The Week in Summary
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Monday, 20 May 2013
Rogue Nokia splinter cell drops its Jolla phone A-BOMB
Ota tuo, vihreä robotti Google!
Smartphone upstart Jolla - founded by a bunch of ex-Nokia engineers - has finally unveiled a smartphone. The gadget's technical details are few and far between at this moment. The handset itself won't be available until the end of the year, but anyone willing to plonk down €100 can get get in line early for the €399 handset …
They WANT to EAT YOUR COMPUTER - welcome your ANT overlords
Whole corner of America faces life without computers
A massive horde of computer-killing "crazy ants" are invading the southeastern US, killing other species as they go. New research released today in the journal Biological Invasions warns the aliens have wiped out at least one other ant invader, the exotic fire ant, but are also targeting local ants with deadly precision. More …
Canadian regulators welcome US Bitcoin refugees with open arms
Money laundering not a problem here, eh
Canadian Bitcoin traders will not be clobbered by laws similar to those being used to target virtual currency exchanges in America, according to a leaked letter from the country's financial investigations unit. The Register has seen a letter from the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) which …
Securo-boffins uncover new GLOBAL cyber-espionage operation
Two-pronged attack hits victims in 100 countries
Government ministries, technology firms, media outlets, academic research institutions and non-governmental organisations have all fallen victim to an ongoing cyberespionage operation with tendrils all over the world, according to researchers. Infosec researchers have uncovered SafeNet in as many as 100 countries. SafeNet …
It! Started! With! A! GIF!... Yahoo! Actually! Buys! Tumblr! for! $1bn!
Mayer gets animated, 'promises not to screw it up'
Yahoo! has "promised not to screw it up" after agreeing to acquire cat'n'porn blogging site Tumblr for about $1.1bn. The Purple Palace is sticking to a hands-off approach to try to keep its square taint off the cool vibe of GIF-heavy Tumblr and stop users abandoning it in droves. Yahoo! said the blogging site would continue …
Petshop iPad fanboi charged with filming up young model's skirt
LAPD throws book at fondleslabber
A Los Angeles fanboi has been charged (PDF) with using an iPad to take upskirt footage of an underwear model. Julio Mario Medal, 38, stands accused of using his big shiny fondleslab to gaze up 22-year-old Brittanie Weaver's skirt and shoot a film about her naughty bits. Brittanie Weaver The blonde beauty claimed he had …
Microsoft: We need a pro to flog our Surface slabs in UK
New bod to tackle Apple, Samsung, twitchy channel partners, skint consumers...
Microsoft UK is seeking a captain to steer the good ship Surface. The candidate will need a sturdy pair of sea legs to navigate potentially choppy waters and prevent it from running aground. Ten-year Microsoft veteran and senior Windows consumer marketing man Rob Epstein is currently moonlighting as Microsoft's lead on the UK …
Amazon cloud-watcher shows some love for Microsoft's Azure
Cloudy beancounter Newvem: 'We're not trying to do 50 clouds ... half-way'
Newvem has been peddling its Cloud Care monitoring and costing tools for virty public infrastructure since it uncloaked last November for Amazon Web Services. Now the company is expanding Cloud Care so it can control-freak Microsoft's Windows Azure heavenly server and storage slices. Support for Cloud Care plugging into …
Crack Army pilot to be first PROPER British astronaut IN SPAAAACE
Ground control to Major Tim, countdown commencing, engines on
Ex-Apache helicopter pilot Tim Peake will become the first bona fide British astronaut in space - and live and work on the International Space Station. Peake performance ... Tim trains in a Soyuz simulator (Credit: ESA) The former army major, and a serving member of the European Space Agency's astronaut corps, said today …
UK.gov STILL wants to tout pupil data - don't use the word 'product'
Is that a screeching U-turn we hear from Gove? Oh, no
At the end of 2012, Education Secretary Michael Gove told Parliament that he wanted "to share extracts of data held in the National Pupil Database for a wider range of purposes than possible in order to maximise the value of this rich dataset". Ultimately, the government wants the private sector to tout "tools and services …
Marks & Sparks accused of silently bonking punters over the tills
Analysis Bank cards bought stuff ALL BY THEMSELVES, say shoppers
High-street socks'n'frocks chain Marks and Spencer is accused of quietly taking money from shoppers' contactless bank cards at the tills. The accusations come from Radio 4's Money Box listeners, who called in to report that M&S had billed cards in purses and handbags over the air, unbeknownst to customers who had intended to …
Schmidt: Don't like our tiny tax bills? Google this... 'Change the law'
Ad biz chairman says he can't wait for reform
Google chief Eric Schmidt has once more defended his advertising giant for its pitiful UK tax bills: the search supremo said his biz abides by the rules, and claims he can't wait for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to reform those rules. Schmidt said in an op-ed for The Observer that Google "has …
Biz bods: Tile-tastic Windows 8? NOOO. We lust after 'mature' Win 7
Tired corporates prefer predecessor, says analyst
Windows 8 won't become an enterprise IT standard as customers dump Microsoft's legacy PC operating system XP. Instead, corporate IT departments will stick to what they know and install Windows 7. That’s according to technology analyst Forrester, which reckoned Windows 7 is fast becoming the de-facto PC operating system for big …
So you want to be a contractor? Well, here's how it works
Free advice from Reg headhunter Dominic Connor
Back in the heady days of 1984, working on the development of Microsoft Unix (yes, that was a real product, AKA Xenix), we needed to write an Ethernet driver, but none of us really felt up to that. We needed to hire an expensive specialist. And so I met my first contractor, who turned up in a far better car than anyone else …
Give porno danger classes to Brit kids as young as FIVE - parents
Sex ed must cover web smut, families tell heads
Schoolteachers should warn British children as young as five about the "dangers" of finding pornography online, say families. The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) asked parents to suggest what schools should be doing to protect kids from smutty websites: nearly half (42 per cent) of 1,009 respondents believed …
Bumbling fraudsters fail to dupe 'Westcost' customers
But channel warned of spike in more sophisticated scams
Fraudsters masquerading as British distie giant Westcoast failed in their attempts to convince resellers to redirect their payments for products and services to a dodgy bank account, the company has confirmed. The scam was initially spotted by some of Westcoast's customers, who then contacted the distributor. The company has …
Cameron's Tech City: Desks? Yes. Cash? Yes. Coders? Nope
Silicon Roundabout's stovepipe-hat-wearers can't find the staff
Lack of skilled staff is hampering the growth of almost half of all tech businesses based around East London's Silicon Roundabout, a survey has found. Research firm GfK asked top-ranking staff from than a hundred companies based within Shoreditch's Tech City cluster about the problems faced by their businesses. 77 per cent of …
Gay marriage? We'll put a stop to that 'human BUG', says Nintendo
Sayōnara, Mr and Mr Robotto
A bug that permitted same-sex marriage in a Nintendo game was a mistake by the developer rather than a victory for equality, we're told. Gamers playing Tomodachi Collection: New Life - the latest version of The Sims-like role-playing game for the 3DS handheld - noticed they had the option of allowing male characters to marry …
Hello, Goodbye ... to $408,000: John Lennon axe under the hammer
Not much Vox for an awful lot of bucks
A guitar played by both John Lennon and George Harrison has sold at auction for a cool $408k. One Vox, yours for $408k The custom Vox was build for Lennon in 1966 by Mike Bennett and Dick Denney, who handled the instrument's mahogany body and electronics, respectively. In September 1967, it appeared in Harrison's hands …
Intel's answer to ARM: Customisable x86 chips with HIDDEN POWERS
Let's all play find the secret hardware register
With new CEO Brian Krzanich and new president Renée James in control of Intel, all kinds of changes are very likely in store: the chip giant wants to expand beyond its dominance in PCs (a declining market) and servers (one that is profitable but not growing very much) to other aspects of the computing landscape. And one such …
NetApp boffins first to go in 'WORKFORCE DECIMATION' plan
300 R&D bods out the door in proposed cull of 1,300, say insiders
Storage array biz NetApp has laid off 300 people at a research and development centre in India and “hundreds” more in the US, according to industry sources. The Times of India reports that anonymous insiders at NetApp's Bangalore operation - which is the company's largest R&D facility outside of the US - have been given their …
'Untidy' Shoreditch just CONFUSES American techies - Olympic hub team
Come join the tech mall in Stratford instead, US firms told
A leading American tech incubator is considering opening a British outpost on the site of the Stratford Olympics, The Register can reveal. Cambridge Innovations Center, once home to part of the Google team that designed Android, is in top-secret preliminary discussions with iCity, the company building a digital hub in a …
Is it time for the great Jihad against networked storage?
