership of the Texan PC giant. The company confirmed last night that it has scheduled the conference call with analysts tomorrow - 16 May - indicating that Dell's …

   EU wants the Swiss and pals to cough up IT giants' hidden bank info

   Where's my money, eh? WHERE'S MY MONEY?

   Europe's finance ministers will start talks with five non-member states to close tax law loopholes exploited by tech multinationals - such as Google and Amazon. The ministers said they wanted to open up negotiations with European Free Trade Association members Switzerland and Liechtenstein as well as with "tax haven" …

   Review: HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook

   All roads lead to Chrome?

   If you read my comparison of the Asus C7 and Samsung Series 3 Chromebooks, you may well have come away thinking: "All well and good, but can I have something with a bigger screen for the same sort of money?" Now, thanks to HP, the answer to that question is yes. The latest entry into the Chromebook steeplechase is powered by …

   Oi, Google! Stop LIBELLING us Germans, fix your autocomplete

   Wie möchten Sie es, Herr Adman?

   Google has been ordered by a German court to block defamatory words appearing in its search engine's autocomplete function. The Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe ruled that the advertising giant must remove libellous material from its algorithms that automatically attempt to guess what one is searching for - but only once …

   Ten years on: How did that cloud strategy pan out?

   How to avoid vendor lock-in

   So the CEO is hearing all about clouds now and the financial director is looking at his pile of beans and as usual wants you to do more with less. And both think it is time for you to build or buy a cloud. Where do you start? The answer is by being brutally honest with yourself and your bosses about everything around you. A …

   It's all gone to Schmitt: New OCZ boss rips 'n' replaces execs

   Tries to prove to $30m backer that the biz can make money

   Flash storage biz OCZ's new CEO has replaced almost a dozen executives - and he's banging on about quality as he strives to resuscitate the near-dead OCZ flash business. OCZ over-extended itself drastically under founder and previous CEO Ryan Petersen, who was ousted last year, leaving the company with far too many under- …

   Currant Bun erects £2 paywall: Wraps digi-paper around free footie

   We've heard worse ideas

   British tabloid The Sun has revealed a subscription plan to access the digital version of the newspaper, Sun+. The daily is essentially offering a football video package with The Sun's stories wrapped around it, for £2 a week. Near-live TV clips of Premier League games will be bundled in the deal, as News International's …

   Hex & plugs & ROM & roll: Computer music stars rock Bletchley

   Seven decades of electronica at code-breaking park museum

   Are programmers the new rock stars? That may be a bit of a stretch, but it hasn't stopped one IT engineer staging a computer music exhibition at Blighty's Bletchley Park. The new hands-on display at The National Museum of Computing, located in the grounds of the wartime code-breaking nerve-centre, focusses on the story of …

   Speaking in Tech: All our stuff's on Amazon's cloud... what if it goes titsup?

   Podcast Should private firms be grilled on biz viability for the 'public interest'...

   It's another banter-packed episode of El Reg's one-and-only podcast, helping you catch up on everything that has happened this week in enterprise and consumer tech. This week: does a private company have a duty of disclosure in the public interest? Is it really a cost saving when you buy the latest tape drive, but it …

   Woes continue at Northamber after PC, server franchise breakage

   'Turnaround will not be immediate', says oldest distie

   Three things in life are certain - death, taxes and perennially declining turnover at Blighty's oldest tech distributor Northamber, which this morning reported another double-digit sales slump. The AIM-listed wholesaler, which plies its trade from Surrey, revealed revenue for fiscal Q3 ended 31 March was down 20 per cent year- …

   Apple seeks techies, designers to revive iWork office suite

   Would YOU enter the walled garden?

   Apple looks set to refresh its answer to Microsoft's office: the neglected iWork software suite, which hasn't received a significant update since 2009. Listings on its jobs page, some of which date back a few months, the fruity firm says it is looking for nine people to help develop the office software collection. Could this …

   UK biz baffled by Reding's planned data protection law rewrite: ICO

   'I've forgotten. What does right to be forgotten actually mean?'

   A large number of British businesses are clueless about many of the main provisions detailed in the European Union's proposed data protection reforms, a new report from the Information Commissioner's Office has claimed. Consultancy firm London Economics - which was commissioned to carry out the research (PDF) on behalf of the …

   Whiptail CEO: Big Blue's flashy BEELLION doesn't faze us

   Interview Cannibalising your own lines? Not for us

   Undaunted by IBM's billion dollar investment in flash, all-flash array startup Whiptail is banking on new investor SanDisk, says Whiptail CEO Dan Crain. Whiptail's plans also include introducing 3D chips into its arraysand developing "revolutionary" array software and management products. It has no intention of entering the …

   Cluster kids, pick your weapons: It's the Battle of Leipzig 2.0

   HPC blog Stop Möckern my big iron

   Napoleon experienced his first defeat* there 200 years ago... Now nine teams of university undergrad students will travel to Leipzig in the hopes of winning the clash of big iron that is the International Supercomputing Conference 2013 (ISC’13) Student Cluster Challenge. Nine teams of university undergrad students will build …

   Why UK slid £150m to tax-exempt phone-mast master Arqiva

   Private biz bags taxpayer handout? Thank George Osborne

   How does one fairly distribute £150m to extend Blighty's mobile coverage? Give the whole lot to a private company that has paid no corporation tax for four years and effectively holds a monopoly. That company is Arqiva, which owns the vast majority of the UK's TV, radio and mobile phone transmitters. It will get £150m of …

   Sony investor wants to break up firm, re-invest in hardware biz

   Loeb's masterplan calls for IPO of entertainment arm

   Sony’s biggest shareholder wants to break up the firm, spinning off its highly profitable entertainment division to generate more cash to plough into its misfiring hardware biz. Activist investor Daniel Loeb and his hedge fund Third Point has a 6.5 per cent stake in the venerable electronics giant, amounting to a whopping $1. …

