The Week in Summary

1. Tuesday, 29 May 2012

   Dole office to roll out digital benefits to north-west – 6 months early

   Greater Manchester and Cheshire testing ground for universal credit

   The government has announced plans to launch universal credit six months ahead of the national rollout in October 2013. The scheme will go live in the Greater Manchester and Cheshire region in April 2013. The Department for Work and Pensions said that the early rollout of its new benefit system is expected to see up to 1,500 …

   The stage is set: Prepare for Hamburg cluster carnage

   HPC blog Sprints, mystery apps and less amps in student contest

   Now that China has settled on its two entrants to the ISC’12 Student Cluster Challenge (I’m dubbing it iSCC for short), it’s time to get a feel for the number-cruncher design competition and what the entrants will face. Airbus is the big-name sponsor of the iSCC this year and has played a vital role in getting this fledgling …

   Hard disk drive prices quick to rise, slow to fall

   ASPs remain 58 per cent above pre-flood levels

   The cost of hard disk drives remained reassuringly expensive in the opening four months of this year despite product availability improving. Long gone are the tales of a declining HDD sector hit by product shortages - sales through distribution were up 36 per cent and 78 per cent in Western Europe and the UK respectively from …

   Sheer weight of Brits' interest knackers new tax tool

   HMRC web calculator flooded by 400,000 punters

   Hundreds of thousands of Brits were so keen to check what the government does with their tax that they crashed a new online expenditure calculator. The service was launched on Monday by HMRC, and promptly fell down again after getting 400,000 visitors before midday - although the service is now limping back to functionality. …

   Google now gets 250k copyright takedown requests EACH WEEK

   More than all requests made during 2009, Choc Factory says

   Google now regularly receives more copyright 'notice and takedown' requests from rights-holders in a week than it did during the entirety of 2009, the company has said. The internet giant said it has experienced a 'rapid' increase in the number of takedown requests and added that it is "not unusual" for it to receive requests …

   Are you handcuffed to the rails of your disk array's sinking ship?

   Blocks and Files How your data could end up tied down to a supplier

   Are your storage arrays now so big, you can't easily migrate your data off them? If so, you've handcuffed yourself to your supplier, open interfaces or not. There are good reasons to need a new storage array, such as the existing one running out of gas or lacking the features you need in the new one. Allow us to demonstrate …

   Chinese rocket parts land on village

   30kg piece of wreckage takes out power lines, shocks locals

   Residents of a remote Chinese village became unwitting participants in China’s much-vaunted space program over the weekend when debris from a recently launched carrier rocket took out a 10 kilovolt (kv) power line and damaged several houses. The Long March 3B rocket launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre in western …

   Vauxhall Ampera hybrid e-car

   First Look The electric cars comes of age?

   Only the most ardent electric-vehicle advocate would argue that the current state of battery technology and absence of recharging infrastructure isn’t an impediment to the widespread adoption of the e-car. On paper, the new Vauxhall Ampera – the European version of the Chevrolet Volt – has the perfect answer to this problem: …

   Shanghai cops set for online 'crime' crack-down

   Only 800,000 sites to keep an eye on officer...

   Shanghai police will start a hi-tech crime team tasked with monitoring all of the web sites registered in the city, as China’s law enforcers look to combat an apparent spike in domestic online crime. Lu Weidong, deputy chief of Shanghai police bureau, told a cyber crime forum attended by China Daily that the extra resources …

   Google Apps win ISO 27001 certification

   FISMA fisticuffs forgotten?

   Google has proudly told the world its online productivity suite, Google Apps, has gained the ISO's good cloudkeeping seal of security approval, in the form of the ISO 27001 security certification. Eran Feigenbaum, Google Enterprise's Director of Security let us all know the good news on Monday, US time, and named Ernst & Young …

   CBA tussles with NFC security

   Launching Kaching on Android in six weeks

   The Commonwealth Bank’s four-year, AUD$1.1 billion technology upgrade is starting to yield results, but the bank claims NFC tech industry standardisation is holding back progress. On the back of the bank’s latest celebrity-styled marketing push, the CBA unveiled the latest features for its NetBanking platform and mobile …

   Foxconn receives Apple smart TV order - report

   Shenzhen factory set for trial run

   The Apple ‘iTV’ rumour mill has gone into overdrive after the latest reports from China suggesting that Foxconn’s Shenzhen plant has received orders from Cupertino to build the much-hyped sets on a trial run. China’s First Financial Daily (via Sina) got the news from the obligatory un-named inside sources, although there was …

   Researchers find back door in milspec silicon

   Claim world's first finding of secret features in chips

   A pair of security researchers claim to have found a back door in a commercial field-programmable gate array (FPGA) marketed as a secure tool for military applications. The FPGA in question is the Actel ProASIC3, a device manufacturer MicroSEMI recommends for use in “portable, consumer, industrial, communications and medical …

2. Monday, 28 May 2012

   NSW gov orders two new green data centres

   Metronode creates 250 jobs

   Leighton Contractors' data centre specialist subsidiary, Metronode, has secured a AUS$182m contract with the New South Wales Government for the creation of two new data centres. The deal has an initial ten year term and will see more than 250 jobs created during the construction phase. Once deployed each data centre will be …

   Internode founder exits exec role amid reshuffles

   Gets seat on the iiNet board

   The executive team of South Australian ISP Internode has been reshuffled following iiNet’s AUD$105 million acquisition of the indie carrier. Founder and MD Simon Hackett has announced that he take leave of his executive role and join the iiNet board in August. Hackett who is also a significant iiNet shareholder said that the …

   Bye! Bye! Yahoo! Livestand!

   Mobile ‘personal media’ relevance app irrelevant

   Yahoo! Livestand has become a casualty of the Scott Thompson CV row, with new boss Ross Levinsohn killing off the company’s iPad “personal magazine” app. When it was launched, the mishmash application was supposed showcase Yahoo!’s C.O.R.E. (content optimization relevance engine) to assemble a user-preference-based newsreader …

   ACCC set to okay Optus HFC exit

   Monopoly concerns outweighed by consumer benefits, apparently

   Optus will exit the HFC business and pocket $AU800 million, if yesterday’s proposed determination from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission stands. The draft determination from the ACCC would allow Optus to pass its HFC customers to the National Broadband Network as it rolls out, and once the rollout is complete …

   Indonesia cleans up SMS

   Telcos spammed one other to harm service

   Indonesia has changed its telecommunications laws to ensure that the nation's mobile carriers pay for SMS messages sent to rivals. Indonesia's current regime is a “sender keeps all” arrangement whereby a mobile subscriber's carrier charges for a TXT, but the recipient's carrier (if different) doesn't get a single rupee. The …

   Scan co-jacking nets crooks '€40k in IT gear'

   Imposters lure recession-hit suppliers

   Crooks have masqueraded as buyers at web bazaar Scan to obtain goods from its suppliers by deception. The fraudsters bought a domain name similar to scan.co.uk, and crafted a counterfeit website and headed paper using the etailer's logo. Letters, complete with the correct VAT and company registration numbers, with orders for …

   Facebook needs Opera - to rescue it from dependence on Apple

   Analysis Fat lady barely starting a preliminary gargle, though

   Facebook is reported to be interested in buying Scandinavian browser company Opera Software. The facts are few, the sourcing criminally light, but the story arrives as Opera is also reported to have instituted a hiring freeze that some claim is a harbinger to putting itself up for sale. Both firms refused to comment on the …

   Dual-dock prototype iPad eyed on eBay

   Own a piece of history

   Some time back, an Apple was granted a patent which showed an iPad with two dock connectors, allowing the device to be docked in either landscape or portrait mode. It was claimed back then that Apple was planning to add the second dock connector to a second-generation iPad. It never did, of course, and it now turns out that …

   Complex cyberwar tool 'Flame' found ALL OVER Middle East

   20 times larger than Stuxnet, two years old... and still active

   A new super-cyberweapon targeting countries like Iran and Israel that has been knocking around in computers for two years has been discovered by researchers. "Flame", a highly sophisticated piece of malware, was unearthed by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and Kaspersky Lab, which said it was more complex and …

   Facebook phone tagged for 2013 release

   Off the wall

   The Facebook hardware rumour mill is in full spin again this week after reports suggest the social network is preparing its own smartphone for 2013. While there have already been numerous whispers that the company is planning to jointly develop handsets with HTC, the latest word on the matter suggests Facebook will go it alone …

   UK High Court split over Twitter airport bomb joke

   New hearing ordered to discuss fate of Paul Chambers after judges disagree

   A man who was convicted of posting a tasteless joke on Twitter about blowing up a UK airport is to have his case heard again. According to report today from New Statesman legal scribe David Allen Green – who is also representing Paul Chambers in the appeal – two judges in the Divisional Court of the High Court had failed agree …

   Hit upgrade on Symantec Backup Exec, and unleash Hell

   Irate users jet into company HQ for facemail criticism

   Backup Exec 2012 users are screaming in frustration over the "improvements" pushed out this year. Users were chatting on the Symantec Connect forum about the redesign, saying that it's more like a trip to the dentist after all. Here are just a few of the 228 comments on the forum: Bulbous: "Menus are now hidden behind other …

   Steve Jobs' Atari memo, Apple I to go under the hammer

   Bids for musings of 19-year-old pre-titan start at $10k

   Before Steve Jobs came up with the iPhone or even the Apple II, he designed paddles for ball-flipping games at Atari where the scruffy 19-year-old was employed to improve game design. Sotheby's New York will auction off a document dating from Jobs's time there: a 1974 report that Jobs wrote for his boss suggesting ways to …

   Agriboffins' site downed by DDoS after GM protest

   Hactivists may have been linked to Anonymous

   Agricultural research institute Rothamsted Research was pulled offline in a DDoS attack just hours after police stopped protestors destroying a GM crop trial at the facility. Rothamsted said that the site was down from Sunday afternoon until this morning after distributed denial of service attack. The cyber-strike came after …