Blocks and Files Big boys look wide open with eyes wide shut
Dheeraj Pandy is running Nutanix as if the company is on a crusade against networked storage. Data delivery latency from networked storage is plain unacceptable, it seems, and clustered virtualised servers should run and present their local storage as part of a pool. There's more of course with big-iron converged systems being …
Streaming music works for us, say US and UK indie labels
Analysis Not clear it does for the musician, however
Are legal music streaming services just Kim Dotcom on a diet, with a lawyer? The debate has raged amongst musicians for years now, and really ignited when Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven frontman David Lowery took issue with the “new music economy” two years ago. In what became known as the “Letter to Emily” storm last year, …
Look behind you, NetApp: Angry investor is coming for YOU
First Xyratex, then Emulex and Brocade... now Elliot's stalking a storage giant
Activist investor Eliott Management, of Emulex fame, always pushes to have its voice heard - especially when it thinks bosses of its "investment companies" don't put shareholders first. Now the fund has actually taken on storage giant NetApp. According to a Bloomberg report, Elliott is pushing NetApp to change its board. We …
Last time CO2 was this high, the world was underwater? NO, actually
Ice sheets DIDN'T melt 3 million years B.C., say boffins
OK, so levels of atmospheric CO2 are rising through 0.0004 (or 400 parts per million) at the moment. Disaster, right? The last time the world saw carbon levels like this, some three million years ago, the mighty ice sheets of Greenland and the Antarctic had melted from the heat and the seas were 35 metres higher than they are …
Boffins find 'scary radio attack'* against pacemakers
*Attack is actually 'very difficult in real world'
It's a little difficult to credit as a discovery the fact that analogue receivers – whether they be on a bluetooth device or a pacemaker – are vulnerable to radio interference. That, however, is what's going to be presented at an IEEE conference later this week. Here's an excerpt of a story from America's Institution of …
Pakistan signs up for China's GPS rival
Doesn't want no steenking US military tech
China’s home-grown sat-nav system Beidou (BDS) is expected to add yet another customer after Pakistan signed up to host ground stations for the service. Pakistan will follow Thailand, Laos and Brunei in becoming a Beidou customer later this month, according to China Daily. Huang Lei, international business director of Beijing …
Intel releases 'Beacon Mountain' Android-on-Atom dev tool
Indroid Inside
Indroid Inside Intel has released “Beacon Mountain” a development environment for Android apps on both its own Atom silicon and ARM chippery. Beacon Mountain emerged over the weekend, promising “productivity-oriented design, coding, and debugging tools for apps targeting … smartphones and tablets.” The software's in version 0 …
US boffin builds 32-way Raspberry Pi cluster
Beowulf cluster built for the price of a single PC
Boise University PhD candidate Joshua Kiepert has built a 32-way Beowulf cluster from Raspberry Pis. Kiepert says his research focuses on “developing a novel data sharing system for wireless sensor networks to facilitate in-network collaborative processing of sensor data.” To study that field Kipert figured he would need a …
Massive EXPLOSION visible to naked eye SEEN ON MOON
Vid 'Equivalent to 5 TONNES of TNT going off', says NASA
Sensational news today from the Moon, as skywatchers say a huge explosion - as bright as a star, and visible from Earth with the naked eye - has been seen on the lunar surface. "It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we've ever seen before," splutters Bill Cooke, a top NASA boffin. According to NASA, …
Yahoo! Japan says 22 MEELLION User IDs may have been nabbed
Suspected breach didn't nab passwords but resets nonetheless recommended
Yahoo! Japan has told its 200 million customers to change their passwords after revealing that 22 million user IDs may have been exposed in a suspected intrusion last week. The attack was detected at around 9:00 PM local time on Thursday night, with the internet giant apparently cutting access while it checked what had …
Nintendo throws flaming legal barrel at YouTubing fans
All your walk-through vid revenue are belong to us
Nintendo has contacted fans who post walk-through videos of its games to YouTube, claiming all revenue from their efforts. Gamer Zack Scott brought the practice to light in a Facebook post. Scott is a member of Let's Play, a community in which folks post "videos in which the author records the complete gameplay of a video game …
Optus outlines its 4G future
Canberra first for TD-LTE rollout
Optus is hoping to shed its bridesmaid status, unveiling plans for a major rollout across four frequency bands, announcing its first TD-LTE deployment, and adding a bunch of cities and regional centres to its rollout. Managing director of Optus Networks Guenther Ottendorfer told a press conference today that the aim is to use …
Hold our tiny silicon spheres, say gravity wave detection scientists
Nano-sensors in optical trap for more sensitive instrument
A group of scientists from the University of Nevada at Reno says tiny sensors – small enough to be suspended in an optical trap – could pave the way for a new kind of ultra-sensitive gravity wave sensor. That is, of course, if gravity waves exist: predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity, gravity waves have proven …
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Sunday, 19 May 2013
EMC vuln gives mere sysadmins the power of storage admins
Time to patch VNX and Celerra software before non-experts do something silly
EMC has warned a flaw in the Control Station software for its VNX and Celerra arrays could allow just about anyone logged into them to do just about anything. EMC's described the fault as stemming from “Script files in affected products exist with ownership permissions for the nasadmin group account.” The nasadmin group is …
Four Anons cuffed in Italy
Postal Police go postal
Four individuals accused of being members of Anonymous and participating in “Operation Tango Down” have been arrested in Italy. According to AFP, the four are being accused of various attacks in Italy, including a DDoS against the Vatican and the parliamentary Website. The Postal Police – responsible for enforcement of …
IBM gives a cloudy outlook for COBOL
Zombie language gets XML, Java support
IBM is giving its COBOL environment a cloudy flavour with an update to the ancient venerable and unkillable language. To the cool kids, COBOL probably looks like a zombie, complete with loose bits of decaying flesh. However it still accounts for a vast amount of operational enterprise code that's too expensive to replace all …
Bureau of Stats releases educational SimClone game
Hey kids! Why bother with Minecraft when you could play an evidence-based policy sim?
Australia's Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has released a game, Run That Town, that borrows heavily form SimCity to give players the chance to learn about the way statistics are used to shape policy. The iOS-only game, offers the chance to pick an Australian postcode, then assume a quasi-mayoral role and juggle competing fiscal …
I know identity of Bitcoin's SECRET mastermind, says Ted Nelson
Coiner of 'hypertext' claims to identify the links
Sociologist, philosopher, computer industry pioneer and inventor of the term “hypertext” Ted Nelson is claiming that he knows the identity of Bitcoin inventor “Satoshi Nakamoto”. In a rambling – and, let's face it, odd – 12-minute post on YouTube, Nelson spins out the suspense, throws in a dialogue with himself as Sherlock …
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Saturday, 18 May 2013
Google builds crowdsourcing into new Maps code stack
Google I/O Wants a unique map for every user
Google has been giving more details about how it has redesigned its Maps software by adding in crowd-sourced photographic and driving directions to its coding scheme. The new Maps package is a ground-up rewrite of the code and the algorithms it uses, with the aim of generating personalized maps for each user that are suitable …
Google's Native Code browser tech goes cross-platform
Google I/O Write web modules in C/C++ that run on both Intel and ARM
At its annual I/O conference in San Francisco this week, Google unveiled a new version of its Native Client technology that allows developers to deploy binary code for web applications in an architecture-independent way. With the original version of Native Client (NaCl), developers could write modules in C or C++ and compile …
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Friday, 17 May 2013
Yahoo! to 'share something special' in New York on Monday
Is hastily called event related to Tumblr rumblings?
Yahoo! will hold a "product-related news event" this upcoming Monday with CEO Marissa Mayer in attendance to "share something special." Did you get your invitation yet? That's the word first tweeted by CNBC on Friday afternoon. Yahoo! later confirmed that it was holding a 5pm press event in New York City – "by invitation …
Adobe's Creative Cloud fails at being a cloud
Sync feature suspended by Adobe FOR TWO WEEKS
The file-syncing part of Adobe's new Creative Cloud family of technologies has been intermittently broken for a week, taking the "cloud" part out of Adobe's "Creative Cloud" redesign of its products. Now Adobe is suspending it "for the next couple of weeks" to make updates. The sync feature, which means files being fiddled …
NASA signs off on sampling mission to Earth-threatening asteroid
2016 launch date set for OSIRIS-REx mission
NASA has given final approval for a billion-dollar mission to visit one of the most potentially dangerous asteroids to Earth, collect samples and bring them back home for analysis. Asteroid sampler to set off in 2016 The OSIRIS-REx* mission, proposed by the University of Arizona, will blast off in 2016 and visit 101955 …
US military welcomes Apple iOS 6 kit onto its networks
The battle with BlackBerry, Samsung marches into the cloud
The US Department of Defense has welcomed Apple's iDevices into its secure networks, and has announced that that it is "taking bold steps to provide sound information and proper analysis as it fortifies its cloud computing, acquisition and data processes." On Friday, the DoD set the stage for a three-way smackdown among Apple …
Jailed Romanian hacker repents, invents ATM security scheme
Add-on device blocks card skimmers
A Romanian man serving a five-year jail sentence for bank-machine fraud says he's come up with a device that can be attached to any ATM to make the machine invulnerable to card skimmers. Valentin Boanta was arrested in 2009 and charged with supplying ATM skimmers – devices that can be attached to ATMs to surreptitiously copy …
Climate scientists agree: Humans cause global warming
Of those who have an opinion, over 97% say we're to blame
A major study of nearly 12,000 peer-reviewed papers in the climate-science literature has – again – proven that among climate scientists, an overwhelming percentage agree with the consensus view that human activity causes global warming. The study was led by John Cook, a post-doctoral fellow in the Global Change Institute at …
MIT takes battery-powered robot cheetah for a gallop
Video Biomimetic big cat needs no power cord, just a walker
Fast, agile robots for reconnaissance and rescue have been under development for half a decade or more, but they all have needed to be tethered to a power cable. Now MIT thinks it has cut the leash with a battery powered "cheetah" capable of outrunning a human. The design, showed off at the International Conference on Robotics …
Google research chief: 'Emergent artificial intelligence? Hogwash!'
Google I/O 'We have to make it happen'
If there's any company in the world that can bring true artificial intelligence into being, it's Google. But the advertising giant admits a SkyNet-like electronic overlord is unlikely to create itself even within the Google network without some help from clever humans. Though many science fiction writers and even some …
Nvidia opens pre-orders for handheld Shield console three days early
Let the feeding frenzy commence
Nvidia is now taking orders for its Shield handheld gaming console, three days early, though the Android-running Tegra-powered gadget won’t make its way into punters’ hands before the end of next month at the earliest. Shield, which incorporates a clamshell design to hold a flip-up 5-inch, 1280 x 720 “retinal quality” screen, …
Yahoo! triumphs! in! $2.75bn! Mexican! standoff!
Mighty award against it abruptly slashed to $172,500
Yahoo! has said that a Mexican appeals court threw out a $2.75bn ruling against it and Yahoo! Mexico over contracts in the country. Worldwide Directories and Ideas Interactivas won the "non-final judgement" at the end of last year after alleging breach of contract, breach of promise and lost profits from a deal on a yellow …
Tablet? Laptop? HP does the splits with Tegra-based SlateBook x2
Netbook with removable screen, anyone?
HP is to follow its Windows 8-based tablet keyboard combo, the Envy x2, with an Android Jelly Bean version - the computer giant’s take on Asus’ popular Transformer series. Set to ship in August - in the US at least; the UK release is less certain - the SlateBook x2 will be built around a 10.1-inch, 1920 x 1200 IPS LCD screen …
Lonely-heart Maltese techie vs Bonnie Tyler for Eurovision crown
Eurovision 2013 32 years since that Bucks Fizz feelin'
A hopelessly sweet song about a ruthlessly organised techie who gets the girl will fight with the ballad from rock vixen Bonnie Tyler and 24 other acts to lift the Eurovision Song Contest crown Saturday night. Gianluca Bezzina will represent not just his home land of Malta but carry the misty eyed wishes of girl-shy geeks …
Breaking news, LITERALLY: Financial Times vandalized by hackers
Stiff Pink 'Un left swinging in the wind
The Financial Times website and its Twitter accounts were this afternoon hijacked by pro-government hackers from the "Syrian Electronic Army". The posh broadsheet's Tech Blog - at http://blogs.FT.com/beyond-brics - was compromised to run stories headlined "Syrian Electronic Army Was Here" and "Hacked by the Syrian Electronic …
Hey, Teflon Ballmer. Look, isn't it time? You know, time to quit?
