The Week in Summary

1. Thursday, 17 May 2012

   Governments may hit social networks with cyber attacks

   Arab Spring alerted governments to power of Facebook, Twitter et al

   Social networking operators like Facebook and Twitter need to consider themselves much more vulnerable to attacks – not because they are more vulnerable or more attractive to criminals than previously, but because states are now actors in security threats. According to Phillip Hallam-Barker, vice-president and principal …

   Hybrid computing just like FLESH-EATING bacteria

   HPC blog A scholarly comparison

   Hybrid computing (using CPUs plus GPUs to accelerate processing speed/throughput) and necrotizing faciitis (a flesh-eating bacterial* infection) have more in common than is typically thought. Both exhibit high growth rates, and both are incredibly difficult to stop once they get started. This story is perhaps best told via …

   Symantec releases software as Amazon Machine Image

   Getting cloudy with managed services

   Symantec has made its new O3 cloud identity and access control suite available as an Amazon Machine Image (AMIs), the company's first foray into selling software as a hosted virtual machine. AMIs are virtual machines that are listed in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) marketplace and can be deployed to AWS' EC2 cloud computing …

   Whitman said to be planning massive HP job cuts

   25,000 to 35,000 HPers may face extinction

   New(ish) HP CEO Meg Whitman has been at the helm for long enough to come up with a longer-term plan for the company, and according to various rumors, her plan will look eerily familiar to HPers who remember the early years of ex-CEO Mark Hurd: job cuts, predominantly in services. According to a report on CNBC television, HP is …

   Dell forges GPU-enriched virty rack workstation

   Quadro graphics and Tesla compute tag team

   Like everyone else on the planet, you want a rocketsled to do your work. The faster, the better. But if Dell has its way, it may not be on top of or underneath your desk, but sitting in a rack in a data center. And it may not be a rocketsled as much as a rocketbus, with multiple people using it at the same time. Virtualization …

   Seagate, WD need to get a firm grip on solid disks

   Blocks and Files Pro-tip: They should buy OCZ and STEC

   STEC is touting its great CellCare flash endurance, and it is great, reinforcing a view that it and OCZ make natural flash market buy-in points for Seagate and Western Digital. Whoa, hang on a minute, where did that idea come from? Let's start from the point that the key future flash technology is the ability to lengthen the …

   You can feed 800 VMs off 1 of our boxes, startup brags

   Tintri wraps NetApp up in white paper

   Apparently, just adding a tincture of Tintri to your virtualised server-storage array pathway gets those VMs running like super-charged rockets. The firm says a European customer is running 800 virtual machines off one Tintri box, leaving a NetApp array chastened in the background. The unnamed customer makes things like …

   Mutant number-crunchers win cluster popularity contest

   HPC blog CUDA you dig it? Yes, you can

   Hybrid computing has come a very long way in a relatively short period of time. My first exposure to hybrids came at SC08 in the lovely city of Austin, Texas. Earlier that year, the Roadrunner system at Los Alamos National Lab had achieved two milestones: 1) It was the first system to break through the petabyte barrier; and 2) …

   Seeing ads on Wikipedia? Then you're infected

   Click fraudsters are milking you for cash

   Surfers who see ads when they visit Wikipedia are likely infected with malware, the online encyclopedia warns. Wikipedia relies on donations to fund its work, resisting the temptation to put ads on its pages. So internet users who see commercial ads when they visit the encyclopedia are been served content via cybercrime …

   Acronis creates new roles for biz and M&A hotshots

   Could be poised to snap up some juicy prospects

   Data protection software supplier Acronis has created two new roles on its executive team: senior vice president in corporate development and SVP in global business development. The move suggests the firm is anticipating a spike in growth and is preparing itself to make a few acquisitions, or even positioning itself to be …

   SGI skips future Xeon E7s, lobs E5-4600s into UV2 supers

   Adds Xeon E5s, Tesla K10 GPU coprocessors to rackable boxes

   Supercomputer and cluster maker Silicon Graphics has fallen hard for Intel's new "Sandy Bridge-EP" Xeon E5-4600 processors for four-socket servers. So hard in fact that with its next generation UV2 shared memory supercomputers, due later this year, SGI is not supporting the future Xeon E7 processors that are the obvious kickers …

   Finally a real use for NFC: Heart monitor in a credit card

   Vid Pay-by-bonk becomes bleeding-edge tech

   We've seen heart monitors built into mobile phones and puck-sized Bluetooth kit, but now iMPak Health has got one down to the size of a credit card and used wireless technology to transfer the data. The RhythmTrak is a functioning electrocardiograph: when a person presses his or her thumbs onto the pads, rather than display …

   BBC shrinks Red Button: Loses 8 channels after the Olympics

   Extra 24 live HD streams during the Games

   The BBC will be dropping eight of its Red Button channels after an Olympic splurge, focusing on IPTV content instead of the alternative electronic programme guide that the Red Button had become. The changes were proposed last year, but have now been confirmed by the BBC Trust as picked up by the a516 blog. Freeview has been …

   Nvidia drops veil on game-changing might of VGX

   HPC blog VDI'ing Your BYODs

   What’s a “holy crap” moment? For me, it’s when I see or hear (or do) something that has far-reaching and previously unforeseen consequences. I’ve had at least two of these moments (so far) at the GTC 2012 conference. The first was when Jen-Hsun Huang, in his keynote presentation, tossed up a slide about Kepler and this new thing …

   Pre-Pet Commodore micro up for grabs on eBay

   Kim-1 could be yours

   Readers, you now have 12 hours or so to bid for a slice of computing history: a Kim-1 single-board computer, released some 36 years ago by the company that would become a key part of Commodore. Kim stood for Keyboard Input Monitor, and the device, based on the MOS 6502, was the equivalent of the Sinclair MK14 or the Acorn …

   Google Knowledge Graph straddles semantic web and Star Trek

   Beyond Bing-blocking and screen-fiddling

   Google’s battle to retain search supremacy is seeing it roll something it claims will take us closer to the "computers of Star Trek". Google has unveiled The Knowledge Graph, which it claims will give you the answers you really want, we presume instead of a bunch of useless blogs, blue links or message fragments from Wikipedia …

   Google, French watchdog to hook up over privacy

   Last encounter left CNIL unsatisfied

   Google will meet CNIL next week to chat about the French regulator's ongoing concerns over the web giant's revamped privacy policy. The Commission Nationale de l'Informatique (CNIL) is looking into the Chocolate Factory's newly streamlined privacy policy because it has said it is unsure if it conforms to EU laws on data …

   Adobe sucks on Oracle brain drain for HTML5 game gain

   Java VM experts exit en masse

   Adobe seems to be juicing its software gaming credentials against HTML5 by grabbing some hard-core Sun Microsystems talent as they slip out Oracle's back door. Four senior and respected members of the old Sun Hotspot Java Virtual Machine team jumped clear of Oracle during March and April, and all four have landed at Adobe. …

   Council fined £70k after burglars nick vulnerable kids' files

   Second data law breach in two years

   The UK's privacy watchdog has fined the London Borough of Barnet £70k ($111k) after the local authority lost extremely sensitive information about young children for the second time in two years. The latest loss occurred when a social worker took paper records home to work on them out of office hours. The staffer’s home was …

   Team up or miss out: Why the channel needs partners

   Your sales depend on making friends ...

   Cloud computing is growing at a stratospheric rate. IDC Enterprise recently reported that businesses are earmarking as much as one-third of their IT budgets for cloud computing products and services. By the end of the decade, global cloud computing spending is expected to top $200bn annually. With cloud budgets increasing as …

   Pinterest valued at $1.5 BILLION, bags $100m in funding

   Next stop: Japan

   Cupcake and kitten-laden photo site Pinterest has bagged $100m in funding from a bunch of investors led by Japanese online retailer Rakuten. Rakuten said today that it was heading up the multimillion-dollar handout with help from existing Pinterest investors Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners and FirstMark Capital …

   Watchdog tells Greenpeace to stop 'encouraging anti-social behaviour'

   Hippies told to stop asking for money to fund vandalism

   The UK's advertising watchdog has upheld a complaint against advertising by hippy collective Greenpeace, which solicited money to help in such things as breaking into power stations and defacing property. The ad in question explicitly stated that gifts to Greenpeace would be used for "direct action" efforts such as painting …

   Steve Jobs' death clears way for rumoured 4in 'iPhone 5' screen

   Apple places order for large display, claim sources

   The next Apple iPhone will have an enlarged 4-inch screen, according to well-placed anonymous sources. The iPhone screen has measured 3.5-inches diagonally since the fruity tech titan's co-founder Steve Jobs brought out the first Jesus mobe in 2007. But Apple is now scaling up the size of its pocket fondleslab, moles told …

   UK man to spend year in the clink for Facebook account hack

   21-year-old admitted breaking into US victim's profile

   A British man has been jailed for a year after hacking into the Facebook account of a US citizen. Gareth Crosskey, 21, of Avon Close, Lancing, in West Sussex, hacked into his unnamed victim's profile on 12 January 2011, gaining access to an e-mail account in the process. The breach was reported to the FBI, which traced the …

   Microsoft books stall at Appule - the Mac expo stiffed by Apple

   Redmond to flog Office at UK fanboi gathering

   Microsoft has signed up for the Appule Personal and Professional User Live Expo, which Apple has so far snubbed. The London-based trade show was to be called AppleExpo, until the organiser Indigo Media received legal letters from Apple about potential trademark infringement. The name of the two-day show, which runs at the …

   HP frogmarches new Xeon, Opteron chips into ProLiants

   Wants world+dog to know that it's also using E5-2400 two-socketeers

   In the wake of Intel's launch of the entry Xeon E5-2400 processors for two-socket servers earlier this week, X86 server juggernaut Hewlett-Packard wants to keep its name in the mind of customers who might be shopping for systems from rivals Dell, IBM or Fujitsu. The four new ProLiant Gen8 systems using the Xeon E5-2400s won't …

   Distie business: Lines get blurry for channel big boys

   What can we learn from J Arthur Rank?

