The Week in Summary

1. Saturday, 13 October 2012

   Google readying on-device malware scanner for Android

   Could block bad apps from any source

   Android malware is on the rise, but the good news is that Google isn't sitting still for it. The search giant is reportedly readying a comprehensive anti-malware system for its mobile OS that will soon be able to spot malicious apps not just in the Google Play store, but also on Android devices themselves. According to a …

   SpaceX satellite burns up on re-entry after Falcon FAIL

   50 per cent success rate for latest Falcon flight

   The satellite that made up the secondary cargo of SpaceX's latest orbital mission has burnt up in the Earth's atmosphere after failing to make it into the correct orbit. The OG2 satellite, a prototype communications platform built by Orbcomm, was carried by the Falcon rocket as a secondary payload and was due to be boosted up …

   Swiss photographer sues Apple for pilfering her eyeball

   What is it with Apple and Swiss image larceny?

   A Swiss photographer has filed suit against Apple in a US District Court in New York, alleging that Cupertino's marketeers used one of her photos without her permission in its MacBook Pro with Retina Display flack attack. "Despite representing that it did not intend to use the photo and knowing that it had not obtained a …

2. Friday, 12 October 2012

   Übertroll firm bags DRM patent for 3D printing

   Patent hoarder Myhrvold & Co. could control nascent tech

   A division of Intellectual Ventures, the IP-holding company founded by Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft's former CTO, has been granted a patent on a system for introducing digital rights management (DRM) controls to 3D printing. Under the system described in the patent, files containing plans for printed objects would be encased in …

   FTC nearing decision in Google antitrust probe

   Four out of five officials agree

   The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is nearing a decision in its 16-month-long investigation into Google's search and advertising businesses, and sources say things are not looking good for the Mountain View–based company. According to Reuters, three separate sources have confirmed that four of the five FTC commissioners are …

   Endeavour: donuts and a Toyota ease shuttle's drive through L.A.

   Trundling to its final resting place at two miles per hour

   If you're reading this right after we clicked The Reg's Publish button at 2:13pm Pacific Time on Friday, know that the Space Shuttle Endeavour is leaving its parking place near the corner of La Tijera Avenue and Sepulveda Eastway in Los Angeles, and continuing its journey to the California Science Center in that city's downtown …

   Apple pays up for stealing design from Swiss Railways

   Cupertinian cash covers clock copyright cockup

   Apple may be willing to spend millions in court over some copyright fights, but it has learned the lessons of history and has decided not to mess with the Swiss. Last month, Switzerland's railway operator SBB took Cupertino to task for stealing the design of its clock for iOS 6's Clock app. Now the world's favorite fondleslab …

   Windows 8 pricing details announced as preorders begin

   Wacky retail packaging revealed

   Microsoft revealed full pricing details for Windows 8 on Friday as Redmond and its retail partners began accepting preorders for the new OS, which will begin shipping on October 26. Starting on Friday, customers can preorder an upgrade edition of Windows 8 Pro for $69.99 in the US or £49.99 in the UK. That's for the full …

   Incompatible IT systems blamed for bank sale collapse

   RBS £1.7bn branch sale to Santander is off

   Royal Bank of Scotland's $1.7bn sale of 318 branches to Santander has gone titsup. The Spanish bank pulled out, largely "because of problems over integrating the two banks' IT systems", The BBC reports. The Telegraph has a teeny bit more detail, reporting a "series of IT problems that have resulted from a lack of …

   Apple to drop chip-baking partnership with Samsung?

   TSMC said to forge Apple's next-gen 20nm, quad-core ARM chips

   Apple is planning to shift production of its ARM-based microprocessors from Samsung to the Taiwanese chip-baking giant TSMC as early as next year, according to a report by the China Economic News Service (CENS). The report, spotted by MacRumors, cites CitiGroup Global Markets analyst J.T. Hsu as saying that TSMC will be Apple' …

   Tosh grabs 2.5-incher, heads for single platter party

   500 gig spinner

   Toshiba has joined Seagate and WD with a single platter 500GB drive for thin notebooks, DVRs and the like. The MQ01ABF is essentially half an MQ01ABD, a 2-platter 2.5-inch drive storing up to 1TB. Like that drive it spins at 5,400rpm, has an 8MB cache and a 6Gbit/s SATA interface. Unlike that 9.5mm thin drive it is 7mm thin, …

   Kissane to mould NetApp: Time to turn off the tap on ONTAP

   Comment Stuck faucet? Force it

   NetApp has sharpened its focus on corporate strategy by moving incumbent product strategist Jay Kidd to a chief technology officer role and recruiting Jonathan Kissane from CA to a new chief strategy officer role. Kidd, previously SVP for product strategy and development at the storage firm, and an ex-CTO at Brocade, now …