Analysis Microsoft chief defies pundits by hanging on - we reveal how
Those who upgraded to Windows 8 aren't the only ones unhappy with the new touch-driven operating system - Wall Street is too. Just don't expect any of the criticism hurled at Steve "Teflon" Ballmer, Microsoft's shy and retiring boss, to stick. The chief executive is under fire from money men who responded to tech reporters …
Tech Data suspends four amid accountancy probe
Channel shocked as auditors rummage through books
Four middle managers in the finance function at Computer 2000 have been suspended as the distributor continues to investigate improprieties into vendor accounting errors. Back in March Tech Data, parent of UK arm C2000, revealed it would restate results for fiscal 2011, '12 and some or all of '13 that could wipe out between $ …
Who is the mystery sixth member of LulzSec?
Analysis And, hang on, what happened to all the loot...
Thursday's sentencing of three core members of hacktivist crew LulzSec and an accomplice hacker who gave them access to a botnet closes an important chapter in the history of activism. But it also leaves a number of questions unanswered. One of the most interesting of these puzzlers is the identity of the mysterious sixth …
Murdoch Facebook gloat: You're like my $580m, 'CRAPPY' MySpace
Billionaire media tyrant has a Ratner moment
Rupert Murdoch had a Gerald Ratner moment on Twitter earlier today when, in a warning to Facebook, he labelled MySpace - a website he once owned - as "crappy". The media tycoon, who bought MySpace in 2005 for $580m and then copped a $254m loss when he sold the drain-circling website six years later, was responding to reports …
CSI coughs for K3's SAP biz
Roll up, roll up
Private-equity-backed Computer Systems Integration (CSI) has acquired the customer list of K3 BTG's SAP Business Objects Maintenance division for an undisclosed sum. Venture capitalist Blackhawk Capital, one-time owner of Microsoft LAR Teksys - which it sold to Di Data in 2009, bought CSI last October as the first in a roll-up …
That $1,000 the lad in Lagos needed? Just email it with Google Wallet
Be afraid, PayPal - be very afraid
Google has integrated its payment Wallet with Gmail, enabling PayPal-style transactions from within the Gmail interface, and to any over-18 American with an email address and a Google Wallet account. Google Wallet has also spread to another couple of handsets, including the Samsung flagships (S4 & Note II) and the HTC One, all …
El Reg drills in Office 365: See the evidence
Vid Trevor goes visual
This week, Trevor Pott kicked off his exploration of Office 365 with this overview. Trevor and his team-mate Josh Folland have also produced four hands-on videos for Office 365. We will broadcast these over the next week or so – all free, all on demand. Here is the first, an Office 365 tutorial. Watch Video ®
I said ‘no’ to a million-pound Tech City empire
Something for the Weekend, Sir? Handed on a plate, thrown back in your face
I have been propositioned in a toilet by a 72-year-old man. He wants me to move in with him and do the business. Ah, it’s possible that I may have phrased this poorly. What I really meant to say is that he is looking to me to arise and provide him with a youthful injection to keep him in the game. No, no, you’re getting the …
Apple chief Cook: You - senators. Get in here and redo this tax law
Listen up, Popeye, fix it if you don't like it
Apple supremo Tim Cook will dare US senators to rewrite tax laws seeing as the politicians are so upset about tech giants' tiny contributions to America's public coffers. At a Senate hearing on Tuesday, the chief exec will suggest ways to persuade firms to bank their profits at home rather than in offshore accounts, a move …
Congress: It's not the Glass that's scary - It's the GOOGLE
Comment On-head TV, fine - but you can't skip the ads on this one
Google Glass is wrapped around the faces of only a few thousand people right now. The company says the device is in very early beta mode. And yet lawmakers in the US have already pounced on the company demanding answers about how the privacy of netizens using the gizmo will be protected. But it would seem that Congress has …
Hunt: I'll barcode sick Brits and rip up NHS's paper prescriptions
'Fell asleep in the hospital and woke up as a one-armed woman!'
UK Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt wants to tear up the NHS's clumsy system of printed prescriptions - and instead use "unique barcodes" to dish out medication straight to the poorly. Under the proposals to hopefully reduce human error, paperwork listing medicines and drugs will be sent directly from doctors' surgeries to …
IT bloke publishes comprehensive maps of CALL CENTRE menu HELL
Seven year mission in the touch-tone catacombs
Most people can't bear to use automated call centre phone lines for even a few minutes. But one former IT manager has spent seven years on the phone in a bid to produce a map of Britain's phone menus. Nigel Clarke, a self-confessed "call centre menu enthusiast", released details of his project today on a site called www. …
Trying to kill undead Pushdo zombies? Hard luck, Trojan is EVOLVING
Malware remains undead, adds double-sneaky stealth mode
The crooks behind the Pushdo botnet agent have developed variants of the malware that are more resistant to take-down attempts or hijacking by rival hackers. Dell SecureWorks and Damballa warned (PDF) on Wednesday that the latest variant of Pushdo comes packed with a fallback mechanism for cases where zombie clients are unable …
TOO GOOD! Groupon ex-boss to drop, er, 'motivational business album'
Andrew Mason to share 'wisdom' through music
Ex-Groupon chief Andrew Mason is moving to San Francisco to start a new company, after of course, he releases an album of "motivational business music". Mason has been keeping himself busy since he was ousted from the voucher bazaar he helped found, doing all those things that (really, really rich) people do when they're …
Half of youngsters would swap PRIVACY for... cheaper insurance
Only old fogies care who knows where they were last summer
More than half of UK youngsters think being tracked is a small price to pay for cheaper car insurance, and 26 per cent will be actively seeking a pay-by-the-mile policy in the hope of saving a few quid. The numbers come from by YouGov and O2, who asked 2,000 drivers how they felt about being spied on every day - only to …
'I think you DO do evil, using smoke and mirrors to avoid tax'
Quotw Plus: 'What's next? Will they ask for my inside leg measurement?'
This was the week when someone kicked Blighty's tax ant-hill and sent MPs and multinationals scurrying in all directions. The Public Accounts Committee called Google and its auditor Ernst & Young back to give more evidence about their British tax dealings, after a Reuters report suggested there might be "inconsistencies" in …
What IS the difference between Virt and Cloud?
Pin your ears back and we'll tell you
There's a lot of talk – some might say hot air – about cloud computing, what it is and what it is not. Ask 10 people and you will probably get 15 answers. Take the formal definition of cloud put forward by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the section of the US Department of Commerce that for more than …
Prankster 'Superhero' takes on robot traffic warden AND WINS
'We are unable to accept your claim of super powers'
A blogger claiming to have superpowers has exposed a flaw in a parking company's vehicle recognition system which could see innocent drivers wrongly hit with fines. Going under the name Parking Prankster, the activist set out to discover whether he could trick automated systems used by private parking companies into issuing …
The quest continues for a fondleslab that fondles you back
British vibro pioneers say: Anything can be a speaker
HiWave, the haptics company which emerged from Brit hi-fi consortium NXT with a mission to make our fondleslabs fondle us back, has fragmented into a part which makes money and the more-interesting Redux. HiWave owned, and still owns, the technology developed by NXT to drive flat-panel speakers, but the executives were always …
Surface Pro to hit Blighty priced 25% up on top-o-the-range iPad
'That's cos it replaces your current laptop+iPad combo'
Microsoft has confirmed prices for the Surface Pro: the 128GB model will cost punters 25 per cent more than a top of the range iPad. The laptop-cum-tablet, which Redmond says is "designed to showcase Windows 8 Pro", will land in the UK on 23 May, Microsoft revealed today. The estimated retail price for the 64GB version is £ …
Microsoft conceals job ad in Bing homepage
Use Internet Explorer with debug on? You're our kinda guy
Microsoft are looking for a new Bing developer - but you'll need to be pretty smart to apply. Oh, and you can only use Internet Explorer, which rules a fair number of applicants out. Visitors to the Bing homepage are currently greeted with a weird blue environment of some sort as the background to the search bar. But rich …
Have your users managed to force iOS devices on you?
Check this, it might stop them losing all the data
NetApp has used its acquired IonGrid technology to provide iOS mobile devices with access to file data stored on its FAS arrays, along with browser access to business apps. Apple iPad and iPhone users will have an App Store app they can use to log into their corporate system, using Active Directory or a multi-factor …
US government wants security research on car-to-car nets
Car crashed? Have you topped up its anti-virus or turned it off and on again?
David Strickland, Administrator of the USA's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), has told that nation's Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation that he plans to research the security requirements of automated cars and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) networks. Strickland appeared before the …
Foxconn still flogging iWorkers, but more lightly
Fair Labor Association finds better safety, more loos, but also overwork
The Fair Labor Association's (FLA's) latest report on workers at Chinese manufacturer Foxconn, Apple's preferred source for many iThings, has found many staff are still working longer hours than is allowed under Chinese law. The report (PDF) is based on audits of Foxconn plants in Guanlan, Longhua and Chengdu. The report was …
Honey, I BLEW UP the International SPACE STATION - in full 3D
CTO's radical rig blasts Sandra Bullock into Spaaace
A few years ago the idea of accelerating a BlueArc filer would have seemed bizarre; it's got its own hardware acceleration. But now media special effects processing can be so mind-blowingly intensive that the hardware accelerated filer itself needs accelerating. The case that's illustrating this point is the new George Clooney …
Yahoo! May! Buy! Tumblr! For! One! BEELLION! Bucks!
