The Week in Summary

1. Friday, 10 February 2012

   Oracle tucks R stats language into database

   R-acle 11g, Quant Edition

   Relational database juggernaut Oracle has embedded the R programming language used by more than 2 million statisticians and quants the world over into its 11g relational database. Call it R-acle 11g, Quant Edition. R, of course, is the open source statistical analysis programming language and is also the name of the runtime …

   Sinofsky shows off Windows 8 on ARM and Office15

   Microsoft aims for separate but equal

   Windows boss Stephen Sinofsky has ended months of speculation with the first (fairly) detailed drilldown into Windows 8 on ARM (WOA) platform, and says it should be ready for a simultaneous launch with its x86/64 counterpart. Devices running WOA will come with both a Metro touch-based interface and the more traditional desktop …

2. Thursday, 09 February 2012

   StreetView disappears Dutch office tower

   Because it’s Friday…

   It’s one of those wonderful discrepancies that happens when a site has to wait a year or so between visits from the Google StreetView photo-harvesters. An office tower in Hoofddorp, The Netherlands, plays “now you see it, now you don’t” on StreetView, depending on your viewing location. At a distance, the Irdeto tower looks …

   IBM does financing deals for Power, storage kit

   Low or no interest rates

   It's a new year and a new first quarter and a new and somewhat challenging economy in North America, and therefore IBM is offering financing deals in the United States and Canada. Last week, Big Blue rolled out a zero per cent financing program called Fast Start Financing that, as the name suggests and as the company has done …

   Elon Musk helps AsiaSat with new regional satellites

   Asia Pac enjoys a satellite bonanza

   Hong Kong satellite operator AsiaSat and space launch company Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) will launch two new communications satellites in 2014 servicing the Asia Pacific region. Space X was founded by dotcom protagonist, PayPal and Tesla creator Elon Musk. AsiaSat 6 and AsiaSat 8 are scheduled to launch in the …

   Teradata surfs big data wave in Q4

   Big data = big bucks

   Data warehousing pioneer and big data playa Teradata has just turned in the best fourth quarter and full year in the company's 33 year history, thanks to the big data wave and a number of key acquisitions that the company that have moved it beyond its core data warehousing biz. In a conference call with Wall Street analysts …

   Eolas falls at first hurdle in bid to tax browser apps

   Google grins at Adobe jury’s verdict

   A jury in Texas has ruled against Eolas Technologies in its patent battle to lay claim to the concept of in-browser applications and most plug-ins. Internet luminaries such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee were flown into the small Texas city to testify in Eolas’ case against Adobe – the first time the father of the World Wide Web has …

   Coming to a continent near you: America

   Also Asia, Europe and Africa

   It’s going to be a heck of a reunion: the Pangea supercontinent that broke up to create the atlas we know today will one day reform in the Northern hemisphere. That’s the conclusion reached by researchers at Yale University who, instead of looking at the past history of continental movements, have turned their attention to the …

   Hackett bookish after Internet sale

   Aus tech entrprenuers back new publishing house

   Internode founder Simon Hackett is behind the launch of Australia’s newest cross-platform book publishing house, MidnightSun Publishing. Supported by fellow technology entrepreneur Ross Williams, the duo have backed niche house MidnightSun, which wants to leverage demand for multi-platform and multi-format books. The …

   Oracle inhales Taleo for $1.9bn

   Blows it onto the Fusion app cloud

   Only two months ago, Taleo, the seller of online talent management software, was saying that it intended to remain independent despite the cloud software feeding frenzy. But today, Larry Ellison, CEO and co-founder of Oracle, made Taleo CEO Mike Gregoire an offer he couldn't refuse: $1.9bn. That price, net of cash and debts, …

   FBI investigated Steve Jobs' reality distortion field, LSD use

   Sex, drugs and bomb threats

   Steve Jobs' drug use, court cases and personality flaws were all investigated by the FBI, as a file released on Thursday reveals. The FBI launched the investigation in 1991 to vet Jobs for a potential post in government under George Bush Snr - an appointment to an advisory committee on foreign trade. It's a popular role for …

   What's in the box, Windows BOFH?

   Sysadmin blog What lurks inside the Windows admin's toolkit...

   Windows is a powerful and complex Operating System (OS). As with any modern OS, it comes equipped with numerous features, utilities, and applications. But Windows' default tools are not always the best widget for the job at hand. The ubiquity of these tools makes them a standard minimal toolkit that Windows administrators can …

   AON: Give us cash, we'll emit 10TB holographic cube

   They do it with mirrors

   Access Optical Networks says it has developed a 1.2TB holographic storage cube that can transfer data at 155MB/sec and last longer than 50 years. Oh, and it's done using mirrors – but no smoke. The storage medium is a 1cm cube of photorefractive lithium niobate crystalline material and the claimed cost/GB is $0.11 in 1,000 …

   Googorola's desire for iPhone royalties will upset Apple cart

   Analysis Moto patents at heart of latest fair licensing row

   Google's outline of how it will use Motorola Mobility's intellectual property – should regulators allow the buyout – has sparked fierce debate as pundits worry about how the smartphone patent wars will pan out. Originally, Google's letter to the IEEE, a global standards body, was praised by commentators because it promised …

   Kodak to kill off digital cameras

   End in sight for snappers, camcorders

   Kodak is knocking its line of budget digital cameras on the head, part of its plan to revive the fortunes of the troubled firm. Out go its YouTube-oriented handheld video cameras and digital photo frames too. Production will have ceased by the middle of the year. Kodak will continue to support these products, and honour …

   Hitachi GST pushes out boosted SSD

   Intel's new NAND

   Hitachi GST has birthed a boosted Ultrastar SSD using Intel's latest 25nm NAND. Intel launched its own 520 just a few days ago. In these frenetic days of flash hyper-awareness, close attention will be paid to the performance of new flash drives to see if suppliers are keeping up with the pace or slipping behind. The Ultrastar …

   Timico Technology Group gobbles Redwood

   ISP and MSP get together

   ISP Timico Technology Group (TTG) has devoured unified comms minnow Redwood Telecommunication for an undisclosed sum. London-based Avaya and Mitel reseller Redwood employs 28 staff and counts Jimmy Choo and Broadgate Estates among its customer list. Tim Radford, chairman at TTG, said the IP telephony and UC services that …

   Appcelerator adds Titanium backend with Cocoafish buy

   I like backends and I cannot lie

   Mobile platform developer Appcelerator has completed its second purchase of the last year, snapping up Cocoafish to gets its APIs and server backend system. The company bought HTML5 expertise with the Particle Cloud buy last year, and this buy was also part of a hunt for specific technology, CEO Jeff Haynie told The Register. …

   Google will swap you a box of crisps for your web privacy

   Or anything else from Amazon for $25 if you agree to be stalked

   Google has revealed exactly how little cash it thinks a user who is willing to "sell" their data to the search giant is actually worth. The answer? $25 for one year of letting the Chocolate Factory happily slurp your data. And that figure isn't even in the form of cold, hard cash. Nope. Amazon gift vouchers are on offer to …

   Airport bomb Twitter joker in second fine appeal bid

   Judges deliberating whether or not to quash conviction

   Paul Chambers, the Twitter joker turned misdemeanour conviction martyr, returned to court on Wednesday to launch a second appeal against a conviction over a "threatening message" to blow Doncaster's Robin Hood Airport "sky high". Chambers, 27, posted the notorious micro-blogging message in early January 2010 while the …

   IBM UK's channel queen abdicates, long live the king

   Richard Potts takes the biz partner hot seat from Jacqui Davey

   IBM has crowned popular channel figure Richard Potts as veep of business partner and mid-market sales for the UK and Ireland, and named Mark Hennessey as worldwide partner boss. Potts, who helped to turn around Big Blue's volume server biz in the UK as director of the System X unit replaces Jacqueline Davey, who is moving to …

   Vodafone squirrels cash into Blighty nightly as Europe falters

   Spain, Italy disappointing - Turkey, India a pleasant surprise

   Vodafone's numbers for the tail-end of 2011 show the network doing pretty well, though it admitted husbanding cash back to the UK nightly just to be on the safe side. It won’t surprise anyone that trading in Italy and Spain has been a bit grim lately, and Vodafone hasn't broken the figures out for Greece but it has pulled out …

   What downturn? Lenovo stuffs pockets with 54% extra profit

   World's number 2 PC maker buoyed by China performance

   Lenovo Group is one of the few PC makers still in the pink, beating market expectations with a fat third-quarter net profit. The Chinese firm's profit jumped 54 per cent to $153.46m in the three months to December last year, up from $99.65m in the same period the year before. Despite the downturn in the global economy and the …

   Ofcom: Make it easier for punters to switch ISPs

   But could middleman plan jack up prices?

   Broadband and landline customers could soon find it a lot simpler to ditch one telco in favour of another, after Ofcom published its proposals on cutting the hassle out of switching providers for punters in the UK. The communications watchdog said today that research showed that 520,000 households in Blighty in the past year …

   Alibaba! suspends! shares! amid! Yahoo! stake! buzz!

   Chinese biz counts readies to buy back web biz's share

   Alibaba.com has suspended its shares on the Hong Kong market, pending news from its parent company Alibaba Group, which reportedly wants to buy back Yahoo!'s stake in the company. The Chinese website asked the market to stop trading its stocks starting today, because it needed to sort out some stuff with Alibaba Group. "The …

   Microsoft sets date for Windows 8 preview - at mobile shindig

   Barcelona, it was the first time that we met

   Microsoft will unveil Windows 8 at Mobile World Congress, says an invitation sent out today. The invitation is for a Windows 8 Consumer Preview in Barcelona on 29 February, two days into the industry event. The choice of the world's biggest mobile show as the backdrop for the unveil makes it clear Microsoft is positioning its …

   How Zuck wields power over Facebook for a few hundred bucks

   CEO's voting rights and package exposed

   Mark Zuckerberg's effortless swagger into the business world got an airing in public yesterday when Facebook filed more documents to the US Securities and Exchange Commission ahead of the company going public in a few months' time. Just days before the dominant social network submitted its regulatory filing confirming its plan …

   Pentax pushes super sturdy snapper

   GPS-equipped Optio WG-2 pumps iron

   Pentax pushed rugged photography into new terrains this week, launching a pair of 16Mp compact cameras that promise to perform under the most demanding of outdoor conditions. The Pentax Optio WG-2 and WG-2 GPS may look like Optimus Prime's caboose, but they're built to pull through even the harshest of Decepticon onslaughts …

   Ethernet standards for hyper-scale cloud networking

   Always just over the horizon

   What if the largest Ethernet networks we see today are just precursors, initial steps on the path to what's been called hyper-scale cloud networking? "Hyper" is the term used generally for something almost unfathomably and exceptionally large. We might say that a regional group of airports is a small air transport network, a …