   In the early '70s to mid-'80s, Rank Audio Visual – a division of the Rank Organisation – was a large distributor of audio visual and photographic equipment, theatre lighting and 8, 16 and 35mm film. It later progressed to the distribution of pre-recorded video cassettes. But what does a man with a gong have to do with the …

   SoundBrush

   iOS App of the Week Paint me a tune

   After happily tapping away with Figure just recently, I decided to try and find some other simple apps that might be fun for musically challenged people like me. SoundBrush is well named, as its clever interface allows you to doodle with sound in the same way that you would sketch with a simple painting app. Tap and swipe to …

   UK.gov IT slasher axes himself - after 5 months in new job

   Ian Watmore follows horde of civil servants streaming out the door

   Former tech-spending axeman Ian Watmore is leaving the civil service just five months after taking up a new role as the permanent secretary at the Cabinet Office. He had previously headed up the reform and efficiency group, the unit tasked with cutting waste from the Whitehall budget. The Cabinet Office explained that Watmore …

   Off-the-shelf forensics tool slurps iPhone data via iCloud

   Cops don't need your actual phone any more

   ElcomSoft has updated its mobile forensics software to include the ability to retrieve online backups from Apple iCloud storage. The enhancement to Elcomsoft Phone Password Breaker adds the capability to retrieve user data associated with iPhones from Apple's iCloud online backup service. Backups to multiple devices registered …

   Compare The Market can't touch web filth extension - simples

   First biz to lose .xxx cybersquat dispute

   Price comparison biz Compare The Market has lost its bid to seize the domain name comparethemarket.xxx. BGL Group, which owns the Compare The Market brand, has the unpleasant distinction of being the first company to lose a cybersquatting case in the new adults-only .xxx extension. The owner of the domain, listed in the Whois …

   Crooks sell skint fanbois potatoes instead of iPhones

   'I wanted an Apple, not a vegetable'

   Greater Manchester police are appealing for help after a number of people who thought they were laying hands on a shiny new iPhone ended up with a sack of spuds instead. The conmen approached people in car-parks and on the street to ask them if they fancied buying laptops or iPhones, but actually gave them some totally random …

   Soyuz hooks up with Space Station, delivers new 'nauts

   Vid Full crew to be ready for Dragon arrival

   The Soyuz spacecraft carrying three new members of Expedition 31 hooked up with the International Space Station this morning without a hitch at 4.36am GMT. Russian cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin and NASA astronaut Joe Acaba blasted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan two days ago. After safely berthing …

   LOHAN starts to feel the barometric pressure

   Mulls spaceplane rocket motor trigger

   As the design of our Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) Vulture 2 spaceplane continues apace, we've been considering just how to fire the aircraft's solid rocket motor at a predetermined altitude. We haven't yet revealed exactly which mighty unit will eventually power the Vulture 2 heavenwards, and still have to …

   Mobile net filters block legit content too – campaign group

   It even bins age-appropriate stuff

   Mobile operators currently provide filter systems that enable parents to stop children accessing websites deemed to contain content suitable for individuals aged 18 or over. However, the Open Rights Group (ORG) said there are "a number of serious problems" with how those systems work. "At present the filtering systems are too …

   Boffins smash 3Gbps speed barrier with 542GHz T-Rays

   Sky's the limit in terahertz territory

   Japanese geniuses have maintained a 3Gbit/s radio link at 542GHz, opening up more of the electromagnetic spectrum to the voracious appetite of wireless data. Not that the research will lead to super-Wi-Fi any time soon - but if the proof-of-concept tech built by the Tokyo Institute of Technology can be commoditised then it …

   Google offers up new mobile usage interface to attract ad loot

   Just the thing to bulk out any business pitch

   The Mobile Marketing Association and Google have again gathered smartphone usage, from 40 countries this time, and provided a snazzy interface capable of generating comparison charts of XLS files on demand. The Our Mobile Planet data follows on from the work the companies did in 2011, but adds another 10 countries as well as …

   Dell to cut UK workforce

   Box shifter 'grows business' by trimming headcount

   Dell has threatened staff in the UK with redundancy, Channel Register can reveal. The cost-cutting measure was revealed yesterday by bosses at one-time direct-selling purist Dell, who sought to play down the size of the headcount reduction. "Dell has shared with the teams that with regret we need to make some very limited …

   Child support IT fail: Deadbeat mums 'n' dads off the hook

   NAO: Child maintenance computers unable to keep tabs on payments

   Problems with IT systems at the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission (CMEC) have left it unable to report payment arrears properly, the National Audit Office (NAO) has found. CMEC, which took over responsibility for statutory child maintenance schemes in November 2008, inherited two primary child support IT systems - …

   Hong Kong CERT wants bigger team to tackle cyber threats

   Region's multinationals a big target for hackers

   Hong Kong’s Computer Emergency Response Team (HKCERT) has called for more resources to help it step up attempts to proactively monitor and deal with attacks on organisations in the special administrative region (SAR) of China. Speaking to The Register, centre manager Roy Ko argued that the nature of the threats facing …

   Sony NEX-7 24.3Mp APS-C compact system camera

   Review DSLR worrier?

   Sony’s NEX-7 is its flagship Compact System Camera that’s been graced with advanced features to justify the high-end price tag for a pocketable interchangeable lens model. Indeed this 24.3Mp APS-C shooter with a built-in OLED electronic viewfinder plus tilting LCD and full manual control, is certainly going to give some DSLRs a …

   GPS rival Beidou will cover Asia Pac by end of the year

   Chinese satnav project could go global as early as 2014

   China will expand its home grown GPS rival Beidou by launching three global positioning satellites that it hopes will make it possible to have the service up and running in Asia Pacific by the end of the year. Beidou, which translates as “Big Dipper”, will be able to provide a high quality positioning, navigation and time …

   Asia leads global BYOD race

   IT managers jump on the bandwagon

   Asian IT professionals are racing ahead of their global rivals when it comes to implementing Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies in their organisations, according to new research from BT. The telecoms giant interviewed 2,000 IT users and managers in 11 countries and found that those in the region were the most forward …

   AWS CISO needs permission to visit his data centres

   He doesn't mind and you shouldn't either because they're not that interesting

   Amazon Web Services' General Manager and Chief Information Security Officer Stephen E. Schmidt is not allowed to make unannounced visits to the company's data centres. Speaking at the AWS Summit 2012 in Sydney today, Schmidt explained that he has to ask for permission from the relevant Vice-President before visiting a data …

   Vixie warns: DNS Changer ‘blackouts’ inevitable

   Father of BIND fears ISP crisis in July

   Ridding the world of the DNS Changer is proving a long, slow process that won’t be accomplished by July 9, when the court orders granted to the FBI expire and infected users suffer their inevitable blackout. That’s the bleak warning given by BIND father and ISC founder and chair Paul Vixie to the AusCERT security conference on …

   Roman roads get the web maps treatment

   M-III traffic means Londinium to Venta (Winchester) takes 3.7 days

   Classical scholars at Stanford University have created a “Geospatial network model of the Roman world” which offers the chance to calculate journey times along Roman roads in much the same way as is possible on Google Maps and other online mapping services. ORBIS, as the model is known, can calculate journey times between 751 …

2. Wednesday, 16 May 2012

   Gates' Corbis busted again for fraud

   Infoflows wins US$12m in damages, Gates still mad

   Corbis, the digital stock photo company founded by Bill Gates in 1989, remains embroiled in a protracted fraud case instigated by Seattle based Infoflows. In the latest instalment Corbis has been ordered to fork out US$12.75 million in damages by the Washington State Court of Appeals as part of the three-year fraud and breach …

   Australia's first space park launched

   WA set to track space stations Swedish style

   Australia’s only dedicated satellite park, SSC Space Australia, is now open for business and is currently in advanced negotiations with two international space agencies from Europe and Asia to use the new West Australian (WA) facility. The park is owned and financed by its parent, Swedish Space Corporation, which selected WA …

   Pirate Bay struggling to get on feet after DDoS to the knee

   Anonymous says 'not us, dude'

   The Pirate Bay claimed to be “getting back up! Stronger than ever!” this evening after crumpling under a DDoS attack for most of today. The draining of the Pirate Bay sparked speculation that it was a victim of Anonymous, after the torrent site slated the hacktivist collective last week. The torrent site cum copyright freedom …

   UK.gov's G-Cloud 2.0 pushes back launch date

   Public sector IT bazaar turns to open source

   The launch of the second version of the UK government’s IT shopping catalogue G-Cloud has slipped to the end of spring. G-Cloud 2.0 is now slated to arrive by “end of May to start of June”, the Cabinet Office has confirmed – which will be several weeks behind the planned early May rollout date. An announcement on the delay is …