   Bing uncloaks Klingon translator

   'Dujeychugh jagh nIv yItuHQo', says Redmond to Google

   Microsoft's ongoing efforts to top Google have seen it approach the final frontier, with a new service that translates written text from various terrestrial languages into the fictional language of Star Trek's Klingon race. The translator service will also be available from Bing's Windows Phone app. The introduction of the …

   McAfee all-in-one security suite covers PCs, tablets, and smartphones

   Put your passport and ID docs in the cloud

   McAfee has launched an all-in-one cross-platform security suite for consumers that incorporates online storage through biometric authentication as well as a host of other security technologies. Equally importantly, the Intel security division is trying to shake up the way security software is sold to consumers. The McAfee …

   Rolls-Royce climbs aboard Bloodhound SUPERSONIC car

   Cash and tech support for mighty motor's mighty motor

   Rolls-Royce has announced it will back the Bloodhound SuperSonic Car (SSC), despite the company's "pretty robust policy about using our power plants in applications for which they were not designed". Bloodhound will be partially powered by a Rolls-Royce EJ200 jet engine, normally found giving the Eurofighter-Typhoon a powerful …

   LogMeIn dives into cloudy things with ARM support

   Get aboard the IoT bandwagon for £60 or less

   LogMeIn has relaunched its cloudy-thing management, now called Xively and available with a sixty-quid ARM development board for those hoping to kick start the Internet of Things. Not that one needs the £57.99 Jumpstart kit to use Xively's cloud. Support for RESTful, JSON and CSV as well as raw sockets ensure that any IP- …

   India's 2020 vision: a $10 BEELION software industry

   Industry body wants PR

   India’s all-powerful IT body NASSCOM wants the country’s burgeoning software industry to generate $10bn in revenue by 2020, in a move designed to "rejuvenate" India’s sprawling IT industry. The body’s newly unveiled 2020 plan will require India’s software market to grow its revenues almost five-fold from the estimated $2.2bn …

   'LulzSec leader's' victim named: tiny Oz council

   Narrabri Shire, population 14,000, target of elite hackers

   So: the person alleged to have described himself as the “leader” of LulzSec was arrested for what, exactly? There's been a lot of noise flowing around, and the odd tip-off (including some to The Register in an extensive phone call on April 29). Since we try to avoid jumping ahead of the court process, we have kept our traps …

   EMC's ViPR: Is it really that venomous?

   Storagebod It's automation, but not as we know it, Jim

   There’s a lot of discussion about what EMC's ViPR is and what it isn’t. How much of this confusion is deliberate and how much is simply the normal of fog of war which pervades the storage industry? Firstly, it's a messy announcement; there’s a hotch-potch of products here, utilising IP from acquisitions and from internal EMC …

   Australia's 2013/2014 budget full of sci/tech goodies

   Cash for gamers, ERP reviews and nuclear waste handling

   Australia's budget for 2013/2014 contains plenty of interest to the technology community. One of the Budget's centrepieces is $AUD9.8 billion of funds, over six years, with the aim of ensuring “Australia to be placed in the top five countries internationally in reading, mathematics and science by 2025”. That investment in …

   NICTA on the budget chopping block

   Updated Current funding deed to be its last

   The research house that gave the world the first provably secure operating kernel, and has been in the engine room of other IT application innovations in bionic vision, logistics, mapping and hundred-Terabit optical networking, is under threat under the 2013 Federal Budget. Funding for NICTA, funded through the Department of …

   Financial firms start lining up for AMD Roadrunner systems

   Open Compute makers could do for Opterons what tier ones didn't

   For more than a few large-scale data center operators and supercomputer centers in the world, AMD's Opteron processors are still an important part of their infrastructure. But over the past few years, as Intel has got its Xeon act together and AMD has had some issues (to put it politely) the tier-one server makers have not …

   Firefox 21 ships with performance-profiling Health Report

   Phones home with stats on startup, crashes, and more

   The Mozilla Foundation has shipped the latest version of its Firefox web browser with a new Health Report feature that monitors browser behavior and optionally submits usage statistics back to Mozilla to help reduce crashes and other problems. According to a blog post by VP of Firefox engineering Johnathan Nightingale, the …

   Larry Page acknowledges creeping vocal paralysis

   Google boss asks for public's help to cure condition

   It has often been noted that Google's CEO Larry Page comes across as somewhat muted when speaking, which he took a break from entirely last year with an unexplained throat issue. Now he has revealed what the problem is. His vocal issues began 14 years ago after a heavy cold left him very hoarse. His condition was diagnosed as …

   D-Wave wins the quantum-classical horse race, kind of

   For the right problem, quantum computing wins

   It's official, it seems: the D-Wave isn't a “real” quantum computer, but it does handle some classes of problems a lot faster than a classical desktop computer. That's the result of the first attempt to benchmark the company's adibiatic quantum computer, but it comes with caveats. But first, some background. D-Wave is a …

6. Tuesday, 14 May 2013

   German publisher accuses Microsoft of URL sniffing

   Teacup storm or Skype snooping?