   Renesas rumours: Semi seeks $1.3bn stimulus, stiffs 12,000

   Chip giant ducks mass redundancies claims

   Down-on-its-luck semiconductor biz Renesas Electronics announced today the first step of a rumoured restructuring plan that's believed to include 12,000 job cuts. Reports over the weekend suggested that Renesas could axe employees and look for a helping hand of up to ¥100bn ($1.3bn, £803m). The Japanese microcontroller maker …

   Crazy Geckos: Nitot on Mozilla's post-Firefox mobile crusade

   Open-source handset versus Android and Apple

   First came the BlackBerry, bringing the smartphones for suits perfected by RIM to consumers. Next came the iPhone, which quickly hoovered up 23 per cent of the market. But the iPhone came at a price: the freedom of users and coders. It is tightly controlled by Apple, as Adobe quickly found to its cost with Flash. Next up was …

   Microsoft will fiddle with prices as euro burns, UK biz fears

   Tumbling currency a nightmare for costing volume buying

   Microsoft's partners are braced for further changes in volume pricing this year as the euro flutters wildly in the economic storm. The Windows 8 maker tore up its licensing price list and rewrote it in euros for a 1 July Europe-wide relaunch. At the current exchange rate with the pound sterling, UK customers will pay on …

   Student cluster warriors to face off on new battlefield: ISC

   HPC blog Nearly THIRTY Chinese universities entered heat

   I’ve been following the annual SC Student Cluster Competition (SCC) for a few years now. It’s a great programme that pits teams of university undergrads against each other in the quest to design, build, and benchmark their own clustered systems. In the process they learn a lot about HPC, get a lot of exposure to the industry, …

   YouView reportedly set for 2500-home pre-Olympics trial

   Soft launch to justify deadline met claims?

   YouView, would IPTV world's answer to Freeview, may get a soft launch into 2500 homes before the start of the Olympic Games. The platform, backed by broadcasters the BBC and ITV, ISPs BT and TalkTalk, and broadcasting infrastructure owner Arqiva, is currently being tested in a hundred locations in London by YouView stakeholder …

   Facebook ninjas scale wall, pluck iPhone techies from Apple's garden

   Social network boosts hardware skills as Zuck mulls Facebook phone

   Facebook has apparently hired in more than six iPhone and iPad engineers who could well be the social network's team for a Facebook smartphone, the The New York Times reports. Facebook privately cherry-picked the Apple employees rather than posting jobs openly, say the NYT's unnamed sources. Over six hardware and software …

   Dell Windows 8 tablet, hybrid details leak

   United slates

   Dell's tablet plans for 2012 have slipped out, revealing a chunky Windows 8 slate and a tablet-laptop hybrid also set to run with Microsoft's tile-centric OS. A leaked company product slide shows the upcoming Dell Latitude 10 to be a dual-core tablet with a 10.1in, 1366 x 768 pixel display, Neowin reports. The Windows 8 …

   Phoenix restructure sends profits down in flames

   Salesforce distracted by overhaul

   Phoenix IT Group saw its wings decisively clipped over the last year, as a wide-ranging restructure battered profits and helped knock sales off-course in an already tough market. The services group insisted it was confident it will see revenue growth over the current year, but remained “cautious” about its likely performance …

   Self-driving Volvos cover 200km of busy Spanish motorway

   Real-world test for Project Sartre

   Three cars have successfully driven themselves by automatically following a lorry for 125 miles on a public motorway in the presence of other, normal road users. The real-world trial, conducted in Spain by Volvo and car automation specialist Ricardo, put technology created for Project Sartre (Safe Road Trains for the …

   Cloud migration: The applications killing season

   How to determine the business value of an app

   Moving applications to the cloud can help to tighten the efficiency of the IT department, but does that mean that every application should be moved? Software may have to be rewritten or at least reconfigured to function properly in the new environment, and it may not always be appropriate to invest the necessary time and money …

   Space Station crew enter the Dragon

   Pic Pop the hatch, get blast of 'new car smell'

   The crew of the International Space Station cracked open the hatch of the SpaceX Dragon cargoship to see what's inside - after the docked capsule was declared safe for them to step in. Don Pettit prepares to unload the SpaceX craft Astronauts Don Pettit and Oleg Kononenko entered the Dragon at 9.53am GMT on Saturday wearing …

   Sony KDL-55HX853 55in 3D LED TV

   Review Flagship Bravia with the Olympics in mind

   The 55inch KDL-HX853 is currently the highest ranked of Sony’s 2012 TVs. It heads up a new Spartan range from the brand intended to rebuild its TV fortunes. Interestingly, it doesn’t come laden with features seemingly pulled at random from a brainstorming session down the local Karaoke; which means it’s not competing directly …

   Virgin Media wipes out websites with routing blackhole

   'Issues which may cause issues' leave network 'virtually unusable' for days

   Virgin Media customers have been struggling to access websites via the telco's network for the past four days, after routing errors crippled the service. The ISP's punters have griped about the problem on VM's forums and various El Reg readers have been in touch to complain that they can't currently access their beloved tech …

   '6,000 RIM jobs at risk' of a pink slip

   Heins source claims layoffs as early as June

   BlackBerry maker Research In Motion is threatening to axe thousands of its workers, according to reports. The ailing mobe firm shed co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis in January after a slump in sales, and replaced the pair with Thorsten Heins. More recently, head of global sales Patrick Spence departed. According to …

   LG shows off 'first' full HD LCD for smartphones

   5in, 440dpi screen, anyone?

   And the latest entry in the 'how many pixels can we cram into a phone display' stakes comes from LG which today announced a 5in in-plan switching (IPS) LCD with a 1920 x 1080 resolution. It's the first full HD screen for a handset, LG claimed. Do the sums and that yields a pixel density of 440ppi. That's than enough to ensure …

   Free Windows 8 desktop app development is dead

   Metro or bust with Visual Studio 2011 Express

   The next free version of Microsoft’s Visual Studio programming suite won’t build normal Windows desktop apps, it has emerged. Visual Studio 2011 Express edition will only allow developers to build touchscreen-friendly programs for the new Windows 8 Metro UI, according to the software's product page here. Coders will have to …

   EU set to smack Chinese telcos over state subsidies

   Getting money off gov is not playing fair, kettle tells pot

   The European Trade Commission is all set to launch a massive case against Chinese firms Huawei and ZTE for allegedly dumping products on the EU market after allegedly benefiting from illegal state subsidies. The commission has told EU member states that it has hard evidence against the two telcos after working on the case for …

   Fusion-io stuffs workstation storage into bulging hand luggage

   HPC blog Dual-GPUs, 3GB/sec I/O and fits in overhead bin

   Fusion-io nabbed prime real estate on the GTC 2012 exhibit floor – right inside the entryway. They took advantage of it by offering a hosted oxygen bar, complete with an oxygen bartender and a wide selection of coloured/flavoured airs. I got the lowdown on their offerings (it's hospital grade oxygen – something I insist upon) …

   Disk-flash storage mix biz chief on the SSD situation

   Interview A NexGen view of flash

   EMC has confirmed a 3-layer enterprise flash cake composed of server cache, server-area Thunder array and SAN-attached Xtremio technology, but not a new design hybrid flash and disk drive array. Start-up NexGen has such an array. We asked NexGen founder and CEO John Spiers questions about his company's views on solid state …

   Jabra Clipper

   Geek Treat of the Week Discreet Bluetooth headset

   Jabra’s Clipper is a two-piece Bluetooth headset designed to be attached to clothing or a bag. The clip part houses the Bluetooth circuitry, controls, a micro USB socket for charging, and a 3.5mm audio jack. The other part is a standard set of stereo earbuds, though you’ll probably want to use your own. The controls on the …

   Why don't the best techies work in the channel?

   'Cos the channel doesn't want them

   I'm OK at Firewall One, but any number of people reading this are better, completing the tasks 10 times more quickly and screwing up 10 times less often. But I'm a better employee than you are. Firstly, a consultancy or reseller is going to be selling me by time, methodically setting up firewall rules taking a day is more …

   TalkTalk subsidiary's customer data placed on the web in IIS whoopsie

   Updated Called TalkTalk, not ListenListen

   Greystone Telecom, adopted child of TalkTalk and provider of telecommunications to the business community, is unwittingly sharing customer and contract details with the world: but TalkTalk doesn't care. The details include customer and contract prices, copies of sales orders and spreadsheets showing how things are going at the …

   New Brit nano-satellite to use Xbox Kinect for docking in space

   Consumer kit really is more powerful than trad space gear

   Boffins at Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL) have come up with a second zany satellite in their STRaND line, which will use Xbox Kinect technology to hook up with another satellite in space. Bits and pieces of the STRaND-1 nanosatellite STRaND, or Surrey Training Research and Nanosatellite Development, is the company's …

   Ex-Nokia Siemens engineer admits eBaying nicked routers

   Cash-strapped dad in court for Wi-Fi kit theft

   A hard-up ex-engineer at Nokia Siemens swiped wireless routers worth thousands of pounds from his employer to refurbish and flog on eBay. Dewaldt Hermann, 33, appeared at Swindon Crown Court to admit he was behind a spate of thefts some months after he started work at the firm, Newbury Today reports. Tessa Hingston, …

   Foxconn to create workers' paradise?

   Report suggests 144 per cent pay rise on the way

   Foxconn plans to double the minimum wage of its mainland China workers by 2013 as part of a renewed attempt to soften the image of the ultra-secretive company, says Taiwanese site Want Daily. The outlet reports that Foxconn president and chairman Terry Gou said he wanted the firm’s Chinese workers paid at least 4,400 yuan (£ …

   Hands on with Nokia's 808 41Mp camphone

   First look Lumia 610 too

   If a company needed some luck right now, then Nokia would certainly fit the bill. Having partnered with Microsoft to deliver a new range of smartphones based on Windows Phone 7, it consequently shares a platform with the likes of HTC and Samsung. Still, Nokia is thinking lucky because it reckons it can deliver services on …

   Biz social networking set for take-off

   Asia Pac leading the rush to work smarter

   The market for enterprise social media and Web 2.0 tools is growing by over 20 per cent a year and will top $126m (£80m) by 2017 as firms look for better ways to collaborate and manage content across Asia Pacific, according to a new report from Frost & Sullivan. The analyst’s Enterprise Social Media and Web 2.0 Market 2010 …

   China claims piracy at new low

   Wait a minute, how low?