Hipster favourite could make Yahoo! cool again
Yahoo! has reportedly opened its chequebook, pencilled in nine zeroes with a one in front, and waved it around in the general direction of blogging site Tumblr. Adweek says Yahoo! is willing to write the billion-dollar cheque because Tumblr is so cool it will excite advertisers. The Wall Street Journal quotes Yahoo! officials …
Australia's net filter sneaks into operation through back door
Regulator's ban on dodgy shares site wipes out hundreds, exposes censorship mechanism
Australia's national internet filter has re-emerged as an incompetence-powered zombie, after the nation's corporate regulator mistakenly blocked access to hundreds of sites. The regulator in question is the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), which says its role is “ensuring that Australia’s financial …
Nine-year-old Opportunity Mars rover sets NASA distance record
All-time champ, however, remains 40-year-old Russki
The never-say-die little rover that could, Opportunity, has set a new distance record for extraterrestrial NASA vehicles. Opportunity has bested larger and faster rovers (click to enlarge) On Thursday, Opportunity's handlers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, received confirmation that the li'l …
Congress asks Google to explain Glass privacy policies
Pesky laws and governments interfering yet again
The pilot phase of Google Glass is barely off the ground, but the Chocolate Factory's high-tech specs have already drawn the scrutiny of the US Congress over concerns that they could infringe individual privacy. In a letter addressed to Google CEO Larry Page, eight members of the Bipartisan Congressional Privacy Caucus called …
Mac malware found with valid developer ID at freedom conference
Angolan activist targeted for screenshot spying
The annual Oslo Freedom Conference, where activists meet to share tips on advancing human rights, has thrown up an unusual piece of Apple OS X malware. At a workshop covering how to secure your hardware against government intrusion, security researcher Jacob Applebaum discovered the code on a laptop owned by an Angolan human …
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Thursday, 16 May 2013
Dell's server, net bizzes do well, but PCs slammed as expected
Wannabe software unit loses money in fiscal Q1
If Michael Dell and his partners had hoped to turn in a bad quarter to help justify the relatively low price the Dell & Friends consortium wants to pay to take the IT giant private, Dell's sales force in the enterprise server, networking, and services units did not do their part to help. The PC business did – but not as much as …
Boffins find world's oldest virgin water trapped in Earth's crust
Billion-plus-year discovery gives hope for life on Mars
A team of British and Canadian scientists think they've found the oldest water sealed off from the Earth's atmosphere hidden deep in the Earth's crust, and estimate it is between 1.5 and 2.67 billion years old. How long before Perrier tries to flog this? The researchers analyzed water welling up from boreholes drilled 1.5 …
Google may chuck Spanner into Datastore
Google I/O Needs to pretty it up or 'people would freak out'
Google may make its globally-distributed Spanner database available as a cloud service as the company tries to let developers fiddle with its innards. The Spanner database* is the successor to the BigTable/Megastore architecture on which Google's just-announced Cloud Datastore is built, and has some more-advanced features, …
Dell uncloaks novel workstation trio, plops one into cloud
Versatile rack mount, entry-level minitower, itsy-bitsy cutie
Dell has filled out its workstation line with three new machines: a versatile, virtualizable 2U rack-mountable big boy, an entry-level minitower, and the minitower's little brother – which, if a workstation could ever be called "cute", would be a leading candidate for that designation. Speaking at a pre-briefing earlier this …
Pirate Bay cofounder to run for European Parliament
Seeks freetard vote for 'solutions we're in dire need of'
Peter Sunde, one of four cofounders of notorious BitTorrent search site The Pirate Bay, says he plans to run in next year's European Parliament elections, despite his impending incarceration for copyright violation. Sunde, along with partners Carl Lundström, Frederik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, were convicted of " …
NASA and Google team up to buy into quantumish computing
Hoping to crack machine-learning conundrum
A consortium of researchers from Google and NASA are planning to crack the issue of machine learning with a $15m quantum computer that will form the basis of a new Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab. The new facility, which will be sited at Silicon Valley's NASA Ames Research Center, will host a 10 square meter shielded room …
Amazon slashes DynamoDB cost to counter Google Datastore
'Datastore? Cute. Here's a 4X price reduction on big reads.'
Amazon has overhauled its DynamoDB NoSQL datastore following Google's unveiling of a price-competitive service. The changes to the row-based DynamoDB were announced on Wednesday, hours after Google launched its Cloud Datastore – a standalone version of App Engine's columnar storage underlay. The Amazon changes let users scan …
London Olympics site to become digital mega-hub
'Gizmos that I barely understand' will power my city, says mayor
Flamboyant London mayor Boris Johnson has formally inked a deal which will see the enormous press centre built for the 2012 Olympics turned into a "colossal super hangar" crammed with thousands of "digital and creative" workers who won't have needed to be "brilliant at school". The London Legacy Development Corporation and …
HP preps Project Kraken for monster HANA in-memory jobs
Sixteen Ivy Bridge-EX sockets and 12TB in a single image
HP has revealed a little more about its "Project Kraken" in-memory system that it is cooking up in conjunction with the engineers at SAP. It's talking about a future in which there are lots of scale-out servers like its Project Moonshot systems and big-memory systems like Kraken on the other end of the spectrum – with not as …
BlackBerry Messenger unleashed: Look out Twitter and Facebook
Analysis Ignorant tech pundits just aren't down with the kids
BlackBerry announced this week that its flagship messenger service, BBM, will no longer be tied to its proprietary handsets, potentially opening up a lucrative licensing stream which could rescue the beleaguered mobe-maker. Fan forums have been in meltdown after the announcement. From some, the pain appears to be personal. Odd …
British LulzSec hackers hear jail doors slam shut for years
'Latter day pirates' cop hefty servings of porridge
Three British members of the notorious LulzSec hacktivist crew and a hacker affiliate were sentenced today for a series of attacks against targets including Sony, News International, the CIA and the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency. The youngest of the four accused avoided jail with a suspended sentence while the other three …
Google 'DOES DO EVIL', thunders British politician
Parliamentary tax probe has leaked documents, say MPs
Even as its I/O shindig in San Francisco dominated the headlines, Google was today accused of lying over its claims last year that it makes no sales in the UK - in order to justify its tiny UK corporation tax bill. The web giant keeps its vast UK ad revenues out of reach of Blighty's taxmen by insisting that a team in Ireland …
Software AG attempts to barge aboard crowded Cloud bandwagon
Vorsprung durch folgende, nicht wahr?
Software AG is late to the cloud computing party - but Europe’s second largest maker of on-premises enterprise software has vowed to “get it right”. Daren Roos, chief operating officer at the German giant, told The Reg: “We will deliver something that works. We are committed to doing a proper cloud.” And to prove it, he …
Things that cost the same as coffee with Tim Cook - and are WAY more fun
A force of heavily armed au pairs, for instance
A coffee date with Tim Cook has sold for the whopping price of $610,000 to an anonymous bidder. The spendthrift Apple fan* will get half an hour with the fruity firm's CEO, during which tête-à-tête he or she will no doubt want to ask Mr Cook why Cupertino charges 65 quid for a Macbook power charger or perhaps explore the …
Mobile tech destroys the case for the HS2 £multi-beellion train set
Comment And robot cars will mean no need for new roads, too
Finally people seem to be waking up to the dog's breakfast which is the economic case for the proposed High Speed Two London-Birmingham rail link. You know, this lovely train set that the politicians want to plonk down in the middle of England. I've never quite been sure why it is that politicians love such train sets: most of …
Biz email slinger Mimecast tumbles over
'Makes me look a tool for recommending them' sniffs bloke
Mimecast, which touts webmail for businesses, has toppled over in Blighty, leaving its customers unable to send or receive emails. Our readers told us the service wasn't delivering mails, and the web portal was inaccessible for users. And peeps on Twitter reckoned the service went down sometime around 11am this morning. …
Senators: You - Cook. Apple guy. Get in here and bring your tax books
No, don't sit down. Where's all our damn money?
Apple head honcho Tim Cook looks set to be hauled in front of a Senate committee to explain why his firm dodges taxes by keeping its cash overseas. Cook is expected to appear in front of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to explain why Apple has failed to repatriate up to $100bn in cash stashed in foreign …
Reg careers Live Chat: Upgrade or go home with Dominic Connor
Live Chat Our man gives it to you straight at 2pm, May 23
Are you looking to switch jobs, skill-up or go back to college - then join The Register’s Careers’ Live Chat on May 23, at 2pm UK time. City headhunter and Reg contributor Dominic Connor and the Reg’s group editor Joe Fay will host an hour's worth of career-enhancing discussion to help your next steps. Dominic has been …
Steve JOBS finally DEFEATS the PC - from BEYOND THE GRAVE
Slablets hurtle off UK shelves as PC mountains moulder
So it's official - the lifelong battle of legendary Apple CEO Steve Jobs is finally won, now that he has toppled the PC platform from beyond the grave: well, in the UK, at least. During Q1 this year more slablets were shipped into consumer and business channels than PCs - that's notebooks AND desktops COMBINED. Beancounting …
Life on Mars means subsisting on grim diet of turd-garden spinach
Space yokel shit-kickers needed to colonise Red Planet
Farmers are often heard singing about their desire for a brand new combine harvester, but they might not even need one if they fancy going to Mars. NASA bods have said the valuable skills of growing veggies and nurturing plantlife are vital to any Mars colonisation. Indeed, according to a talk given at the Human 2 Mars …
Copyright minister: Google has better access to No. 10 than me
Downing Street overrun with whispering Oompa-Loompas
Google has greater access to No. 10 Downing Street than the government's own ministers, one such minister has admitted. Viscount Younger of Leckie, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Intellectual Property - the third copyright minister in a year - made the candid confession before the Media, Culture and Sport …
'Momentous year' for TalkTalk as it surges from 3rd place to, er, 4th
This is 'fundamentally better', insists Harding
TalkTalk has reported a slight fall in revenue and pre-tax profit for the full financial year. The budget telco told the City that sales for the 12 months to 31 March had slipped by one per cent to £1.67bn compared with £1.68bn a year earlier. Profit before tax dipped four per cent to £122m, the company added. TalkTalk CEO …
Dixons feasts on corpse of Comet, chortles over 'slab bonanza
Pixmania and southern EU remain sore boils on bottom line
PC World and Currys helped steer sales growth at Dixons Retail in fiscal '13 ended 28 April against the background of a land grab for fallen Comet's trade and a boom in slablets. In a trading statement today - preliminary numbers are filed on 20 June - the retail mammoth said like-for-like Q4 sales climbed seven per cent on a …
Fusion-io turns up wick on its product development cycle
Something new to drool over every year
Take note competitors; under new management Fusion-io is going to introduce major product developments every 12-14 months with mid-life kickers every 6-7 months. This is a bit like Intel's tick-tock cadence, with a Fusion tick being a basic product architecture change, and a tock being a mid-life kicker or refresh. In the …
Wannabe hacker, you're hired: Brit bosses mull cyber-apprenticeships
Just put on this white hat
Britain's biggest businesses are draughting up cyber-security apprenticeships to train the online samurais of the future. According to digital knowhow spreader e-Skills, just seven per cent of all computer security professionals are aged between 20 and 29. The employer-led quango sees apprenticeships as a vital way of …
Quantum lurches Starboard: Vigorous investor comes aboard
Blocks and Files Tape-slinger invites 3 new directors to boardroom table
Struggling storage biz Quantum has been in a quandary about how to react to aggressive shareholder Starboard Value. Now the tape and disk data protection vendor has decided to play nice and invite three Starboard nominees onto its board. It works like this: the board goes up from eight seats to nine. Jeffrey Smith, Starboard' …
Dark blue side of the Force used to quell Star Wars nerd clash
Dr Who are you looking at, mate?