   Nvidia shows off superjuiced Kepler GPU

   HPC blog From workhouse to racehorse

   There were quite a few surprises in today’s GTC12 keynote by NVIDIA CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang. If NVIDIA were just introducing a new and faster rev of its latest GPU processor, one that brings three times the performance without breaking the bank on energy usage, that would be a solid win, and in line with expectations …

   Mobile fee dodgers will get away with enough cash to bail out Greece

   US code paranoia lets cash trickle through cracks

   Mobile customers are dodging fees running to hundreds of billions of dollars by a combination of accident and design – both facilitated by badly designed billing systems which aren't up to the task. However, US paranoia plays its part too. The numbers come from Juniper Research and estimate that by 2016 operators will have …

   Samsung and SK Hynix shares slide on Apple snub

   Memory-makers hurt by losing contract to bankrupt Elpida

   Shares in Samsung have fallen over 6 per cent on news that Apple preferred to place huge chip orders with bankrupt firm Elpida Memory. It was reported in Taiwan yesterday that Apple had booked up half of the mobile DRAM capacity at Elpida's plant in Hiroshima for future iPhones and iPads. Despite the multiple patent battles …

   Speaking in Tech: The worst government IT deal of ALL TIME

   Podcast The one about the oversized Cisco routers

   It's the eighth episode of our enterprise tech podcast – and it's a special one. The podcast is split up into two parts: in the first part, your hosts interview a journalist investigating the State of West Virginia's absurd purchase of drastically oversized Cisco routers – it's an incredible story you have to hear to believe. …

   Is there life after ads for St Zuck?

   Analysis Facebook credits, and what they might buy

   As we reported today, the third-largest advertiser in the United States says it's going to stop advertising on Facebook, citing lack of engagement. General Motors is taking the $10m it spunks on Facebook ads somewhere else. This is a tiny proportion of GM's $1.1bn annual advertising budget, but it's hardly a vote of confidence …

   Britain has 10 million twits, tweets Twitter

   Why shout at the TV when you can yell at the web instead?

   There are ten million active Twitter accounts in Blighty, the microblogging wunderkind announced on, er, Twitter this morning. And 80 per cent of UK twits access the site on their mobiles. The UK is believed to be the world's fourth most active nation of tweeters, after the US, Brazil and Japan, going on a 2011 analysis by …

   Three pitches 'cheaper' MiFi mobile hotspot

   As good as the current model, but less expensive

   Three hasn't said how much cheaper its new MiFi device is than Three's existing one, but that's what the telco is promising. The new model, the E5331 from Huawei, delivers the same 3G HSPA connectivity - 21.6Mbps download, 5.76Mbps upload - as the E586, the current offering. It supports up to five connected devices and will …

   NASA found filming August's Mars landing in California desert

   'Just a rehearsal for the real one', insist rover boffins

   NASA boffins have been found at a site deep in California's Mojave desert with a Mars rover of the exact type they say will land on Mars this August, filming the machine as it drove about among the Earthly sand dunes. 'Hey, we just wanted a lot of footage for, erm, our kids' But it's all above board, apparently: this is no …

   Logicalis profits throttled by tight-fisted biz

   UK earnings down a quarter

   ICT jack-of-all-trades Logicalis UK has been hit by a freeze in demand as customers weathered the biting economic storm. The British subsidiary saw sales edge up 1 per cent to $296m (£185.8m) year-on-year and a 24 per cent fall in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization to $9.7m (£6.09m) for fiscal 2012 …

   BBC deletes Blue Peter from BBC One

   Children's TV staple sent away to digital

   Blue Peter - home to four-legged rascal Shep, the coat-hanger advent crown and school-boy favourite Janet Ellis, is being turfed out of its home on BBC One. The 54-year-old show that gave kids the drama of hibernating tortoises, out-of-control baby elephants and, yes, Janet Ellis, will be shoved into the back end of Freeview. …

   Juniper taps former HP man to sort out distribution matrix

   Channel bigwig Will Hamber signs up

   Juniper Networks has lured Will Hamber to head up its fragmented distribution business across EMEA. Hamber is moving across from Edge-Core Networks, where he was GM for Europe and Africa from June last year, prior to that he held various management roles at HP, latterly as channel sales director for networking. He will link …

   Pure pushes flash stash, mocks spinning disk with YouTube gag

   Vid Cheap as NAND chips

   Pure Storage is pushing the idea that its deduped flash array is cheaper than tier one enterprise disk array storage but miles faster and more reliable. The start-up has been engaged in a prolonged, two-year beta trial for its flash array technology and has just announced general availability of its first product: the Flash …

   Google unleashes Chrome 19, flattens 20 bugs

   Hot fuzz spawns QuickTime patch

   Google released a major update to its Chrome browser on Tuesday that tackles 20 security vulnerabilities, eight of which are classified as high-risk bugs. Chrome 19 – a cross-platform update for Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome Frame – also includes a number of improved features such as tab sync. Google paid security researchers …

   Social Network scribe to turn hefty Steve Jobs tome to popcorn-fodder

   Plus: Aston Kutcher grows creepy beard for role in the OTHER Jobs film

   The screenwriter who brought a bratty young Mark Zuckerberg to life in the film The Social Network has been appointed as the writer of new Steve Jobs biopic. Aaron Sorkin will continue his lionisation of tech superstars with the new film, funded by Sony. The film promises to tell the story of Jobs' rise from rude-but- …

   Pints under attack as Lord Howe demands metric-only UK

   Weights and measures a 'uniquely confusing shambles'

   Lord Geoffrey Howe of Aberavon has demanded that the UK goes fully metric as soon as possible, describing the current mix of miles and kilometres and pints and litres as a "uniquely confusing shambles". Speaking yesterday in the House of Lords, the former chancellor and deputy prime minister insisted: "British weights and …

   Why GM slammed the brakes on its $10m Facebook ads

   Analysis Wheels fell off 'boring inefficient' car adverts

   In the week that Facebook finally went public, General Motors has axed its paid-for advertising on Mark Zuckerberg's social network. GM said today that it was still going to have a Facebook page and everything, but it wasn't going to buy any more ads because they just aren't shifting enough cars. It reportedly spent $10m on …

   'Catastrophic' Avira antivirus update bricks Windows PCs

   rundll32.exe? cmd.exe? You clearly don't need those

   Security software biz Avira has apologised after its antivirus suites went haywire and disabled customers' Windows machines. A service pack issued in Monday caused its ProActiv monitoring software to think vital operating system processes were riddled with malware and blocked them from running. Users of the affected products …

   Real-time drone videos get GPU-tastic

   HPC blog Swimming in sensors, drowning in data

   Here at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC 2012), you see a lot of things that you didn’t think were quite possible yet. Case in point: cleaning up surveillance video. The standard scene in “24” or any spy thriller is of agents poring over some grainy, choppy, barely-lit video that’s so bad you can’t tell whether it’s four …

   Watchdog bites bar over 'offensive' Facebook ad

   NSFW Stoke venue's man oysters leave ASA open-mouthed

   The Advertising Standards Authority has sunk its teeth into the Manhattan Bar in Stoke on Trent, for a Facebook promotion "likely to cause serious or widespread offence". The ASA ruled the offending ad, seen right, in breach of CAP Code (Edition 12) rule 4.1 (Harm and offence), and ordered that it must not appear again in its …

   Fasthosts officially not the best in UK for virtual servers

   Boasts in adverts banned by ASA after rival complains

   Brit web biz Fasthosts has been slapped down by the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) for boasting that its virtual servers were the "best" in the UK. The hosting company was unable to prove that its virtual machines were better than all the other virtual servers in the country, or that they used "industry-leading technology …

   Confused, pessimistic on G-Cloud? You must work in government

   VMware's ex-G-Cloud man's cure: communication

   Confusion and pessimism about the government’s G-Cloud and ICT plans is widespread among civil servants running the nation’s technology . A VMware survey of more than 180 senior public sector IT staff found 63 per cent doubt the Cabinet Office will be able to hit its stated spending goals on cloud computing. Nearly half of IT …

   Lost Winds 2: Winter of the Melodias

   iGamer Blow job?