   The rate of software piracy in China dropped to just 38 per cent in 2011, according to new government-backed figures that are markedly different to those from the Business Software Alliance (BSA), which recently branded the country the world's worst offender. State-run newspaper China Daily proudly reported the figures, which …

   Acronis loses Australian General Manager

   Interviews under way for replacement, steady as she goes etc.

   Backup software vendor Acronis has lost its General Manager for Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific. Karl Sice left the company in May to take up a new position as Head of Sales and IT Solutions at online stationer Staples. Acronis confirmed Sice's departure to The Register and said interviews for a replacement have …

   ITU adopts two ultra-high def TV specs

   4K and 8K both get UHDTV moniker

   The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has “agreed a draft new Recommendation on the technical details for ‘Ultra High Definition Television’,” but has decided that both 3840x2160 tellies, and future 7680 x4320 screens, both get the name UHDTV. You'd think the ITU would have learned from global confusion around just …

   Bandwidth broker to light up dark nets

   Mobsource adds "network as a service" to the "x-aas" lexicon

   A new global bandwidth exchange and trading platform targeting the growth in cloud based services and leveraging a global bandwidth glut has been launched by an Australian telecommunications executive. Globally launched earlier this month at International Telecoms Week in Chicago, Mobsource.com now has between US$10 -20 …

   Trekkie wants to build USS Enterprise … in twenty years

   Suggests open source design process to get spaceship boldly going

   A US Star Trek fan has launched an online project aimed at building a working replica of the USS Enterprise … in twenty years. “BTE Dan”, as the fan identifies himself at the buildtheenterprise.org site, says he's tired of stagnation in the world's space programs and feels that shooting for an iconic project like building a …

   'Biocoal' fuels steam train comeback

   Uni of Minnesota steampunks plot loco speed record

   Trainspotters who find the homogenized world of modern locos a bit dull could soon be celebrating the return of steam, if all goes well in a University of Minnesota study. The university, along with Sustainable Rail International, are to restore a 1930s locomotive – 3463, a 4-6-4 Hudson-type loco built by Baldwin that’s spent …

   Big Blue supers crunch kaon decay

   Massive machines probe matter mystery

   Looking at the fundamental properties of matter can take some serious computing grunt. Take the calculation needed to help understand kaon decay – a subatomic particle interaction that helps explain why the universe is made of matter rather than anti-matter: it soaked up 54 million processor hours on Argonne National …

3. Sunday, 27 May 2012

   Short-lived backhaul declaration better, says Voda

   ‘Don’t lock in long-term price’, carrier tells ACCC

   Vodafone is warning the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) against setting backhaul service prices too far into the future, saying that an early review would be better for the industry than a long-term lock-in. The carrier’s latest submission to the competition regulator’s draft FAD (That's a 'final access …

   YouTube takes on Instagram with 'Frontrow'

   Global launch at Sydney Opera House's Vivid Festival

   YouTube has unleashed an app which takes it into Instagram territory, in the form of an Australian-devised app called Frontrow which has made its debut at the Vivid LIVE festival at the Sydney Opera House. “For the first time, audiences around the globe will be able to watch select performances live on YouTube, and share the …

   TiVo spits out monster 6-way Pace box for US eyes only

   Probably commissioned by mega US cable corp

   The fact that the very first product out of the relationship between TiVo and Pace is a six-tuner device means automatically that it‘s for use in the US – nowhere else has that kind of requirement yet. But in the US six tuners is becoming a requirement, and the TiVo Premiere being delivered at cable TV giant RCN already has …

   People-powered Olympic shopping mall: A sign of utter tech illiteracy

   Comment If anyone knew what was Watt, this would never happen

   It's just about certain, now: Almost everybody in the world has no idea of the most basic facts regarding energy use. Most people don't even know that the words "energy" and "power" have different meanings1, and just about everyone is so massively ignorant on the subject that they actually consider that the use of special floor …

4. Saturday, 26 May 2012

   Cisco Cius sees us no more

   Businesses want consumer tablets

   Cius tablet Cisco is pulling back from its Cius tablet computer and all but abandoning it. OJ Winge, the SVP of TelePresence Technology at Cisco, has blogged that the Android-powered Cius is heading towards the exit because employees of its business customers are bringing their own, consumer-style, devices to the office; …

   UK cookie law compliance takes effect today

   Web operators, put down your BBQ forks! The ePrivacy Directive is here

   From today the UK's Information Commissioner's Office will begin enforcing the EU's revised ePrivacy Directive that requires website owners to be upfront with their users about the information they collect. The so-called cookie law was implemented on 25 May 2011 by Brussels officials, but getting the legislation transposed …

   Ten... tablet survival accessories

   Product Roundup Handy add-ons for your fondleslab

   We like tablets. Way more portable than most laptops - even netbooks - they're nevertheless no less functional. Notebooks clearly have the edge when it comes to outright performance, but you can get a lot done with a fondleslab - and that's before you think about them as entertainment centres. But, like all technology …

5. Friday, 25 May 2012

   South Africa and Australia to share SKA

   Africa to be main site for giant radio telescope

   The square kilometre array (SKA) will be shared between Australia and South Africa. The colossal radio telescope was the subject of bids from both nations, each of which hoped to secure the rights to host hundreds of radio telescopes with a combined surface area of one square kilometre. The SKA Committee decided on Friday, …

   MySQL's growing NoSQL problem

   Open ... and Shut Web application payback

   Just a few short years ago, MySQL was the undisputed king of the open-source database hill. But with the NoSQL market emerging at an 82 per cent compound annual growth rate (CAGR), it's looking like MySQL may get bulldozed by its NoSQL peers. While this shift toward NoSQL provides an interesting commentary on where the …

   NetApp's Cloud Czar predicts the death of VMAX

   Tier 1 is old-school, says CTO

   Blocks and Files NetApp's CTO of cloud is predicting the death of EMC's VMAX and other tier 1 storage arrays. What will kick them off the data centre stage? Flash arrays and storage-class memory, apparently. Val Bercovici, NetApp's "Big Data and Cloud Czar", sees basically two storage tiers in the now not-so-distant future: …

   US mayor and son charged with hacking into opposition site

   We'd rather be fending off global cyberwar, sniff Feds

   A small town US mayor and his son have been arrested over allegations they hacked into a website calling for his recall. Dr Felix Roque, 55, the mayor of West New York, New Jersey, and Joseph Roque, 22, of Passaic County, allegedly hacked into recallroque.com and illegally accessed e-mails in February. Joseph Roque is accused …

   Steve Jobs' death clears way for vibrating Apple tool

   Actually he was alive when patent was submitted, but still a surprise

   Steve Jobs famously hated the idea of styluses on tablet computers. But, er, it looks like Apple is thinking about making one given the revelations from the US Patent Office yesterday. The Patent Office has published two pending patent applications from Apple relating to styluses that would work with iPad and iPhone: the first …

   Dell may fatten up software offering by swallowing Quest

   VC deal has only just been done

   Dell could be looking to buy Quest Software, according to reports. Bloomberg cites informed sources and says Dell tried to buy Quest when the software company agreed in March this year to go private and be bought by InSight Venture Partners for around $2bn. That transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of this …

   Hackers threaten fresh wave of anti-capitalist web rioting

   Sticking it to The Man, man, but for lulz too

   A new activist group is drumming up recruits for a cyberwar campaign against corporate giants due to launch on Friday, 25 May. TheWikiBoat intends to hit a high profile list of more than 40 multinationals - including BT, Best Buy, Tesco, McDonald's, Wal-Mart and Apple - with denial of service attacks as well as attempts to …

   Tim Cook spurns $75m Apple divvy

   Can't be bothered carrying small change

   At a time when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is coming under flak for his personal gains from Facebook shares, Tim Cook has turned down a $75 million dividend on his Apple shares. It's the first time since Steve Jobs took over in 1997 that Apple are issuing shareholder dividends. And Cook has offered to forgo the dividends due …

   IBM bans Dropbox, Siri and rival cloud tech at work

   BYOD doesn't save cash, leaves Big Blue with security headache

   IBM has banned employees from using Dropbox and Apple's iCloud at work as it claws back permission to use third-party cloud services. The rethink has also resulted in a edict against the iPhone 4S's Siri voice recognition technology at Big Blue. Jeanette Horan, IBM’s chief information officer, told MIT's Technology Review that …

   Microsoft corrects itself: 'We expect fewer people to use Windows 8'

   El Reg drills into Ballmer's '500 million by 2013' figure

   Microsoft doesn’t really expect that 500 million "users" will have Windows 8 next year, but it’s still juggling the numbers. The company has said reported comments by chief executive Steve Ballmer on Windows 8 uptake in 2013 are a "restatement of data" by a company employee in December 2011, and that these stats relate to …

   Absinthe 2 lifts iOS 5.1.1 gadgets over garden wall

   Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak

   iDevice jailbreakers: you can now take almost all of Apple's iOS 5.1.1 gadgets out of the walled garden, thanks to hacking tool Absinthe 2.0, released today. The jailbreak software, which only works with iOS 5.1.1 - past versions of the mobile operating system have working jailbreaks already - and will open any iPhone, the …

   Man's car warns of AIR RAID OVER LONDON

   Pic Reg reader narrowly escapes Kensington-Chiswick warzone

   Reg reader Graham Schofield was this morning offered perhaps the most sensational reason for being late to work we've ever seen: an air raid affecting the A4 in west London. Mercifully for Graham, his Audi's satnav flagged up the conflagration before he got caught in the crossfire resulting from what we assume is a serious …

   SpaceX joy as Space Station robo-arm grabs Dragon's tail

   Elon Musk's team makes history, astronaut has cheesy line ready

   Elon Musk's SpaceX has just made history with the first ever commercial cargoship to be captured by the International Space Station's robotic arm. ISS captures the Dragon. Credit: NASA TV Flying above northwestern Australia, flight engineer Don Pettit aboard the ISS reached out with the Canadarm and grabbed the Dragon at 9. …

   Ten... Star Wars videogame classics

   Round-up 35 years, six movies, 120 games

   Star Wars - there was no 'A New Hope' or 'Episode IV' back then - shot onto cinema screens on 25 May 1977, which means the franchise celebrates its 35th birthday today. A day for celebration, then, that might be enough of an excuse for you to revisit our Star Wars gift guide and snap up some Tatooine tat, much to the dismay of …

   Toshiba America says no to new netbooks

   Want a small laptop? Get an Ultrabook

   Another sure sign the netbook's day is done: Toshiba's US wing has confirmed it will no longer offer new versions of the laptop-lite machines. Wondering where the heck the Intel Atom N2600-based Toshiba NB510 had got to, US netbook site Liliputing asked the company when the Cedar Trail machine might be expected to arrive …

   Dell's past glories might be working against it

   To be like HP? Or not to be like HP? And what's with the silence on channel?