   Is Microsoft “snooping” on Skype text conversations, or merely protecting users from malware URLs? German publisher Heise Online has given that question prominence with the accusation that Redmond is snooping, as the result of receiving return visits from Microsoft IP addresses if they send HTTPS URLs through Skype text chats …

   IBM to push Linux apps on Power iron in China, then elsewhere

   If you want to peddle boxes, you have to sell the ISVs first

   IBM is opening a Power Systems Linux Center in Beijing, China, in the hopes of getting more local ISVs interested in its Power Systems iron and luring them away from x86-based systems. With the Power Systems business taking it on the chin in IBM's first quarter – revenues fell 32 per cent compared to a year ago – you can bet …

   Watch out, Nokia: Global mobile phone sales slowing

   Only the Asian market showing growth

   It seems as though hardly a month goes by without the launch of some flashy new mobile phone. Yet according to new figures from Gartner, overall mobile sales are slowing throughout most of the world, which could mean trouble ahead for some vendors – particularly Nokia. Total sales of all types of handsets were essentially flat …

   Top guns doomed as US Navy demos first carrier-launched drone

   Killer robot takes to the skies

   The US Navy has successfully completed the first carrier launch of its unmanned X47B drone, a programmable stealth strike aircraft with a range of 2,100 miles and the skills to allow automatic in-flight refueling, which could give it global reach. #BREAKING: #USNavy history is made! Was airborne at 11:18A. More to come. MT @ …

   Too much infosec regulation undermines security, warns NAB

   Encouraging compliance discourages responses

   More prescriptive regulation of the security posture in industry sectors like banking could have the paradoxical impact of reducing security, according to Andrew Dell, head of IT security services at the National Australia Bank. “We have to become much more agile and proactive – how we look at, how we react to cybercrime. Our …

   Video services chug half of US net capacity

   Amazon cloud serves up biggest, Google second biggest, Microsoft...?

   Video services Netflix and YouTube consume nearly half of US internet capacity at peak times, demonstrating the massive scale of Amazon and Google's infrastructure clouds, but causing us to ask 'whither Microsoft?' As of the first half of 2013, Netflix accounted for almost a third (32.5 per cent) of downstream traffic on US …

   Budget could mean more paperwork for contractors

   Sole traders may have to pay tax monthly, not quarterly

   Australia's 2013/2014 budget could mean extra work for IT contractors. Such workers are often considered “sole traders” or “independent contractors” for tax purposes and are currently required to submit quarterly payments for the goods and services tax (GST) and personal income tax. Australia has around 750,000 independent …

   Google adds Atari Easter Egg for Breakout's birthday

   Cute game born in Jobsian heart of darkness

   Google has added a playable version of the early Atari game Breakout to its Image Search system to celebrate the game's 37th birthday. To access the game go to the Google Image search page and enter "Atari breakout." The search results pages then form into five rows of bricks and the paddle and ball game commences under mouse …

   Engine Yard plugs PHP into its platform-as-a-service

   Halves weakling instance prices, intros Riak support

   Oracle-backed Engine Yard has added support for PHP apps to its platform cloud as the company tries to maintain feature parity against bigger companies with better infrastructure. The PHP support was announced on Tuesday and takes EngineYard's roster of supported languages to three, including Ruby on Rails and Node.js. It sees …

   Microsoft: Next WinPhone 8 update to arrive this summer

   Won't be 'Blue,' but will include important features

   We still don't know for sure what changes will arrive in Windows 8.1, the big OS update that's expected to ship as a preview in late June, but Microsoft has begun teasing a few details of the next update to Windows Phone 8. Windows group chief marketing and finance officer Tami Reller confirmed that the major desktop update …

   Marlinspike: Saudi mobe network tried to recruit me to sniff citizens' privates

   Gov plans to probe tweets, chat, claims crypto guru

   Claims that a Saudi mobile network is attempting to spy on citizens emerged after the telco apparently tried to recruit top cryptographer Moxie Marlinspike - who promptly went public. The cryptography expert and former hacker, who left Twitter's security team in January, said he had been asked to help Mobily in its state- …

   Dell files suit accusing Hitachi and pals of 'price-fixing conspiracy'

   Wants damages from optical drive suppliers

   Dell has filed a lawsuit alleging that six suppliers which manufactured the optical drives used in its computers had illegally agreed to set the components' prices. In a complaint filed at a federal court in Austin, Texas, the world's third-largest computer manufacturer said it was seeking damages for a "price-fixing …

   Judge orders redacted Aaron Swartz prosecution docs to be revealed

   MIT and JSTOR allowed to black out names and network info

   A US judge has ordered that documents from the criminal hacking case against internet activist Aaron Swartz should be unsealed, after they've been redacted by MIT and JSTOR. Swartz took his own life in January just ahead of the trial over the theft of academic articles from online reference library JSTOR using a computer at …

   New Lumia 925: This, loyalists, is the BIG ONE you've waited for

   Hands-on Nokia veep drills high-end master plan for El Reg

   Today, Nokia launched its best smartphone to date: the Lumia 925. I got some hands-on time with the Windows Phone 8-powered device - and a tour of the gadget by shoegaze icon Nokia senior veep of product management Kevin Shields, who explained some of the key design decisions. It's a covetable bit of kit - but with iPhones and …

   Apple adds Galaxy S 4 to Samsung patent suit

   Might as well kick Korean mobe-maker where it'll hurt most

   Apple has ratcheted-up its patent-infringment attack on Samsung, asking the US District Court of California to add Sammy's new smartphone flagship, the Galaxy S 4, to the list of products that Apple alleges violate its patents. That handset was launched with hella hoopla this March (and reviewed by The Reg this Monday), and is …

   BlackBerry and Apple pie this summer. Or BBM-onna-Droid

   Hey, rivals, have our loyal fans! No, wait

   BlackBerry's hugely popular social-network-in-hardware BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) will be available on iPhone and Android for free from this summer. BBM is one of the defining features of the BlackBerry, a brilliantly designed social network that has earned the firm a compulsive following. For BBM's "members", the messenger is …

   Microsoft: YES! You can have your desktop back again for FREE!