   With his Chibi proportions and boyish looks, Toku cuts an extremely familiar figure, as do most of the things around him: talking animals, impish sprites and elemental deities. So pervasive is Nintendo's influence throughout Winter of the Melodias, in fact, that neither the land of Mistralis nor its diminutive hero would seem …

   HTC phones held up at US ports after Apple patent ban

   Stocks low as customs search boxes for illicit gear

   US sales of two new HTC smartphones have been held up at customs over the company's patent battle with Apple. The fruity firm bagged a small win against HTC in December last year with the International Trade Commission that covered just two claims on a patent. HTC immediately said it would put workarounds in all its new …

   Dell feeds Xeon E5s to hungry new PowerEdge beasts

   Cheaper duos and quads, so we hear

   Dell has added nine new Xeon E5-powered boxes to its PowerEdge 12G lineup as it chases the booming market for quad-socket machines in Asia. These latest workhorses use Intel's new Xeon E5-2400 processors for two-socket servers and the E5-4600 for four-socket servers, and will add to the five rack, tower, and blade servers and …

   The Incredible 4PB Hulk: EMC monsterises VMAX

   Last big primary data array push before flash tsunami

   EMC has gained top datacentre dog bragging rights with a coming 4 petabyte VMAX 40K storage array, storing 60 per cent more than HDS's biggest VSP array and 74 per cent more than IBM's DS8000. This is possibly one of the last massive primary data arrays before flash takes over the primary data storage universe*. EMC says its …

   Carphone Warehouse touts cut-price iPads

   Catch: they're last year's model

   Carphone Warehouse still has plenty of iPad 2s in its stock cupboard and has just knocked up to £50 off the price to shift them. Officially, the iPad 2 is now only available with 16GB of storage, which will set you back £329. But CW has some 32GB and 64GB models left, in both their Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi plus 3G forms. The two 32GB …

   ASA tuts at TalkTalk over broadband speed estimator

   Tool can stay, but ISP must add warning about potential inaccuracy

   TalkTalk got rapped on the knuckles by the Advertising Standards Authority today after it upheld a complaint that its broadband speed checker was rather overestimating the actual speed of web surfing. A customer had complained that when he typed his postcode into the box, he was told his estimated speed was 3.8Mbps with a …

   Sony outs 1080p skinny laptops

   Vaio Z revamped

   More updated Vaio laptops from Sony, this time the Z series - the latter the original Ultrabook, introduced before the MacBook Air and long before Intel coined the term. Of course, World+Dog is making slimline notebooks now, so the new Z's 17mm thickness and 1.2kg weight are not the leading edge laptop specs they might once …

   EMC rounds up rival arrays, beats 'em into submission

   You will work with each other

   EMC VMAX arrays will team up competing drive arrays with a new version of the VMAX Enginuity OS. Much like the existing HDS VSP and NetApp V-Series, Enginuity v5876 will enable VMX to virtualise third-party arrays behind a VMAX head using EMC Symmetrix Federated Tiered Storage (FTS). The VMAX, which is getting a substantial …

   Google+ dying on its arse – shock new poll

   Bet-the-company wager goes south

   Google has bet the company on Google+, but it’s dying on its arse. A study by traffic analysts RJ Metrics suggests that public engagement with the social network is weak, and failing to gather momentum. "The decay rate here is very concerning," says the report, summarised here. "Users are less and less likely to make …

   Facebook starting to go big in Brazil. Hmm ...

   Plus: Monaco and Iceland have more accounts than people

   Facebook's user base is plateauing across Europe and the US and the site has seen losses as well as gains in the developing world, the latest statistics from Social Analytics firm Socialbaked show. Facebook membership increased by 0.88 per cent in the US in the last six months and by 1.52 per cent in the UK. By contrast, the …

   O2 dips toe into Groupon's pond with tat discounts

   Polls punters for special offer ideas

   Taking a leaf out of Groupon's book, O2 is asking its "Priority Moments" customers which firms it would like O2 to negotiate deals with, tapping the social networks to discover that most O2 users like Nandos regardless of their demographic. Priority Moments is O2's group-buying effort, using the O2 brand to negotiate discounts …

   Only global poverty can save the planet, insists WWF - and the ESA!

   Analysis Windfarms for all, but without using steel or concrete

   Extremist green campaigning group WWF - endorsed by no less a body than the European Space Agency - has stated that economic growth should be abandoned, that citizens of the world's wealthy nations should prepare for poverty and that all the human race's energy should be produced as renewable electricity within 38 years from now …

   Hitachi GST releases skinny spinner

   Slim slow slider

   Western Digital's latest acquisition, Hitachi GST, has released a skinny single platter drive for consumer electronics devices. The CinemaStar Z5K500 is a 7mm thick disk drive featuring 250GB, 320GB and 500GB capacities, with a maximum areal density of 630Gbit/in2, a 32MB cache, a 6Gbit/s SATA interface and a 7,200rpm spin …

   One in two punters don't mind cookie-spewing stalking ads

   Survey: Do not track, or do if you want

   Nearly half of UK internet users are happy for advertisers to track their online activity in order to deliver more targeted ads, according to new survey figures. As many as 45 per cent of 2,001 internet users aged 16 or over said they were happy for advertisers to track their online behaviour in order to deliver personalised …

   IT bungle left dole office unable to check benefits for months

   Tech delay hit DWP's Work Programme

   Late delivery of IT to support the Work Programme left it without a system to carry out automated checks on whether people - who had been placed into work by the programme's 18 prime contractors - had stopped claiming benefits. A report by the public accounts committee, which draws similar conclusions to a National Audit …

   Microsoft touts 400% Asia growth for Office 365

   SMBs make the leap online but Google benefiting too

   Microsoft is trumpeting impressive 400 per cent growth in adoption of its Office 365 online productivity suite by Asian SMBs over the past three quarters, although analysts pointed out that Google is still taking business from Redmond worldwide. Office 365, Microsoft’s “Office in the cloud” play, was launched initially in …

   Nokia Lumia 900 WinPho 7 smartphone

   Review Bigger and better?

   So you’re trying to revive the fortunes of what was, until a few weeks ago, the biggest mobile phone manufacturer on the planet. You’ve launched a handset or two with a new operating system and they’ve gone down quite well. So what next? How about taking one of those handsets and releasing a near-identical one, different only in …

   75,000 Raspberry Pi baked before August

   Distie says Arduino sales 'overtaken in an instant'

   RS Components, one of two distributors for the Raspberry Pi, says the 75,000 of the tiny computers are burbling through the manufacturing supply chain and will be ready for release “in July to August”. Speaking at a press event in Sydney today, ANZ Country Manager Jeremy Edward said many buyers of the computer come from within …

   Telstra denies IPTV shift

   Ellis review results hold staff in suspense

   Telstra has strongly rejected claims that the company will move away from the IPTV market, in a response to The Register's report last Monday that it was reviewing its IPTV strategy and considering moving its 300,000+ T-Box customers to Foxtel. The carrier refuted claims that it will move away from the IPTV market, with …

   Stuxnet ≠ cyberwar, says US Army Cyber Command officer

   AusCERT: What is cyberwar anyway?

   While “cyber* operations” are becoming an increasing focus of both government and private research, legal frameworks are failing to keep pace, the US Army Cyber Command operational attorney Robert Clark has told the AusCERT security conference in Queensland. As noted earlier by F-Secure’s Mikko Hypponen in his keynote address …

   China steps up crack down on hi-tech exam cheats

   No, you may not take that tablet into the exam hall...

   The Chinese ministry of education has been forced to update its rules prohibiting cheating in college entrance exams to take account of the increasingly ingenious hi-tech methods used by desperate students and their parents to succeed in the hugely important exams. State-run news agency Xinhua said the government made 15 …

   Apple places massive DRAM order at Elpida plant - report

   Memory-hungry fondleslabs and iPhones the culprits

   Apple has taken a punt on bankrupt Japanese DRAM manufacturer Elpida, placing orders for a whopping 50 per cent of the firm’s production of chips at its Hiroshima facility, according to Digitimes. Industry sources told the Taiwanese tech title that Cupertino is keen to source the DRAM chips from Elpida to power upcoming iPhone …

   Graphics shocker: Nvidia virtualizes Kepler GPUs

   GTC 2012 VGX revs virty desktops, fluffs gamy clouds, changes everything

   You game-console makers who still want to be in the hardware business, look out. You console makers who don't want to be in the hardware business (this might mean you, Microsoft), you can all breathe a sigh of relief: after a five-year effort,­ Nvidia is adding graphics virtualization to its latest "Kepler" line of GPUs. The …

   South Australia plans digital evidence review

   Laws mentioning “telegram and telegraph” may not cover Internet adequately

   Law reform advocates in South Australia are leading a push to have the rules of evidence reviewed to take new computer and communications technology into account. Showing just how persistent out-of-date laws can become, the South Australian Law Reform Institute (SALRI) says it’s probably time to get rid of evidence rules …

   Casablanca to screen for free on Facebook

   Not the beginning of a beautiful friendship outside the USA

   Seventy year-old flick Casablanca is set to get a free outing in a new medium: Facebook. Warner Brothers will show the film at 7:00 PM on May the 16th, Pacific Standard time. The screening appears to be a promotion for the film’s birthday and its inclusion in a new series of e-books for film buffs from the studio. But if you …

   Button batteries BURN KIDS FROM INSIDE

   Where’s that dead CMOS battery you replaced last week?