It was a conflict that didn't take place in a galaxy far, far away, but a little known corner of Norwich University. Organisers of a sci-fi convention held in Alan Partridge's home town had to use the power of the (police) force after a barney erupted between two groups of furious nerds. Officers were called after the …
Acorn founder: SIXTH WAVE of tech will wash away Apple, Intel
'Violent event' to finally dethrone dead genius overlord Jobs
Acorn co-founder Hermann Hauser has claimed the world is entering a new "sixth wave" of computing, driven by the arrival of omnipresent computers and machine-learning. Speaking at a Software East event this week, the celebrated computer whiz said we are entering an era where computers are everywhere and often undetectable - …
Telly apocalypse foretold for 4G arrival fails to hit London: Brighton next
Good frequency fences make good neighbours, seemingly
Freeview-watching Londoners are safe from 4G interference, with trials failing to elicit even a single complaint - thanks to the capital's comprehensive coverage and its use of a Freeview band well clear of invading 4G signals. The tests were carried out by at800, the body charged with spending £180m in mobile-network cash to …
Gartner chap slams gov-funded IT education boosts
IT is not a beautiful or unique snowflake and does not deserve help
Government spending to develop folks with the IT skills business wants is a waste of time and money, according to Gartner analyst Rolf Jester. Australia-based Jester popped out a blog post carrying that opinion today, in response to the release of Australia's annual federal Budget. The release of that document is always a cue …
Verizon starts selling VMware's split personality phones
Bring your own device provided it's one of these two Androids
VMware has notched up a significant achievement in its quest to reduce its dependence on server virtualisation - by striking a partnership with Verizon Enterprise that gives its BYOD-ware Horizon Suite a better chance of finding its way into users' hands. VMware is mad for what it calls end-user computing, largely because …
My god, what's that STENCH belching from your iPhone?
I love the smell of freshly squashed pig in the mornin'
A new prototype iPhone peripheral pumps out smells based on user interaction, allowing devs to add an aromatic dimension to games and messaging as long as users keep their reservoir stocked. ChatPerf slips onto the bottom of an iPhone and comes with an SDK allowing anyone to scent-enable their application. Some variation in …
TUANZ: don't risk mobile competition
New Zealand plots spectrum future
New Zealand has kicked off the consultation period for its planned 700 MHz spectrum auction, to take place in 2013. That country's Radio Spectrum Management Agency has adopted the Asia Pacific Telecommunity (APT) band plan, in which 45 MHz of paired spectrum will be made available in nine 5 MHz blocks. The government is …
Hemp used to make graphene-like supercapacitors
Pass de battery on de left-hand-side
A group of scientists from the University of Alberta have created a process that makes graphene-like nanomaterials out of hemp waste, suitable for use in supercapacitors. While graphene is already known to be a good energy store, it's also expensive, so commercial supercapacitors use activated carbon electrodes. According to …
Tech startups, Silicon Valley, not all they're cracked up to be
Business think tank finds $100m companies more likely to emerge in other places, sectors
Technology startups are not quite the growth engine they're assumed to be, according to a 30-year study by economic think-tank the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. The Kaufmann Foundation, to give the organisation its commonly-used short name, happily describes itself as “the world's largest foundation devoted to …
Google forges BigTable-based NoSQL datastore
Google I/O Takes out BigTable, thwacks Amazon DynamoDB over the head
If you're Google, building cloud services for the public must be frustrating – after spending a decade crafting and stitching together software systems for use internally, when you try and sell them to the outside world you need to unpick them from one another. It seems more like butchery than creation, but that's the name of …
Google tells Microsoft to yank its new WinPhone YouTube app
Says it's deliberately ripping off content creators
No sooner has Microsoft managed to get a full-featured YouTube app running on Windows Phone 8 – something it long maintained was impossible – than an irate Google has asked it to immediately remove the app from the Windows Phone Store. The Verge, which editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky has described as "a news site which covers …
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Wednesday, 15 May 2013
Cisco boosts sales and profits despite softness in switching and routing
Servers and video help fill in the gaps
Cisco Systems took a big bet more than four years ago when it jumped into the server market with its Unified Computing System blade and rack servers and started peddling converged Nexus switches at the same time. Those bets have paid off, and rising sales of these products are filling in the revenue gaps in the quarter ended in …
NASA: Our ALIEN HUNTING star-scan 'scope is KNACKERED
Planet-spotter not spinning its wheels in space
In a press conference on Wednesday, NASA warned that its Kepler orbital telescope, which has had much success in spotting Earth-sized planets, may be on its last legs after a serious equipment failure. The telescope relies on four spinning reaction wheels to keep it aligned on target, and one failed last year. Now another has …
Analyst warns NetApp is prepping layoffs
1,300 pink slips prepared
According to a private Piper Jaffray note to its clients, NetApp is preparing to announce a 10 per cent work force reduction, about 1,300 people, in under-performing areas of its business such as Engenio, the acquired LSI disk array business. The idea is, according to Piper Jaffray, for NetApp to maintain a solid operating …
Australia downloads a limping 13 Mbps, says Ookla
Looking under the data, it's not so simple
There are, it seems, 44 countries in the world with better broadband download speeds than Australia, according to the latest Netindex release by Ookla. This has brought a predictable round of soul-searching, particularly as Mongolia appears higher on the list than Australia (it scored an average speed of 13.79 Mbps, while …
Google takes on AWS, Azure virty servers with micro billing and fat disks
Google I/O Compute Engine open for all
Google is done dabbling with raw compute and storage infrastructure and has thrown the doors wide open on its Compute Engine services, while at the same time offering finer-grained pricing and fatter persistent storage for its virtual machines than is available from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Windows Azure, and other public …
Oracle updates Java versioning to allow more security fixes
New scheme skips numbers to leave room for emergencies
Seemingly borrowing a page from the old, line-numbered BASIC programs of the 1980s, Oracle has adopted a new version numbering strategy for the Java Development Kit (JDK) – one that skips numbers, in case Oracle has to go back and plunk in new code later. Traditionally, Oracle has issued new patches for the JDK on a …
Overland Storage may acquire Tandberg
Cripple plus walking wounded equals able-bodied entity
Overland Storage may be about to acquire Tandberg Data. A crippled tape and disk data protection and NAS storage supplier bleeding cash, Overland Storage is looking for respite from its financial woes by acquiring, on a basis of equals, the newly recovered Tandberg Data. The news is laid out in an SEC form SC 13D/A filing …
Google platform cloud now takes PHP apps
Google I/O Google closes gap with cloud competitors
Google is adding PHP to Google App Engine as the company tries to appeal to developers of the widely-used language. The addition was announced on Wednesday at Google's developer jamboree Google I/O. It means GAE now supports three widely used web languages – Python, Java, and PHP – and Go, a Google-sponsored language designed …
Biological chips go analog to boost efficiency
Analog chips run rings around digital ones at tiny scale
MIT boffins have figured out how to create synthetic analog organic circuits that can perform useful tasks without needing the sophistication that digital methods demand, which could lead to more efficient gloopy circuits and even more precise drug manufacture. The advance, which could create technology for carefully managing …
Fujitsu peddles three-way hybrid super to Nagoya University
Mash up to push up above 3.66 petaflops – eventually
Nagoya University is the latest academic institute in Japan to take a slice of the K supercomputer design - and put it on its campus to run applications on a monstrous 10.51 petaflops box. In theory. And in an interesting twist, the new machine is a hybrid Sparc64-Xeon-Xeon Phi cluster that will eventually push up into the …
Android device? Ooohhhh, you mean a Samsung phone
Koreans nabbed nearly all the Q1 profits – more even than Google
Android may now be the bestselling smartphone OS in the world, as Google pointed out in its Wednesday morning I/O conference keynote, but a new report says most handset vendors aren't actually making much money off Android – with one notable exception. According to a study by market research firm Strategy Analytics, the global …
Atlantis raises 20 million greenbacks to flog virty desktop software
D-round takes pot up to $30m total
Privately-owned Atlantis Computing has just raised $20m to flog its Atlantis ILIO desktop virtualisation software around the world. ILIO – In Line Image Optimisation - has virtual machines running inside a server's RAM and delivers virtual desktops at less than $300 per desktop. The company's second CEO, Bernard Harguindeguy …
Alleged CIA spook cuffed by Russians: US Gmail 'spycraft' revealed
Cloak and blather, sniffs ex-FBI bod
A US diplomat accused of attempting to recruit a Russian security services staffer as a double agent used a comical "spy arsenal" of equipment, it is claimed. Ryan Fogle - third secretary of the political department of the US Embassy in Moscow - was allegedly caught redhanded by Russia's counterintelligence agency, the FSB, …
Skyera hires flashy Western Digital veep as chief architect
WD potentially challenging the big SSD boys
Flash array startup Skyera, which counts Western Digital among its investors, has recruited a WD flash product exec as its new chief architect. According to a story in the Sacramento Bee, Skyera recruited Andy Tomlin as its chief architect. Tomlin was WD's vice presidnt of SSD Development responsible for all firmware, software …
Feds stamp on cash pipeline to Mt Gox, Bitcoin's Wall Street
Warrant served on account used to transfer crypto-dosh
The Department of Homeland Security has frozen an online trade route between US citizens and Mt. Gox - the world's largest exchange of crypto-currency Bitcoin. The move will be interpreted as an opening skirmish in a battle to control the electronic cash, which has exploded in popularity and so far avoided regulation by …
Live Blog: Google I/O keynote
Google I/O Chocolate Factory shows off the new goodies
At 7am this morning, the streets of San Francisco were thronged with developers lining up to get into Google's annual I/O conference. Over 6,000 delegates have signed up for the show and they all want the best seats for the opening keynote presentation that will lay out Google's plans for the next year's developments in …
Apple: ebook price fixing? Nooo, nothing to do with us, no siree
Maybe you should ask the publishers
Apple has told a US court it certainly wasn't involved in any conspiracy to rig the prices of ebooks. The fruity firm said that it was neither involved in nor knew of any meetings or conversations between the publishing houses that "allegedly formed the basis of the purported conspiracy". "Apple did not conspire to fix e-book …
Euro PC shipments plummet into bottomless pit of DOOOOM
11th quarter of decline, 20pc drop on last year - Gartner
PC shipments in Western Europe declined for the 11th quarter in a row, and suffered the steepest drop on record in the first three months of 2013. That's according to market watchers at Gartner. Some 12.3 million desktops and notebooks found a home during Q1 of this year - those platforms are not completely dead - but this …
Virident tempts EMC flash boss over, creeps up on Fusion-io
Intrigues all round in the flash supplier world
Server flash card upstart Virident has recruited Ken Grohe, EMC's flash business general manager, to run its worldwide customer operations, while it strengthens its position against flash supremos Fusion-io The recruitment is open for anyone to see on Grohe's LinkedIn page. Concurrent with Grohe's hire, Virident, which used …
Murdoch hate sparks mass bitchin', rapid evacuation from O2, BE
1 in 3 polled punters will quit ISP gobbled by Sky
Boycotting Rupert Murdoch-owned stuff - such as the media baron's newspapers - is nothing new. But now that Telefónica UK has sold its O2 and BE home broadband businesses to BSkyB, customers are either fleeing the networks or moaning bitterly about who they perceive to be their looming "nasty old" overlord. O2 and BE punters …
All aboard the patch wagon! Next stop: Microsoft, Adobe, Mozilla
Come on, those security bugs won't fix themselves
Today, right on schedule, Microsoft's monthly security patch bandwagon rolled into town with updates for Internet Explorer, Office and Windows - with Adobe bringing up the rear. This latest instalment of Patch Tuesday addresses 33 bugs in a range of Redmond software, as revealed late last week. The flaws have been grouped into …
Will customers buy into Oracle's modern-day mainframes?