   Ingram Micro CEO outlines growth plan as 2011 profits falter

   Weak Euro consumer biz and challenged Oz operation blamed

   Ingram Micro's new chief exec has set out three strategic priorities as he gets to grips with the challenges facing the world's largest distributor and looks to bolster bottom line goodness. Alan Monie, who returned to Ingram as COO in November and was made top dog last month, outlined the imperatives on a Q4 conference call …

   Groupon loses $42.7m in Q4, shares tumble

   Hang on to your coupons, we'll make a profit next quarter

   Groupon (GRPN) has posted a net loss of $42.7m for the last three months of 2011, disappointing Wall Street's expectation that the coupon-pushers would make a small profit. Groupon stocks closed the day at $24.58 but in after-hours trading stocks tumbled 15 per cent to $20.75 – suggesting that Groupon shareholders might want to …

   UK cops set up new £30m bases to nail cybercrooks

   They're proper champion e-bobbies

   The UK is to establish three regional policing e-crime hubs as part of efforts to boost the capability of British police to tackle the growing problem of cybercrime. The new hubs, in Yorkshire and the Humber, the Northwest and in East Midlands, will each get their own three-officer team. Each will work alongside the …

   New sat data shows Himalayan glaciers hardly melting at all

   Results 'really were a surprise', say climate profs

   New scientific analysis of satellite gravity measurements has shown that ice is melting from glaciers around the world much less quickly than had been thought. The new research is important as worldwide glacier melt is thought to be one of the main factors which could drive rising sea levels in future. The new results were …

   Google Wallet PIN security cracked in seconds

   Luckily no one important is using it

   A researcher at website categoriser zvelo has discovered Google Wallet's PIN protection is open to a brute-force attack that takes seconds to complete. And Google is powerless to fix the problem, it seems. The attack is limited to instances where physical access is available, or the phone has been previously "rooted" by the …

   Royal astro-boffin to MPs: Stop thinking about headlines

   'Nuclear biz is screwed, chill out about carcinogens'

   "In politics the urgent seems to trump the important," venerable astro-boffin Lord Martin Rees told a committee of MPs yesterday, saying that it there needed to be "bipartisan consensus on long-term issues" such as energy and the environment if Britain is to haul its sorry ass into the next century. Giving evidence to The …

   Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

   Review Hit and myth

   Like a mage's potion, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is based on a tried and tested formula: the essence of Fable II, a dash of Oblivion, the gizzards of God of War. And let's not forget the vital binding agent, of course: a liberal dose of Tolkien's legendarium. Circle of strife That's not to say Big Huge Games' debut title …

   iPad 3 shell shots spied on web

   Snaps point to bigger battery. Possibly

   Snaps are circulating Apple and iPad fansites revealing that the upcoming iPad 3 will hold a larger battery than its predecessor… probably. One shot, from repair site Fix-iPhones, shows the inside of what's claimed to be the back of the iPad 3's casing. The site infers that the re-sited screw holes and such mean the new tablet …

   Google drive cloud to rain on Apple, Dropbox parade

   Web giant has our email and docs, might as well hand over everything else

   Never one to miss out on an up-and-coming tech trend, Google is all set to launch its very own cloud storage service, competing with the likes of Dropbox, Microsoft and Apple. People familiar with the matter were unable to keep schtum and spilled to the Wall Street Journal (paywall), telling it that the Chocolate Factory's new …

   Asus posts patch for Prime random reboot bug

   Tablet's auto-restart glitch fixed

   Asus UK has posted a firmware update for its Android tablet, the Eee Pad Transformer Prime. The new code fixes the fondleslab's "random reboot problem", the company claimed. This glitch has tried the patience of a fair few Prime owners, and we wonder if it was one of the factors that persuaded UK retailer Clove to cease …

   Japan enlists foreign bloggers to revive tsunami-hit tourist biz

   Will 10 gaijin really make a difference?

   The Japanese government is trying to get foreign bloggers to do PR for it by inviting them to earthquake- and tsunami-hit areas to write compassionately about the progress being made in reconstructing the ravaged north-east of the country. The Foreign Ministry thought up the idea in a bid to revive the disaster-hit nation’s …

   Life-size Portal gun to shoot onto shelves soon

   Hole in the wall

   Despite the fact they generally sit on the mantlepiece as a decorative reminder of where one's interest lies, replica weapons are a big business and gaming enthusiasts are an eager audience to target. Fans of Valve's Portal franchise are the latest group in sight. They're being pitched with this 1:1 scale model from the series …

   Trustwave admits crafting SSL snooping certificate

   Allowing bosses to spy on staff was wrong, says security biz

   Certificate Authority Trustwave has revoked a digital certificate that allowed one of its clients to issue valid certificates for any server, thereby allowing one of its customers to intercept their employees' private email communication. The skeleton-key CA certificate was supplied in a tamper-proof hardware security module ( …

   HP hands in-house Android code to TouchPad tablet hackers

   Developed as a WebOS fall-back plan?

   Top marks to HP for handing over an Android kernel it once coded for its TouchPad tablet to fondleslab hackers. The catch: there's no Wi-Fi support. Still, for the likes of the CyanogenMod team, that shouldn't pose too much of a hindrance. Indeed, early investigation of the wireless code in WebOS and regular Android shows the …

   Now Siri brushes up on Russian, Japanese languages

   Mandarin lessons going well too, says Apple dev mole

   Apple is already testing Chinese, Japanese and Russian language support for its voice-activated personal assistant technology Siri - and will roll out the new functionality next month as its efforts to cosy up to customers in these lucrative markets gathers pace. Chinese tech site DoNews spoke to an Apple development engineer …

   Privacy warriors sue FTC over Google's policy tweak

   Failure to halt imminent changes makes EPIC angry

   The Electronic Privacy Information Center is suing the US Federal Trade Commission for failing to take action against Google's plans to change its terms of service on 1 March. EPIC is concerned that the privacy policy revamp will be bad news for punters. As we've noted previously, a user of Gmail can shortly expect to be much …

   Lenovo slates Ice Cream Sandwich for ThinkPad tablet

   Unlock your fondleslab with your face

   Lenovo will update its ThinkPad Android-based tablet to Ice Cream Sandwich in May, the PC giant said last night. The business-centric fondleslab currently ships with Android 3.1 Honeycomb. The new version of the operating system will be delivered over the net, across Wi-Fi or 3G, since the ThinkPad has both. Lenovo touted …

   British Red Cross First Aid

   iOS App of the Week In case of emergency, break out app...

   The Red Cross was in the news recently when it issued new guidelines for performing CPR - Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation - and it has followed this up with a free First Aid app that's worth downloading in case of emergencies. The app is divided into four sections. The Emergency area provides instant advice for dealing with …

   MongoDB straps SQL to Google's MapReduce

   One toasting too many for NoSQL?

   To NoSQLers he's the Devil who flames their work. Bring up his name while interviewing the CEO or founder of any NoSQL start-up, as I have, and the interviewee withers to a tight smile. Say "Michael Stonebraker" to the database wizards of today, though, and they'll nod sagely at mention of the pioneer of relational database …

   Hackers claim to have penetrated Foxconn backdoor

   We don't care about iPhones or workers, only lulz

   It had to happen eventually. Controversial hardware manufacturer Foxconn was reportedly hacked late on Wednesday and a heap of staff email log-ins and intranet credentials posted online which could allow third parties to lodge fraudulent orders. In a lengthy message posted to Pastebin, hacking group Swagg Security claimed the …

   Licked RIM has a lifeline: a social network in a box

   Analysis Don't forget the secret power of BBM

   RIM's fortunes have taken a catastrophic, Nokia-style nosedive in the past year - but it has a chance of pulling up. Admittedly, the odds are long, but this week the Canadian company began its fightback. It's certainly right up against it. Fewer enterprise customers are dependent on RIM's email servers. The trend to 'bring …

   IBM stuffs XIV array with flash tech

   Big Blue puts pedal to the metal

   IBM has pressed the gas pedal to the floor with its third generation XIV array and given it up to 6TB of solid state drive cache storage. The XIV array is a single tier device and this is a flash cache, an SSD Caching option, not a separate tier of storage. IBM provides no performance boost numbers, saying instead: "The …

   NHS hands out 3G slabs and phones to roving nurses

   Should help community care workers cut down on desk-time

   The Northern Devon Healthcare NHS Trust is piloting mobile devices for its community care nurses and therapists to enable them to access files, capture data and update back office systems remotely. The launch of the 14-day pilot, beginning on 7 February 2012, will see about 60 staff equipped with smartphones and tablets using …

   Asus UX21E Zenbook 11.6in Ultrabook

   Review Thin! Small! Mad! Gorgeous!

   Having already reviewed the slightly larger Asus UX31E Zenbook for El Reg, and quite liking it, I whinged that sending me the UX21E model would be a waste of time. It wasn’t, obviously, because you’re reading this. I loved it. In fact, I preferred it. For such a small device, the Asus UX21E has a big feel – in use, nothing …

   Apple Stores getting petitions on ethical conduct for breakfast

   250,000 signatures for fair treatment of iWorkers

   Breakfast at Apple retail outlets in Washington, DC, New York, San Francisco, London, Sydney, and Bangalore will come with a side order of protest on Thursday morning, as “concerned Apple customers” will be dropping off 250,000-signature petitions calling out Apple on supplier working practices. The petitions ask Apple to …

   Robot surgery gets virtual at Euro Space Agency

   CAMDASS augmented reality for astronaut patch-up

   The European Space Agency is showing off an augmented-reality kit which it says will ultimately pave the way for diagnosis and even surgery for astronauts. The CAMDASS – Computer-Assisted Medical Diagnosis and Surgery System – combines a head-mounted display with 3D guidance. The prototype has been developed with ultrasound in …

   Thodey chimes in on TV Now decision

   Telcos 'need clarity'

   Telstra CEO David Thodey has told journalists and analysts that the telecommunications industry “needs clarity” following the Federal Court decision which clearly and simply said “Optus TV Now is legal”. In other words, since the clarity provided by the Federal Court is not the clarity Telstra wants – with $AU153 million …

   Huawei gets more UFB kiwi action

   Rolls out that fibre for New Zealand

   Huawei has secured another key government win in New Zealand to provide fibre services to the Christchurch UFB with Enable Services Limited. The multi-million dollar contract covers the provision of all network equipment, including fibre ducting, fibre optic cables and open access layer two network solutions. It will also …