   The next time you replace a button battery, do take care to dispose of it thoughtfully lest your kids swallow it and end up subjecting their innards to a damaging electrical current. So warns the journal Pediatrics, through a new study titled Battery-Related Emergency Department Visits in the United States, 1990–2009. The …

3. Tuesday, 15 May 2012

   New Apple keyboard patent may spell trouble for Android

   Threat level hinges on lawyers' cunning

   The US Patent and Trademark Office has handed Apple's legal team what may turn out to be a powerful weapon in their ongoing battles against anyone with the temerity to launch products competitive with the iPhone and iPad: a patent on soft keyboards that modify their keys with the tap of an on-screen button. Granted on Tuesday …

   Baidu touts mobe with 100GB web drive

   $158 cloud-backed smartphone from 'China's Google'

   Baidu, the company which dominates China's search business as Google dominates elsewhere, has launched a smartphone using the company's cloud platform to reduce the price and keep the users loyal. The snappily titled Changhong H5019 will sell for less than RMB1,000 (about £98/$158) and offers a three-and-a-half inch …

   Greenpeace targets Apple with 10-foot Pod stunt

   Fanbois drool over prospect of iOS-based home

   Silicon Valley cops arrested two Greenpeace activists who sealed themselves into a huge (i)Pod outside Apple HQ today, but chose not to cuff another bunch of activists who were dressed as giant iPhones. Greenpeace has been chastising the Mac and iOS firm for the last few years for not exactly being the freewheeling, earth- …

   Cheques not checking out just yet

   Electronic payments surge in Oz, but don't bounce paper rivals

   Electronic payments surging, but cheques not about to bounce Electronic payments are replacing the humble cheque, but not so fast that the descendants of the promisory note are irrelevant or should be hustled towards a hastened retirement. That’s the conclusion of the Australian Payments Clearing Association’s (APCA’s) new …

   Nvidia's Kepler pushes parallelism up to eleven

   GTC 2012 Hyper-Q and Dynamic Parallelism make GPUs sweat

   When Nvidia did a preview of its next-generation "Kepler" GPU chips back in March, the company's top brass said that they were saving some of the goodies in the Kepler design for the big event at Nvidia's GPU Technical Conference in San Jose, which runs this week. And true to its word, the Kepler GPUs do have some goodies that …

   US Supremes hammer final nail into Psystar coffin

   The fat lady croons doom tune over hackintosher's corpse

   The long and sordid Psystar saga creaked to its anti-climactic close on Monday: the US Supreme Court has refused to hear the hackintosher's request to review an appeals court's September 2011 decision not to overturn a December 2009 permanent injunction preventing the Florida company from selling Mac OS X–based clones. "We are …

   EMC rolls new VMAX bundle for cloud pushers

   Array plus SW plus services platform

   It just sits there and rakes in money for you as users get provisioned, use the space and get billed: that's the message EMC is pushing to cloud service providers with a new VMAX bundle of array, software and services. VMAX SP – for service providers – is a VMAX array packaged with software and services at four levels to help …

   Scammers exploit wannabe demon-slayers hyped by Diablo III

   Go straight to hell

   Cybercrooks latched onto the release of Diablo III on Monday with a run of scams themed around the widely anticipated video game. Blizzard's games systems collapsed due to the higher than expected demand for the demon-slaying game, The Guardian reports. The software company is attempting to stop pirates from nicking the new …

   US dope farmer in Walmart rattlesnake chomp shock

   Mulch shopping trip ends in 'six bags of anti-venom'

   A Walmart customer required the urgent administration of "six bags of anti-venom" after a rattlesnake sank its fangs into him at a Washington state tentacle of the retail monolith. Mica Craig, 47, was in the store in Clarkston, innocently shopping for some mulch with which to nourish his cannabis plants, which he's "licensed …

   Bubble 2.0 startups will crash out before they cash out

   Open ... and Shut Why Facebook and Amazon won't come a callin'

   It's possible your next startup idea will earn you $1bn, but don't count on it. While there are some stand-out success stories in Silicon Valley, there is also a raft of startups pushing product features masquerading as companies. Some of these will be acquired by the likes of Zynga and Amazon, and some will go public. But …

   Kepler chip drought leaves Nvidia gasping for moolah

   Profit halved in Q1, everyone wants a piece of TSMC

   Supply shortages for 28 nanometer GPUs from fab partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp adversely impacted GPU chip and coprocessor maker Nvidia once again in its most recent quarter. Revenues for the first quarter of fiscal 2013 ended in April came in at the high end of the company's guidance, but nonetheless fell by …

   Mole sheds light on incoming illuminated Amazon Kindle

   No colour reader, though

   The E Ink display in Amazon's Kindles may be great for reading in bright sunshine, but it's pants on gloomy days and totally useless in the dark. But that may soon change: Amazon is said to be preparing a front-lit version of the popular e-book reader. Citing a source who claims to have seen the prototype, Reuters reports the …

   The key questions you must ask to save your virty desktop dream

   Sysadmin blog Shifting to stateless? Don't turn it into a nightmare

   What is required for a successful stateless desktop deployment? Planning. Every implementation will be different, and experience has taught me that there are very few hard and fast rules. Stateless desktops are non-persistent, meaning that they get destroyed every time the user logs off and returned to a known setup. Proper …

   Coupon-spaffer Groupon starts to sniff actual profits

   And those marketing costs are way down

   Groupon significantly reduced the amount of money it lost in the first quarter of this year, only ending up with a net loss of $11.7m compared to a loss of $146.5m in the same quarter of 2011. The daily deals site actually managed to make its first ever operating profit, claiming $39.6m on its coupons, but interest and taxes …

   Bitcoin bank Bitcoinica still titsup after cyberheist

   More than $90k in tokens snatched

   Bitcoin exchange Bitcoinica remains offline following a hack against its systems last week that resulted in the theft of digital currency valued at approximately $90,000 (£56k). The digital currency exchange took its servers offline on Friday following the discovery of a breach on Friday, as a statement on Bitcoinica's website …

   ICO blasted offline by DDoS cannon in Leveson protest

   Anonymous-linked hacktivists shell site for days

   The UK's Information Commissioner's Office website has been blown offline by a distributed-denial-of-service attack that appears to be a hacktivist protest over the Leveson Inquiry. The ICO spokesperson told The Register in an emailed statement that access to the site had been disrupted over the past few days by the DDoS …

   'IT is no place for the little ladies', says Dell mouthpiece

   It's called box shifting for a reason

   Texan tech titan Dell has been forced to assert its commitment to equal rights in the workplace after a Danish funnyman compering its channel event in Copenhagen rattled off a string of sexist jokes. The channel and indeed the tech industry is known for being male dominated, a point that - if we are being charitable - …

   UK's '£1.2bn software pirates' mostly 'blokes under 34'

   Tougher laws needed to stem dodgy downloads, says BSA

   The BSA is again bemoaning the lack of deterrents for software piracy after the commercial worth of unlicensed programs in the UK for 2011 remained at £1.2bn, unchanged on the previous year. This equates to a piracy rate of 26 per cent as more than one in four applications installed on users' machines was illegal, the software …

   Lenovo intros carbon-fibre ThinkPad Ultrabook

   Dozens of other black laptops launched too

   It's ThinkPads a-go-go at Lenovo, with dozens of the black-clad laptops announced today in four families: the T, X, L and W series. ThinkPad X1 Carbon The highlight is the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, built around a carbon-fibre chassis and intended to be the lightest pro-oriented Ultrabook there is. It's a 1.4kg, 14-incher with on …

   Red Hat hits 10-year, $1bn Enterprise Linux birthday

   How a Unix killer crawled from the dot-com bust

   Making a Linux distribution is easy, and lots of people have done it and continue to do it. All you have to do is get the source code and integrate the pieces you like and slap your logo on it. Making a commercial Linux distribution that makes enough money to cultivate innovation and stability in the kernel is not so easy, …

   Siri subtly shifts smartphone allegiance

   No longer nominates Nokia kit

   Conspiracy theorists and Apple haters, rejoice! Siri, Cupertino's iPhone 4S voice assistant, is no longer suggesting the Nokia Lumia 900 WinPho handset might be the best cellphone. As we reported earlier, that's the recommendation that Siri has been making of late. Siri checks Wolfram's Alpha database for the information, and …

   VMware puts on new vFabric suite, takes your database on a date

   Virty giant gets flirty with PostgreSQL

   VMware pretty much owns the virtualization layer on X86 iron inside of enterprises, but it has a long way to go to get the same kind of uptake for its vFabric application framework. Just as it did when it turned the bare-metal ESX Server hypervisor into a server virtualization stack and then a cloudy infrastructure ubertool, …

   Facebook ups IPO shares to $38, edges towards $104bn value

   You want some stocks? Pay more... bitch!

   Facebook has reportedly raised the price range on its IPO shares from the $28-$35 range to $34-$38 each, as the growing interest of investors has boosted the valuation of the firm to up to an eye-watering $104bn. By the end of last week, reports abounded that the initial public offering was oversubscribed, and the demand for …

   Inside the Skynet ghost town built by bunker-based boffins

   Analysis Brainiacs beaver beneath barren burg called CITE

   It's an empty city in the middle of the New Mexico desert ringed by a security perimeter. The wind will blow down barren streets, whisper through a vacant school, round high-rise offices cleared of commuters and out through lonely houses in suburbia. Unseen boffins will beaver away in underground bunkers. But this is not the …

   IT products give energy giant DCC relief from icy hot patch

   Distribution makes up for pleasant winter, British biz MicroP hauls in bucks

   DCC gained some cheer from its IT distribution business over the last year, after an unusually mild winter put a chill on its energy distribution business. Overall revenues at the Irish conglomerate came in at €10.7bn for the year ending 31 March, up 23.2 per cent. Pre-tax income was €155.8m, compared to €203.8m in the …

   World+Dog as likely to view vids on PC as TV

   But viewing figures down

   Folks, you're as likely to watch video content on your computer as your TV, if stats collated by asking tens of thousands of web-surfing consumers around the world is anything to go by. Nielsen, a US market research firm, asked 28,000 or so people in 56 countries how often they watch video content on a computer, on a TV or on …

   Virgin straps on phone masts for the flying upper classes

   'HELLO? Hello darling, I'm on a Virgin- What? No..'