   Small biz scrappers urged to take the fight to hackers

   RSA Europe Active defence in a hostile world

   Small businesses should consider the possibility of developing well formulated plans for "hacking back" at aggressors in the event of a hack attack. Presenting an "active defence" would not be a form of vigilantism and could even work within the law, argued two speakers at a presentation at the RSA Europe conference. …

   Microsoft sues Google directly in German Maps-on-Moto lawsuit

   These manufacturers are only Mountain View pawns

   Microsoft is taking the rare step of suing Google directly for something, tacking it onto a lawsuit against Motorola Mobility over Google Maps. Yesterday in Munich court, Microsoft's general counsel Dr Tilman Müller-Stoy told Moto that it was going to amend its complaint to add its parent Google as an additional defendant. Dr …

   Orally urinating turtle boffin in nominative-determinism classic case

   Shit Fun Chew probes mouth-excreting chelonian

   We're obliged to reader Roger Denholm for alerting us to the best example of nominative determinism we've seen for many moons - the case of Shit Fun Chew and the orally urinating turtle. New Scientist reports that Alex Yuen Kwong Ip of the National University of Singapore has been studying Pelodiscus sinensis, known to its …

   'Stop-gap' way to get Linux on Windows 8 machines to be issued

   You'll still be able to pick up a Penguin

   The Linux Foundation is temporarily supporting a Microsoft security policy to ensure Linux isn’t blocked from running on PCs installed with Windows 8. The Foundation plans to obtain a Microsoft key to sign a pre-bootloader from core Linux kernel maintainer James Bottomley. Together, the key and pre-bootloader will allow users …

   Online mutterings foretell iPad Mini on October 23

   BEHOLD ye fanboiyim, the Pocket Stroker™ cometh

   Rumours about the new iPad Mini have fixed the date for its launch on October 23rd, which would put the miniature slab in stores in time for Christmas. Mutterings had previously set the mini-tablet launch as sometime in October: and AllThingsD and Apple Insider are betting on 23rd October as the day. The other touted date - …

   Jimmy Wales: It was Wikipedia that ended the evil of SOPA

   RSA Europe And we shall battle Blighty's snooper charter

   Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said the site's blackout played a key part in defeating the USA's controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). The English version of Wikipedia, Reddit and hundreds of other smaller websites coordinated a notional service blackout for a day in mid-January to raise awareness of SOPA. Wales …

   British computing biz going stronger than Continent - Computacenter

   Services-based economy?

   Computacenter's (CC) UK biz was the group's major growth engine in Q3 fuelled by the realisation of infrastructure services contracts and to a lesser extent product sales. This performance just about offset the challenges elsewhere in the organisation - difficulties in Germany and currency headwinds across the continent - that …

   O2 network staggers across UK

   Good job it's not really as vital as oxygen

   O2 has been hit by a serious failure, with reports coming in from around the UK of the network disappearing and its status page conceding some network problems. The trouble started mid-morning with phones dropping off the network, but the problems aren't location specific so it seems some sort of central server is again …

   Anonymous turns on 'one man Julian Assange show' Wikileaks

   Bond of chumship between DDOSers and Assange™ broken

   Members of hacker collective Anonymous have stopped supporting Wikileaks after the site put up a paywall, saying that Wikileaks is more bothered about Julian Assange™ than getting information to the public. In a statement on Pastebin, linked through from Anonymous Twitter account AnonymousIRC, the group said Wikileaks had …

   Stone's veteran CEO Bird flies the nest

   Board has shortlist of successors

   Stone Computers has confirmed that longstanding chief exec James Bird has left the building. The search for a successor is well underway but these are big boots to fill - Bird founded Stone in 1991 and has been pretty much at the helm ever since, save a year's absence in 2005. That was the year Bird sold the business to the …

   Take away bad drivers' mobile phones, they still crash their cars

   Jalopy-jabber crackdown achieves diddly squat - study

   Chinese researchers reckon its bad drivers who cause accidents, not the phones they're using at the time, and that banning in-car use doesn't reduce accident figures significantly. The state-sponsored study was triggered by disappointing results from bans on mobile usage, which haven't reduced accidents as much as had been …

   Samsung, not Nokia, fans' most favoured WinPho brand

   Survey suggests Microsoft could triple is market share

   Nine per cent of folk thinking of getting a new phone in the next six months say they’re likely to go for a Windows Phone 8 device. So suggests research data from ChangeWave, a US pollster, after asking 4300-odd North Americans and assorted other peoples in September about their near-term smartphone purchasing plans. If you’ …

   'Mapsgate' fails to dislocate iPhone 5 demand

   Widely reported geo-glitches 'not a problem', say buyers

   Were you steered away from the iPhone 5 by Apple’s ‘Mapsgate’ controversy? Were you tied by the introduction of a new, incompatible Lightning cables? If so, you're not like most potential buyers of Apple's latest phone, it seems. New research suggests these issues have had little or no impact on demand for the iPhone 5. In …

   GreenBytes brandishes full-fat clone VDI pumper

   VMworld Barcelona 'Focused on an enormous pain point'

   GreenBytes, a flash-array storage vendor, appears to have re-focused on virtualised server I/O offload – and most punters here at VMworld on the Catalonian shores are asking themselves why. It all started when Stephen O'Donnell became GreenBytes' chairman in July this year, with an executive aspect to the role we understand. …

   Why is solid-state storage so flimsy?