   No, no, no need to thank us - we love you all

   Microsoft has confirmed that it will issue its Blue update to Windows 8 without charge, with first code scheduled at the company’s Build conference starting on June 26. This is in line with Redmond's previous policy in which users have been charged only for an entirely new iteration of the Windows OS, not for service packs and …

   Rackspace does tech support for popular languages on its cloud

   Getting all fanatical about SDKs – for free

   Rackspace Hosting has spent the past six months putting together a set of officially sanctioned software development kits and runtime environments for popular programming languages to run on its eponymous infrastructure cloud, and now it is ready to offer tech support for those SDKs when companies deploy applications on the …

   BlackBerry's Q5 QWERTY gets flirty with buy-curious teens

   We need to talk about Kevin

   BlackBerry's new Q5 QWERTY smartphone was revealed today as "youthful and fun", rather distancing the device from its pinstripe pocket-dwelling siblings, the Q10 and Z10. The Q5 a mid-range sibling to the first BlackBerry OS 10 QWERTY phone, the Q10, which we reviewed here last week. But somewhat surprisingly, the BB10-powered …

   Vodafone gets surprise £2.1bn dividend from Verizon Wireless

   Trebles all round in Newbury tonight

   US cell network Verizon Wireless will pay out a shareholder dividend this year - and as there are only two shareholders, the $7bn (£4.5bn) divvy will be split between, er, Verizon and Vodafone. That means Voda - headquartered in Newbury, UK - will take home $3.15bn (£2.1bn). Vodafone owns 45 per cent of Verizon Wireless - the …

   Azlan enters EMC channel in stealth mode

   We will NOT upset other distributors, they won't even know we're here

   Azlan wants to slip quietly into EMC's partner base without making any waves for existing distributors, well almost. This may be music to the ears of EMC's distie pals at Arrow and Avnet who were privately concerned a price led strategy from Azlan would trash their margins, something they've complained about in past situations …

   Dell committee to Icahn: Show us the money

   How exactly will you buy new shares for everyone?

   Dell's special committee has asked Carl Icahn and his investment partner Southeastern Asset Management for a bit more info on their plan to thwart Mike Dell's bid to take the firm private, while Icahn suggests himself for the board. The committee, set up to look into Mike Dell's offer to take his company private for $24.4bn …

   Frenchie bean-counters sweet-talked into slipping on Trojans

   Ne touchez pas à ce téléphone, mon ami!

   Crooks hoping to empty company bank accounts are calling up the firms' bean-counters to chase invoices packed with hidden malware. Finance staff are tricked into opening the booby-trapped messages in phone calls from con men, who claim to have emailed in legit paperwork that needs urgent attention. The documents instead …

   CIA ups stake in database-as-a-service firm

   Cloudant trousers $12m, opens San Francisco office

   The CIA has maintained its influence over Cloudant by upping its investment in the database-as-a-service firm. The $12m funding round sees Cloudant's existing investors In-Q-Tel*, Avalon Ventures, and Samsung Venture Investment Corporation up their shares in the company, and new investors Fidelity Investments, Rackspace …

   Amazon coughs millions for Liquavista screen tech while workers strike

   Kindle Colour soon? Not while Leipzig's downing tools

   Amazon has nabbed screen tech firm Liquavista from Samsung, potentially for its use in building a colour ereader, while its workers go on strike in Germany. Although the etailer already has Kindle-branded tablets in colour, it doesn't as yet have a sun-defying ereader display that can do colour, an option that would give its …

   Full metal jacket: Nokia launches new Lumia 925

   4G phone for grown-ups

   Nokia tweaked the top of its range with a new 4G Windows 8 model today. The aluminium 925 breaks with Nokia’s Stickle Brick garish-coloured plastic design philosophy and offers a more grown-up styling. The camera module is snaffled from the erstwhile flagship, the 920, with optical image stabilisation, spruced up with an extra …

   Sun lets loose with THREE record eruptions in 24 hours

   Excited boffins say star may even show off twin peaks

   The Sun looks like it's ramping up to its expected solar maximum this year, after it let loose three X-class solar flares in just 24 hours. Our solar system's parent star lashed out late Sunday night and again on Monday with two coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from its upper left side. The Sun followed that up on Monday night …

   Micro P parent does it AGAIN, kicks recession in nackers

   Get big, get niche, oh wait... that is meaningless, get out

   DCC Sercom, parent of Brit IT distie Micro P and games console wholesaler Gem, has again laughed in the face of a flatlining local economy. Turnover in the tech division of Irish conglomerate DCC grew 17.9 per cent to €2.27bn (£1.92bn) for the year ended 31 March 2013, and a whopping 16.8 per cent of this was organic. The …

   Foundem urges Brussels: REJECT Google's search biz offer

   Argues some tweaks make it even more anti-competitive

   UK-based price-comparison site Foundem has urged competition officials in Brussels to reject Google's formal offer of concessions, which is intended to address the ad giant's alleged abuse of dominance in Europe's search market. Google commands a hefty 90 per cent share of the search business in the European Union. In April, …

   'WikiLeaks of financial data' prompts worldwide hunt for tax evaders

   'We’re coming after you' - taxman warns

   A cache of data amounting to a whopping 400 gigabytes of information leaked by bank insiders has triggered an offshore tax evasion investigation across the United States, the UK and Australia. Tax authorities in the the three countries are examining the leaked data, which reveals the complex offshore vehicles used to stash …

   EMC hits flash leader Fusion-io where it hurts: Low-cost server cards

   Cheapie PCIe flash cards? That's OUR thing

   Storage, virtualisation, info and cloud giant EMC is set to widen its attack on server flash card leader Fusion-io by releasing a low-cost flash card for hyper-scale data centres. Server flash card cache coherency is also set to appear for Oracle RAC environments, according to Stifel Nicolas analyst Aaron Rakers, who was at …

   Mystery Sony big-screen ereader to sport E Ink bender

   Liable to be pliable, folks

   E Ink reckons its "Mobius" flexible epaper screen will be the first of its kind to go into mass production, an event the company claims will take place some time later this year. The Mobius will make its debut as a 13.3-inch panel built into a unnamed “digital paper product” made by Sony, which co-developed the panel with E …

   Who is Samsung trying to kid? There will NEVER be a 5G network

   Analysis Not just satellites nobbling 'fifth-gen' smartmobes

   There will almost certainly never be a "5G" mobile broadband network, but that hasn't stopped Samsung using the trendy moniker to describe its 1Gbit-per-second wireless experiments. The South Korean giant managed to achieve that data transfer rate through two kilometres of air in the 28GHz radio band, thanks to some advanced …

   Intel Centerton server-class Atoms: How low can you go?