   Dell's Q1 earnings call this saw the one-time bete noire of traditional IT suppliers undershoot expectations, and admit that it was walking away from business where it couldn't compete and where it was having trouble closing "transactional" business. It also virtually bypassed the question of the channel. The fact that it was …

   Dragon starts final approach to International Space Station

   Rendezvous sensors need last-minute tweak, but SpaceX is a go

   The SpaceX Dragon is still approaching the International Space Station and on course, with a few minor delays. Snapshot of the Dragon on final approach. Credit: NASA TV At the moment, NASA is projecting a grapple time – when the ISS's robotic arm Canadarm will reach out and grab the Dragon – of 10.02am EDT, or 15.02 BST, …

   Fujitsu, TalkTalk bag Post Office contract spurned by BT

   Broadband platform manoeuvres for snail mail outfit

   Fujitsu and its strategic partner TalkTalk have won a contract that could be worth £500m to supply a broadband network to the Post Office. BT had been the Post Office's previous provider, having inked a four-year deal in May 2007 with the national telco's wholesale wing supplying kit and customer support to make the national …

   Barclays Online Offline again

   You can take it to the bank. In fact you'll have to

   Barclays Online banking has suffered its second weekday working-hours outage in a matter of days, offering only intermittent service for most of this morning according to Register readers and throwing a complete double-six at lunchtime today. "Live Help" folk on the Barclays site noted that: "We are aware that our online …

   'We're public now, so could you please click on an ad or two'

   Quotw Plus: 'Disaster for Apple!'

   This was the week when Facebook stocks took an early drubbing in the market before recovering somewhat to a more stable, albeit reduced, price. The social network wasn't able to find its feet in time to stop a slew of lawsuits from disgruntled investors who jointly and severally blame Facebook, Zuckerberg, the IPO underwriting …

   Passwords are for AES-holes

   Something for the Weekend, Sir? Security is an illusion

   When did you reach burnout? For me, it was spring 2009. Looking back, I did well to last as long as I did but the constant pressure of coming up with something new, again and again, became too much. I'm not confessing to an emotional crisis, by the way. I'm talking about my ability to create new system logins that I can …

   Dixons keeps wolves from the revolving credit facility door

   Can bricks-and-mortar houses resist lupine halitosis forever?

   Dixons Retail has inked a £300m revolving credit facility with its financial backers that should ease the cash flow of Blighty's largest retailer. The deal extends Dixons current facility, which was due to mature next year, until the end of June 2015. Sources say this will provide short term guarantees that should keep the …

   How to keep your money safe if the euro implodes

   A Channel Reg cut-and-keep guide...

   This is your handy guide to surviving the coming disintegration of the euro. Umm, OK, the coming possible, maybe even likely, disintegration of the euro. The current betting from the major banks is that there's a 50 to 75 per cent chance that Greece will leave before the year end. There's at least one Nobel Laureate who thinks …

   EU beaks to rule on Microsoft's $1.1bn fine appeal in June

   Redmond challenged record antitrust punishment

   On 27 June, Microsoft will find out whether its appeal against a record antitrust penalty has been successful in the EU's General Court. In February 2008, the European Commission added another €899m ($1.13bn) to the fine Microsoft was expected to pay for failing to comply with an original antitrust ruling in 2004. The second …

   Vatican in pact with Microsoft to initiate world's youths into Office

   None might buy or sell save with the Number of the Beast ... which is 365

   The Vatican has blessed Microsoft's cloud apps strategy in the shape of deal that could see Office 365 being rolled out to 43 million Catholic students worldwide. The secretive and highly conservative organisation, condemned by some as the Anti-Christ, will initially provide the software suite to 4.5 million students via the …

   Ex-Lloyds bank digital security chief 'submitted £2.5m in false exes'

   Head of Fraud, indeed

   A former Lloyds Banking Group head of digital banking fraud and security has been charged with defrauding her employer. Prosecutors said that Jessica Harper had submitted false expenses claims that totalled £2.46m. The Crown Prosecution Service's deputy head of the central fraud group, Andrew Penhale, said in a statement: …

   Max Payne 3

   Review Time to kill

   With a tip of the hat to director John Woo and The Matrix, Remedy Entertainment's Max Payne wowed the gaming world in 2001 with its unique slow-mo shooting action. And since Max Payne 2 appeared in 2003, I've been holding my breath in anticipation of the third in the series. Squintessential character Although with Rockstar …

   London picked as test bed for Skynet-like Intel tech

   New UK lab pledged to study citizens in real-time

   London will be a guinea pig for future smart city technology after Intel pledged to spend a slice of £25m ($40m) on a new lab in the capital. The chipmaker will also plough millions into research centres dotted around Blighty. Intel will set up the unwieldily monikered Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable Connected …

   Instagram-owner Facebook emits in-house camera app

   And yes, it has colour filters

   Facebook has launched a new Instagram-like mobile camera app via Apple's iTunes store. The social network, which inelegantly plonked itself on the Nasdaq a week ago, said in April that it planned to buy photo-sharing startup Instagram in a $1bn cash-and-stock deal. Observers considered the proposed buyout of that app to be a …

   And the worst film NEVER made is...

   Poll result Drumroll, please

   Well, ladies and gentlemen, the time has come to announce the winner of our reader poll to select the worst film never made. And the winner is... Yes indeed, the nightmarish prospect of Eddie Murphy as Jar-Jar Binks swung the popular vote, with The Phantom Menace: The Musical securing 380 thumbs-up. For inflicting this …

   Crazy Texans dunk servers in DEEP FRYERS

   HPC blog | Vid Will 2012 be the year of immersive mineral oil cooling?

   I first met the Green Revolution guys back at SC09 in Portland, Oregon. As I roamed the exhibit hall, people kept telling me to check out “those guys with the deep fryers full of servers”. At last I found them out in the lobby, which is the kids’ table section of the show. Above is a quick video of their demo that I shot …

   Big Blue flaunts scantily clad Xeon E3, E5 racks

   Pics Disrobed servers give Dell an eyeful in 4-socket arena

   Like all the other tier one server makers, IBM is ramping up shipments on the next wave of Xeon chips from Intel inside of its System x, BladeCenter, and Flex System machinery. Big Blue says the new machines will help fill in some gaps in its x86 system lineup, which previously had been exploited by rivals Hewlett-Packard and …

   Aga cooks up phone-controlled 'iOven'

   Stove jobs

   Aga, oven maker by appointment to the rural chattering classes, has turned up the heat of technology on famously basic ranges to create the iTotal Control Oven, a stove equipped with a cellular modem to allow chefs to command their cooker remotely. The iTotal Control Oven not only connects to the web, but its built-in Sim, …

   Diablo III dev rolls 12d6, scores PC sales record

   Trebles and Skillrunes all round

   Diablo III has become the fastest selling PC game of all time, publisher Blizzard has claimed, after shifting 3.5m copies within 24 hours of release. Despite a few niggling problems with the game - which Blizzard is readying a patch for, it said - Diablo III hit shelves last week and was snapped up by record numbers of PC …

   Silicon Roundabout touts startup jobs for 'ninjas' this weekend

   800 tech roles from 100 companies... and FREE coffee

   Got your own nunchuks? Spent a day learning HTML? Get down to Shoreditch's Silicon Roundabout this weekend and get yourself a job at a startup. A waged job. Silicon MilkRoundabout, the hiring fair for startups, hits London this weekend, and 800 jobs are going at over 100 of the "top tech startups in the UK", according to the …

   Spring tech sales bloom as Brits grab tablets

   E-book readers, media streamers too

   It won't surprise anyone to learn that Brits are buying more tablets than ever before, but they're increasingly keen on e-book readers and set-top media players too. So the latest UK retail over-the-counter sales figures from market watcher GfK, covering April 2012, reveal. Year on year, tablet unit sales were up 214.2 per …

   Belkin YourType Folio

   Accessory of the Week Laptop conversion kit

   There’s no shortage of iPad keyboard cases to choose from, but this one from Belkin, designed for the new iPad, has a neat trick up its sleeve: the keyboard is detachable, held in place by Velcro. That might not sound like a big deal, but it allows you to vary both the angle of the iPad’s screen and the distance between …

   Facebookers trigger vote to choke Zuck's data suck

   50,000 punters sound off on privacy policy rewrite

   Facebook may be forced to make changes to its data use policy after campaigners helped drive enough complaints about the company's own proposed amendments to trigger a user vote on the matter. Under Facebook's 'Statement of Rights and Responsibilities' the company is obliged to allow its users to vote on alternatives the …

   Hefty Euro reseller: 'We laugh in the face of recession. Ha ha'

   Specialist Computer Holdings sees sales and profits rise

   Specialist Computer Holdings (SCH) tweaked the nose of the recession to record double-digit sales and profit rises in fiscal 2012 ended March. According to unaudited numbers seen by El Reg, the Midlands-based parent of reseller SCC and distie group SDG grew turnover 10 per cent to more than £2.75bn and operating profits by 50 …

   Huawei mimics Nokia Siemens Networks marketing

   Plagiarism or total coincidence?