   Flyers heading to New York on Virgin Atlantic will be able to make calls from the plane, thanks to a mobile mobile base station and a satellite uplink, but expect to pay through the nose for a service which hasn't proved popular elsewhere. Only customers of O2 and Vodafone will be able to connect at all, and those will be …

   Apple scrubs old Leopards of Flashback Trojan infections

   Security airdrop saves legacy fanbois from nasties

   Apple has released patches that defend users of its older Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard operating system against security threats. Monday's security fixes help defend Mac users stuck on the two-year-old operating system against assaults by the infamous Flashback Trojan. Users of the newer Snow Leopard (10.6) and Lion (10.7) operating …

   IMDb

   Android App of the Week Film fan's feast

   If you're a fan of the movies then this app should be right up your aisle. Not only can IMDb tell you just about everything you could ever wish to know about just about every film ever made, but it has all the information you need to plan your movie-going night out too. Film opening dates, show times, the location and contact …

   Apple's Siri nominates Nokia as best phone maker

   You cannot be Siri-ous

   Who'd've thunk it? Apple's voice-assistant, Siri, has suggested Nokia's Lumia 900 as the lead candidate to be the best cell phone ever. Someone put that very question to Siri, and here, courtesy of fansite WMPowerUser, is the result: Source: WMPowerUser Siri interrogates Wolfram's Alpha database for answer to punters' …

   HP plonks newcomer into hot seat for EMEA Enterprise Group

   But future role for HP EMEA MD unconfirmed in shakeup

   HP has shuffled the management deck in EMEA in a restructure that's bagged big cheese Peter Ryan the top job at the Enterprise Group. The vendor confirmed in March it was stitching together the PC and printer divisions and merging the Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking (ESSN) and Global Accounts and Technology Services …

   HTC fires up latest Desire

   Budget Ice Cream Sarnie phone

   HTC would like you to know about the Desire C, a Beats Audio-equipped phone running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Pitched a the lower reaches of the smartphone segment - T-Mobile will be selling the C for £180 on PAYG, for example, or free on a £15.50 per month contract - the handset is based around a 3.5in, 320 x 480 …

   Steve Jobs' death could clear way for more open Apple - Woz

   But don't sacrifice the shininess

   Apple could be more open and just as successful - but don’t take it from us. That’s from company co-founder and computing idealist Steve Wozniak. While on a tour of Australia, Woz rekindled memories of the mid-1970s and his dream behind the first Apple computers he built with Steve Jobs. Woz was inspired to speak out after …

   NHS 'pays up to THREE times over the odds' for IT gear

   Health bosses told to stop blowing taxpayers' cash

   The NHS is paying double or even triple normal prices for trivial tech gear including printer parts, cables and optical mice, according to a poll of IT bosses. Here's just one example of how the Department of Health is cutting deals that are worse than what other wholesale buyers are getting - and worse than what average …

   London's Oyster card website still down after 12-hour outage

   Transport for London: We did this on purpose

   Transport for London's Oyster card website jumped the tracks and fell offline for 12 hours, leaving anyone wanting to top-up, cancel or renew their card online unable to do so. Since at least 8pm yesterday visitors to the Oyster page, when accessed through the main TFL site, were faced with this error message: Some tweets …

   Nokia outs budget phone pair

   Two-Sim simple handset

   Nokia has unwrapped a couple of budget phones this morning, pitching the 110 and 112 as internet devices despite their - by modern standards - tiny 1.8in, 128 x 160 screens. The two dual-band handsets can take two Sims, mind, handy for mixing business and pleasure.   New Nokias: 110 (left) and 112 There's a variant of the …

   Sony to add full HD display to 15in Ivy Bridge laptop

   Budget Vaios outed too

   Two laptop lines were refreshed by Sony this morning: the Vaio E and S. The existing 14in E gains a new "wrap-around" look and 15.5in and 17.3in siblings. The bigger machines go on sale early in June, Sony said, but neither qualifies for Ivy Bridge chippery. Instead we have a Core i5-2450M backed by 6GB of 1333MHz DDR 3 …

   US-Russian trio blast off to space station in Soyuz launch

   Spacemen get ready for Elon Musk's Dragon docking

   Three new crew members blasted off in the wee hours of this morning for a two-day flight aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station. While Elon Musk is still dreaming of carrying people into space in his Dragon craft, and NASA's Shuttles rumble off into retirement, the Soyuz spacecraft is still the only …

   IBM smashes Flash out of Wimbledon, serves up HTML5 app

   Adobe's double fault: too snazzy and doesn't work on Apple kit

   Next month’s Wimbledon tennis championship in London will serve up more player data than ever before and, for the first time, deliver live video to game fans over the web. SPSS software from IBM will be deployed at all 19 courts and to capture information, draw up competitors’ stats and evaluate their performance. The kit is …

   Fastest-ever hydrocarb scramjet hits Mach 8, doesn't explode

   HIFire 2 engine successfully lights match in a hurricane

   The successful test launch of the hydrocarbon-fuelled scramjet HIFire 2 by the US brings mankind a step closer to practical travel at over five times the speed of sound. Reliable hypersonic transportation could revolutionise trips to space and across the globe, but sustained flight at such speed is difficult: several test …

   Spy under your car bonnet 'worth billions by 2016'

   Break the speed limit, break the bank with your insurance quote

   Technology that allows cars to snoop on motorists and tell insurers about their bad driving will form a worldwide market worth $14.4bn (£8.95bn) by 2016, analysts reckon. A new report from Juniper Research suggests intelligent vehicles chock-full of gear for navigating, recording info for insurance purposes, and telling the AA …

   Google compressed-filth legal battle with smut site ended in US

   Miniature nudies aren't porno piracy

   A publisher of adult photos can no longer raise claims that Google infringed its copyright in the US following a stipulation by a district court in California. The court said Perfect 10's claims that Google infringed its rights had been "voluntarily dismissed with prejudice", and that the publisher could not appeal against the …

   Flashy mutant Ultrabooks to shove pure SSD chaps off cliff

   Ultrabook makers will embrace hybrid trend

   Storage industry research firm TrendFocus says Ultrabooks will increasingly use hybrid disk drives for their near-SSD speed, HDD capacity and ability to undercut pure SSD Ultrabook prices. Seagate thinks hybrid drives will eventually enter every part of its product portfolio. According to Stifel Nicolaus analyst Aaron Rakers, …

   West Midlands plods get mobile fingerprint tech

   Portable mobile dab-slabs lead to Brummie collars felt

   West Midlands police is to introduce fingerprint scanning devices, which allow officers to find out if a person is wanted by police or the courts. The force said it plans to roll out 70 hand-held MobileID devices following a successful pilot of the technology. The devices are satellite-linked to a national fingerprint database …

   HP Envy 14 Spectre Ultrabook

   Review Shiny slab of laptop lusciousness

   The test unit I reviewed was forwarded on to me from the Harrods press office. That alone should tell you a lot about the HP Envy 14 Spectre. For you, Harrods may conjure images of oil sheiks browsing bling, affectatious middle classes buying ham and feeble-minded tourists ogling Saint Diana's soiled crockery, but Harrods makes …

   AMD: New Trinity laptop chips out-juice Intel graphics

   'Ultrabook? Fuggedaboutit. Ultrathin is in'

   Laptop manufacturers hoping to flog ultrabooks – or, as Intel has trademarked them, Ultrabooks™ – may be able to shave their prices a bit now that AMD has released its second-generation A-Series accelerated processing units (APUs), code-named "Trinity". AMD promises that its new 32-nanometer, high-k metal gate CPU-GPU mashups …

   125,000 Ubuntu PCs to land in Pakistani students' laps

   Education booster or vote-buyer?

   As the One Laptop Per Child initiative goes from strength to strength around the world, there are signs that Pakistan may be getting the message too, after the Punjab government began handing out 125,000 free Ubuntu-based laptops to college and university freshers. Chairman of the Punjab Information Technology Board, Umar Saif …

   Game goes titsup in Australia

   Administrator installed

   Competition from online retailers has claimed another casualty in the high street with the demise of the australian incarnation of chain store retailer, Game. PricewaterhouseCoopers was yesterday appointed voluntary administrator of the UK-owned gaming company, which has over 500 Australian employees and 92 stores nationally …

   Thailand dries off and ramps up IT spending

   Smartphones and services set to propel country to second in SE Asia

   Thailand is back on the scene and spending like there’s no tomorrow, according to new IDC stats which show the country is set to complete its rehabilitation from the devastating floods last year and jump to number two spot in IT spending in Southeast Asia. The analyst’s latest IT spending forecast predicted Thailand will …

   ESA seeks doctor for Antarctic spaceflight sim

   13 months of cold, dark, cramped quarters a "very interesting analogue"

   The European Space Agency (ESA) wants to interview “doctors who are not afraid of the dark” for a spaceflight research gig at one of the coldest, darkest places on earth. The location in question is Concordia Station (location pictured below), a research facility perched at 3200m on the high Antarctic plateau. The station goes …

   Indian government to buy in tech for social good

   Acquisition fund could start on farming tech next year

   The Indian government has revealed ambitious plans to set-up a Technology Acquisition Fund designed to facilitate the purchase of technologies from across the globe in order that they may be modified and commercialised domestically to benefit the whole of Indian society. Renu Swarup, an advisor to the country’s science and …

   iCloud blows away 15 million users for 90 minutes

   Normal service has been restored, photo-sharing on the way

   Apple’s iCloud service crashed for ninety minutes on Monday, US time, leaving 12% of users – about 15 million people - possibly “unable to access iCloud mail.” Apple issued a system status update confirming the outage, which took place from 8:00AM to 9:30AM, Pacific Daylight time. The reason for the outage is not known, but …

   Yellow Pages targets zombie survivalist market

   There’ll be an app for that after competition concludes

   Australia’s Yellow Pages will hand out A$2500 to the developer whose app best assists users to survive a zombie invasion and/or apocalypse … with the aid of the popular business directory. The reason for the prize is the API that Sensis, publisher of the Yellow Pages in Australia, offers developers who wish to link to dredge …

4. Monday, 14 May 2012

   Physicists iron out lumps in quantum dots

   Silicon part of the problem at the nano-scale

   Continuing to shrink the scale of electronics presents a host of problems, including the way surfaces interact with electrons. At the smallest scale, it's difficult to get a "ballistic" electron to follow a consistent path, something an international team of physicists hopes to solve. In a paper published in Physical Review …

   Solving traffic jams with maths

   Make the traffic control the lights, instead of the other way around

   A Swiss traffic management and transport economics expert believes a combination of queue management and computing can help solve the gridlock that plagues the modern city. Dr Dirk Helbing of ETH Zurich, a professor of sociology specializing in modeling and simulation, says “self organizing” traffic control systems, using …

   LightSquared files for bankruptcy

   End of the line for 4G wannabe? Wanna bet?