   Review Reduced-power virtualisation - take that, ARM

   In late 2012 Intel launched Centerton: the first in its new line of Atom-based server processors. Hoping to cut ARM's invasion of the data centre off at the pass, these low-power CPUs are targeted at an emerging "Metal as a Service" movement that sees a return of unique workloads to individual processors. I've finally gotten …

   Android is a mess and needs sprucing up, admits chief

   Comment Can Google really fix it? It isn't in control any more

   Android looks unstoppable, and it's a mess. The first fact tends to eclipse the second observation, but Android's new supremo diplomatically acknowledges as much in an interview. "Here’s the challenge: without changing the open nature of Android, how do we help improve the whole world’s end-user experience?" Chrome chief …

   Astronaut Chris Hadfield's Space Oddity ends in Kazakhstan

   Crooning Canadian 'naut returns to terra firma

   Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield is back on Earth following a 144-day stay aboard the International Space Station, which ended on a high note when the crooning spaceman released an impressive high-altitude version of David Bowie's Space Oddity. Hadfield and fellow Expedition 35 'nauts Tom Marshburn and Roman Romanenko …

   Dell's enterprise biz: Can you beat HP without being HP?

   Server boss comes to London, become hostage to fortune

   The head of Dell’s enterprise business last week claimed the firm was on track to take the number one spot in the x86 server market this year, kicking out incumbent HP. Marius Haas made himself a hostage to server market fortune as the Texan firm shipped its enterprise top brass into London to convince customers, and channel …

   Hm, disk drive maker, what's that smell lingering around you?

   It's death and failure, says ex-Sun storage chap

   The disk drive vendors have been utterly screwed by mismanaging the disruptive force of solid state drives: that's the view of Mike Shapiro - lately a storage bigshot at Sun and Oracle. Mike Shapiro was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer, CTO, and VP of Storage for Sun and then Oracle. He is most recently a founder at a …

   You thought only Google dodges UK taxes? So do all the Brit firms

   Amazing how much tech business gets done in the Caymans

   Big British-based tech firms like Autonomy and BSkyB have subsidiaries in onshore and offshore tax havens, and avoid paying taxes in much the same way as has been highlighted in the case of US firms Google and Amazon. Research shows that most of Blighty's top companies have offshoots in tax havens, according to charity …

   Borked your iDevice? Pay EVEN MORE to have it fixed by Applecare

   Or scream at their hapless techies on their forums

   Cupertino is reportedly planning changes to Applecare with a move towards shop-based iDevice repairs and a lucrative subscription service scheme. The AppleCare and AppleCare+ schemes look likely to be overhauled in America this autumn, with the altered services rolled out across the world afterwards. Tara Bunch, an Apple vice …

   Windows 8 'sales' barely half as good as Microsoft claims

   Don't even mention the XP/Vista sales comparisons

   Microsoft claimed last week that it's made '100 million' Windows 8 sales and the claim has been widely repeated. But channel feedback and the experience on the ground point to a very different picture. The Guardian's Charles Arthur has made a stab at estimating the true figure, and suggests it's much less, at between 57 …

   Esteem Systems bosses ponder selling themselves

   Just happen to be standing about in this shop window

   Top brass at mid-market channel player Esteem Systems are reviewing future options and may again begin a formal process aimed at selling the operation. The business was almost sold to integrator Calyx in 2008, but the acquirer's backer Anglo Irish Bank pulled the funding as credit availability was swallowed up in the crunch. …

   Torvalds unveils first Linux 3.10 release candidate

   Download, then be nice to your mother, Linux Lord advises

   The first release candidate for version 3.10 of the Linux Kernel is upon us. Linus Torvalds released RC1 of the new kernel on the eve of Mother's Day (in North America and Australia), together with some advice on how to treat Mum/Mom right on the occasion. “So this is the biggest -rc1 in the last several years (perhaps ever) …

   Drone to deliver beer-as-a-service

   GPS-guided Octocopter to parachute cans into South African music festival

   Organisers of South Africa's OppiKoppi Music Festival are promising attendees the chance to order a beer and have it parachuted out of a drone and into the campground. The festival takes place from August 8th to 10th. The lineup is dominated by local acts and therefore doesn't look like it's worth booking a flight to South …

   BSA targets Indonesian pirates

   Thar be treasure...

   In a sign of Indonesia’s increasing importance as a market for Western technology vendors, anti-piracy body the Business Software Alliance has teamed up with local police to bust numerous firms found to be running illegal copies of well-known software. The raid on 20 businesses back in March yielded pirated software from …

   You want to put 3D gun designs on the web? You'll need a 2D printer

   Comment Psst! Meet me in the Rotterdam nuke-material bazaar

   Much fun has been had over the Liberator, the 3D printed plastic gun. Our editor - a man who knows about such things - here at El Reg has pronounced it a piece of crap. Innumerable people have declared that it's either the end of civilisation as we know it or proof perfect that the Commie statists will never win. My own …

   India to battle Maoists with more mobiles

   Tower-building project will boost coverage in leftist-controlled regions

   The Indian government is looking to build nearly 3,000 mobile towers in areas across the country without coverage, in a Rs. 30 billion (£358m) bid to tackle left wing extremism. The mobile infrastructure project will cover 2,199 locations in nine states where militant Maoists known as Naxals are prevalent. Naxals are seen by …