   Loral set to build NBN Co satellites

   Turnbull doesn't like it, again

   NBN Co has awarded Space Systems/Loral an $AU620 million contract to build, deliver and deploy two next-generation Ka-band satellites to cover regional Australia. The tender follows a two-year procurement process undertaken by NBN Co and is part of a total investment of around $AU2 billion that is required to deliver the NBN …

3. Wednesday, 08 February 2012

   Cisco stabilizes switching and routing in Q2

   Raises dividend, remains cautious

   Networking - and some would say data center bellwether - Cisco Systems turned in a better-than-expected fiscal Q2 ended in January, with revenues up 10.8 per cent to $11.53bn and net income up a very good 43.5 per cent to $2.18bn. "We are moving ahead of our competitors and our industry peers," proclaimed Cisco CEO John …

   iRobot Warrior-bot goes on sale this Spring

   For the geek who has everything

   iRobot has confirmed it’s ready to start manufacture and sale of its Warrior 710 robot early this year. The 345lb Warrior system is a four-tracked beast capable of 8mph carrying a payload of 150lb, with a pincer-equipped robotic arm that can reach up over 11 feet and lift 220lb. It’s an evolution of the Warrior X700 that …

   Eolas claims royalties for browser apps and plug-ins

   Berners-Lee warns of disaster for internet

   Eolas Technologies has begun its trial against Adobe over two patents that, it claims, gives it the rights to embedded browser applications and plug-in and AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) web development techniques. The case, which began this week in the notoriously patent-happy US District Court for the Eastern …

   US Navy preps railgun for tests

   Bedding down BAE Systems prototype

   The US Navy’s Office of Naval Research is preparing to test a prototype railgun delivered by BAE Systems under a $US21 million contract signed in 2010. The industry prototype – a kind of dream machine for Mythbusters’ fans – is due for tests in coming weeks at a facility in Dahlgren, Virginia. The ONR’s aim is to develop a …

   Solarflare turns network adapters into servers

   When a CPU just isn't fast enough

   Solarflare, a maker of 10 Gigabit Ethernet server adapter cards for performance-obsessed companies like stock exchanges, hedge funds, and supercomputer centers, is turning its network interface cards into servers, more or less. Solarflare is doing this by adding field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to the NICs and special …

   Telcos to shape up under new code

   Comms Alliance lays down the law

   Australian carriers, voice services and ISPs will be forced to take their obligations to the rights of consumers seriously under a new revised consumer code from industry group, the Communications Alliance. The new Telecommunications Consumer Protections (TCP) Code has been submitted to the Australian Communications and Media …

   Path runs screaming from privacy snafu

   We meant to copy your address book but we didn’t think you’d mind

   After sparking an outcry – and arguably putting itself on the wrong side of privacy laws outside America – ex-Facebooker and now CEO of Path, Dave Morin, has blogged an apology. The furor surrounding the application broke with this blog post, in which a Path fan analysed the app’s behavior and discovered that it copied a user’ …

   Toshiba may be getting excess WD disk biz

   Rumour mill spits out Tosh as buyer

   We are hearing that Toshiba is buying Western Digital's "excess" 3.5-inch disk drive business, clearing the way to the completion of the WD's acquisition of Hitachi GST . The Hitachi GST acquisition has been blocked by EU and Chinese regulators due to competition concerns. The EU has required WD to offload some 3.5-inch hard …

   Sir Paul McBeatle to offer free iTunes concert

   B.Y.O. Bottom, should you desire a kiss

   Sir Paul McCartney, late of Wings, will celebrate the release of his latest album with a live concert streamed over Apple's iTunes this Thursday at 7pm, Pacific Time. Unfortunately for our UK readership, that'll be 3am for British fans of the 69-year-old song stylist – and we can only guess that such an hour is a wee bit late …

   Nekkid Tech: The Great Backup Industry SMACKDOWN

   Podcast Plus, adopt a needy cloud

   Last week, Greg Knieriemen turned the heat up on Marc Farley, StorageIO's Greg Schulz and the legendary StorageZilla. This time, Greg hosts special guest Jim McNiel, CEO of FalconStor Software (@jimmcniel), who gives us the skinny on the future of tape, back-up software lock-ins and cloudy convergence. This week we discuss …

   Chrome to weed out dodgy website SSL certificates by itself

   Ditched online checks like 'seat belt that snaps when you crash'

   Google will drop online checks for revoked website encryption certificates in future versions of its Chrome browser after it decided that the process no longer offers any tangible benefits. For about a decade now, browsers check the validity of a website's secure sockets layer (SSL) certificate by polling online revocation …

   Ancient cave girl genome could crack Man's genetic puzzle

   Boffins pore over 500GB of data plastered online

   Nearly 500GB of data from the DNA of an ancient girl has been published for the first time. The genetic information - made available for wider analysis by intrigued boffins - was extracted from her finger bone and tooth, which were unearthed in the Denisova Cave in Siberia in 2008. “It's a tiny little bone,” said Professor …

   Sony posts PlayStation firmware patch

   Bye-bye, PSN; hello, SEN

   Sony's latest PlayStation firmware - version 4.10 - is now available for download, with the Sony Entertainment Network ready for PS3s from here on. As announced earlier this week, Sony has renamed the PlayStation Network in an effort to streamline all of the company's online services into one sensibly-named bracket. Aside …

   Apple's Hong Kong store rolls out iPhone 'reservation' system

   Yes, sir, but have you booked an appointment?

   Apple has been forced to restrict iPhone sales in its Hong Kong store to discourage the recent epidemic of scalpers. Fanbois looking to get their hands on a SIM-free version of the hugely popular 4S or older models must now request a reservation between the hours of 9am and 12pm to give them a chance of picking up the device …

   Cray puts super stake in the big data ground

   Crunch this

   Big data may or may not pan out for the users, but it is a bit of a boom for IT vendors, who are scrambling to prove their data analytics chops and go for the easiest money in the market these days. And to that end, supercomputer maker Cray is setting up a dedicated division to chase big data biz. The division, called YarcData …

   New driver-snooping satnav could push down UK insurance premiums

   TomTom signs up with Motaquote to stuff spy in GPS box

   The idea has been hovering in the ether for some time, but TomTom is the first satnav firm to sign on the dotted line and bring insurance to drivers through their GPS. The Dutch company has joined up with Motaquote insurers to offer UK drivers "Fair Pay" insurance, where customers pay lower premiums because their satnav …

   Resellers: Microsoft price hike was 'demanded by Euro country bosses'

   Insiders say UK channel exploited weak pound to fuel deals on continent

   Microsoft's planned overhaul of volume-licensing prices was in response to cries of frustration from its European country managers unhappy their UK counterpart were benefiting from the regional disparity to win biz on the continent, channel sources claim. As The Register recently revealed, the software giant is aligning …

   Quarter of Wolfram Alpha brainteasers come from Siri

   Apple's smart-arse software relies on boffinry website

   A quarter of traffic to the intelligent computational engine Wolfram Alpha comes from Siri, Stephen Wolfram said in a New York Times article. The robot-loving physicist (who once said that all science needed to know could be found by studying the behaviour of cellular automata) launched the knowledgable super-brain in 2009. …

   Revealed: Apple's plea for fairness in mobile patent war

   Letter to telecoms body begs for level playing field

   In November Apple wrote to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute suggesting an overhaul of the whole FRAND system of licensing patents fairly and reasonably. The letter was sent to the Director General of ETSI, the premier standards body within Europe, and signed by Apple's VP of intellectual property - it's …

   Mozilla explains user-tracking proposal for Firefox

   Telemetry has no UUID, Metrics Data Ping might

   In a story published yesterday your humble Reg writer wrongly confused Mozilla's Telemetry project with the open-source outfit's so-called Metrics Data Ping proposal. Mozilla has been in touch to clear things up. The org's global privacy and policy boss Alex Fowler kindly explained the differences between the two systems to us …

   Virident flasher claims Oracle database streak record

   Solid disks thrust into willing 80-core NEC box

   Exit Exadata, Fusion-io and Violin Memory - so to speak: the Oracle database random IO speed record has been smashed by an 80-core NEC server fitted with eight Virident flash drives. A single Xeon-based 80-core NEC Express 5800/A1080a GX server, fitted with eight 1.4TB Virident FlashMax solid-state drives (11.2TB of flash …

   Indonesian train roof fare-dodgers given the brush off

   Foul-smelling brooms purge carriages of surfing commuters

   Indonesian train operators have come up with yet another ingeniously cruel system designed to discourage fare-dodging commuters from blagging a free ride on the roof of their carriages - this time involving brooms covered in putrid gunk. Fresh from the success of its plans to dislodge the pesky roof-dwellers with small …

   Glad to be hybrid: Office 365 flits from cloud to cloud

   Interview Public and private partnership

   “The hybrid cloud environment is a great place for Office 365,” evangelises Simon May, appropriately enough a tech evangelist at Microsoft UK. May began his professional life with an eight-year stint at a global financial institution where he covered plenty of tech ground, from desktop and server support through to IT project …

   Now HDS joins server flash party

   Still no comment from HP

   Hitachi Data Systems intends to join the server flash storage party, throwing its NAND hat into the ring to speed application I/O and increase the virtual machine population. It is joining EMC, NetApp and possibly HP. Dell has said it is doing something too, leaving IBM as the only unknown. Here is an HDS' statement from …

   LinkedIn offers MORE SECURE hobnobbing option

   Social-network-for-suits finally gets some SSL love

   LinkedIn is now gradually rolling out secure browsing for its social-networking-for-suits service. The company confirmed in a blog post yesterday that the site will encrypt web traffic over SSL. However, unlike Google, which uses HTTPS by default on its stuff, LinkedIn is offering it as an option for its users. Facebook and …

   Olympus goes retro with µFT snapper

   Mirrorless magic

   Olympus extended its array of Micro Four Thirds cameras today, launching the E-M5, a retro-style snapper based on the classic design of the company's OM range of 35mm SLRs. The E-M5 is the first model in the firm's new OM-D collection and adds a number of features as yet unseen in the company's other Micro Four Thirds cameras …

   Marlinspike asks browser vendors to back SSL-validator

   Analysis 'Convergence' open source dev needs vendors to balance the load

   Moxie Marlinspike is encouraging browser developers to support an experimental project to shake up the security of website authentication by moving beyond blind faith in secure sockets layer (SSL) credentials. The Convergence open-source project is designed to address at least some of the main shortcomings that underpin trust …

   Nokia: No Belle download for Apple users

   Even if they have its own Mac OS X updater app

   Nokia has told Mac-using owners of handsets capable of being upgraded to its Belle operating system they need to switch to a PC to apply the update themselves. The Finnish phone giant posted the latest incarnation of the OS formerly known as Symbian yesterday for a series of older Nokia handsets. Alas, the new code is only …

   Android's Chrome finish comes too late for Flash coating

   Adobe confirms Flashless browsing

   Google may have got its Chrome browser running on Android, but Adobe is standing by its decision not to port Flash to any new mobile browsers, not even Chrome. Flash content works fine in Android's embedded browser, and Adobe has previously said that it will be porting Flash to Android 4 (aka Ice Cream Sandwich), but that port …

   Halliburton latest biz to dump BlackBerry for iPhone

   But our developers are raking it in, screams RIM

   Citing better application support, oilfield services giant Halliburton will be handing out iPhones in future - despite RIM's claims that its app developers have never had it so good. Halliburton is the latest in a long line of companies shifting away from the former default choice of RIM's BlackBerry infrastructure. For …

   Yahoo! chairman! falls! on! his! sword!