   Just hours before the expiration of a deal designed to keep it from defaulting on its debt, 4G wannabe LightSquared announced on Monday that it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. "The filing was necessary to preserve the value of our business and to ensure continued operations," said the company's interim co-COO …

   Buffalo ships world's first 1.3Gbps Wi-Fi hardware

   Edges out Netgear in 802.11ac race

   If you've been jonesing for faster Wi-Fi performance – not that you have any client devices that can yet take advantage of next-generation wireless networking technology – your wait is over: Buffalo has begun shipping the industry's first 802.11ac router and bridge. Not only do Buffalo's new Wi-Fi devices promise impressive …

   Nvidia launches Nsight CUDA dev tools into Eclipse

   GTC 2012 Visual Studio tools get some polish, too

   Nvidia kicked off its GPU Technical Conference today by launching an updated version of its Nsight development platform that wraps around the CUDA compiler set and now interfaces with Eclipse-based integrated development environments. Nvidia also unwrapped updated versions of the Nsight tools that plug into Microsoft's Visual …

   Google shoves cybersquatter off 763 Googletastic domains

   'Gay network' owner had splashed over £6k on names

   Google has seized over 750 domain names from a cybersquatter who used them to drive traffic to a series of "gay interest" websites and now wants Google's trademark cancelled. The company has won a complaint covering 763 domains that all included the word "google" followed by the name of another company, keyword or celebrity, …

   Japanese operator to test quake-proof floating phone-mast BLIMPS

   Now that's a cloud network

   Japan's third-largest network operator will trial blimp-based cells that could be instantly deployed to 100 metres above the ground even if said terra firma is shaking uncontrollably or has disappeared under flood waters. Next month's tests, reported by IDG, involve attaching 3G base stations to a handful of helium-filled …

   Kelway accuses rivals of cloak-and-dagger cloud strategy

   Lifts covers off ServiceWorks cloud packages

   Kelway has accused rival service providers of using irrelevant metrics as a smokescreen to blind customers evaluating contracted cloud services. The London-based firm has lifted the covers off ServiceWorks, a bunch of standardised cloud services with a set price list, including Platform-as-a-Service compute, managed private …

   Mp3Tunes files for bankruptcy

   Also-ran run-in

   For Michael Robertson, it’s déjà vu all over again. The same flexible and somewhat optimistic interpretation of copyright law that sank his music service in the dot.com bubble has also sunk his current music service, over what was essentially the same idea. On Friday Robertson’s cloud music locker – MP3Tunes – filed for …

   Next-gen MacBook Pro, iMac make benchmark site debut

   Ivy Bridge chips, retina screens, USB 3.0 all a-board

   Faster MacBook Pros have surfaced on the Geekbench benchmark collation site promising, if genuine, performance 17 per cent up on its predecessor. The reference, to a 'MacBook9,1', lists a machine with a four-core Intel Core i7-3820QM Ivy Bridge processor operating at 2.7GHz and running Mac OS X 10.8 (Build 12A211). It has 8GB …

   EMC gobbled XtremeIO to Xterminate NetApp, says Xpert

   And Fusion-io 'a mosquito they could squash at any time'

   A financial analyst reckons EMC bought XtremIO to fend off the threat posed by NetApp. Andrew Nowinski, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, had this to say in a recent research note: "We believe this threat of potential market share gains from [NetApp's Data ONTAP] 8.1 is what prompted EMC to acquire XtremIO for $430m." We asked …

   Intel goes wide and deep with Xeon E5 assault

   Blunting AMD's advantages

   If you were planning on buying new servers in the coming weeks and months, Intel just gave you a whole lot of homework. And if you work at Advanced Micro Devices, you're getting some homework, too. Intel already has a slew of E5-2600 processors aimed at workhorse two-socket machines and a bunch of E7s in different flavors …

   Intel woos microserver makers with Xeon E3-1200 v2 singlers

   Ivy Bridge better for baby boxes

   For a company that had to be dragged to the microserver space – though not exactly kicking and perhaps muttering instead of screaming – Intel has certainly taken a shining to the market and is not about to give X86 rival Advanced Micro Devices and the army of ARM RISC server wannabes any chance of getting a toehold in this …

   XMA sales throttled by UK gov belt-tightening

   Reseller's revenues plummet £24m in 2011

   XMA lost a huge chunk of revenues in calendar 2011 as public sector austerity measures were pushed through by the Coalition. The Nottingham-based dealer, part of the Kelido Group which also includes distributor Westcoast, saw sales for the year ended 31 December tumble 17.4 per cent to £116m. "The IT industry was extremely …

   Study shows SMB cloud security fears largely overstated

   Cost and security assumptions questioned

   Research into small businesses in the US and Asian markets has shown that there's an increasing mismatch between the theory and practice of cloud security. When questioned in a blind test conducted by comScore and funded by Microsoft, a third of SMBs said they didn’t use cloud security because of fears over the cost of …

   Headbanger plays Star Trek theme on floppy drives

   Vid Very heavy metal

   Storage is weird, wonderful and sometimes very odd. Did you know floppy disk drives can be used for something other than emergency boots of legacy kit or as cool antiques? It must have been a fairly uneventful day when floppy lovers discovered their drives can be used as "musical instruments" – to play the theme tune to …

   Road deaths spark crackdown on jaywalking texter menace

   Vid lok b4 u cross or els!11

   Cops in Fort Lee have fined 117 pedestrians in a fortnight for jaywalking while engrossed in their smartphone screens - after three people died by wandering into traffic. So far this year officers have warned 575 citizens in the New Jersey borough that they risked, apart from death, an $85 (£52) ticket for strolling into …

   Adobe backs down, patches critical Photoshop CS5 hole

   Paid upgrade fix row leaves a nasty taste

   Adobe backed down on Friday and promised to release a fix for earlier versions of its Photoshop software after previously insisting users who wanted to safeguard themselves from a critical security vulnerability had to pay for an upgrade. A security flaw in Adobe Photoshop version CS5 and earlier means users could be exposed …

   What you should know about migrating to the cloud

   Have a pleasant journey

   Small businesses account for roughly half the UK economy. The technology requirements for a one-man band are wildly different from those of a 250-seat tech support service company, yet both fall under the SME banner. So what is the general advice that will work for everyone and anyone who is considering moving some IT into the …

   Antitrust probe looms over Windows RT 'browser ban'

   Internet Explorer shenanigans: Hasn't Microsoft been down this road before?

   US politicians are reportedly poring over complaints by Mozilla that Microsoft will block access to rival browsers in Windows 8 on ARM, aka Windows RT. The powerful Senate Judiciary Committee plans to “take a look” at the allegations made by the Firefox maker last week, which were backed up by Google. Whispers of a probe …

   Foxconn chief: we're gearing up for Apple 'iTV'

   Sharp investment explained?

   Foxconn chief Terry Gou reportedly reckons that Apple, one of the contract manufacturer's biggest customers, is indeed preparing the so-called 'iTV'. To be fair to Gou, he didn't actually say Apple is planning to offer an HD TV, but he did say his company is preparing its production lines for such a product, at least according …

   Never mind the buzzwords: How the landscape looks to resellers

   Survey: Big Data, BI and hosting services to grow

   By now you should all be busy filling in the latest channel survey, but it’s worth casting your eye over the results from our last channel survey, conducted at the back end of last year. It showed that resellers were increasingly getting out of their boxes - and not just because it was Christmas. The results covered a range of …

   UK milk wastage = 20,000 cars = actually completely unimportant

   For goodness' sake, can't headline writers count?

