Top Twenty Stories

Virgin Media site goes titsup in Pirate Bay payback attack

Anonymous claims takedown victory

Virgin Media's main website dropped off the interwebs on Tuesday with hackivist collective Anonymous claiming responsibility for the DDoS attacks in response to the company's recent cut-off of The Pirate Bay. The telco said it had to down its "customer-facing" website for about an hour last night, after it was hit by …
Apple's HTML5 bet against Android extermination

Open ... and Shut To be closed, one must support 'open'

Harvard professor Clayton Christensen has more than 500 billion reasons to think he's wrong to suggest Apple is in for rough sailing, but he's not backing down. The father of disruption theory - a theory that Apple's former chief executive Steve Jobs claimed had a huge impact on his thinking - believes that Apple's end-to-end, …
Microsoft makes good with a 23-fix Patch Tuesday

Busy Wednesday for BOFH

It'll be all hands to the pumps in IT departments around the globe as Microsoft has issued this month's round of patches. There are 23 flaws to be fixed. The seven patches include three critical issues, affecting Microsoft Windows, Office, Silverlight, and the .NET Framework. One patch, MS12-034, sorts ten flaws, some of which …
RIM's new BlackBerry Curve 9320 tempts teens

One-way Curve

RIM churned out another BlackBerry this week: the Curve 9320, a low-cost Qwerty handset pitched at yoof. The 9320 sports bog-standard specs that include a 2.4in, 320 x 240, a 3Mp camera and 512MB of Ram. It also runs RIM's soon-to-be-superseded BlackBerry OS 7.1, but an update to the forthcoming BB10 is unlikely. Still, …
Hated Visual Studio 11 beta in HIGH-ENERGY colour blast

I can C clearly now the grey has gone

Microsoft is breaking out the paints and giving the next Visual Studio a dash of colour after its drab John Major-inspired beta was branded hideous, monstrous and depressing by thousands of coders. VS11: Radiating blue energy The company said it has "increased the 'energy' level of the Visual Studio 11 themes" in the Visual …
Jetting off abroad? Pack protection ... for your Wi-Fi

Feds warn of malware attacks on hotel net surfers

A US government agency is warning travellers to be wary of malware that installs itself via pop-up browser windows on hotel internet connections. The malicious dialogue boxes typically pose as software updates to legitimate software products, an advisory from the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) explains. "The FBI …
Cloud data fiasco forces bosses to break out the whiteboards

Atlassian team-tracker outage caused by disk failure

Workers relying on Atlassian's cloudy team-tracking software have reverted to whiteboards and spreadsheets after a service outage made key project data vanish. A Reg reader contacted us to say firms using Atlassian’s JIRA service had lost their all data, and said Atlassian had been unable to recover it despite a week of trying …
Queen unveils draft internet super-snoop bill - with clauses

Her Maj opens Parliamentary session with clear nod to CCDP

The Queen has detailed the government's upcoming programme of law-making on a grey day darkened by the gloom of a double-dip recession and plans to massively increase surveillance of the internet in the UK. Opening the new session of Parliament, Her Majesty confirmed on Wednesday that "draft clauses" would be introduced to …
The Pirate Bay cries foul over Pirate Bay copycats

Leeching proxies face leechers' wrath

Beware of unauthorised copies of The Pirate Bay, comes a warning from, er… The Pirate Bay. The Swedish site notorious for indexing unauthorised copies of music, films and books has found itself being copied, and it doesn't like it one bit. On its blog, The Pirate Bay advises fans to use the authentic, original ThePirateBay and …
Cisco hits the roof in Olympics marketing dash

Pics Not just 3D, but Fry-D™

Cisco has thrown open its Olympics hospitality suite, giving partners and customers both a panoramic view of the Olympic Park and an up-close, 3D view of Stephen Fry loitering on a London Underground platform. The networking giant is the London 2012 Network Infrastructure Supporter, meaning it is the only comms vendor to be …
US court tosses out Proview's IPAD trademark gripe