   Bostock and three directors quit ailing web biz to save it

   Yahoo!'s chairman and three other board members are stepping down as the once-mighty web firm continues its drawn-out internal shake-up. Chairman Roy Bostock announced the purge in a letter to shareholders, saying the directors had chosen not to stand for re-election to the board "in order to accelerate the company's …

   Greenpeace releases meaningless 'Cool IT' rankings

   Analysis Hippies' 'leaderboard' apparently made using dartboard

   International hippie* collective Greenpeace has issued a "Cool IT leaderboard" of apparently randomly selected major firms which it has assigned meaningless self-generated scores intended to indicate how eco-friendly the companies are. The list includes Google (top ranked with a score of 53 out of a possible 100) and other …

   Apple's new TV allegedly spotted... in Canadian office

   Will be controlled by Siri, waving, unicorns

   Prototypes of the hotly anticipated Apple TV are sitting in the offices of telcos in Canada, reports newspaper The Globe and Mail. The report adds that the new TVs will feature voice-control through Siri, gesture control and video chat. Apple has sent out the prototypes of its "iTV" device to help it cut deals with local …

   Toshiba 14in USB LCD Mobile Monitor

   Review Panel beater?

   It sounds like a great idea: a 14in LCD monitor that connects using USB. Perfect for tablets, netbooks and mobile phones, right? Well no, because it doesn’t work with them. That’s not to say Toshiba’s Monitor is entirely without merit. It’s a neat looking device, similar in size to a slim laptop and weighing the same as a …

   Virgin Media finally turns an annual profit

   Only took five years since beardie rebrand

   Virgin Media pulled in annual revenue that was just shy of £4bn, the company reported this morning. The telco recorded an operating cash flow of £1.6bn, while net income for the year ended 31 December 2011 sat at £75.9m - that's the first time Virgin Media has racked up an annual profit from its business. It took the company …

   Samsung reveals Tocco Lite 2 release details

   Budget blower inbound

   Samsung revealed it will launch the successor to its popular Tocco Lite handset this March, with the budget blower targeting the social network generation. No surprise there, then. The Samsung Tocco Lite 2 packs a 3in, 320 x 240 touchscreen. Features include a built-in music player, a 3.2Mp camera, Bluetooth 3.0 and micro SD …

   Russians drill into buried 20 million-year-old Antarctic lake

   Will boffins find prehistoric life - or secret Nazi files?

   Russian scientists have drilled through to a 20-million-year-old lake under Antarctica, which, depending on who you listen to, could harbour alien life forms, prehistoric microbes or Hitler's secret hideout. An artist's cross-section of Lake Vostok. Credit: US National Science Foundation Lake Vostok, the subject of much …

   Amazon 'rolling out a retail store in Seattle'

   Apple Store-inspired Kindle-pushing boutique rumoured...

   Amazon could be about to open a bricks-and-mortar store in Seattle aimed at selling the Kindle - according to rumours on blog goodereader. Amazon execs are impressed by Apple's trendy hangouts shops, said the goodereader source, and want to get a piece of the boutique retail pie. The Seattle store would test out the concept …

   T-Mobile's Full Monty speed 'capped at 1Mb/s'

   Cellco denies, confirms cap

   T-Mobile's unlimited tariff, The Full Monty, has come under scrutiny after reports surfaced that the cellco may have placed a speed limit of just 1Mb/s on the package. The price plan, launched this month, aims to compete with Three's The One Plan by offering T-Mobile customers a fully unlimited package for £41 per month. …

   Huawei's Ascend P1 headed to China in March

   Update: Home market gets first dibs on P1 S's chunkier sister

   Chinese electronics giant Huawei could be set to launch its P1 as early as next month, according to reports. Huawei senior vice president Yu Chengdong took to Twitter-like service Sina Weibo to reveal that the first devices could be on sale in China by the end of March, according to Tech Sina (Chinese) – although the exec …

   HP may be going the server flash route

   Company won't confirm it, but the G8 looks pretty flashy

   HP's new G8 servers will sport lots of flash, according to a knowledgeable HP fan. The ProLiant G8 is the successor to the popular G7 servers and will be known as the Gen8 ProLiant. Our information is that it or versions of it will use flash memory to support 50 per cent more transactions and 30 per cent more virtual machines …

   Logitech rolls out touch-sensitive mouse

   Buttons, wheels out; taps, swipes in

   Logitech will next week release its answer to Apple's Magic Mouse: an input doohickey with a touch-sensitive skin. The Touch Mouse M600 uses said surface to read taps, swipes and scroll gestures. The M600 is wireless - it uses Logitech's proprietary 2.4GHz tech - and optical. Out this month, the Logitech Touch Mouse M600 …

   NFC leader Inside Secure to IPO this month

   It's no Facebook, but it does actually design stuff

   Inside Secure has filed for an initial public offering, looking to raise almost €80m a day after it celebrated shipping 20 million chips, and signed up a major handset manufacturer. The filing is with the NYSE Euronext Paris, and Le Figaro reports that it will involve raising up to €79.3m in order to pay for more research and …

   Nokia axes 4,000, shifts smartphone manufacturing East

   Factories hit in cost-cutting drive

   Having reviewed operations at its manufacturing facilities in Hungary, Mexico and Finland, Nokia has decided to halt its assembly lines there. Smartphones will still be customised at the three sites, but the gear itself will be built in Asia. The change will affect 4,000 jobs between the factories – loading custom firmware …

   Coke-snorting cop bots to replace sniffer dogs

   Roboplod finds could count as evidence in court

   Sniffer dogs can get tired, but fibre-optic sniffer robots don't have the same problem. And they are just as good at detecting cocaine, says Tong Sun, a professor of sensor engineering at City University London. Prof Sun and her team won a £140k grant on Tuesday to work on the coke-detecting robots that they foresee will …

   Heathrow facial recognition tech stalled by borders fiasco

   Airport's scanner rollout to miss Olympics target

   Heathrow airport may now not get facial recognition technology at all five of its terminals in time for the Olympics as planned, according to the Financial Times. Plans for BAA to install 'e-gates' facial recognition technology at the airport to allow registered non-EU nationals to use electronic self-service immigration …

   Move over cybercrims, DDoS now protesters' weapon of choice

   Attackers swap rifles for machine guns with laser sights

   Ideological hacktivism has replaced cybercrime as the main motivatation behind DDoS attacks, according to a study by Arbor Networks. Up until last year, DDoS attacks were typically financially driven – either for reasons of competition or outright extortion – but the activities of Anonymous and related groups have changed that …

   Apple won't rule out all singing, all dancing iBooks on Kindle

   But they must be free. And will need an Android app

   Apple has come under fire for keeping all products of its new interactive book-making tool within its walled garden. According to a tough End User License Agreement, any iBooks created by the iBooks Author software can only be sold through the iBookstore so Apple can help itself to a 30 per cent cut. But an unusually chatty …

   Ten... Freesat TV receivers

   Product round-up Orbital options for the digital switchover

   Whether you’ve cut the cord and churned away from Sky, or need to survive the digital switch-over without recourse to Pay-TV or aerial, it’s worth considering Freesat. The gratis satellite TV service matches Freeview for SD channels, and offers a smattering of high-def plus the BBC iPlayer, hardware permitting. It’s a good bet …

   Australian sports get busy with copyright special pleading

   Chewing on the government's ear

   Australia’s sports administrators, usually busy trying to steal each others’ audiences, have discovered the spirit of cooperation in the face of the Optus TV Now Federal Court decision. The prime minister has confirmed that the Australian Rugby League, Australian Football League, Cricket Australia, Tennis Australia, and the …

   SGI to restructure (again) after fiscal Q2 loss

   Blame Europe, Xeon E5 product transitions

   It is becoming more apparent why supercomputer and server maker Silicon Graphics' former president and CEO Mark Barrenechea decided to exit stage left back in December. While the company was growing gear sales, it was heading deeper into the red ink as old machines came off maintenance and new machines await their ramps this …

   'App Economy' has created 466,000 US jobs

   Thanks to Apple, Google, Facebook...

   Although Apple may be facing mounting criticism for outsourcing its manufacturing beyond US shores, creating 700,000 jobs in China and elsewhere, one tech-industry advocacy group claims that Apple, the Android ecosystem, Facebook, and lesser lights account for roughly 466,000 US jobs in what it calls the "App Economy". " …

   Laser boffins blast bits onto hard drive at 200Gb/sec

   Superheating drives forego magnetic write heads

   A team of scientists have published a new way of using heat to store data magnetically, which could increase the speed of hard drives over a hundredfold. Conventional drives use electromagnetism to selectively change the polarity of points on a drive, representing a one or a zero. But according to research published in Nature …

   Hong Kongers protest over end to all-you-can-eat tariffs

   SmarTone on the receiving end of user fury

   Hong Kong dwellers have staged a mini-protest outside one of the stores of SmarTone against the cellco's response to new rules from the local regulator which will force all network operators to scrap unlimited data tariffs. Local newspaper The Standard reported that the group of angry customers gathered outside a SmarTone …

4. Tuesday, 07 February 2012

   New Fedora boss pushes for the clouds

   Robyn Bergeron takes the reins

   Red Hat has appointed former Fedora program manager Robyn Bergeron to that distro's next project leader – and she has plans to make the operating system more focused on cloud services. Bergeron takes over from Jared Smith at an interesting time in the market, with the industry increasingly looking beyond the basic client/ …

   Koala food may power US Defence force

   US Navy bigwig boosting biofuel in Queensland visit

   Koalas might soon face a food shortage if the US Department of Defence pursues its interest in Australian research for the creation of biofuels from local flora. Visiting US Navy Director for Operational Energy, Chris Tindal, has been in discussion with the University of Queensland on UQ's biofuels research, including the …

   Global digirati head to Sydney

   LBI and ZINFI Tech set up shop

   New South Wales has attracted two more international digital developers to its burgeoning “Silicon Valley” styled digital economy. London-based Lost Boys International (LBi) and Silicon Valley-based ZINFI Technologies have both set up shop in Sydney with the help of the NSW state government and expect to create up to 25 new …

   Will Apple set up shop in Walmart warehouses?