   Nokia Siemens Networks has pointed out close similarities between its marketing material and Huawei's. “Rarely does a competitor turn out to be your biggest fan. But that’s the only conclusion that can be drawn from the ringing endorsement of how we market our consulting by Chinese company Huawei,” says a Nokia Siemens …

   Mega 12ft interactive electro-whiteboard lures GTC12 punters

   HPC blog Uses crunchy Nvidia graphics cards

   While wandering the exhibit floor at GTC12, my attention was captured by what looked like a massive (12ft x 4ft, 3.66m x 1.22m) electronic whiteboard with fast-moving screens portraying information in lots of different forms. Each window was being created, resized, moved, then closed at high speed without lag or distracting …

   NMap 6.0 arrives

   Fyodor’s finest since 2009

   Popular open source network discovery and security auditing tool Nmap has reached version 6.0. The new code hit the Net last Monday, complete with a message from coder Gordon Lyon, aka Fyodor, that the new version represents “almost three years of work, 3,924 code commits, and more than a dozen point releases since the big …

   NHS axes HealthSpace: 'Just too difficult' to use

   Secure personal health record project canned from March 2013

   The Department of Health has confirmed that HealthSpace, NHS patients' personal health records organiser, will close by March 2013. It follows a speech this week by Dr Charles Gutteridge, national clinical director for informatics at the Department of Health, at the Westminister Health Forum in London. Gutteridge said in the …

   Real Networks will refund $2m to grumpy punters

   Fesses up to 'disappointing' customers with pre-clicked boxes for 'free' trials

   Real Networks has agreed to hand over US$2.0m to satisfy disgruntled customers, who were railroaded into buying content thanks to pre-clicked boxes in web forms or “free” offers that nonetheless requested credit card details and did not make recurring costs plain. Consumers who, upon realising their error, requested refunds, …

   Nokia and Symbian still number one in China

   Most users still on legacy platforms and feature phones

   Android may have an insurmountable lead in the Chinese smartphone market, but when it comes to internet-connected mobiles Symbian and Nokia are still number one according to new stats from search giant Baidu. The company’s latest quarterly Mobile Internet Development Trends Report for Q1 2012 measured only internet-connected …

   Queensland Police warn of tax refund phishing

   Fake email mimics Australian Taxation Office formats

   Queensland Police are warning residents of the Sunshine State about a new phishing scam that sees emails arrive in Australian Taxation Office (ATO) livery, complete with promise of a refund. Such emails are, we imagine here in El RegM’s antipodean eyrie, probably the only email one really wants to open from the ATO. …

   HTC One V Android smartphone

   Review High five?

   In the beginning was the Hero and then came the Legend, and now the Legend has sired the One V. Yes, the V is the runt of the One litter but its forebears had a solid following and, as a one-time Hero owner, I’m hoping the bloodline is in good health. Another one: HTC's One V With the One V, HTC’s design has reached its …

   Police cuff hundreds in £7.3 MILLION phone scam

   Two plane-loads of crooks flown to China, amid suspicions of high-level Police corruption

   Police across South East Asia have swooped on an international telephone fraud gang, arresting over 480 people in eight countries after an investigation lasting six months. The alleged gang members, most of whom are Chinese and Taiwanese, are suspected of conning their victims out of 73 million yuan (£7.3m), according to a …

   Google's 7in tablet stalled for last-minute tweaks

   Asus-built device now rumoured for July release

   Google fans eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Chocolate Factory’s much-hyped 7in tablet are going to have to wait a little longer after reports suggested it wouldn’t hit the stores until July. Taiwanese news site Digitimes got the tip from “sources from the upstream supply chain”, who said shipments of the first 600,000 …

   Sunshine nudges asteroid into odd orbit

   NASA spots drift in 1999 RQ36

   New NASA measurements of the orbit of the half-kilometer asteroid 1999 RQ36 have given space science its most precise measurement of such space rocks' orbit – and revealed a 160km deviation from the orbit predicted by gravity. The drift, which showed up by comparing observations made in 1999, 2005, and September 2011, is due …

6. Thursday, 24 May 2012

   Singtel to build pan-Asian storage and compute cloud

   VMware in the box seat in Oz, Singapore and Hong Kong

   Singtel will federate its hosting facilities across Asia to create a single cloud for its customers. The company appears not to be taking the full public cloud plunge, announcing yesterday that it will “launch a regional PowerON Compute cloud service in the second half of this year.“ The new offering “will enable customers …

   Motorola Mobility loses to Microsoft in German patent battle

   All your long texts are belong to Redmond

   Motorola Mobility has suffered another blow in Europe, with a German court deciding it’s breached Microsoft patents. Already under EU investigation for allegedly reneging on its FRAND responsibilities, Motorola Mobility has been found to be infringing Redmond’s IP by allowing users of its mobile phones to send long text …

   Australian government kicks off IT price discrimination inquiry

   ‘Oz tax’ under scrutiny

   The infamous practice of adding a price premium to tech products imported into Australia is now under the scrutiny of a parliamentary committee, with submissions open until 6 July, 2012. If vendors bother to respond at all – in his letter establishing the inquiry, Senator Stephen Conroy notes (PDF) that the tech sector was …

   Fantasy cabal sells off novel-as-app platform

   Neal Stephenson’s Subutai splits into content and publishing software companies

   Subutai Corporation, the brainchild of Neal Stephenson, has sold its Personal Ubiquitous Literature Platform (PULP) to a company called Brainstem Media. Brainstem is founded and run by the PULP’s developers. PULP was developed to deliver chapters of a serialised novel to an iOS and Android app. The novel in question, The …

   China's home grown mobile platforms drive smartphone growth

   Xiaomi's Android-based MIUI hailed as Apple rival

   The trend among domestic Chinese mobile players to build their own, highly localised, operating systems based on Android, is set to drive additional revenue and push smartphone adoption to a tipping point in 2013, but many efforts are likely to be short-lived, according to IDC. The trend for hyper-local Androids can be …

   How zombie LulzSec exposed privates' love lives with PHP hack

   Single soldiers site swallowed surprise load

   A dating website for US soldiers was hacked and its database leaked after it blindly trusted user-submitted files, according to an analysis by security firm Imperva. The report highlights the danger of handling documents uploaded to web apps. "LulzSec Reborn" hacktivists attacked MilitarySingles.com and disclosed sensitive …

   Bigger, longer deals dangled at G-Cloud 2.0 launch

   UK.gov buffs incentives in revamped tech bazaar

   The UK government has launched the second version of G-Cloud, its tech shopping catalogue for the public sector, with reworked conditions to entice suppliers. Among the changes, the length of some IT contracts up for grabs has been doubled to 24 months under “exceptional” circumstances. There’d been some concern from civil …

   Unions urge under-fire HP workers to 'resist' job cuts

   Attempts to protect 1,600 UK staff ... not including Lynch

   Unite and the Public Services Commercial (PCS) unions will form a tag team to "use every means possible" to safeguard the jobs of 1,600 HP UK employees under risk of redundancy. The tech monster revealed late last night that it is hitting the eject button for 27,000 workers worldwide – including Autonomy founder Mike Lynch – …

   Top Facebook exec begs students: 'Click on an ad or two'

   Keep Zuck's shareholders happy... please

   Now that Facebook is being scrutinised by its new-found shareholders, it really needs people to start clicking on its ads. That's a fact shamelessly highlighted by Mark Zuckerberg's right-hand woman, chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, who was speaking to business students at Harvard University this morning. According to …

   Cookies on The Register

   The cookies we set and why

   This website is owned and operated by Situation Publishing. When someone visits www.theregister.co.uk / www.reghardware.com / www.channelregister.co.uk we collect standard internet log information and details of visitor behaviour patterns. We do this to find out things such as the number of visitors to the various parts of the …

   Google to bring Raspberry Pi to Bash Street

   Computers for kids

   Google is to indirectly equip 102 UK schools with Raspberry Pi devices. The ZX81 de nos jours - though Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, who announced the scheme last night, likened the Pi to the more education-centric, posher BBC Micro - will come to schools through UK charity Teach First. Google and Teach First will …

   Mars rover Opportunity spots WALL-E in crater ramble

   Pic Me and my shadow

   NASA's Mars rover Opportunity snapped a dramatic photo of itself roaming around the planet's Endeavour Crater today. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ The image caught the clear shadow of the hardworking robot, which to our wise eyes on the Vulture space desk looks a bit like the cute movie character …

   EMC denies big server biz plans ... but IS building servers

   Embedded ones, true, but what's wrong with off-the-shelf hardness?

   EMC has always maintained that it is not is in the server business, but now it is developing servers – albeit to go into its arrays and run application software inside VM containers. At EMC World in Las Vegas, the company once again strongly refuted suggestions that it was entering the general server business. In fact, it is …

   Fake Angry Birds app makers fined £50k for shock cash suck

   Making money-grabbing malware is too easy on Android, say experts

   A firm that disguised Android malware as Angry Birds games has been fined £50,000 ($78,300) by UK premium-rate service regulator PhonepayPlus. A1 Agregator posted mobile apps posing as smash-hit games, including Cut the Rope, on Android marketplaces and other outlets. Rather than offer free entertainment, the software silently …

   Moshi Monsters pushed onto pint-sized kiddies' mobes

   Under-10s' social network spreads

   Monstro city, the social network frequented by all the coolest kids in the playground, is going mobile and has signed a deal with Gree to deploy at least two games on that platform. UK-based Moshi Monsters is school-yard flavour of the month right now, boasting collectable figurines and a social gaming network which makes …

   Sysadmins: Chucked your Exchange servers up? Let's enable SSO

   Sysadmin blog Keeping things simple for the users...