Monitor biz and Apple told to end spat in China

A US judge has thrown out the case brought by Proview that accused Apple of tricking it into selling the "IPAD" name for less than it should have. China's Proview filed the case in February, claiming that Apple had deliberately created a special company called IP Application Development (IPAD) just to talk Proview into handing …
Apache releases new OpenOffice build, promises faster upgrades

New graphics focus and more to come from IBM additions

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has released an updated version of the OpenOffice free software suite, with enhanced graphics and better encryption support. Version 3.4 of the office suite has had major changes in the graphics capability of the package. OLEObject handling has been improved, thanks in part to volunteer …
Telefonica touts new free VoIP app to cut off rival Skype

Telco bets future of mobile on TU Me

Telefonica, owner of the O2 brand, has launched VoIP service TU Me across all its territories, and for all punters with an iPhone, as the telco bets on the future direction of mobile use. The new service comes out of Telefonica's purchase of Jajah, and follows on from trials of "O2 Connect" last year. However the VoIP call and …
Kelvin MacKenzie blasts 'footie rights warehouse' BSkyB

Battle for the Johnstone's Paint Trophy taken to Ofcom

The latest onslaught against media baron Rupert Murdoch comes from an unlikely assailant. Former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie says he'll lodge a complaint with Ofcom over BSkyB's exclusive ownership of football rights. MacKenzie briefly ran BSkyB as its MD, after leaving the Currant Bun in 1994, and has often defended Murdoch's …
AMD's Hondo APUs ready for Windows 8 Q4 launch - report

Chip giant's tablet-friendly silicon on the way

Chip giant AMD is set to debut its 32nm Trinity APUs in notebooks later this month, while the firm’s tablet-friendly Hondo chips will hit the streets in the fourth quarter to coincide with the much-anticipated launch of Windows 8, Digitimes has learnt. Citing “sources from notebook players”, the Taiwan-based tech title said …
PHP devs lob second patch at super-critical CGI bug

If at first you don't succeed, compile, compile again

The developers of PHP have released updates to thwart fresh attacks against systems that use the scripting language to dynamically generate web pages. All users are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.4.3 or PHP 5.3.13, as appropriate, after a serious security bug in PHP-CGI-based setups was disclosed. Developers attempted to fix …
BT outage kills phone lines in Eastbourne and Brighton

Sussex hospital, businesses, schools cut off

BT phone lines were down for 20,000 customers in Brighton and Eastbourne this morning, cutting phone contact to businesses and homes and even preventing a patient from getting through to the Royal Sussex County Hospital. A power cut in the Eastbourne Telephone exchange caused the landline outage that was first logged just …
Leaked Twitter accounts 'mostly banned spammers'

Tweet site downplays dump of 55,000 passwords

Twitter has downplayed the significance of a data dump that leaked the login details of 55,000 twits. Most of the usernames and passwords copied into a string of five Pastebin posts on Monday are either duplicates or belong to blocked spammers, according to the micro-blogging site. A spokesman said it was in the process of …
VMware CTO reveals future directions in VMUG vid

Speech in Italy says acquired techs 'don’t work well enough together yet'

VMware Chief Technology Officer Steve Herrod has told an Italian VMUG meeting the VMware’s cloud infrastructure suite is still only loosely integrated and that the company has plans to do better. The video of Herrod’s speech has come to light through a Microsoft blog written by Dave Northey, a staffer at Microsoft Ireland, who …
Secret's out: Small 15K disk drive market is 'growing'

Not just flash and trash

The market for small and fast disk drives is actually growing – rather than shrinking, as flash array vendors are enthusiastically implying. At Western Digital's executive forum event in Vienna today, a person close to WD said: "In our business 15,000rpm drives are not all dead. In the 2.5-inch, 15K enterprise disk drive area …

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