   Sets sights on middle America

   The contrast between Apple's prestige city-centre stores and the Sam's Club warehouse chain – where budget goods are sold straight from the pallet – is sharp. But that's where Apple wants to set up mini stores to sell its gadgets. There are about 600 Sam's Club retail warehouses across America selling everything from exercise …

   VMware crafts mega-controller for public clouds

   Easier provisioning for service providers, resellers

   If VMware wants service providers to dump Xen and KVM hypervisors, it has to make the job of using the VMware stack easier than the hodgepodge of usually hand-crafted tools that service providers employ and that, to a certain extent, give them their competitive advantage. Or, perhaps in some cases, a competitive disadvantage. So …

   Spacemen urge NASA to build nuke ship for Mars trip

   Nuclear rocket engines rise from the dead

   Mars has given nuclear spacecraft engines a new lease on life, with nuke ships being named as a top priority – along with electrical propulsion – in a new report that recommends what NASA should focus on in coming years. The two propulsion systems prioritized in the 468-page report by the National Research Council (NRC) – …

   Stratus ruggedizes VMware clouds

   Fault tolerant appliance for vCenter control freak

   Clouds have a single point of failure, and Stratus Technologies thinks it can make it some dough fixing it. Stratus and its peers NEC and Hewlett-Packard, which sell fault-tolerant servers, would love for you to be so freaked out by the mission-critical nature of your applications that you would get out a big ole check and buy …

   HP readies next-gen servers for launch

   Looks like Xeon E5 boxes

   Server juggernaut Hewlett-Packard is hosting a shindig in Las Vegas next week with the bigwigs in its server unit, and the speculation is that the company will preview its forthcoming ProLiant G8 servers sporting Intel's "Sandy Bridge-EP" Xeon E5 processors. The invite to the event, which is being hosted at The Cosmopolitan on …

   Google adds Chrome finish to Android

   Ice Cream Sandwich users only, sadly

   Google has announced a beta version of its increasingly popular Chrome browser for Android users, but only if you’re on the most current build, version 4.0, dubbed Ice Cream Sandwich. The Chocolate Factory’s latest creation has been designed to allow easy synchronization with the desktop version of the browser. Bookmarks can …

   NetApp slaps down Lightning with multi-card flash flush

   Supports vMotion and DRS

   NetApp is developing a server flash storage offering that will include beefy NetApp steak and not just EMC Lightning sizzle, according to insiders in the company. Our understanding, from people close to the action, is that NetApp server flash software will work with any server PCIe-connected flash memory card, and with …

   Rambus drops $35m for Unity Semiconductor

   Cash for CMOX

   Rambus is spending $35m (£22.13m) in cash to buy Unity Semiconductor and get into the post-NAND memory business. Unity is involved with CMOX resistive RAM technology, said to combine DRAM speed and NAND non-volatility. It hopes to produce a 1 terabit chip by 2014. Unity's people will be joining Rambus, putting an end to any …

   Xeround's cloudy MySQL database goes freemium

   Rejiggers pricing, puffs up on other clouds

   Xeround, a startup with experience in making scalable database management systems for telcos and service providers, vaulted itself into the cloudy database business last June with the launch of its eponymous database service running atop Amazon's EC2 service. Now it is tweaking the product's packaging and pricing to make it more …

   6,300 wannabe astronauts flood NASA inbox

   Second-highest number of applications since 1978

   NASA has received the second-highest number of astronaut applications ever for the 21st astronaut class when more than 6,300 people signed up to be space invaders. NASA astronaut Mike Fossum in spacewalk training. Credit: NASA The US space agency usually receives around 2,500 to 3,500 applications when it announces …

   Chinese company demands $38m, 'apology' from Apple

   Convoluted iPad trademark battle grinds on

   A Chinese trademark-infringement case against Apple's right to use the name "iPad" that has been rumbling along since October 2010 has taken another turn: the Shenzhen company involved in the imbroglio now wants Cupertino to be levied a $38m fine – and it wants an apology. "We are asking the court to order Apple to stop …

   Canonical kicks Kubuntu to the kerb

   Axed KDE-based Linux distro was biz non-starter

   Ubuntu shop Canonical has withdrawn support from development of the KDE-based Kubuntu Linux desktop after seven years for commercial reasons. Canonical employee Jonathan Riddell has said his employer will stop funding his Kubuntu work following April's expected release of the next Ubuntu LTS, version 12.04. The decision means …

   Cloud proves that OldSQL is still cool

   Open... and Shut Relational lives to fight on

   As the IT world scrambles pell mell into the cloud, veteran vendors like Oracle are having to figure out how to make money in an IT market that is increasingly turning its back on traditional software licensing. While Oracle has faced down challenges to its core database business before from open source, the cloud presents an …

   TRENDnet home security cam flaw exposes thousands

   Just when you thought you were alone in the bath

   TRENDnet has acknowledged a flaw that meant that live feeds from its home security cameras were accessible online without needing a password. The US-based manufacturer admitted the problem - which affects its SecurView Cameras bought after April 2010 - and began releasing firmware updates designed to plug the hole on Monday. …

   Google's whack-a-mole Marketplace cleans house again

   Rovio Mobile, not Rovio MobiIe

   Google's reactive policy over content on the Android Marketplace saw dozens of applications popping up overnight with names close enough to the real thing to reel in a mark or two. The worst offender has to be "Rovio MobiIe", which simply replaced the "L" with a capital "I" to make its products indistinguishable from those …

   Apple eyes ISPs to sell 'iTV'

   Analysis Canny marketing as World+Dog goes IPTV

   What are we to make of the claims from moles within Canada's two key telcos that both companies have Apple HD TVs in their labs? That Apple is indeed working on an own-brand television now seems certain. Equally sure seems the notion that the so-called 'iTV' won't be remotely revolutionary, though it will be spun that way by …

   Channel body count hits dotcom implosion high

   Reseller bloodbath in 2011

   The channel body count in 2011 reached a high not seen since the dotcom bubble burst, stats from credit reference agency Graydon UK reveal. In Q4 88 firms collapsed, up nearly 30 per cent year-on-year, which took the tally for the whole of 2011 to 356, up by almost one third on reseller fatalities in the previous twelve months …

   2020: A Press Odyssey – reporter licensing explained

   Sketch Daddy, who's Hugh Grant? Oh, you mean Lord Grant

   It's 2020, and a schoolgirl is doing her homework. "Daddy, what's a press licence?" "Oh, that. Well a press licence allows you to call yourself a journalist and get into official events, for official journalists." "What for?" "Well you get into events held by the government or a company, or for example a football club, and …

   Acer sues ex-boss Lanci for shacking up with Lenovo

   Update Contract's non-compete clause in question

   Acer has sued former president and CEO Gianfranco Lanci amid claims that he breached a non-compete clause by joining rival Lenovo. The lawsuit was lodged in a Milanese court today, according to a notification Acer made to the Taiwan Stock Exchange. The PC giant will seek to ascertain whether Lanci violated the "non-compete …

   Oracle demands retrial in SAP slurp spat

   Snubs paltry $272m payout, wants full $1.3bn in damages

   Oracle has filed for a retrial in its SAP spat over illegal file downloading, moaning that the reduced damages awarded just aren't enough. Oracle originally won a whopping $1.3bn in damages in its suit against SAP over the German enterprise software biz's subsidiary TomorrowNow illegally slurping Oracle software and support …

   O2 quietly cans gratis Cloud Wi-Fi connectivity

   Own-brand hotspots offered instead

   O2 has quietly dropped The Cloud from the list of Wi-Fi hotspot aggregators it grants its mobile customers free access to. Until the start of the month, O2 customers could access the internet through The Cloud's many WLANs. Now, however, only BT Openzone and O2's own O2 WiFi hotspots are included for free. Punters tell us …

   Blighty's PC market fell to its knees in Q4

   Consumer and biz sales slide, Apple posts growth

   The UK PC market shrank by nearly one fifth in the Christmas quarter, suffering the worst decline in half a decade. PC shipments in Q4 slumped by 19.6 per cent to 2.95 million units, with every major vendor apart from Apple posting negative growth. "PC vendors vendors face a long, uphill struggle to regain the interest of …

   UK's digital policy seized by fanatical bureaucrats, say MPs

   Analysis 'Hey... That's OUR job!'

   The UK government's digital policy has been captured by ideological fanatics at the IPO, Parliament heard today. The debate was tabled by Pete Wishart MP (Scot Nat, Perth) who devoted much of his speech to the agenda of the Intellectual Property Office (IPO), which is what the old Patent Office is now called. It can't have …

   Canon focuses on low-end with PowerShot snappers

   Compact definition

   Canon snapped into focus today with the launch of six 16Mp A-series PowerShots to slot into its lower-end range of compact cameras. First up is the PowerShot A810 and A1300, classic models that still run on AA batteries. The A1300 rocks up with an optical viewfinder too, an unusual rarity in this day and age. Both feature 28mm …

   Raspberry Pi ship date slips

   Crystal trips

   Raspberry Pi won't make it into buyers' hands before 20 February and perhaps not until the end of the month, the organisation behind the $25 microcomputer has admitted. The compact yet fully laden motherboard went into mass production early in January. The hope was the gadget would be available to buyers by now. Alas not. …

   Google goggles with Terminator HUD 'coming soon'

   8GB of flash, front-facing cam, voice recog and head-tilting nav

   Google is actually working on twitch-responsive sci-fi-style head-up display glasses, according to a report by 9TO5Google. And the new tech apparently includes a cursor that responds to head movements. The article includes great eye-candy, including a clip from CES 2012 on Motorola's headset computer and a Terminator clip. …

   UK.gov's mega-cloud VIP biz list kept under wraps

   Suppliers find out if they're in the G-Cloud club

   Scores of IT suppliers and consultancy firms have made it onto the G-Cloud framework, but government officials are keeping schtum about the names and numbers until a two-week cooling off period passes. A Cabinet Office spokesman told El Reg that 600 firms applied to be involved in Blighty's public sector mega-cloud system, and …

   Conclusive PROOF of human activity causing glacier to VANISH

   Captain Prat blagger cuffed with hot ice slung in cooler

   Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has had to walk back on the idea that the world's glaciers will all be gone within decades due to human-caused carbon powered global warming: but news has now emerged showing that in at least one case human action has absolutely indisputably led to the disappearance of large …

   Hackers spunk 'pcAnywhere source' after negotiation breakdown

   'Fed posing as Symantec worker' offered $50k to activists

   Hacktivists affiliated with Anonymous uploaded what they claim is the source code of Symantec's pcAnywhere software early on Tuesday, following the breakdown of negotiations between the hacking group and "a federal agent posing as a Symantec employee". Symantec has confirmed that a dialogue had taken place between the …

   YouView will launch this Spring, says TalkTalk

   Consumer trials coming

   ISP TalkTalk has reiterated its expectation that YouView, the would-be UK standard IPTV platform, will launch this coming Spring. The company's CEO, Dido Harding, told investors today that initial work getting customers to understand what YouView is all about has begun, laying the groundwork for consumer trials of the service …

   Brazil sues Twitter over police checkpoint tweets

   Threatens $290k fine... daily

   Twitter should be more proactive in blocking tweets about police checkpoints, according to the Brazilian Attorney, who reckons a daily fine of R$500,000 ($290,000) will get the company moving. If the injunction, lodged with the Federal Court of Goiás, is successful, then Twitter will be obliged to suspend accounts which warn …

   Nokia posts 'major' Sym... er... smartphone OS update

   Belle, end of Symbian?