How about that stack, Larry...
Oracle is making a big play to cash in on the simplification of enterprise IT environments with "engineered systems," the collection of vertically integrated appliances that debuted five years ago with Exadata. While Oracle insists customers who enter into the Big Red cocoon will reap all kinds of benefits, some may be …
Datatec pours mixed cocktail of fiscal '13 numbers
Logicalis went bananas, sez Montanana
Tech group Datatec was not yet ready to call an end to market uncertainty across the globe following a mixed turnout for its distribution and integration units in fiscal '13 ended February. Group sales at South Africa-listed Datatec climbed four per cent to $5.25bn including $185m from acquisitions, but operating profit fell …
Euro trade chief snaps on glove, goes it alone in Huawei, ZTE probe
But first, he'll have a little word with China
European Union trade chief Karel De Gucht will investigate allegations that Chinese telecoms hardware makers are undermining their Euro rivals. The China-based electronics goliaths are accused of unfairly gaining an advantage by trousering state subsidies from the communist regime and dumping cheap networking kit on the …
Dell will drop the F-bomb FIVE days early in epic power struggle
That's F for financials, and perhaps a D for performance
Dell has pulled forward the reporting of its fiscal Q1 financials by five days amid a battle between Michael Dell and activist investor Carl Icahn over the future ownership of the Texan PC giant. The company confirmed last night that it has scheduled the conference call with analysts tomorrow - 16 May - indicating that Dell's …
EU wants the Swiss and pals to cough up IT giants' hidden bank info
Where's my money, eh? WHERE'S MY MONEY?
Europe's finance ministers will start talks with five non-member states to close tax law loopholes exploited by tech multinationals - such as Google and Amazon. The ministers said they wanted to open up negotiations with European Free Trade Association members Switzerland and Liechtenstein as well as with "tax haven" …
Review: HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook
All roads lead to Chrome?
If you read my comparison of the Asus C7 and Samsung Series 3 Chromebooks, you may well have come away thinking: "All well and good, but can I have something with a bigger screen for the same sort of money?" Now, thanks to HP, the answer to that question is yes. The latest entry into the Chromebook steeplechase is powered by …
Oi, Google! Stop LIBELLING us Germans, fix your autocomplete
Wie möchten Sie es, Herr Adman?
Google has been ordered by a German court to block defamatory words appearing in its search engine's autocomplete function. The Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe ruled that the advertising giant must remove libellous material from its algorithms that automatically attempt to guess what one is searching for - but only once …
Ten years on: How did that cloud strategy pan out?
How to avoid vendor lock-in
So the CEO is hearing all about clouds now and the financial director is looking at his pile of beans and as usual wants you to do more with less. And both think it is time for you to build or buy a cloud. Where do you start? The answer is by being brutally honest with yourself and your bosses about everything around you. A …
It's all gone to Schmitt: New OCZ boss rips 'n' replaces execs
Tries to prove to $30m backer that the biz can make money
Flash storage biz OCZ's new CEO has replaced almost a dozen executives - and he's banging on about quality as he strives to resuscitate the near-dead OCZ flash business. OCZ over-extended itself drastically under founder and previous CEO Ryan Petersen, who was ousted last year, leaving the company with far too many under- …
Currant Bun erects £2 paywall: Wraps digi-paper around free footie
We've heard worse ideas
British tabloid The Sun has revealed a subscription plan to access the digital version of the newspaper, Sun+. The daily is essentially offering a football video package with The Sun's stories wrapped around it, for £2 a week. Near-live TV clips of Premier League games will be bundled in the deal, as News International's …
Hex & plugs & ROM & roll: Computer music stars rock Bletchley
Seven decades of electronica at code-breaking park museum
Are programmers the new rock stars? That may be a bit of a stretch, but it hasn't stopped one IT engineer staging a computer music exhibition at Blighty's Bletchley Park. The new hands-on display at The National Museum of Computing, located in the grounds of the wartime code-breaking nerve-centre, focusses on the story of …
Speaking in Tech: All our stuff's on Amazon's cloud... what if it goes titsup?
Podcast Should private firms be grilled on biz viability for the 'public interest'...
It's another banter-packed episode of El Reg's one-and-only podcast, helping you catch up on everything that has happened this week in enterprise and consumer tech. This week: does a private company have a duty of disclosure in the public interest? Is it really a cost saving when you buy the latest tape drive, but it …
Woes continue at Northamber after PC, server franchise breakage
'Turnaround will not be immediate', says oldest distie
Three things in life are certain - death, taxes and perennially declining turnover at Blighty's oldest tech distributor Northamber, which this morning reported another double-digit sales slump. The AIM-listed wholesaler, which plies its trade from Surrey, revealed revenue for fiscal Q3 ended 31 March was down 20 per cent year- …
Apple seeks techies, designers to revive iWork office suite
Would YOU enter the walled garden?
Apple looks set to refresh its answer to Microsoft's office: the neglected iWork software suite, which hasn't received a significant update since 2009. Listings on its jobs page, some of which date back a few months, the fruity firm says it is looking for nine people to help develop the office software collection. Could this …
UK biz baffled by Reding's planned data protection law rewrite: ICO
'I've forgotten. What does right to be forgotten actually mean?'
A large number of British businesses are clueless about many of the main provisions detailed in the European Union's proposed data protection reforms, a new report from the Information Commissioner's Office has claimed. Consultancy firm London Economics - which was commissioned to carry out the research (PDF) on behalf of the …
Whiptail CEO: Big Blue's flashy BEELLION doesn't faze us
Interview Cannibalising your own lines? Not for us
Undaunted by IBM's billion dollar investment in flash, all-flash array startup Whiptail is banking on new investor SanDisk, says Whiptail CEO Dan Crain. Whiptail's plans also include introducing 3D chips into its arraysand developing "revolutionary" array software and management products. It has no intention of entering the …
Cluster kids, pick your weapons: It's the Battle of Leipzig 2.0
HPC blog Stop Möckern my big iron
Napoleon experienced his first defeat* there 200 years ago... Now nine teams of university undergrad students will travel to Leipzig in the hopes of winning the clash of big iron that is the International Supercomputing Conference 2013 (ISC’13) Student Cluster Challenge. Nine teams of university undergrad students will build …
Why UK slid £150m to tax-exempt phone-mast master Arqiva
Private biz bags taxpayer handout? Thank George Osborne
How does one fairly distribute £150m to extend Blighty's mobile coverage? Give the whole lot to a private company that has paid no corporation tax for four years and effectively holds a monopoly. That company is Arqiva, which owns the vast majority of the UK's TV, radio and mobile phone transmitters. It will get £150m of …
Sony investor wants to break up firm, re-invest in hardware biz
Loeb's masterplan calls for IPO of entertainment arm
Sony’s biggest shareholder wants to break up the firm, spinning off its highly profitable entertainment division to generate more cash to plough into its misfiring hardware biz. Activist investor Daniel Loeb and his hedge fund Third Point has a 6.5 per cent stake in the venerable electronics giant, amounting to a whopping $1. …
Bing uncloaks Klingon translator
'Dujeychugh jagh nIv yItuHQo', says Redmond to Google
Microsoft's ongoing efforts to top Google have seen it approach the final frontier, with a new service that translates written text from various terrestrial languages into the fictional language of Star Trek's Klingon race. The translator service will also be available from Bing's Windows Phone app. The introduction of the …
McAfee all-in-one security suite covers PCs, tablets, and smartphones
Put your passport and ID docs in the cloud
McAfee has launched an all-in-one cross-platform security suite for consumers that incorporates online storage through biometric authentication as well as a host of other security technologies. Equally importantly, the Intel security division is trying to shake up the way security software is sold to consumers. The McAfee …
Rolls-Royce climbs aboard Bloodhound SUPERSONIC car
Cash and tech support for mighty motor's mighty motor
Rolls-Royce has announced it will back the Bloodhound SuperSonic Car (SSC), despite the company's "pretty robust policy about using our power plants in applications for which they were not designed". Bloodhound will be partially powered by a Rolls-Royce EJ200 jet engine, normally found giving the Eurofighter-Typhoon a powerful …
LogMeIn dives into cloudy things with ARM support
Get aboard the IoT bandwagon for £60 or less
LogMeIn has relaunched its cloudy-thing management, now called Xively and available with a sixty-quid ARM development board for those hoping to kick start the Internet of Things. Not that one needs the £57.99 Jumpstart kit to use Xively's cloud. Support for RESTful, JSON and CSV as well as raw sockets ensure that any IP- …
India's 2020 vision: a $10 BEELION software industry
Industry body wants PR
India’s all-powerful IT body NASSCOM wants the country’s burgeoning software industry to generate $10bn in revenue by 2020, in a move designed to "rejuvenate" India’s sprawling IT industry. The body’s newly unveiled 2020 plan will require India’s software market to grow its revenues almost five-fold from the estimated $2.2bn …
'LulzSec leader's' victim named: tiny Oz council
Narrabri Shire, population 14,000, target of elite hackers
So: the person alleged to have described himself as the “leader” of LulzSec was arrested for what, exactly? There's been a lot of noise flowing around, and the odd tip-off (including some to The Register in an extensive phone call on April 29). Since we try to avoid jumping ahead of the court process, we have kept our traps …
EMC's ViPR: Is it really that venomous?