   Amazon launches own currency

   Web bazaar now 'coining it', for self and devs

   Amazon.com has started printing its own money. The company's effort, dubbed Amazon Coins, will be familiar to anyone that has acquired Microsoft Points or Nintendo Points, as the Coins require consumers to stump up real-world cash in return for a balance of online-only credit tied to a single store. Coins can be spent in …

   Google pools cloud storage

   Limits to inbox size are no more

   Google has changed its approach to cloud storage, with individuals and business users of its apps now offered a pool of storage rather than silos dedicated to different services. Announced in an inevitable pair of blog posts, the Chocolate Factory is calling the new arrangement “unified storage”. Storage wonks wondering why …

   Government admits seizing two months of AP phone records

   Press investigators trawl calls in the Land of the Free

   The Associated Press reports that government investigators seized two months' worth of telephone records from its staff last year and hid that fact until now. "There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters," said CEO Gary Pruitt …

   Google abruptly shuts down search-by-SMS portal

   Users cut off without notice, apparently for good

   Without warning, Google has shut down the gateway that allowed mobile users to access its search engine via SMS text, effectively cutting off from the service customers who lack data plans. The Chocolate Factory launched its SMS search feature in 2004 and has maintained it ever since, providing abridged query results such as …

   IT'S OFFICIAL: Hipster era is OVER – sorry, beanie boiz...

   Scientific study reveals unvarnished truth about ironic PBR drinkers

   An automated telephone survey organization based in Raleigh, North Carolina, apparently having nothing better to do or merely seeking publicity – in this case, successfully – put its finger on the pulse of public sentiment and discovered, as they headlined their results, "Americans So Over Hipsters." Public Policy Polling …

7. Monday, 13 May 2013

   Seven Media mulls IPTV service

   Sees NBN as enabler for 2014 launch

   Having effectively killed off TiVo in Australia, TV broadcaster Seven West Media is considering its IPTV options, telling investors it has plans to create a “broadcast to broadband” operation in 2014. While Australia's free-to-air broadcasters have embraced the Internet for program catch-ups, they have mostly responded to the …

   Dell gooses HANA appliances, loads up SAP Business Suite

   Looks ahead to those Ivy Bridge-EX machines later this year

   Enterprise application software powerhouse SAP is beside itself with glee that its HANA in-memory database is driving more business than expected, and server makers like Dell, which are building appliances that meet the very strict – and unmalleable – configurations prescribed to run HANA, are hoping that this turns into a …

   NBN Co hoses down 'scary Russian crackers' report

   Nothing here to see, move along

   NBN Co, the company building Australia's National Broadband Network, has found itself having to refute reports in the finance press that its networks had been “penetrated” by “cyber gangs”. While attacks and scans are the lot of any and every network administrator, the company says the reported Trojan infections never got past …

   Samsung sends gigabit '5G' signal TWO WHOLE KILOMETRES

   Marketecture wars Forget 5G, this is a grab for influence over future standards

   The world is getting excited at the advent of “5G” wireless systems with a demonstration of a gigabit air interface using the 28 GHz band by Samsung. It's not too bad as a piece of early-stage academic technology demonstration, as it happens: the engineers used 64 antenna elements in what you might think of as a “massively …

   France weighing 'culture tax' on phones, slabs, PCs, TVs

   'It's necessary to close loopholes to restore fairness'

   The Socialist government of France is mulling a new "culture tax" to be levied on smartphones and other consumer electronics as one possible measure to help fund music, film, and the arts in a rapidly changing media landscape. Last fall, French president Francois Hollande created a special panel, chaired by former Canal+ CEO …

   Microsoft splashes big bucks to blast Google Apps

   Latest ad campaign smacks of desperation

   Microsoft is spending big bucks to convince computer users that Google Apps are a risky bet with a new series of ads featuring Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo star Rob Schneider and disgraced athlete and former jailbird Pete Rose – neither of whom presumably come cheap. Both adverts push Microsoft's contention that Google Apps can …

   NYC attorney seeks mobe-makers' help to curb muggings

   'Why no remote killswitch?'

   In a series of letters, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has called upon smartphone makers to explain what they are doing to combat the growing problem of handset theft. "Cracking down on violent and dangerous cell phone thefts is important for New Yorkers," Schneiderman said in a canned statement. "The …

   United Nations: 'Overpopulated Earth? Time to EAT BUGS'

   Or feed them to cattle, pigs, chickens, and fish, then eat them

   World population is slated to top nine billion by 2050, and seeing as how arable land is being rapidly swallowed by towns and cities, oceans are increasingly overfished, and climate change is disrupting traditional farming, a new United Nations study proposes a twist on Marie Antoinette's dietary advice: let them eat bugs. " …

   Report: AT&T dropping Facebook phone after dismal sales

   Turns out folks won't buy that for a dollar

   Facebook's experiment with branded hardware may be coming to an abrupt end, according to a report that AT&T is discontinuing sales of the HTC First handset after finding that people won't buy it – even for 99 cents. The First is Facebook's showpiece for its Home application, the mobile application that Mark Zuckerberg said at …

   So you've got a nice virtual desktop stack – wait, here comes DaaS Boot

   Duplicated data in GreenBytes-Desktone's torpedo range

   Storage supplier GreenBytes has teamed up with desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) provider Desktone to dedupe virtual desktop data and accelerate its delivery to employees' machines. Desktone provisions and boots virtual desktops from its cloud through partners such as Dell and Fujitsu. Customers can treat their entire virtual …

   Icahn, SAM to give MickeyD the boot if they take over Dell

   Dell board very politely says 'Put up or shut up'

   Michael Dell wants to take his company the company that bears his name private, but he might be polishing up his resume instead in a few months. Activist investor Carl Icahn and Southeastern Asset Management made it clear last Friday that they were not happy with the proposed $24.4bn takeover of Dell by the company's founder, …