   Nokia may be obsessed with Microsoft's Windows Phone OS, but that hasn't stopped it rolling out the latest version of its other OS, Belle, to a seven handsets. Step forward owners of Nokia N8, E7, E6, X7, C6-01, C7 and Oro phones, you can now download Symbian - no, don't mention the 'S' word... - Nokia Belle for your gadget. …

   Mac OS X ARM port by Apple work experience kid revealed

   Project sparks non-Intel-powered MacBook rumour fever

   A Dutch computer science student's homework has stirred the old rumour that Apple may ditch the Intel platform and power its Macbooks with ARM processors. Tristan Schaap's bachelor thesis at the Delft University of Technology described work he did at Apple as an intern: getting the core of Mac OS X to run on an MV88F6281 …

   Nikon unveils mammoth megapixel DSLR

   D800 does 36Mp

   Nikon unveiled its much-anticipated FX-format D800 digital SLR camera this morning. The Nikon D800 - successor to the company's D700 - has been upgraded to sport a 36.3Mp CMOS sensor feeding the Nikon's latest image processor, the Expeed 3. The D800 features 1080p video recording with options for 24, 25 and 30fps frame rates …

   ViewSonic V350 dual Sim Android smartphone

   Review For business and pleasure

   Every now and again, a brand new product comes along that seems to hark back to days of yore, to a time when things were different. One of those things would be the steam-powered PC, another is the ViewSonic V350 – a smartphone that can work on two networks simultaneously. Dual of the dial: ViewSonic's V350 There was a time …

   High Street chains vow to play fair on warranties

   Dixons, Comet and Argos pulled over by OFT

   UK retailers have offered a number of concessions after the Office of Fair Trading had a word about their extended warranties on electrical goods. Dixons, Comet and Argos have all told the OFT, which was worried about unfair competition, that they will set up a warranty comparison website and provide punters with more …

   Toshiba releases 'world's thinnest' Android tablet

   Sales limited to a single retailer

   Toshiba's 'world's thinnest, lightest' tablet, the AT200 - aka the Excite in the US - goes on sale over here next week. The 7.7mm-thick, 10.1in 1280 x 800 tablet, announced in September 2011, runs Android 3.2 Honeycomb, on a 1.2GHz Texas Instruments OMAP 4430 processor. It has 1GB of DDR 2 memory and either 16GB or 32GB of …

   Has Microsoft finally killed off Windows 8 Start button?

   Era of Windows 95 finally over

   Microsoft is reportedly killing the Start button in Windows, a staple of Redmond's PC operating system since the landmark Windows 95. Purported screen shots of Windows 8 Consumer Preview are reported to show a Super Bar that extends across the full bottom of the screen minus the Start button orb. In place of the orb is a "hot …

   Parliament ponders £400,000 iPads-for-MPs plan

   Representatives to get slated

   Members of Parliament may soon be issued with an iPad each in a scheme that could cost the tax payer over £400,000. House members have been testing the Apple tablet throughout the past 12 months in a bid to modernise the Mother of Parliaments and save print costs. Now the cross-party Administration Committee has recommended a …

   Google unleashes 'Solve for X' confabs to save the world

   Boffins gathered for new TED-like talks

   Internet giant Google is once more trying to save the world, this time with its TED-rip-off "Solve for X" project. The Chocolate Factory has launched the project after the first invite-only gathering of minds, which pulled techies and boffins together to talk about "moonshots", ie, wildly ambitious projects to solve world …

   TalkTalk loses 43,000 customers, chunk o' revenue in Q3

   Better HomeSafe than sorry, telco insists

   TalkTalk lost 43,000 broadband customers during the company's third quarter and reported that revenue in that area of the business had fallen year-on-year. The telco told the City this morning that it was continuing to unbundle exchanges during the quarter and attributed the decline in subscribers to the fact that it was …

   HTC wants a hug after glum Q1 estimates

   Under-pressure biz seeks 'emotional connection' with punters

   HTC could be in for a spot of bother in 2012 after its Q1 outlook missed analysts’ estimates. Commentators suggest the firm may struggle to compete with Apple, Samsung and the wealth of handset manufacturers crowding this increasingly competitive space. The Taiwanese hardware manufacturer forecast revenue of about NT$65bn to …

   Beware Freedom of Info law 'privacy folktale' - ICO chief

   Chicken Lickens in a flap as FOIA scrutinised

   Is Blighty's Freedom of Information (FOI) law working? The civil servant leading the agency charged with enforcing it thinks so, and says a review by politicians shouldn't succumb to myths about the supposed dangers of more openness by the State. UK Information Commissioner Christopher Graham has called for "careful analysis …

   Chilli crab scoffing boffins build anti-cancer claw robot

   New stomach tumour busting gadget inspired by top Asian nosh

   The fight against cancer reached a weird new level after Singapore’s centuries-old chilli crab dish inspired boffins to build a tumour-removing robot. Widespread reports explain that the gear, which is mounted on an endoscope, has a small pair of pincers to grab the affected area, an even smaller hook to slice off the …

   Avast! Mobile Security

   Android App of the Week Prepare to repel boarders

   The security or lack thereof of the Android platform - real or imagined - is a common topic of conversation at the moment so it seems like a good time to take a look for a comprehensive security app. My preferred choice is Avast!. Avast! for Android is free and carries no advertising, making it perfect for anyone who is just a …

   Mac demand helps Apple business bloom in Blighty

   Rival PC players slump

   Apple was the only major computer maker to increase its shipments into the UK PC market during the final three months of 2011. Figures posted today by Gartner, a market watcher, noted shipment declines for the four remaining players in the UK top five. Apple's shipments rose 17.2 per cent from 228,000 units in Q4 2010 to 267, …

   N Korea mobile phone subscribers top 1 million

   No need to be lonely in hardline communist state

   Axis of evil North Korea now has a whopping one million mobile phone users some four years after the technology was first introduced in the repressive state. Egyptian telco Orascom Telecom, which helped to launch a 3G service in the Democratic People’s Republic in 2008, reportedly revealed the figures in a regulatory filing. …

   Google-hosted blogs to be censored on country-by-country basis

   But you can work around it with a 'No Country Redirect'

   Google will remove content posted on its blogging platform on a country-by-country basis after altering the way the service organises blog posts. The internet giant said the move was designed to help it take down material deemed to be unlawful in one country but to enable readers in other countries to see it. Google said it …

   Prehistoric cricket love songs recreated for your listening pleasure

   Throbbing Jurassic passion returns in boffin-mungous feat

   An international team of top boffins has quite literally left no stone unturned in its efforts to answer a highly unusual question: Just what did the love songs of the Jurassic era really sound like? This is actually the mating music of a "primitive bush cricket", whose modern descendants are also known as katydids, which …

   Inside the mind of EMC: Is storage just a launchpad?

   Blocks and Files: I wanna be a data centre contender ...

   It's a vision thing: EMC was a storage company and is an information company, but in the next decade it looks like it will be a data centre infrastructure company. This thought comes from a parsing of two Pat Gelsinger replies to an interview with EMC's Mark Twomey, otherwise known as the blogger Storagezilla. Reply number …

   Suppliers get a shot at £4bn worth of gov hardware deals

   From tablets to servers and storage

   The Government Procurement Service has advertised for suppliers to join a wide-ranging £4bn ICT framework. The framework will be open to public sector organisations for two years, according to a notice in the Official Journal of the European Union, and covers the following lots: Desktop client devices: which will include …

   Colorfly Pocket Hi-Fi C4

   Review The audiophiles' PMP

   The true audiophile is likely to have many questions concerning the Colorfly Pocket Hi-Fi, but chief among them is likely to be ‘How f*%&ing much??!?’ At £549 this Chinese-made high fidelity portable music player is nobody’s idea of a bargain, but if you’re one of those brave souls who still cares about sound quality, who …

   Czechs, Slovaks stall on ACTA

   Romania doesn’t know why it didn’t

   The fragile European consensus over the ACTA treaty is fraying at the fringes: the Czech Republic and Slovakia have decided to suspend the ratification process, while Romania’s support for the treaty could stall on a change of government. Newsagency Ceske Noviny reports that the Czech government has decided further analysis of …

   Adobe adds Flash sandboxing to Firefox

   Hackers bypass it in 3, 2…

   Adobe has released beta code for sandboxing its heavily hacked Flash code within Firefox, in a similar fashion to the Chrome security protections added to its Reader software and Google’s Chrome browser. “Sandboxing technology has proven very effective in protecting users by increasing the cost and complexity of authoring …

   Google limits Android support for CDMA phones

   Android power users may face hobbled handsets

   Google is dropping full support for CDMA handsets running Android, leaving millions of customers wondering if their phones and tablets will be able to cope. Last Friday, Google posted a message on Google Groups to say that in the future, the Chocolate Factory wouldn’t provide full support for CDMA devices, such as those …

   Oracle wins round in Java patent lawsuit against Google

   Appeals court allows incriminating Mountain View email

   A three-judge US Court of Appeals panel has denied Google's request to toss out another judge's decision to allow an incriminating email from being used as evidence in Oracle's Java-patent lawsuit against Mountain View. The email in question was sent by Google engineer and ex–Sun man Tim Lindholm shortly before Oracle …

5. Monday, 06 February 2012

   Chip sales definitely not down – but almost – in 2011

   Semis take a December dive

   The chip biz didn't do as badly as many had feared it might last summer, closing out 2011 with $299.5bn in worldwide sales, up four-tenths of a per cent from the record $298.3bn revenue level set in 2010. All the news was not good, however, since global semiconductor sales took a big hit in December, according to stats …