   A scientific paper written with the aim of highlighting nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions has resulted in a crop of foolish headlines pointing out that the UK's waste of milk creates an environmental burden equivalent to having another 20,000 cars on the roads. To anyone with even a basic grasp on numbers - someone aware, let us …

   Hyundai Veloster coupé

   Review Welcome to the world of 2+1 motoring

   Tradition dictates that cars look the same from the left as the right. Not Hyundai’s new hatchback coupé, though. It has a rear door on the passenger's side but not on the driver’s. Clever idea or gimmick? More to the point, will it lure buyers away from the the obvious alternatives, the VW Scirocco and Vauxhall Astra GTC? …

   Cost-cutting Serco says UK economy improving

   ... but too late to save jobs of 500 souls

   IT outsourcing behemoth Serco Group says the outlook for the UK economy is decidedly brighter as the nation feels its way through the economic gloom. The services player reckons it is on track to meet 2012 targets with sales in the first half expected to grow 6 per cent, due to acquisitions made last year. In a steady-as-she- …

   Tomb Raider delayed for quality improvement

   Lara Croft doesn't believe Mayan prophesies

   Lara Croft's rousing return to current-gen consoles has been pushed back to 2013, so developers at Crystal Dynamics can make Tomb Raider "the best game of their careers", apparently. The latest instalment of Tomb Raider was pegged for release this autumn, and while fresh content will be revealed at next month's E3 expo, the …

   SpaceX sets new blastoff date for Dragon: 19 May

   Really this time, we think

   The flight of the Falcon 9 has once more been rescheduled, with a new launch date of 19 May, as Elon Musk's SpaceX decided to tweak the software one more time. The first commercial craft to restock the International Space Station, a Dragon capsule strapped to a Falcon 9 rocket, has seen more than its fair share of push-backs …

   Stuck in a dull conference? You need Verity's survival guide

   Stob Getting your own back on technical seminar speakers

   The technical conference season is once more upon us. The speakers at these affairs spend a lot of time sharing their software design patterns and anti-patterns with us; as a regular attendee it seemed to me that we punters were overdue for revenge. Here is some of their own medicine. Pattern: BTDTGTTS Motivation: At a talk …

   Freecom Hard Drive Sq 2TB

   Geek Treat of the Week DIY DVR

   Freecom’s Hard Drive Sq is a SuperSpeed USB 3.0 hard drive which is clearly pitched at the growing number of us who have smart TVs and want to be able to record programmes without investing in a Freeview or Freesat DVR. Designed by Berlin-based Iranian designer Armam Emami, the aluminium enclosure looks strikingly like Apple’s …

   Behind the lens of NASA's self-adapting ISS space telescope

   Analysis A hunk of space glass this ain't

   Funding cutbacks and an arguably anti-science fiscal policy haven't stopped exciting new projects emerging from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in La Cañada Flintridge, California. We spoke to Dr Michael Sievers from JPL about one such project, cutely named the Optical Testbed and Integration on ISS eXperiment (OpTIIX …

   Ofcom: Now's your chance to make Local TV for Local People

   Getcher applications in for White Space telly channels

   Ofcom has received 87 expressions of interest from groups interested in running Local TV channels, and three companies interested in broadcasting them, so has launched the beauty contest to see who gets to be the next Alan Partridge. Local TV should be up and running within the next two years, in the 21 locations selected for …

   Heathrow CIO pledges seamless future with £1.5bn collaborative system

   Let's get this baby off the ground

   The CIO of the world's busiest airport has announced that £1.5 billion will be sunk into improving real-time and decision-making software systems at Heathrow. Philip Langsdale gave 2012's Appleton Lecture at the Institute of Engineering and Technology and explained the systems that Heathrow needed to make the airport run …

   StorSimple, TwinStrata join in HP Cloud love-in

   .44 cloud magnum could blow your SAN head clean off - punk

   Cloud storage gateway suppliers are cosy-ing up to HP with both StorSimple and TwinStrata emphasising their HP Cloud Storage creds. StorSimple has certified the HP Cloud Services public beta offering, and says it can be used with its cloud data management features, like Cloud Snapshots, thin restores, non-disruptive upgrades …

   Telstra to hand T-box customers to Foxtel

   Exec exodus continues as speculation downloads

   Telstra is expected to shut down its aggressive IPTV ambitions and hand over its 300,000 plus T-Box customers to Foxtel, once the merger of Foxtel and Austar is completed, sources close to the deal have told The Register. Speculation has been rife that Telstra’s burgeoning IPTV division would be the casualty of the AUD$1.9 …

   Overclockers to fight for global supremacy

   Keep an eye on your servers as 'Chimp challenge' hits Folding@home

   Overclocking enthusiasts around the world spent the weekend topping up their coolant tanks and tuning their rigs with unusual fervour, as they prepared to go into battle in the annual Chimp Challenge. The competition sees overclocking and hardware enthusiast communities assemble special teams, each of which aim to do as much …

   China begins work on world-beating MEGA power cables

   An 800kv line will have largest capacity on the planet

   China’s apparently unceasing efforts to lead the world in every conceivable field continued on Sunday after engineers in the western region of Xinjiang began construction of what is claimed will be the largest capacity power line on the planet. The 800 kilovolt (kv) ultra-high voltage power transmission line is being built by …

   How to simulate a light armoured vehicle

   Thales Australia reveals tech behind trainers for eight-wheeled monster

   The Australian Light Armoured Vehicle (ASLAV) is an eight-wheeled, 13,450-kilogram monster, which bristles with a grenade launcher, a pair of machine guns and a 25 millimetre M242 “Bushmaster” chain gun. The ASLAV can carry six troops in addition to its three crew. Two of the latter ride inside the vehicle's turret, where the …

   China and India scoop 17% of venture capital cash

   USA still number one, but investors like startups in high-growth markets

   Deals with Chinese and Indian web firms are helping to fill the pockets of Silicon Valley venture capitalists (VCs) with ever greater wodges of cash, with one quarter of the top 100 VCs now investing in the region, according to Forbes’ Midas List 2012. The US business magazine’s annual list of the best dealmakers in the tech …

   Apple drops '4G' label from new iPad

   Fondleslabs now link to 'fast mobile data networks'

   Apple has stopped using the term “4G” to describe the new iPad in the UK and Australia, after regulators took it to task for doing so because the device would not work with what carriers call 4G in both nations. In the UK the company now says the fondleslab works with “fast mobile data networks”, as you can see in the screen …

   Atlassian, Zynga among San Francisco's best town bikes

   Free tune-ups, showers and bike parking win awards for code shops

   Australia’s developer darling Atlassian, Zynga, AirBnB, Rackspace and less-techy corporate brethren Levi's and Veritable Vegetable have been recognised as the most bike-friendly employers in San Francisco. The tech companies scored the gong at San Francisco's annual Bike to Work Day, at which Mayor Edwin Lee and the SF Bicycle …

5. Sunday, 13 May 2012

   Lasers battle cattle farts!

   In other news, cows with guns

   It’s not exactly “cows with freakin’ lasers!”: the aptly-named Methane Research Cluster is to use lasers to measure the methane emissions from Australia’s vast herd of ruminants. The University of Melbourne-led project wants to improve “measurement and management” of methane emissions, starting with grazing lands in the north …

   Iranian firms told not to use foreign email providers

   Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, MSN et al face the chop

   Iran has reportedly banned some domestic companies from using foreign email services and hosting providers, as its attempts to create an autonomous, nationwide intranet gather pace. Local weekly Asr Ertebatat claimed on Saturday that Iran’s telecommunications ministry is preventing banks, insurance firms and telephone …

   Yahoo! CEO! quits! after! CV! row!

   Third Point LLC claims Scott Thompson’s scalp, wins board seats

   Scott Thompson has stepped down as Yahoo! CEO and has been replaced, for the time being at least, by Ross Levinsohn. Several directors, namely Patti Hart, VJ Joshi, Arthur Kern and Gary Wilson, have also left the company. The departures are a big win for Third Point LLC, an investment company that says it is Yahoo!'s largest …

   Russian upstart claims BitTorrent-killer

   ‘Pirate Pay’ names Microsoft as investor

   A team of Russian developers is touting a technology it says can kill off BitTorrent-based P2P file sharing – and says it has attracted investment from Microsoft. According to a story in Russia Beyond the Headlines, the technology developed by Andrei Klimenko, his brother Alexei, and Dmitry Shuvaev has attracted $US100,000 …

   Samsung buys US Spotify clone, hopes to bruise Apple's eco-system

   All it needs is international music rights

   You don‘t have to be a genius to know that mSpot, which has just been bought by Samsung Electronics in the US, is going to go through both a transformation and a huge international upsurge in usage, if it has, or can get, international music rights. Samsung has been talking about a rival to iTunes for some years, ever since …

6. Saturday, 12 May 2012

   Look out, Amazon Cloud! HP's on the warpath

   HP tech bigwig on the zen of Windows open source

   You might think the hard work for Hewlett-Packard is done, after it came from behind to build its own Amazon-style cloud so quickly. But the difficult part – taking on Amazon and winning with open source – lies ahead. The world's biggest PC maker lifted the lid yesterday on the biggest change to its business in recent history …

   'Shame on the register to post wrong informations'

   Mailbag Pirate Bay freetards can't, won't see the irony

   Heard the one about The Pirate Bay being ripped off? This week there was a lovely story of the Swedish scofflaws being annoyed by clone sites. Many of you enjoyed the wedding-cake sized dollops of irony in this, but some furious freetards didn't. El Reg has got it all wrong, they insist. MarKo1 is a newcomer to the Reg forums …

   Ten... Ultrabooks

   Product round-up Light, fantastic

   It took a little while for the production lines to get going, but the first few months of 2012 have seen super-slim Ultrabooks completely outnumbering every other type of desktop or laptop PC coming our way. Intel’s tight definition of the Ultrabook category means that there are certain things you can more or less take for …

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