   Xyratex shrinks ClusterStor to prop up sinking revenues

   SMEs, please buy it and stop us sinking into the red

   Xyratex has downsized its ClusterStor high-performance computing storage array with the scale-out storage 1500, hoping to add much-needed revenue growth by flogging departmental HPC storage. Like the existing 6000 and 3000 models it is a Lustre system with scale-out capability through modular building blocks. Xyratex's idea is …

   UK.gov blows a fuse at smart meter stall, sets new 2020 deadline

   And once that meter is in, it'll never come out

   Smart meters won't be fully rolled out in the UK until 2020, one year later than planned. And replacing a smart meter with a dumb one won't be allowed under a new set of rules, which are intended to speed up lagging deployments. Smart meters, described the other week as "crap computers in a crap box" by an electronic security …

   'Zombie hunter' task force unleashed on the UK tech biz

   Brain-slurping VCs turn firms into walking dead

   A special force of crack zombie hunters swings into action today to rid old Blighty of the shuffling scourge of undead firms surviving only to pay the interest on debts. The mission of the task force, whose formation was revealed by The Channel last month, is to build a profile of private equity backed businesses in the IT …

   Feds use Instagram pic of delicious steak dinner to nab ID thieves

   A moment on the lips, a long time in prison?

   It's long been said that you are what you eat. Now American cops have used that claim to track down two people who have just pleaded guilty to identity theft. It is reportedly the first time an Instagram pic has been used in a federal felony complaint. The suspects were tracked by the IRS after one of them apparently used …

   Oracle and SAP ARE big software, but for how long?

   Choked by the cloud, or death by a 1,000 cuts

   When Oracle announced disappointing third-quarter results in March 2013, executives at the company were quick to blame poor sales execution for a two per cent decline in new software licences and cloud software subscriptions. It wasn't a symptom, they insisted, of underlying problems with the company’s product portfolio - or …

   HP wanted to offload Autonomy on SAP, says SAP co-chief

   Updated But German software firm was 'never seriously interested'

   HP tried to offload Brit software house Autonomy onto German giant SAP sometime before last month, it is claimed. Bill McDermott, co-chief exec of SAP, told the UK's Times that the firm had been approached by HP after it was told the business was "available", but SAP wasn't keen on the idea. "We were aware that it was on the …

   Bloomberg blocks its hacks from snooping on financial terminals

   Get your stories the old-fashioned way, you lot

   Bloomberg has blocked its journalists from eavesdropping on users of its financial data terminals after it emerged that reporters were obtaining stories through their snooping. Financial services firms, including merchant banks, pay about $20,000 a year to rent each Bloomberg terminal. Thousands of traders in stock exchanges …

   Brits' phone tracking, web history touted to cops: The TRUTH

   Analysis What's inside the info on 27 million punters up for sale

   Pollster Ipsos MORI is under fire for touting data on millions of EE customers - from their whereabouts to their browser history - to anyone with a chequebook, including London's Metropolitan Police. The Met shelved the deal when the Sunday Times learned of the mass info flogging. But private companies have been buying the …

   Bill & Jobs' excellent adventure: Steve's tech looked better than mine

   Design eye for the QWERTY guy

   “We did tablets – lots of tablets – well before Apple did, but they put these pieces together in a way that succeeded.” Bill Gates had a few kind words for old rival Steve Jobs at the weekend, conceding Apple’s late co-founder had a gift for design and admitting that Microsoft had missed its opportunities on tablets. In an …

   Ground control to major strum: ISS's Hadfield sings Space Oddity

   Vid Crooner Chris in high-altitude homage to Bowie

   Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has marked the end of his stay on the International Space Station by releasing his high-altitude version on David Bowie's Space Oddity. Cmdr Hadfield has been aboard the orbital outpost since December last year, and commander of Expedition 35 since March. He handed over control of the …

   Review: Samsung Galaxy S4

   Faster, brighter, thinner - what’s not to like? Well...

   In purely commercial terms, the Samsung Galaxy S III was always going to be a tough act to follow. After all, it established and then cemented Samsung’s position as the number one smartphone maker by volume - and the only one to give Apple the collywobbles. I suspect that’s why Samsung has played it safe and opted for …

   Which petite model likes a fondle and GETTING WET? Sony's Xperia ZR

   Pics Take this new mobe swimming. Just not deep, or for long, OK?

   Sony has come up with a new waterproof smartphone: the Xperia ZR, which is essentially an Xperia Z with a slightly smaller screen. The gadget giant's other hydrophilic phone, the Z, is, our reviewer thought, “a bit of a slab”. Thankfully, the Japanese manufacturer has launched a slightly more compact model. The Xperia ZR's …

   PERIL in ORBIT: ISS leak plugged in FIVE-HOUR spacewalk

   Nauts lash new ammonia pump on leaky truss

   International Space Station engineers Chris Cassidy and Tom Marshburn have plugged the ammonia coolant leak on the orbiting science lab. The pair's successful spacewalk and repair job over the weekend has cleared the way for their crewmates to set off home for Earth tonight. Flight Engineers Cassidy and Marshburn completed …

   El Reg drills into Office 365: What's under the hood?

   Sysadmin Trevor tells us what's the score

   Microsoft's cloudy services offering have had an overhaul. Office 365 is faster, stronger, smarter, better and more like TIFKAM (the interface formerly known as Metro), or Modern User as it is now called, than ever before. The new overhaul is a major upgrade in usability and administer ability. Let's take a peek under the hood …

   MI5 spymasters axe intel database upgrade, pour '£90m' down drain

   Double-oh-eight-figure-failure

   MI5 has reportedly abandoned a planned £90m upgrade to an intelligence database after the delayed IT project failed to meet its requirements. The record management system was supposed to be up to speed in time last year to tackle the threat of a terrorist attack on the London Olympics. Designed to collect intelligence data and …

   Boffins plan to drop €250,000 TEST-TUBE BURGER on London

   Beefeaters, on your marks...