   ‘Oldest animals’ show up in Namibian dig

   Ancient sponge the granddaddy of us all

   For now, anyhow, the starting date for highly-organised life has gained a new record, with a dig in Namibia yielding up sponge fossils dated somewhere between 100 and 150 million years earlier than anything else yet found. While the tiny sponges, turned up by British and African researchers in sites including Namibia’s Etosha …

   VMTurbo control freak spans more clouds

   Allocating virty resources, free market–style

   There are a lot of different ways to allocate resources in a world that has a scarcity of just about everything except wise guys. You can do command and control from the top down, as many governments have tried and many systems management tools do as well. Or you can take the free-market approach by creating pools of resources …

   The hole in the copy-proof fence

   The Optus TV Now decision

   The value of live sports sponsorships isn’t going to collapse overnight, regardless of the dire predictions made in the wake of last week’s decision in the Optus TV Now case. The judgment, that TV Now is legal, has been greeted with the usual response from the plaintiffs (the Australian Rugby League and the Australian Football …

   NewSat scores $US180m in new contract win

   Aus satellite gets popular

   Australian satellite operator NewSat has secured another contract, this time worth $US180 million, for capacity on its yet-to-be-launched Jabiru -1 satellite. MEASAT Satellite Systems has booked capacity for 15 years across multiple transponders covering South Asia and South East Asia. The Jabiru-1 is a large Ka-band next …

   Boffins uncloak G-rated teledildonic breakthrough

   Remotely kiss a cow, kiss a bunny, kiss your loneliness goodbye

   A team of robot reseachers have developed a prototype of internet-based remote kissing devices that – for reasons unexplained – comes in two versions, one a cartoonish bunny, the other a cow. The bunny, well, The Reg can accept, seeing as how a juvenile oryctolagus cuniculus domesticus might be some folks' idea of kissable …

   Upgrade eliminates Atlantis from Google Earth

   Data glitch explanation won’t satisfy true believers

   The latest update to Google Earth has resolved the software error that caused some to suspect the lost city of Atlantis had been found in the Atlantic Ocean. For the last three years, Google Earth has shown what appears to be a grid on the sea floor between the Canary Islands and the mid-Atlantic ridge that bisects the ocean. …

   Shrunken Intel process boosts SSD performance

   The new 520 Series more than doubles 510's IOPS

   Intel has announced a boosted follow-on to its 510 SSD: the 520 Series, with more than double the IOPS performance and a top-end model with almost twice the capacity. The 2.5-inch 520 is a client or PC SSD, and is built from 25nm 2-bit MLC NAND; the 510 used a 34nm process. Like the 510, it has a 6Gb/s SATA interface, but its …

   Symantec: 'NetBackup 7.5 speeds backup 100X'

   Cuts 25-hour chore down to 15 minutes

   Symantec says backup is a multi-point product mess, with big data blowing backup-window timing out of the water, and so it has souped up both BackupExec and NetBackup to cover more backup and restore use cases. The sexy news – well, as sexy as backup news can be – is that the latest release of NetBackup is said to be 100 times …

   Cisco recalls suicidal UCS blade servers

   Goodness gracious, great MOSFETs afire

   Cisco Systems warns that its high-end B440 blades for its "California" Unified Computing System have a potentially disastrous defect that could result in one or more board failures, and emit a flash of light that could perhaps give system administrators heart attacks. Last week, Cisco put out a field notice to customers using …

   Resellers smack down Microsoft's 'single-digit' price rise claim

   Channel sources: Volume licensing lift will be closer to 20 per cent

   Microsoft says that a planned overhaul of volume licensing pricing due in the summer will be capped at single digit percentage rises. Redmond said that Open, Select and Select Plus agreements struck in the UK after 1 July would be aligned to euro prices and charged based on the exchange rate with sterling. "Based on the …

   Anonymous releases law firm's emails about Haditha killings

   Hacked lawyers who defended Marine over Iraqi deaths

   Anonymous has leaked a trove of emails relating to the deaths of 24 Iraqi civilians at Haditha after hacking into a law firm's systems. The hacktivists claim to have made off with a 2.6GB email spool after breaking into the systems of Puckett Faraj, the law firm that represents Frank Wuterich, 31, the Marine staff sergeant at …

   Avast false alarm hits Steam's weekend gamers

   'I am sworn to carry your burdens'

   Freebie anti-virus scanner Avast falsely identified an executable associated with the popular Steam gaming platform as a Trojan on Sunday. The snafu, which persisted for around 90 minutes, meant that SteamService.exe was wrongly identified as a Trojan (specifically Trojan-gen) and sent to quarantine. Judging by posts on Steam …

   iPhone 4 incapable of handling Siri, says chip chap

   Cough up for 4$ or somehow stagger on without blabberware

   Siri won't run on iPhone 4 because the phone's chip can't handle it, an analyst at the Linley Group has said. The news is a blow to iPhone 4-ers hoping for an upgrade to the voice-activated virtual assistant and is also a surprise to anyone familiar with the I-hacked-my-iPhone-4-to-run-Siri stories. Linley Gwennap of the …

   UK gov rejects call to posthumously pardon Alan Turing

   Wartime codebreaker's 'absurd' conviction must stand

   The UK government has turned down a call to posthumously pardon Alan Turing. A petition to pardon the war-time codebreaker for a 'gross indecency' conviction attracted more than 23,000 signatures, prompting the tabling of early day motion in the House of Commons last week. Turing was arrested and eventually convicted for …

   Android dominates first-time smartphone buyer biz

   Apple strong in upgrade arena

   Punters picking their first smartphone are more likely to select an Android handset. When they come to upgrade, however, there's a good chance they'll defect to the opposition. So suggests market data from US research company NPD, released today. NPD looked at sales data for Q4 2011, focusing not simply on the number of …

   An NT-powered Windows Phone? Not so fast...

   MS mulls partying like it's 1996....

   Sources close to Microsoft have confirmed the veracity of last week's Windows Phone leaks – but say no decision has been taken to base the mobile platform on the Windows 8 kernel. The information that leaked last week concerns 'Apollo', the next-but-one release of Windows Phone. It's all genuine, but should be thought of as …

   Google tells French watchdog 'non' on privacy tweak halt

   'At no stage did any DPA suggest pause was necessary'

   Google has rejected calls from the European Union's watchdog to delay imminent changes to the Chocolate Factory's privacy policy. The company's global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, wrote a letter to France's data protection authority in response to an earlier missive sent by the EU's Article 29 Working Party last week. " …

   Printed jaw lets woman swallow again

   Let's eat, Grandma

   3D printing techniques have been taken to jaw-dropping heights after an 83-year-old woman was given a replacement mandible. She becomes the first patient ever to be fitted with a printed lower jaw. Given the old dear's age, and the fact that her lower jaw was so badly infected, traditional surgery was deemed too much of a risk …

   Apple kicks China's most popular browser out of iTunes

   Bans Qihoo apps from its store ...

   Qihoo, maker of the most popular web browser in China, has had all of its products kicked out of iTunes, though it's far from clear which breach of the rules is responsible. The company's web browser, security suite and instant-messaging client have all disappeared from the Chinese iTunes store, leaving the company with with …

   Apple tells authors: All your books iBook files are belong to us

   But you can export them as PDFs if you want

   In a legal rewrite pushed out Friday, Apple has made its iBooks publishing agreement sound slightly less evil by clarifying just what you can do with the content you create on its iBook Author software. Yes, all iBooks are locked to the iBook store but you can export those files as PDFs. As The Reg pointed out at the time of …

   Ofcom proposes fall in BT Openreach charges to rivals

   Updated Just wait for that nice Brussels man to agree

   BT will be forced to cut the prices of the access charges it applies to the company's broadband and telephone lines when leasing them out to other providers, Ofcom said today. The communications watchdog, which regulates BT's Openreach division because the business has a dominant market position in Blighty, submitted its " …

   Windows Phone 8 to get NFC, HD and Skype

   Rumours confirmed, details emerge

   Following a leaked video which showed Windows Phone top dog Joe Belfiore listing the features adorning the next version of Windows Phone, beta testers have come clean on what we should expect. The video was intended for device manufacturers, but got into the hands of PocketNow, which promptly shared the details. The …

   BTJunkie closes shooting gallery

   'My life is officially ruined'

   Popular torrent search engine BTJunkie – nothing to do with BT – is voluntarily closing, according to a notice posted on the site, without offering a reason. The site has indexed other torrent trackers since 2005, and was the fifth most popular Torrent site. "It's the end of an era", reckons one piracy fansite. BTJunkie users …

   Schools IT supplier RM swings to full year loss after sales dive

   We knew about gov budget cuts but we didn't really get it...

   Ailing specialist education IT supplier RM has admitted it reacted too slowly to government budget cuts in schools after revealing massive losses in fiscal 2011 ended 30 November. The firm posted a loss before tax of £23.4m for the 14 months to nOVEMBER 2011 – including restructuring costs and excess property provisions. This …

   Job-seeking Marriott hacker gets 30 months' porridge

   Nabbed and jailed after Secret Service sting

   A job-seeking Hungarian hacker who tried to land work with Marriott by hacking into the hotel chain's network before "offering" to sort out the resulting mess has been found guilty of hacking and attempted extortion and jailed for 30 months. Attila Nemeth, 26, admits sending Trojan-infected emails to workers at the hotel late …

   Google and Facebook remove 'offensive' content from Indian sites

   Internet firms comply with court order

   Facebook and Google have removed content from Indian domain websites in response to a court order to get rid of "objectionable content". The Indian subsidiaries of the internet firms were in court in New Delhi on Monday in a civil suit against the firms, and other web giants, brought by Muslim petitioner Mufti Aijaz Arshad …

   Scientists weave battery into clothing

   Uses jumper leads?

   Scientists charged into the fashion industry this week, unveiling a flexible battery that can be woven into fabric and used to boost the juice of everyday gadgets. The lithium-ion cells were produced by a group of boffins from the Polytechnic School of Montreal. The team claims their bendy power cells are the first wearable …

   Apple vs Amazon in ereader format smackdown

   iBooks enlists kiddies on the EPUB3 front

   Format wars are a mixed blessing for consumers. Whether it's Betamax versus VHS or Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD, the consumer ultimately wins because companies have to advance superior technologies. But problems arise if the format you backed loses the war - and your device becomes next year's expensive doorstop. A new fight is …

   Analyst touts iPad 'transformer' after CEO confab

   Dual dock ports, clip-on keyboard for laptop-like use?