Storagebod It's automation, but not as we know it, Jim
There’s a lot of discussion about what EMC's ViPR is and what it isn’t. How much of this confusion is deliberate and how much is simply the normal of fog of war which pervades the storage industry? Firstly, it's a messy announcement; there’s a hotch-potch of products here, utilising IP from acquisitions and from internal EMC …
Australia's 2013/2014 budget full of sci/tech goodies
Cash for gamers, ERP reviews and nuclear waste handling
Australia's budget for 2013/2014 contains plenty of interest to the technology community. One of the Budget's centrepieces is $AUD9.8 billion of funds, over six years, with the aim of ensuring “Australia to be placed in the top five countries internationally in reading, mathematics and science by 2025”. That investment in …
NICTA on the budget chopping block
Updated Current funding deed to be its last
The research house that gave the world the first provably secure operating kernel, and has been in the engine room of other IT application innovations in bionic vision, logistics, mapping and hundred-Terabit optical networking, is under threat under the 2013 Federal Budget. Funding for NICTA, funded through the Department of …
Financial firms start lining up for AMD Roadrunner systems
Open Compute makers could do for Opterons what tier ones didn't
For more than a few large-scale data center operators and supercomputer centers in the world, AMD's Opteron processors are still an important part of their infrastructure. But over the past few years, as Intel has got its Xeon act together and AMD has had some issues (to put it politely) the tier-one server makers have not …
Firefox 21 ships with performance-profiling Health Report
Phones home with stats on startup, crashes, and more
The Mozilla Foundation has shipped the latest version of its Firefox web browser with a new Health Report feature that monitors browser behavior and optionally submits usage statistics back to Mozilla to help reduce crashes and other problems. According to a blog post by VP of Firefox engineering Johnathan Nightingale, the …
Larry Page acknowledges creeping vocal paralysis
Google boss asks for public's help to cure condition
It has often been noted that Google's CEO Larry Page comes across as somewhat muted when speaking, which he took a break from entirely last year with an unexplained throat issue. Now he has revealed what the problem is. His vocal issues began 14 years ago after a heavy cold left him very hoarse. His condition was diagnosed as …
D-Wave wins the quantum-classical horse race, kind of
For the right problem, quantum computing wins
It's official, it seems: the D-Wave isn't a “real” quantum computer, but it does handle some classes of problems a lot faster than a classical desktop computer. That's the result of the first attempt to benchmark the company's adibiatic quantum computer, but it comes with caveats. But first, some background. D-Wave is a …
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Tuesday, 14 May 2013
German publisher accuses Microsoft of URL sniffing
Teacup storm or Skype snooping?
Is Microsoft “snooping” on Skype text conversations, or merely protecting users from malware URLs? German publisher Heise Online has given that question prominence with the accusation that Redmond is snooping, as the result of receiving return visits from Microsoft IP addresses if they send HTTPS URLs through Skype text chats …
IBM to push Linux apps on Power iron in China, then elsewhere
If you want to peddle boxes, you have to sell the ISVs first
IBM is opening a Power Systems Linux Center in Beijing, China, in the hopes of getting more local ISVs interested in its Power Systems iron and luring them away from x86-based systems. With the Power Systems business taking it on the chin in IBM's first quarter – revenues fell 32 per cent compared to a year ago – you can bet …
Watch out, Nokia: Global mobile phone sales slowing
Only the Asian market showing growth
It seems as though hardly a month goes by without the launch of some flashy new mobile phone. Yet according to new figures from Gartner, overall mobile sales are slowing throughout most of the world, which could mean trouble ahead for some vendors – particularly Nokia. Total sales of all types of handsets were essentially flat …
Top guns doomed as US Navy demos first carrier-launched drone
Killer robot takes to the skies
The US Navy has successfully completed the first carrier launch of its unmanned X47B drone, a programmable stealth strike aircraft with a range of 2,100 miles and the skills to allow automatic in-flight refueling, which could give it global reach. #BREAKING: #USNavy history is made! Was airborne at 11:18A. More to come. MT @ …
Too much infosec regulation undermines security, warns NAB
Encouraging compliance discourages responses
More prescriptive regulation of the security posture in industry sectors like banking could have the paradoxical impact of reducing security, according to Andrew Dell, head of IT security services at the National Australia Bank. “We have to become much more agile and proactive – how we look at, how we react to cybercrime. Our …
Video services chug half of US net capacity
Amazon cloud serves up biggest, Google second biggest, Microsoft...?
Video services Netflix and YouTube consume nearly half of US internet capacity at peak times, demonstrating the massive scale of Amazon and Google's infrastructure clouds, but causing us to ask 'whither Microsoft?' As of the first half of 2013, Netflix accounted for almost a third (32.5 per cent) of downstream traffic on US …
Budget could mean more paperwork for contractors
Sole traders may have to pay tax monthly, not quarterly
Australia's 2013/2014 budget could mean extra work for IT contractors. Such workers are often considered “sole traders” or “independent contractors” for tax purposes and are currently required to submit quarterly payments for the goods and services tax (GST) and personal income tax. Australia has around 750,000 independent …
Google adds Atari Easter Egg for Breakout's birthday
Cute game born in Jobsian heart of darkness
Google has added a playable version of the early Atari game Breakout to its Image Search system to celebrate the game's 37th birthday. To access the game go to the Google Image search page and enter "Atari breakout." The search results pages then form into five rows of bricks and the paddle and ball game commences under mouse …
Engine Yard plugs PHP into its platform-as-a-service
Halves weakling instance prices, intros Riak support
Oracle-backed Engine Yard has added support for PHP apps to its platform cloud as the company tries to maintain feature parity against bigger companies with better infrastructure. The PHP support was announced on Tuesday and takes EngineYard's roster of supported languages to three, including Ruby on Rails and Node.js. It sees …
Microsoft: Next WinPhone 8 update to arrive this summer
Won't be 'Blue,' but will include important features
We still don't know for sure what changes will arrive in Windows 8.1, the big OS update that's expected to ship as a preview in late June, but Microsoft has begun teasing a few details of the next update to Windows Phone 8. Windows group chief marketing and finance officer Tami Reller confirmed that the major desktop update …
Marlinspike: Saudi mobe network tried to recruit me to sniff citizens' privates
Gov plans to probe tweets, chat, claims crypto guru
Claims that a Saudi mobile network is attempting to spy on citizens emerged after the telco apparently tried to recruit top cryptographer Moxie Marlinspike - who promptly went public. The cryptography expert and former hacker, who left Twitter's security team in January, said he had been asked to help Mobily in its state- …
Dell files suit accusing Hitachi and pals of 'price-fixing conspiracy'
Wants damages from optical drive suppliers
Dell has filed a lawsuit alleging that six suppliers which manufactured the optical drives used in its computers had illegally agreed to set the components' prices. In a complaint filed at a federal court in Austin, Texas, the world's third-largest computer manufacturer said it was seeking damages for a "price-fixing …
Judge orders redacted Aaron Swartz prosecution docs to be revealed
MIT and JSTOR allowed to black out names and network info
A US judge has ordered that documents from the criminal hacking case against internet activist Aaron Swartz should be unsealed, after they've been redacted by MIT and JSTOR. Swartz took his own life in January just ahead of the trial over the theft of academic articles from online reference library JSTOR using a computer at …
New Lumia 925: This, loyalists, is the BIG ONE you've waited for
Hands-on Nokia veep drills high-end master plan for El Reg
Today, Nokia launched its best smartphone to date: the Lumia 925. I got some hands-on time with the Windows Phone 8-powered device - and a tour of the gadget by shoegaze icon Nokia senior veep of product management Kevin Shields, who explained some of the key design decisions. It's a covetable bit of kit - but with iPhones and …
Apple adds Galaxy S 4 to Samsung patent suit
Might as well kick Korean mobe-maker where it'll hurt most
Apple has ratcheted-up its patent-infringment attack on Samsung, asking the US District Court of California to add Sammy's new smartphone flagship, the Galaxy S 4, to the list of products that Apple alleges violate its patents. That handset was launched with hella hoopla this March (and reviewed by The Reg this Monday), and is …
BlackBerry and Apple pie this summer. Or BBM-onna-Droid
Hey, rivals, have our loyal fans! No, wait
BlackBerry's hugely popular social-network-in-hardware BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) will be available on iPhone and Android for free from this summer. BBM is one of the defining features of the BlackBerry, a brilliantly designed social network that has earned the firm a compulsive following. For BBM's "members", the messenger is …
Microsoft: YES! You can have your desktop back again for FREE!
No, no, no need to thank us - we love you all
Microsoft has confirmed that it will issue its Blue update to Windows 8 without charge, with first code scheduled at the company’s Build conference starting on June 26. This is in line with Redmond's previous policy in which users have been charged only for an entirely new iteration of the Windows OS, not for service packs and …
Rackspace does tech support for popular languages on its cloud
Getting all fanatical about SDKs – for free
Rackspace Hosting has spent the past six months putting together a set of officially sanctioned software development kits and runtime environments for popular programming languages to run on its eponymous infrastructure cloud, and now it is ready to offer tech support for those SDKs when companies deploy applications on the …
BlackBerry's Q5 QWERTY gets flirty with buy-curious teens
We need to talk about Kevin
BlackBerry's new Q5 QWERTY smartphone was revealed today as "youthful and fun", rather distancing the device from its pinstripe pocket-dwelling siblings, the Q10 and Z10. The Q5 a mid-range sibling to the first BlackBerry OS 10 QWERTY phone, the Q10, which we reviewed here last week. But somewhat surprisingly, the BB10-powered …
Vodafone gets surprise £2.1bn dividend from Verizon Wireless
Trebles all round in Newbury tonight
US cell network Verizon Wireless will pay out a shareholder dividend this year - and as there are only two shareholders, the $7bn (£4.5bn) divvy will be split between, er, Verizon and Vodafone. That means Voda - headquartered in Newbury, UK - will take home $3.15bn (£2.1bn). Vodafone owns 45 per cent of Verizon Wireless - the …
Azlan enters EMC channel in stealth mode
We will NOT upset other distributors, they won't even know we're here
Azlan wants to slip quietly into EMC's partner base without making any waves for existing distributors, well almost. This may be music to the ears of EMC's distie pals at Arrow and Avnet who were privately concerned a price led strategy from Azlan would trash their margins, something they've complained about in past situations …
Dell committee to Icahn: Show us the money
How exactly will you buy new shares for everyone?
Dell's special committee has asked Carl Icahn and his investment partner Southeastern Asset Management for a bit more info on their plan to thwart Mike Dell's bid to take the firm private, while Icahn suggests himself for the board. The committee, set up to look into Mike Dell's offer to take his company private for $24.4bn …
Frenchie bean-counters sweet-talked into slipping on Trojans
Ne touchez pas à ce téléphone, mon ami!