   My previous article focused on migrating Exchange into Microsoft's cloud, but there is more to Office 365 than just Exchange. Single Sign On (SSO) between Office 365 and your local Microsoft domain can be a bit tricky. A proper implementation has high minimum requirements, and there are very good arguments against cutting …

   NetApp streaks ahead, avoids trip-up by bum flash leg

   Don't want to be an all-flash also-ran

   NetApp is a veritable money machine these days, and is currently clocking in growing fourth quarter and annual results, but a blip may have appeared on the horizon as it searches for a way to bolster its flash offering. The tech giant has signalled it is going to both partner up to expand on flash technology and work on a few in …

   Met cops get new pocket-sized fingerprint scanners

   Mobile print-takers identify perps in seconds

   Met bobbies will soon be able to scan suspects' fingerprints on the street and pull up their records in seconds using internet-connected handheld gadgets. London's top cops ordered 350 phone-size devices, which will be used to run identity checks on anyone believed to have committed an offence or potentially wanted for a crime …

   Pipex 'silence' condemned punters' emails to spam blackhole

   Analysis ISP blocked for a week after 'ignoring' complaints

   Pipex subscribers struggled to send emails for several days after antivirus biz Trend Micro declared the ISP's network a source of spam. Messages sent via Pipex's servers were either blocked or deliberately delayed by internet providers and businesses that rely on Trend Micro's services to filter emails. El Reg stepped in to …

   How I went from Unix engineering to flogging Google apps

   My 25 years of comical IT buzzwords

   When I started work as a Unix software engineer at Logica nearly 30 years ago, we were on the cusp of a revolution in IT. IBM was top dog in tech and Digital Equipment Corporation was the world's second-largest IT company. The other major players were the BUNCH companies: Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data Corporation and …

   New smart meter tells Brits exactly what they already know

   Live 'leccy stats from the cloud to save 'millions'

   We're all going to be much richer thanks to British Gas, which will push kit from Cambridge startup AlertMe into 10,000 homes this summer. The rollout will reach the rest of the energy giant's ten million customers in the autumn. Not that AlertMe is guaranteed to be supplying all the kit, which will integrate with smart meters …

   SpaceX does what it HASN'T done before: Dragon in close ISS flyby

   Station 'nauts see light on but no one home on capsule

   It's another moment of truth for upstart space startup SpaceX as once again the company attempts to do something that has only ever been accomplished to date by major government space agencies: docking one spacecraft to another in orbit and transferring cargo. First time a US spacecraft has been seen from this vantage since …

   Reg readers love Private Cloud (true)

   Playing the SLA long game

   When IT is your day job it is easy to lose sight of why you are doing it. Alright, it’s to pay the bills, fund your next holiday, buy nice stuff and so on. But from the point of view of whoever is paying your salary, the point is to enable and add value to the business. You and your colleagues in the IT department are there to …

   Attack of the clones: Researcher pwns SecureID token system

   Analysis But RSA claims it would only work on rootkit-compromised gear

   RSA Security has downplayed the significance of an attack that offers a potential way to clone its SecurID software tokens. The attack, developed by Behrang Fouladi, senior security analyst at SensePost, offers a potential way to defeat the hardware binding and copy protection embedded in RSA's software. Having defeated this …

   Zombies, Run!

   iOS App of the Week Exercise motivate-urgh, urgh

   There are dozens of apps aimed at joggers that can plot a route for you, and measure your speed, progress and calories burned. Yet none of them deal with the fundamental fact that jogging is the most boring form of exercise known to humanity. Zombies, Run! attempts to add a bit of fun to your pavement pounding by involving you …

   Toshiba swaps skinny Android tablet's CPU

   OMAP out, Tegra 3 in

   Toshiba has taken its very thin AT200 tablet, ripped out the 1.2GHz Texas Instruments OMAP 4430 CPU and flung in an Nvidia Tegra 3 penta-core processor instead. The result is the AT300, launched today. It's a 10.1in, 1280 x 800 job running Android 4 Ice Cream Sandwich. There's 1GB of Ram on board and a choice of 16GB or 32GB …

   Google quizzed AGAIN by French data watchdog

   CNIL unhappy with previous answers on privacy

   French data regulator Commission Nationale de l'Informatique (CNIL) has demanded more answers from Google over its handling of the data of its users. The watchdog said it was unhappy with Google's initial response to a 69 questions it submitted to Mountain View earlier this year, following the companies decision to cut and …

   Biz law reform: Bad news for lawyers, good news for hippies

   Eco-tech funds in, tribunals out in draft bill

   Vince Cable presented his new Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill to Parliament on Wednesday afternoon, promising more action on competition, streamlined employment tribunals and a £3bn Green Bank that will funnel cash into eco-friendly energy and tech industries. The proposed changes to employment law will encourage work- …

   LG pitches £7k 55in OLED TV, again

   Thin telly requires fat wallet

   LG showed off its 55in OLED TV at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January, and despite demo'ing the device again this week, this time over here, it's still vague about the release date. While it will start appearing in showrooms in July, just in time for Olympics footage, and LG will happily take your order, the best …

   Minority Report-style swishery demoed with cheap webcam

   HPC blog You'll be sorry if you flip it off, though

   New tech at GTC12 lets punters pretend to be Tom Cruise in Minority Report: opening windows, moving them, closing them, and essentially acting like a cool, futuristic cop. Eyesight Mobile Technologies performed an interesting demonstration on the exhibit floor. In the video, marketing director Liat Rostock shows us how the …

   LOHAN sucks 27 inches

   Mounting excitement down in REHAB

   The epic saga of our shed-built hypobaric chamber – the Rocketry Experimental High Altitude Barosimulator (REHAB) experiment – continues today with the news that we've just laid our hands on a proper vacuum pump which allows LOHAN to suck an impressive 27 inches. REHAB newbies should get some background info here and here …

   Yahoo! leaks! private! key! in! Axis! Chrome! debut!

   Extension launch scuppered by certificate blunder

   Yahoo! today released its Axis extension for Chrome – and accidentally leaked its private security key that could allow anyone to create malicious plugins masquerading as official Yahoo! software. Australian entrepreneur Nik Cubrilovic, who last year garnered notice for identifying Facebook's tracking cookies, revealed the …

   World+Dog to demand ever larger tablet-phones

   Screen-inflation nation

   We're not speaking to people on our phones, these days, we're mostly browsing the web. And that, says market watcher ABI Research, is driving demand for devices that lie in the grey area between smartphones and tablets. Come 2015, shipments of these big-screen phones or small tablets - or, as we used to call them, Mobile …

   Converged system threesome show off new Vblocks

   New additions to federate and protect as trio adopt VPLEX

   VCE, the VMware/Cisco/EMC converged system threesome, has introduced two new Vblocks and adopted VPLEX to federate Vblocks. A Vblock is built from pre-integrated Cisco UCS X86 servers and Nexus switches, VMware vSphere server virtualisation and EMC VMAX or VNX storage arrays. It is ordered, installed and operated as a single …

   Rival mobile networks hang up on EE's 4G call

   All we wanted was a monopoly

   Vodafone and Telefonica have laid out their arguments against EE's request to be allowed a monopoly on 4G telephony, and very damning they are too, but the public seems more supportive and Three's filing isn't public yet. Not that there's any doubt about where Three stands, the company told us it had filed a response with …

   Cable to stimulate stiff growth in entrepreneurs' trousers

   UK.gov to pour £200m into pockets of small biz

   Under-fire UK business secretary Vince Cable has launched the government's new £200m "GrowthAccelerator" programme to help small businesses with the potential to do well to actually do well. Meanwhile, Cable was branded a "socialist" by Tory donor and Downing Street advisor Adrian Beecroft on Wednesday, in his report on …

   IT firms drown as rising tide buoys rest of UK plc

   Techy Brit biz collapse rate leaps a third

   The number of British business failures eased back in April, however IT firms bucked the trend with insolvencies up by a third compared to last year. Credit ratings giant Experian said that 1,564 businesses failed in April, compared to 1,808 company collapses in the same month last year. Put another way, this was 0.08 per cent …

   Special Projects Burro pops his hooves

   Mysterious demise of El Reg's asinine mascot

   It's with heavy hearts that we announce today the death of Aladdin – our Special Projects Burro. Our asinine mascot was perfectly OK yesterday afternoon when I popped out to see that all was well with the donkey herd, but a couple of hours later he'd inexplicably gone hooves-up. There was no external sign of injury, so we' …

   Brocade shakes up sales leaders after earnings slump

   New cards, same old faces?

   Brocade has printed out a whole bunch of new business cards for its sales and marketing department, just a week after releasing Q2 results that showed sales falling year on year. Regan McGrath has been named VP of global channels and marketing at the mission critical networking vendor. He was previously veep of sales for the …

   Samsung outsources notebooks to Taiwan - report

   Compal set to be the lucky ODM

   Korean electronics giant Samsung has reportedly begun outsourcing notebook production for the first time, with Taiwanese ODM Compal Electronics the lucky manufacturer and shipments to begin as early as June. Taiwanese tech title Digitimes spoke to its familiar “notebook supply chain manufacturers” who blabbed that the deal …

   Russian satellite beams home 121-megapixel pics of Earth

   Blue marble looking good from height of 36,000km

   Russia’s ELECTRO-L weather satellite has used its 121-megapixel sensors to send home the highest-resolution set of space pics yet. Even NASA admits it can't match the Russian bird for sheer mega-pixelage, which is yours to peruse thanks to an animated GIF proivded by the Russian Federal Space Agency. The original is a little …

   WTF is... Li-Fi?

   Feature Optical data transfer's new leading light?

   Forget about Wi-Fi - the future of home wireless networking is, according to boffins, the light bulb. So say a number of researchers and technologists who are looking to light to provide the next step in high-speed data networking in the home. The principle is simple: turn a light on and off so rapidly that the human eye …

   'Six-eyed' robot to tour National Museum of Australia

   Wi-Fi-guided bot will test NBN scenarios, augment reality for virtual visitors

   The National Museum of Australia will trial a mobile robot as a way of facilitating more student visitors to the institution. Around 90,000 students visit the museum each year, but Australia has more than four million students across all tiers of education. Most are at least 300 km from the Museum's Canberra home. The Museum …

   Obama orders gov app deluge

   Developers cheer as every US government agency to release two mobile apps inside a year

   The US government has amplified its focus on getting the machinations of White House effectively digital with a strong push on mobile technology. President Obama yesterday issued a directive for each federal agency to make at least two key government services available via mobile apps phones within the next 12 months. The …

   China turns on the sprinklers with ambitious rain-making plans

   Points rocket launchers, guns at the sky, unleashes "weather army"

   China is to step up its use of cloud-seeding technology to open the heavens more frequently than ever before, in a bid to prevent drought and make the weather more predictable. Zheng Guoguang, administrator of the China Meteorological Administration, told attendees at the National Weather Modification Conference in Beijing …

   HP takes a big profit haircut, too

   Blame printers, servers, and services

   This is taking "industry standard" a little too far perhaps. Dell's revenues got a haircut and its profits swooned in its most recent quarter, and Hewlett-Packard followed suit in its second fiscal quarter with profits falling a lot faster than its revenues dropped. The difference, of course, is that HP is a considerably larger …

   Boffins develop nanoscale vacuum tube running at .46 THz

   Power hungry but radiation resistant relic could make comeback … in spaaaace

   Researchers from NASA and Korea’s National Nanofab Center have cooked up nanoscale vacuum tubes, potentially bringing some of the earliest electronic devices back into the mainstream of technology. As detailed in a new paper from Applied Physics Letters, the tiny tubes were manufactured using the same processes applied to …

7. Wednesday, 23 May 2012

   Insect vision a template for computer ‘sight’

   Can you see what bees see?