   It's the mega-pricey cultured-meat slab without any of the grease, but would you wolf down a five-ounce lab-bred burger? The world's most expensive piece of fast food - a meat patty made up of cultured meat that cost a massive €250,000 (£211,000, $325,000) to create - will soon be served in London. Designed by a group of …

   Adobe price hike: Your money or your files, frappuccino sippers

   Analysis We count the costs of signing up to a cloudy Creative Suite

   So, Adobe: can it justify shifting its Creative Suite to a contentious new licensing model? Some say it is making life more difficult and expensive for those users who'd prefer to simply purchase the software outright, while others say it's just a decent business trying to do right by everybody. I refer, of course, to the …

   Integration gets back on track with the vertical stack

   We don't need no vendor lock-in

   What is the role of integrated stacks, in which compute, networking, storage and management are vertically integrated? And how do you avoid vendor lock-in? Let's get the discussion started with three expert submissions, one from an analyst, one from an IT practitioner and one from a vendor. And tell us what you think in the …

   Apple asked me for my BANK statements, says outraged reader

   Exclusive Want a shiny iThing? Get your passport out

   Apple is believed to have asked some online shoppers to hand over copies of their driving licence, passport and bank statements to verify their identity. A concerned Reg reader alerted us to Apple's data-slurp requests after she received one herself - and was told by her bank that they had never heard of private companies …

   What freetard are you: Justified, transgressor or just honest?

   Analysis Ofcom has you pigeonholed

   New research commissioned by UK uber-regulator Ofcom confirms that a tiny number of Brits are responsible for most of the copyright piracy in Blighty - and they're predominantly male and wealthy. But you knew that already. However, the ambitious study has tried something new. It attempted for the first time to create a field …

   Ancient thumb-driven whirly-wheel smartmobe UI ported to Android

   Fandroids, come see what the future might have been

   The mobile interface designed to kill the iPhone has finally launched, but as an Android freebie rather than aboard the revolutionary handset we were promised in 2009. The handset, known as the Else, was built by Emblaze, a company better known for encoding video and suing Apple than making phones. With the help of Japan's …

   Got that Monday morning feeling?

   Promo Then check out these IT job vacancies

   Twice a month The Register highlights some tech vacancies gleaned from the jobs board of reed.co.uk, our UK recruitment partner. In today's outing we swoop on four permie open positions, in London, Manchester, Ipswich and Surrey. Osborne, a large property company, is recruiting an Applications Support Analyst, to work in …

   Løvefïlm signs hit beards’n’berserkers series Vikings

   Will Amazon streaming service rune the day?

   British and German fans of horned helmets, dragonships, bloodeagles, forked beards and berserker frenzies will need to avail themselves of a LOVEFiLM LoveFilm subscription if they want to catch the History channel’s popular new historical potboiler, Vikings. The Amazon-owned video streaming service blew its gold-rimmed horn …

   Storage-slinger: Sales down for 6th year running? Blame TAPE

   Disk and software booming ... but not quite fast enough

   Storage biz Quantum's position couldn't be further from that of rival CommVault. Revenues down? Yes. Both annually and sequentially? Yep. Losses deeper? Mmhmm. Annually and sequentially? Yes indeed. It's the same old, same old for Jon Gacek's crew at Quantum, where unreeling tape revenues overtook slowly growing disk revenues …

   UK superfast broadband crew: EC competition bods are holding us up

   Why must they hassle us over BT monopoly?

   The UK is accusing the European Commission of holding up its superfast broadband programme with pesky concerns about free market competition. The government has been trying to get its hands on state aid to build the infrastructure necessary to get better broadband to everyone, but unfortunately, with state telco BT pretty much …

   China: Online predator or hapless host?

   Analysis Reg man asks if all the China-bashing is justified

   The People’s Republic of China has been singled out in increasingly unequivocal language by the US and its allies as one of, if not the greatest, source of online attacks, be they perpetrated by criminals or the Chinese state itself. But amid all the anti-Beijing bluster, has China been given an unfairly bad rep? At first …

   Your Flying Car? Delayed again, but you WILL get it, says Terrafugia

   Analysis And the VTOL hybrid job to follow, promise engineers

   Not long ago the famous Massachusetts startup Terrafugia caused something of a stir by releasing details of a new electric hybrid flying-car design, the TF-X - though the company is now very late in delivering even its less-radical Transition design. Transition 1.0 We here on the Reg flying-car desk have always liked the …

   Japan begins planning exascale super

   Seeking funds for design project

   Japan is plotting its return to global supercomputing dominance, with its science ministry seekings funds to design the successor to its K supercomputer, to be completed by 2020. According to The Asahi Shumbun, the new project aims to create a super with 100 times the processing capacity of the Fujitsu-Riken Research Institute …

   On the hunt for a new ampere

   Counting charge one electron at a time

   While there's been lots of attention paid to the search for a new kilogram, another of the SI system's fundamental units of measurement is under examination: the ampere. Along with the kilogram, metre, second, Kelvin, mole and candela, the ampere is one of the fundamental yardsticks used to measure the world around us. And, …

   Open source cellular targets rural comms

   Linux and Asterisk for cellular networks

   Start-up RangeNetworks is hoping that the combination of low cost and transparent software will allow it to break into the notoriously locked-down cellular network market. Mobile network infrastructure is traditionally the preserve either of either established vendors (think Ericsson or Alcatel-Lucent), or well-backed new …

   Fibre system capacity doubled in university study

   All you need is a little bit of maths

   Today's optical fibre systems have twice the theoretical capacity currently attributed to them, according to research from the University of Tel Aviv. The study, published on Arxiv, is part of the widespread academic interest in studying the channel capacity of fibre optic systems. Over long distances, and particular where …

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