Crooks hoping to empty company bank accounts are calling up the firms' bean-counters to chase invoices packed with hidden malware. Finance staff are tricked into opening the booby-trapped messages in phone calls from con men, who claim to have emailed in legit paperwork that needs urgent attention. The documents instead …
CIA ups stake in database-as-a-service firm
Cloudant trousers $12m, opens San Francisco office
The CIA has maintained its influence over Cloudant by upping its investment in the database-as-a-service firm. The $12m funding round sees Cloudant's existing investors In-Q-Tel*, Avalon Ventures, and Samsung Venture Investment Corporation up their shares in the company, and new investors Fidelity Investments, Rackspace …
Amazon coughs millions for Liquavista screen tech while workers strike
Kindle Colour soon? Not while Leipzig's downing tools
Amazon has nabbed screen tech firm Liquavista from Samsung, potentially for its use in building a colour ereader, while its workers go on strike in Germany. Although the etailer already has Kindle-branded tablets in colour, it doesn't as yet have a sun-defying ereader display that can do colour, an option that would give its …
Full metal jacket: Nokia launches new Lumia 925
4G phone for grown-ups
Nokia tweaked the top of its range with a new 4G Windows 8 model today. The aluminium 925 breaks with Nokia’s Stickle Brick garish-coloured plastic design philosophy and offers a more grown-up styling. The camera module is snaffled from the erstwhile flagship, the 920, with optical image stabilisation, spruced up with an extra …
Sun lets loose with THREE record eruptions in 24 hours
Excited boffins say star may even show off twin peaks
The Sun looks like it's ramping up to its expected solar maximum this year, after it let loose three X-class solar flares in just 24 hours. Our solar system's parent star lashed out late Sunday night and again on Monday with two coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from its upper left side. The Sun followed that up on Monday night …
Micro P parent does it AGAIN, kicks recession in nackers
Get big, get niche, oh wait... that is meaningless, get out
DCC Sercom, parent of Brit IT distie Micro P and games console wholesaler Gem, has again laughed in the face of a flatlining local economy. Turnover in the tech division of Irish conglomerate DCC grew 17.9 per cent to €2.27bn (£1.92bn) for the year ended 31 March 2013, and a whopping 16.8 per cent of this was organic. The …
Foundem urges Brussels: REJECT Google's search biz offer
Argues some tweaks make it even more anti-competitive
UK-based price-comparison site Foundem has urged competition officials in Brussels to reject Google's formal offer of concessions, which is intended to address the ad giant's alleged abuse of dominance in Europe's search market. Google commands a hefty 90 per cent share of the search business in the European Union. In April, …
'WikiLeaks of financial data' prompts worldwide hunt for tax evaders
'We’re coming after you' - taxman warns
A cache of data amounting to a whopping 400 gigabytes of information leaked by bank insiders has triggered an offshore tax evasion investigation across the United States, the UK and Australia. Tax authorities in the the three countries are examining the leaked data, which reveals the complex offshore vehicles used to stash …
EMC hits flash leader Fusion-io where it hurts: Low-cost server cards
Cheapie PCIe flash cards? That's OUR thing
Storage, virtualisation, info and cloud giant EMC is set to widen its attack on server flash card leader Fusion-io by releasing a low-cost flash card for hyper-scale data centres. Server flash card cache coherency is also set to appear for Oracle RAC environments, according to Stifel Nicolas analyst Aaron Rakers, who was at …
Mystery Sony big-screen ereader to sport E Ink bender
Liable to be pliable, folks
E Ink reckons its "Mobius" flexible epaper screen will be the first of its kind to go into mass production, an event the company claims will take place some time later this year. The Mobius will make its debut as a 13.3-inch panel built into a unnamed “digital paper product” made by Sony, which co-developed the panel with E …
Who is Samsung trying to kid? There will NEVER be a 5G network
Analysis Not just satellites nobbling 'fifth-gen' smartmobes
There will almost certainly never be a "5G" mobile broadband network, but that hasn't stopped Samsung using the trendy moniker to describe its 1Gbit-per-second wireless experiments. The South Korean giant managed to achieve that data transfer rate through two kilometres of air in the 28GHz radio band, thanks to some advanced …
Intel Centerton server-class Atoms: How low can you go?
Review Reduced-power virtualisation - take that, ARM
In late 2012 Intel launched Centerton: the first in its new line of Atom-based server processors. Hoping to cut ARM's invasion of the data centre off at the pass, these low-power CPUs are targeted at an emerging "Metal as a Service" movement that sees a return of unique workloads to individual processors. I've finally gotten …
Android is a mess and needs sprucing up, admits chief
Comment Can Google really fix it? It isn't in control any more
Android looks unstoppable, and it's a mess. The first fact tends to eclipse the second observation, but Android's new supremo diplomatically acknowledges as much in an interview. "Here’s the challenge: without changing the open nature of Android, how do we help improve the whole world’s end-user experience?" Chrome chief …
Astronaut Chris Hadfield's Space Oddity ends in Kazakhstan
Crooning Canadian 'naut returns to terra firma
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield is back on Earth following a 144-day stay aboard the International Space Station, which ended on a high note when the crooning spaceman released an impressive high-altitude version of David Bowie's Space Oddity. Hadfield and fellow Expedition 35 'nauts Tom Marshburn and Roman Romanenko …
Dell's enterprise biz: Can you beat HP without being HP?
Server boss comes to London, become hostage to fortune
The head of Dell’s enterprise business last week claimed the firm was on track to take the number one spot in the x86 server market this year, kicking out incumbent HP. Marius Haas made himself a hostage to server market fortune as the Texan firm shipped its enterprise top brass into London to convince customers, and channel …
Hm, disk drive maker, what's that smell lingering around you?
It's death and failure, says ex-Sun storage chap
The disk drive vendors have been utterly screwed by mismanaging the disruptive force of solid state drives: that's the view of Mike Shapiro - lately a storage bigshot at Sun and Oracle. Mike Shapiro was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer, CTO, and VP of Storage for Sun and then Oracle. He is most recently a founder at a …
You thought only Google dodges UK taxes? So do all the Brit firms
Amazing how much tech business gets done in the Caymans
Big British-based tech firms like Autonomy and BSkyB have subsidiaries in onshore and offshore tax havens, and avoid paying taxes in much the same way as has been highlighted in the case of US firms Google and Amazon. Research shows that most of Blighty's top companies have offshoots in tax havens, according to charity …
Borked your iDevice? Pay EVEN MORE to have it fixed by Applecare
Or scream at their hapless techies on their forums
Cupertino is reportedly planning changes to Applecare with a move towards shop-based iDevice repairs and a lucrative subscription service scheme. The AppleCare and AppleCare+ schemes look likely to be overhauled in America this autumn, with the altered services rolled out across the world afterwards. Tara Bunch, an Apple vice …
Windows 8 'sales' barely half as good as Microsoft claims
Don't even mention the XP/Vista sales comparisons
Microsoft claimed last week that it's made '100 million' Windows 8 sales and the claim has been widely repeated. But channel feedback and the experience on the ground point to a very different picture. The Guardian's Charles Arthur has made a stab at estimating the true figure, and suggests it's much less, at between 57 …
Esteem Systems bosses ponder selling themselves
Just happen to be standing about in this shop window
Top brass at mid-market channel player Esteem Systems are reviewing future options and may again begin a formal process aimed at selling the operation. The business was almost sold to integrator Calyx in 2008, but the acquirer's backer Anglo Irish Bank pulled the funding as credit availability was swallowed up in the crunch. …
Torvalds unveils first Linux 3.10 release candidate
Download, then be nice to your mother, Linux Lord advises
The first release candidate for version 3.10 of the Linux Kernel is upon us. Linus Torvalds released RC1 of the new kernel on the eve of Mother's Day (in North America and Australia), together with some advice on how to treat Mum/Mom right on the occasion. “So this is the biggest -rc1 in the last several years (perhaps ever) …
Drone to deliver beer-as-a-service
GPS-guided Octocopter to parachute cans into South African music festival
Organisers of South Africa's OppiKoppi Music Festival are promising attendees the chance to order a beer and have it parachuted out of a drone and into the campground. The festival takes place from August 8th to 10th. The lineup is dominated by local acts and therefore doesn't look like it's worth booking a flight to South …
BSA targets Indonesian pirates
Thar be treasure...
In a sign of Indonesia’s increasing importance as a market for Western technology vendors, anti-piracy body the Business Software Alliance has teamed up with local police to bust numerous firms found to be running illegal copies of well-known software. The raid on 20 businesses back in March yielded pirated software from …
You want to put 3D gun designs on the web? You'll need a 2D printer
Comment Psst! Meet me in the Rotterdam nuke-material bazaar
Much fun has been had over the Liberator, the 3D printed plastic gun. Our editor - a man who knows about such things - here at El Reg has pronounced it a piece of crap. Innumerable people have declared that it's either the end of civilisation as we know it or proof perfect that the Commie statists will never win. My own …
India to battle Maoists with more mobiles
Tower-building project will boost coverage in leftist-controlled regions
The Indian government is looking to build nearly 3,000 mobile towers in areas across the country without coverage, in a Rs. 30 billion (£358m) bid to tackle left wing extremism. The mobile infrastructure project will cover 2,199 locations in nine states where militant Maoists known as Naxals are prevalent. Naxals are seen by …
Amazon launches own currency
Web bazaar now 'coining it', for self and devs
Amazon.com has started printing its own money. The company's effort, dubbed Amazon Coins, will be familiar to anyone that has acquired Microsoft Points or Nintendo Points, as the Coins require consumers to stump up real-world cash in return for a balance of online-only credit tied to a single store. Coins can be spent in …
Google pools cloud storage
Limits to inbox size are no more
Google has changed its approach to cloud storage, with individuals and business users of its apps now offered a pool of storage rather than silos dedicated to different services. Announced in an inevitable pair of blog posts, the Chocolate Factory is calling the new arrangement “unified storage”. Storage wonks wondering why …
Government admits seizing two months of AP phone records
Press investigators trawl calls in the Land of the Free
The Associated Press reports that government investigators seized two months' worth of telephone records from its staff last year and hid that fact until now. "There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters," said CEO Gary Pruitt …
Google abruptly shuts down search-by-SMS portal
Users cut off without notice, apparently for good
Without warning, Google has shut down the gateway that allowed mobile users to access its search engine via SMS text, effectively cutting off from the service customers who lack data plans. The Chocolate Factory launched its SMS search feature in 2004 and has maintained it ever since, providing abridged query results such as …
IT'S OFFICIAL: Hipster era is OVER – sorry, beanie boiz...
Scientific study reveals unvarnished truth about ironic PBR drinkers
An automated telephone survey organization based in Raleigh, North Carolina, apparently having nothing better to do or merely seeking publicity – in this case, successfully – put its finger on the pulse of public sentiment and discovered, as they headlined their results, "Americans So Over Hipsters." Public Policy Polling …