   Will the Apple iPad 3 be an 'homage' to the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime, complete with clever clip-on keyboard accessory? One financial analysts comments, posted after a meeting with Apple CEO Tim Cook, suggests it might be. Enter Citigroup researcher Richard Gardner, who late last week said he'd been chewing the fat with …

   MPs rattle telcos to help kill extremist material online

   Update ISPs once again asked to police interwebs

   Internet service providers must do better at removing violent material from websites, a group of MPs thundered today. The Home Affairs select committee published a report this morning that highlighted how extremist groups and individuals use the internet "to promote violent radicalism". MPs were told by a series of witnesses …

   Samsung Series 7 Chonos 15.6in Core i7 notebook

   Review NOT a MacBook clone

   Surely someone is having a laugh. Having read nothing but five-star reviews of this luxury notebook on other sources, I find myself surprised to be staring at a four-star product on my desk. Four stars is pretty good, you know, but that’s one less than five. All in good time: Samsung's Series 7 Chronos What am I missing …

   Amazon lures Microsoft WinPhone chief with Kindle

   Etailer claims third Redmond scalp

   Microsoft's man rallying developers and partners to buy into Windows Phone is reportedly jumping ship to help push Amazon's cross-platform Kindle push. Brandon Watson is head of the Developer Experience team working on Windows Phone 7, which leads developer marketing and developer platform products. Watson is reported to be …

   Apple TV surfaces on Best Buy

   Spec leak - or fishing expedition?

   US electronics retailer Best Buy has begun asking punters if they'd be interested coughing up $1499 for a 42in HD TV from Apple. A customer survey form reprinted by the Verge pitches the notion of a 42in, 1080p LED-backlit telly running iOS. The telly, the form suggests, might provide access to iTunes downloads and rentals, …

   Micron grabs almost-retired COO for chief

   Mark Durcan will take over as CEO after death of Steve Appleton

   Chip-maker Micron Technology has named a new CEO following the death of Steve Appleton on Friday in a plane crash. Micron named former chief operating officer Mark Durcan, who had been standing in as chief following the accident, as the new CEO for the firm. Just two weeks ago, Micron had said that Durcan was planning to …

   iOS 5 'crashes more apps' than Android

   Is it an upgrade problem, or a user problem?

   Recent data has shown that iOS apps crash more often than apps running on the Android platform. The data comes from Crittercism – monitoring software that records app crashes as a percentage of app launches and makes money by sending reports and diagnostics to the app's creators. After looking at data taken about app crashes …

   IT budgets plunge in North America, Europe

   Rise in the East and Latin America

   If you were expecting for IT spending to go up this year and for new projects to get going – and perhaps to get a pay raise – the consensus is building that this is not going to happen. That's the bad news. The good news would seem to be that instead of being asked to do more with less, IT shops will be asked to do a lot more …

   EMC server flash rival slams VFCache

   Fusion-io thinks Lightning misses target

   EMC's VFCache server cache doesn't quite hit the mark. Although it validates server flash use, caching is not enough. That's the view of Fusion-io chairman, CEO and co-founder David Flynn. Fusion-io leads the server PCIe flash market and its boss appears to think EMC's approach misses the target. Flynn said he welcomed the …

   Twitter snaps up Google Asia exec

   Service could be set for greater expansion in the region

   Micro-blogging phenomenon Twitter is stepping up its efforts at international expansion and has pinched a senior Google executive in a clear sign the company could be looking to target Asia in the coming months. Shailesh Rao was managing director of Google India and also headed up the web giant’s display advertising business …

   PSN renamed Sony Entertainment Network

   SEN-sible name change?

   The PlayStation Network is to undergo a major rebranding this week when it is integrated into an all-new Sony Entertainment Network. On Wednesday, 8 February, PSN account holders will find their details transferred to the SEN, tying Sony's digital entertainment offerings together in one sensibly-named platform. "PlayStation …

   Boffins find prehistoric croc species with 'mate-attracting' skin helmet

   'Shieldcrocs' mingled with dinosaurs

   Bone-bothering US boffins have identified a new species of prehistoric crocodile, nicknamed "Shieldcroc" because of a flat ornamental skin shield on its ginormous head. Rather cartoony artist's rendition of Shieldcroc. Credit: Henry P. Tsai, University of Missouri The hard-headed Aegisuchus witmeri is one of modern-day …

   Motorola: refurb tablets shipped with former owners' data intact

   Whoops

   Motorola Mobility has admitted that some refurbished Xoom tablets were sent out to their new owners with previous users' data still present in the gadgets' memory banks. The company, which is waiting for a thumbs-up from the Feds before it can be swallowed by Google, offered its profuse apologies for the snafu. Some 6200 …

   Facebook's IPO unveils plans to invade China

   Social network would love to tap that

   Not content with almost total domination in Western markets, social networking behemoth Facebook could be planning an assault on China if it can just do a deal with the authorities there, its latest regulatory filing has revealed. The firm’s IPO filing with the SEC last week provided commentators with a wealth of interesting …

   New dole system is 'digital by default', like it or not

   Claimants who do not comply will be 'nudged' by 'back office' workers

   Universal credit – the government's "new and improved" benefits system – will be the first major government service to be digital by default. This is according to Steve Dover, director of major programmes at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). Dover says: "There will be a back office to deal with the more vulnerable in …

   Doctors sick of anonymous-coward NHS feedback commentards

   Welcome to the internet, doc

   A leading GP has declared that the general public are too rude about doctors on the internet in a complaint that may amuse those of us more familiar with the culture of "Internet feedback". In an interview with eHealthInsider, Dr Chaand Nagpaul, of the British Medical Association's GP Committee said that patient comments about …

   Huawei-Symantec sneaks out of US back door

   Has it been booted out?

   Huawei-Symantec, the joint venture between Huawei and Symantec, has effectively stopped trading and is leaving the United States. This follows the US government's blockade of several of its acquisitions, including parent Huawei's deal to snap up 3Leaf Systems, which it sought to acquire in May 2010 for $2m and its attempted …

   Hackers may be able to 'outwit' online banking security devices

   Investigators probe malware threat to 2-factor authentication

   Hackers may already able to use malware to outwit the latest generation of online banking security devices, security watchers warn. An investigation by BBC Click underlines possible shortcomings in the extra security provided by banking authentication devices such as PINSentry from Barclays and SecureKey from HSBC. Using such …

   MYSTERY as QLogic hurls InfiniBand from train

   Comment Reg storage desk baffled in the case of the fibre fracas

   Storage networking and InfiniBand supplier is giving up on InfiniBand and selling that business line to Intel for $125 million. QLogic is in a seemingly permanent duel with Emulex, from which it was spun-out in 1994, for dominance in the Fibre Channel host bus adapter (HBA) market and also the so far un-dynamic Fibre Channel …

   Indian court grabs back 122 GSM licences from operators

   Firms devalue to the tune of $25bn

   India's Supreme Court has ruled that the 2G licences awarded in 2008 were not fairly distributed, and has snatched 122 of them back from the operators who were using them. The court has decided the first-come-first-served approach adopted by then-telecoms minister Andimuthu Raja was "totally arbitrary and unconstitutional", …

   EMC crashes the server flash party

   Lightning strike with thunder to follow

   The perfect server flash storm hitting storage arrays has generated EMC's well-signalled Lightning strike; VFCache has arrived, extending FAST technology from the array to the server. Project Thunder is following close behind, promising an EMC server-networked flash array. This is a major announcement and we are covering it in …

   CA wins copyright wrangle against ISI

   Don't nick the source code kids

   CA Technologies has won a protracted legal battle against Sydney based software company Independent Systems Integrators ( ISI). In late 2010, CA claimed that ISI had infringed the source code in two of its computer programs and had also breached confidence in documents relating to the computer programs. The Federal Court of …

   TV giant HBO invests $AU10m in Quickflix

   'Hug it out b***h' downunder

   Ambitious Australian IPTV company Quickflix has secured an international investment coup with a $AU10 million cash infusion from Home Box Office (HBO). The investment will give the Time Warner subsidiary a strategic stake in the ASX listed Quickflix. HBO will also appoint a representative to the Quickflix board. Quickflix …

6. Sunday, 05 February 2012

   Some coral reefs growing in a warming world

   Cooler, marginal reefs don’t mind warmer water

   While Austraia’s iconic Great Barrier Reef has been suffering bleaching and damage, the combined impact of warmer oceans agricultural runoff, a few thousand kilometers to the west, coral growth seems to be enjoying the changing climate. The research, published on February 3 in Nature, shows that the Porites coral – so stressed …

   Boffins embed electronics into fibres

   Hope for cheaper telecoms kit

   University of Southampton and Penn State researchers have demonstrated a technique to embed electronics into optical fibres, which if commercialised would enable simpler and cheaper telecommuniations kit. The idea, according to head of the university’s Optical Research Centre Dr Pier Sazio, is to build an electro-optical …

   Hollywood gathers to pick over Limewire’s corpse

   Whip? Check. Dead horse? Check.

   Movies studios are moving on the defunct Limewire, filing a complaint in a US Federal Court to take their cut from the company’s copyright infringments. Following a 2010 summary judgment against the company in a case brought by record labels, the company last year settled with the music industry majors for $US105 million. That …

   Can Sony's new supremo make the sacrifices to save his biz?

   Comment We drill into the uphill battle ex-Playstation boss Hirai faces

   When Faultline first began following Sony in 2003, it was worth $36 billion on the stock market. At the time Apple was worth $9.8 billion and it was about to launch the iTunes Music Store. We said that Sony should buy Apple and put Steve Jobs in charge. Of course it was whimsical, Apple and Jobs in particular would never have …

7. Saturday, 04 February 2012

   Tame the gas monster with sensors, suckers and a spiffy new fan

   Part 3 More performance-tuning for your home and office

   I'm pleased to say that what with the relatively warm 2011 and our conservation efforts we had the lowest consumption of electricity and gas at home of any year yet, a bit over 1,500kWh ('units') of electricity and under 4,000kWh of gas. (A typical UK household is nearer 3,300kWh 'leccy and 18,000kWh gas.) With our solar PV …

   Eight... HD camera smartphones

   Product round-up Sharp shooters for parties and protests

   You know that really annoying person who is videoing the gig with their camera phone to stick on Facebook when they get home? That's me. These days my TV is HD and my games console is HD, so it only makes sense that my phone – the device I use the most, day in and day out – should be HD too. Luckily, HD on smartphones is …

   Zuckerberg's 2012 personal income tax bill: $1.5 billion

   That's 'billion', with a 'b'

   If all goes according to plan, Facebook founder, chairman, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's share of the profit in his company's upcoming initial public offering will result in him facing a tax bill of around $1.5bn for 2012. What's more, the Financial Times reports, that astronomical bill could increase if the IPO is more successful …

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