   Computers aren’t yet good at making complex, ad-hoc decisions from visual inputs. However, the discovery at Melbourne’s RMIT that bees' brains are big enough to do so could set the direction for future computer vision research. According to RMIT Associate Professor Adrian Dyer, of RMIT’s school of media and communication, the …

   BigPond GameArena hacked, 35,000 passwords reset

   Quick disclosure from Telstra

   Telstra has taken the unusual – in Australia – step of proactively announcing that a service has been compromised. The carrier has announced that it’s reset the passwords of 35,000 users of its GameArena and Games Shop services, stating that “the sites, operated by a third party company, were victims of a hacking attack.” The …

   Google in the clear on Oracle patents

   API copyright decision still to come

   Google has successfully defended Android against Oracle’s patent infringement claim, leaving whether its API breaches copyright as the only question still in play between the two companies. The 10-person San Francisco jury has found that neither of the two patents that were the grounds for Oracle’s suit were infringed. As a …

   HP cuts 27,000 workers

   Autonomy's Mike Lynch among thousands departing

   As rumored last week, IT giant Hewlett-Packard is slashing its employee count worldwide to squeeze more profits from its revenue stream. The job cuts are not as deep as some had been expecting, but are still going to be tough on the company. In a statement put out ahead of its conference call with Wall Street analysts, HP said …

   MSN China shoots for e-retail push to grow business

   Bing and Windows Phone Marketplace tie-up on the cards

   Microsoft is reportedly set to expand its MSN China business, with a push into the e-commerce space and increased integration with Windows Phone, whilst looking to grow the presence of its Bing search engine in the People’s Republic. Bejing-based consultancy Marbridge Consulting brought the news to the masses courtesy of its …

   Armenia jails Bredolab botmaster for 4 years

   First computer crime conviction in the former Soviet republic

   A cybercrook who established a 30 million computer strong botnet has been jailed for four years in Armenia. Georgy Avanesov, 27, a Russian citizen of Armenian descent, had apparently been making a cool $125,000 a month renting out access to zombie drones in the infamous Bredolab botnet. Other crooks used access to these …

   HP started then spiked HP-UX on x86 project

   Juicy Itanium trial document firehose opened

   As part of the ongoing lawsuit about whether or not Oracle had committed itself to supporting its software on Hewlett-Packard's Itanium-based servers, the software giant did a core dump of very interesting documents that show what many of us suspected: that HP did indeed mull acquiring the Sparc/Solaris business and that HP did …

   Red Hat could cash in with open-source cloud juggling act

   Open ... and Shut From Linux to big-data shifter

   The good open source lord giveth, and it taketh away, and no one knows this better than Red Hat. As Red Hat chief executive Jim Whitehurst declared at this week's Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, California, open source and its children – including cloud computing – are laying waste to the economics of how …

   VMware sees Mirage, buys up company

   Virty giant eats Wanova for VDI flavouring

   Virtualization juggernaut VMware gobbled up four year old VDI vendor Wanova today, giving the virtualization juggernaut another weapon to fire at Citrix. VMware pretty much still owns the x86 virtualization racket among enterprise IT shops, despite heroic efforts to dislodge it by Microsoft, Citrix Systems, and Red Hat, but the …

   Speaking in Tech: Leo Apotheker vs Meg Whitman

   Podcast Money man Chris Lynch talks to Greg and the gang about who did it better

   It's a bulging bag of treats today at our enterprise tech cast, hosted by Greg Knieriemen, Ed Saipetch and Sarah Vela. Our special guest this week is Christopher Lynch, a tech venture capitalist. Chris is a partner at Atlas Venture and former CEO and President of Vertica (which was sold to HP last year) and Acopia (which was …

   Seagate poised to swallow LaCie, haul fattened bod into channel

   Cali firm dives into deeper international waters

   Spinning disk supremo Seagate has nailed down an agreement from Paris-based external drive products manufacturer LaCie to snap it up, and LaCie is up for it – though the trade union and regulatory stuff is still being worked out. If the transaction completes, Seagate will be able to round out its mainstream consumer storage …

   CompSci eggheads to map Android malware genome

   Aim for taxonomy of droid ills

   Mobile security researchers are teaming up to share samples and data on malware targeting the Android platform. The Android Malware Genome Project, spearheaded by Xuxian Jiang, a computer science researcher at North Carolina State University, aims to boost collaboration in defending against the growing menace of mobile malware …

   The most dangerous job in America: Keeping iPhones connected

   AT&T blamed for deaths of cell-tower climbers

   An investigation into the deaths of workers putting up cell towers has shown how US network operators distance themselves from those taking the risks, with AT&T's dash to provide iPhone connectivity allegedly killing more than most. The investigation was carried out by ProPublica and (US TV show) Frontline, which have spent …

   Red Hat lures in JRuby power pair

   Linux shop polishes cloud languages

   Red Hat has lured two of the brains behind JRuby, Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo, who once worked at Sun Microsystems. The duo are joining the Linux distro shop to expand their work on JRuby, Java Virtual Machine (JVM) languages and OpenJDK, Nutter tweeted. Nutter called out the opportunity to actively contribute in OpenJDK …

   Oracle gobbles upstart Facebook, Instagram biz tout

   Social networking marketer Vitrue joins Larry's cloud

   Oracle has snapped up social media marketing company Vitrue for an undisclosed sum. Vitrue helps companies to market themselves online on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram and will add to Oracle's suite of cloud services. "The proliferation of social media and an increased demand by consumers to engage with brands across …

   SAP hopes to embiggen its cloud with Ariba slurp

   Still seeking a secure foothold in fast-growing market

   Software giant SAP is hoping to beef up its cloud with an offer to slurp business commerce company Ariba for $4.3bn. The acquisition should give SAP a boost as it tries to claw its way into the cloud, currently dominated by arch-rival Oracle and Salesforce.com. SAP has been chomping businesses left, right and centre as it …

   'We've done nothing wrong' - Schmidt on Euro antitrust probe

   Big Tent Defiant Google supremo buttonholed by El Reg

   Google chairman Eric Schmidt has declined to be drawn on possible incoming antitrust law infringement charges in Europe. The Register repeatedly asked Schmidt to explain if his company would indeed offer up "remedies" to Brussels officials currently probing Google's business practices, which some rivals have claimed favours …

   Shoreditch a hub of 'exciting innovation', says science minister

   Big Tent David Willetts lays out economic recovery with data apps

   Science minister David Willetts told a gathering at Google's Big Tent event this morning that future scientific research will rely heavily on the mining, slicing and dicing of data from the public sector. His comments come as the government's Open Data Institute was launched, having been plonked on the London's Silicon …

   Wireless remote control inventor zaps out at 96

   Eugene Polley took the knobs off technology

   The man who took the knobs off the TV set and made a significant innovation in wireless technology, Eugene Polley, died yesterday in Illinois, aged 96. Polley invented the first wireless TV remote control in 1955. Called the Flash-Matic, the remote was produced by US firm Zenith Electronics. The wireless remote has been hailed …

   Open Data Institute pours golden £10m shower on upstarts

   Taxpayer-funded teams to tackle public info dumps

   The Open Data Institute has launched with a taxpayer-funded £10m pot to turn the government’s public information dumps into something tangible. Or that's the promise. Based at Silicon Roundabout in London’s Shoreditch, the group is headed by web daddy Tim Berners-Lee and artificial intelligence professor Nigel Shadbolt. The …

   Nvidia Kai to enable cut-price Android tablets for all

   Quad-core and a whole lot more?

   Nvidia has let slip 'Kai', the quad-core ARM-architecture system-on-a-chip it hopes will get powerful tablets into World+Dog's hands for $199 (£127) a pop. Speaking to the chip designer's shareholders, investor relations chief Rob Csonger said: "Our strategy on Android is simply to enable quad-core tablets running Android Ice …

   MPs wrestle slippery bureaucrats in intellectual property Jell-O

   Analysis 'Evidence base weak' for IP, says UK's IP top cop

   The all-party group of MPs looking into the UK's looming obliteration of copyright rounded on their quarry yesterday - and it turned out to be an enthralling battle of wits. John Alty and Edmund Quilty of the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) were quizzed on their controversial role in maintaining - or failing to maintain - …

   Boffins cram binary data into living cells' DNA

   Pic Biological non-volatile storage survives reproduction

   In a move that could have appeared in a Michael Crichton novel, Stanford University brainiacs have written and read a binary digit encoded in a DNA cell sequence which survives cell reproduction - a non-volatile genetic bit. DNA, Deoxyribonucleic acid, contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning …

   Facebook IPO plunge sparks tidal wave of lawsuits

   Shares plummet, investors sue everyone, regulators pull out their probes

   Investors in Facebook's IPO are not taking the stock's drubbing lying down and have launched lawsuits against the social network, its underwriters and NASDAQ, while regulators probe the way the debut was handled. Investor Darryl Lazar has filed a class action suit against Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, the network's early backers …

   MASSIVE Chinese web cannons blast 123-reg offline

   UK's largest hosting biz titsup in DDoS outrage

   A "massive" distributed-denial-of-service attack emanating from China has taken down 123-reg, the UK net biz that hosts 1.4 million websites. In a statement on the its service status page just after midday today, 123-reg blamed attackers in China: From 11:30 to 22:50 our network was undergoing a massive distributed denial of …

   Volvo claims V40 is first car with an airbag for pedestrians

   Protection for head-in-clouds texters

   Volvo has devised an automobile airbag for pedestrians. The car company is building the new tech into its V40. Sensors detect the impact, and a control unit works out whether the signals they're sending indicate that the car has collided with a person. If it thinks that's the case, it deploys the windscreen and A-frame …

   Apple design chief Jony Ive knighted - but not by the Queen

   Steve Jobs' 'spiritual partner' honoured

   Apple's VP of Industrial Design Jonathan Ive was knighted today by the Princess Royal at Buckingham Palace. Ive was dubbed a knight for his services to design and enterprise. Ive – born in Chingford, Essex – was plucked out of a comparatively lowly job at Apple by Steve Jobs himself, who spotted Ives' potential when he …

   Sky Movies monopoly probe scrapped as rivals turn up

   Competition Commission U-turns at sight of LoveFilm, Netflix

   The Competition Commission has called off the attack dogs against Sky's movie business, for now. The regulator has revised its views following the entry of Amazon's LoveFilm and Netflix into the pay-movie market. A provisional decision made last August decreed that Sky had a monopoly on running movies first in the UK, which it …

   Jailed Facebook hack Brit targeted Justin Bieber's girlfriend

   Selena Gomez 'told' fans her boyfriend 'sucks' in attack

   A British man jailed for a year after hacking into a private Facebook account targeted Justin Bieber's actress-turned-singer girlfriend, it has emerged. Gareth Crosskey, 21, of Lancing in West Sussex, was sentenced to 12 months behind bars by London's Southwark Crown Court last week. Crosskey had pleaded guilty to two …

   Everything Everywhere activates top-secret erections

   Orange and T-Mobile finally complete network love-in

   Customers of Orange and T-Mobile are now using one network, with handsets switching seamlessly to the nearest cell tower, though the company still refuses to say exactly where those cell towers are. Orange and T-Mobile customers have been roaming between the two networks since 2010, but only when a signal from the home network …

   Google warns against ISPs hard on web filth

   Big Tent Meanwhile, Mail columnist visits p0rn site. Gasp

   Google may not be willing to comment on how much money it makes from pornography online, but the search giant's UK public policy head Sarah Hunter has unsurprisingly urged caution when it comes to ISPs filtering content over their networks. Speaking at Google's annual Big Tent event in Watford this morning, Hunter gently …

   Return to Castle Wolfenstein

   Antique Code Show Ex the Axis

   As a nipper during the 1970s and early 80s, there can't be a war movie I haven't seen, either at the cinema or on telly on a rain Sunday afternoon. You can surely say the same of Grey Matter Interactive, because its Return to Castle Wolfenstein lets you play pretty much every famous war film scene. Not that this is a dull …

   Dev justifies Dead Island 'Game of the Year' claim with 3m+ sales

   Even zombies are baffled

   Every year a handful of critically-acclaimed videogames are re-released as a "GOTY Edition", which signifies they've been awarded a Game of the Year gong by a respected publication. Which is why, when Deep Silver announced this week that Dead Island - a game panned by critics - would be getting the GOTY Edition treatment, …

   Lenovo's on fire - and this time in a good way

   Closing in on HP yet making loss in emerging markets

   Lenovo set its sights on emerging and "PC+" markets as it seeks to build on what it describes as a record year. However, it also needs how to make those markets pay as neither contributed to the firm's bottom line in its most recent set of results. The Chinese PC giant turned in consolidated sales of $7.5bn for the fourth …

   Serco close to flogging UK defence nuke tech biz

   Amec admires Technical Consulting Services wing

   IT outsourcing monster Serco is locked in talks with engineering consultancy and project management services outfit Amec to sell its Technical Consulting Services biz. The unit provides consulting and project services including IT to the UK civil and defence nuclear markets, turning over in the region of £70m last year. Cost- …

   Why on Earth is Microsoft moving to Euro pricing now?

   Analysis Time to take a sniff at the coffee, perhaps

   I find it quite amusing that a company would decide to have uniform pricing right across a continent in a currency that looks like it might not survive the phasing in period of the new pricing regime. But that's what Microsoft seems to be doing. As El Reg has pointed out, pricing is now to be standardised on the euro price …

   UK.gov energy policy: You can't please all the people much of the time

   Comment 'Lights kept on' - but at a price

   Try and please everyone, and you can end up pleasing no one. The government's new draft Energy Bill risks just this. The Government says it needs £110bn of investment in new energy production plant to keep the lights on. That's slightly down from the £120bn figure the Department had cited earlier, but it needs to be qualified …

   Apple tops tablet, mobile computer markets in Q1

   Lagging in laptops, mind

   The usual caveat applies: these numbers only work if you factor in tablet sales. Do, says market watcher DisplaySearch, and Apple is once more the world's top-selling maker of mobile computers. The Cupertino company took 22.5 per cent of the market in Q1, almost double the market share of its nearest rival, HP, which notched …

   Greedy LOHAN draining away mankind's vital fluid ... allegedly

   Irresponsible globe embulgement - is it really an issue?

   We at El Reg's Special Projects Bureau have, over the last few months, been challenged by various readers as to why we're using helium to lift our audacious LOHAN spaceplane towards its stratospheric date with destiny. Why not use hydrogen, they cry. It's easy to manufacture, cheap as chips, and – critically – not a finite …

   Wyse ties with Rise in cloudy client clinch

   Dell and FastHosts by another name

   Wyse Technology has struck a deal to push cloud services through the UK channel along with hosted services provider Rise. The firms said Wyse partners will be able to tout cloud-based applications as managed services based on Rise's DataCenter on Demand offering – which naturally would be accessed via Wyse's client hardware or …

   TfL delays wave-and-pay tickets until 2013

   Wants more time to make kit 'more robust'

   Transport for London's (TfL's) plan to introduce contactless ticketing across the whole of its network is likely to happen in 2013, and will not be completed by the end of 2012 as previously announced by the authority. In October 2010, TfL said it wanted to introduce contactless technology across its transport network by the …

   Alcatel-Lucent tinkers with Telstra's enterprise network

   Vanquishes Juniper to add 'smarts' for cloudy products

   Telstra is revamping the network smarts of its enterprise IP offerings in an Asia Pacific-first roll out of the Alcatel –Lucent supplied Application Assured Networking (AAN) service. The AAN solution aims to amplify the performance of cloud based services and virtual private networks (VPNs) for enterprise customers. Telstra …

   Chuck Exchange mailboxes into the cloud... sysadmin style

   Sysadmin blog UC certificates, MX records and how to make a teeny bit of extra dosh

   How do we migrate Exchange mailboxes into the cloud? A customer of mine has recently approached me with a request to move his mail hosting into the cloud, and it had to include BlackBerry support. After some discussion of the options available, a hosted exchange solution was deemed best, with Microsoft's own Office 365 emerging …

   Dole Office staff snooped into private data 992 times in 10 months

   And that's just the times they were caught...

   Staff at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) were disciplined a total of 992 times for unlawfully or inappropriately accessing individuals' social security records between April 2011 and January this year. The figures were obtained following a freedom of information (FOI) request to DWP by Channel 4's Dispatches …

   EMC's hunt for Joe Tucci replacement continues

   Will they have to drag him back like last time?

   EMC's CEO succession looks to be in trouble with no clear internal successor to Joe Tucci who is just months away from retirement. Could EMC look outside the company for its next CEO? In January the EMC board invited Joe Tucci to stay on for another year instead of retiring. Why did they do that? There were several prospective …

   Ten... Mi-Fi HSPA 3G wireless mini-routers

   Product Roundup DIY hotspots

   If you want cellular data connectivity when you're out and about you can cough up for a laptop or tablet with a Sim card slot, but they are hardly cheap. Or you can tether your phone if your telco lets you. Another alternative is a portable router. These can be bought with data contracts from the usual suspects, or unlocked …

   2011 sets new record for counterfeit electronics

   IHS iSuppli says most counterfeits come from Asia, at a rate of one every 15 seconds

   Asian countries led by China are responsible for the vast majority of reports of counterfeit electronics parts, which have reached 12 million over the past five years in a potentially lethal development for the global supply chain, according to analyst IHS iSuppli. Citing data from supply chain monitoring organisation, ERAI, …

   Huawei enterprise to be 100% channel 'in 3-5 years

   Seeks partners to marry comms, apps

   Huawei's year-old enterprise division wants to put all of its business through the channel in three to five years, according to Jeff Hwong, the company's regional sales director for Southern Pacific Enterprise Business. Huawei created the division to flesh out its business, which also deals direct with telcos and offers …

   Indian SMBs facing advanced attack threats

   Symantec warns of lack of security know-how

   India’s growing urban population is under concerted cyber attack as criminals increasingly focus advanced targeted techniques on small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and look to exploit piecemeal security and low levels of awareness, according to the latest report from Symantec. The security giant’s Internet Security …

   Facebook underwriters accused of hiding forecast

   Revenue numbers revised on the quiet, says Reuters

   Reuters is airing accusations which, if true, would cast the Facebook IPO process in a very poor light indeed. The news service claims that underwriters Morgan Stanley cut its revenue forecasts for The Social NetworkTM but withheld the information from all but a privileged few. The allegations are detailed in this Reuters …

   Canary Islands host long-distance quantum teleportation

   Spooky action between La Palma and Tenerife, with space the next stop

   The Canary Islands of La Palma and Tenerife have been briefly connected by a quantum teleportation system that sets a new distance record for the spooky communications technique. In an angle that will get Trekkie bloggers reaching for the “beam me up” metaphors, the researchers, from Austria, Germany, Canada and Norway, hope …

   Windows XP update fails in infinite .NET patch loop

   UPDATE: MSFT slow to publicise fix for faulty patch

   Microsoft has issued guidance on how to fix problems created by its last bunch of patches. Redmond's patches for May brought pain to Windows XP users who have installed the .NET framework. The problem seems to involve updates KB2633880, KB2518864 and KB2572073. Each download the updates and installs them, but then insists on …

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