   Something for the Weekend, Sir? Flash, ooh-err

   No matter how much storage space you get, and no matter how much you free up later on, it always gets stuffed to the gills. I am, of course, talking about my attic... and the garage, and indeed the garden shed. Many reasons for this have been mooted, including the need to do something with my kids' childish belongings as they …

   And the latest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is ... the EU?

   Prevented Germans invading anyone for record period

   The European Union has won the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize. The 27-member-states bloc won the famous award today for having contributed, during its six decades of existence, "to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe," the Norwegian Nobel Committee said today. Prominent recent Peace Prize …

   MYSTERIOUS GREEN GLOW seen on iPhone 5s

   'What can it mean?', wondering fanboys ask

   Days after Apple explained the purple haze invading iPhone 5 photos as a holding-it-wrong problem, a new strange colour is tripping out 5-owners. This time a green glow described as a plasma bleed from the edges of the screen is appearing on some of the new handsets. The green light is momentary, and appears on the unlock …

   Unrootable: Mash these bits together to get a CLASSIFIED spyphone

   Sysadmin blog Someone kind of already has - but who?

   What does it take to build a classified smartphone? Demand clearly exists Given how readily every iPhone and Android device is rooted, infected, and otherwise compromised, the answer isn't simply "better software." In the battle to secure our mobile endpoints, operating system tricks and mobile device management will only take …

   Metric versus imperial: Reg readers weigh in

   Poll Mostly in kilos: Hobbits and suchlike to be exterminated

   Our suggestion earlier this week that El Reg's Special Projects Bureau get with the program(me) and convert entirely to SI Units prompted the traditional lively debate among our beloved commentards. The consensus seems to be we should indeed kick imperial into touch, with a couple of exceptions, which we'll come to later. …

   Dolly the Sheep creator scientist Keith Campbell dies

   Obit RIP cell biologist who first cloned a mammal

   Biologist Keith Campbell, famous for creating the first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep, has died aged 58, the University of Nottingham said. Professor Campbell's creation of a live Ovis aries clone in 1996 was an incredible event, thrilling scientists with a breakthrough that paved the way for other successful cloning …

   El Reg VULTURE logo FOUND ON MARS

   Playmobil or It Didn't Happen This is how you do it, Red Hat

   Seriously underwhelmed is the only way to describe El Reg's reaction earlier this week to Red Hat's guerilla marketing stunt which saw the Linux outfit flash a giant ad at punters flying into Barcelona airport for VMWorld Europe: The Special Projects Bureau quickly scrambled an astroturfing SWAT team which moved with …

   HP veep: 'Lenovo won't be No 1 in PCs... oh wait...'

   Quotw Plus: 'Hackers used a spell they call Aura of God, I think'

   This was the week when someone laid waste to the World of Warcraft, decimating city populations and leaving behind weeping masses of MMORPG-ers who no doubt dropped to their knees, shook their fists at the heavens and screamed, "Whyyyy?". An "exploit" was duly exploited, resulting in the deaths of both in-game characters and …

   Samsung shoots Galaxy S III with shrink ray, unveils 4in Mini

   Size flatters

   Samsung has officially unveiled the Galaxy S III Mini, the widely predicted compact version of the firm's flagship Android smartphone. As revealed earlier this week, the Mini boasts a 4in, 800 x 480 display plus a dual-core 1GHz ST-Ericsson Novathor U8420 chipset powering Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. The blower features a 5Mp rear …

   Winston Churchill's personal papers digitised, available online

   Madam, if I were your husband I should read them

   The man who famously stated that the British would "fight them on the beaches" in the event of a German invasion has had some of his less-often quoted words including his private letters (and his receipts for cigars) fully digitised and made available online in the Churchill archive. Winston Churchill's private musings, …

   UK.gov tries to close site giving home addresses of badger cull figures

   Animal libber reveals opponents' details, keeps his secret

   The British government has unleashed a legal threat against a website hosted in the US that is currently displaying the names, home addresses and personal telephone numbers of MPs, farmers and others who are said to be in support of the controversial UK badger cull. The Register spoke with a man going only by the name "Jay", …

   Vote NOW for the vilest Bond villain

   Poll I've been expecting you, 007

   In the 50 years since Her Majesty's Secret Service first let 007 loose on the silver screen, James Bond has faced some truly fearsome adversaries. Menaced by steel-toothed giants, Koreans wielding killer bowler hats, and dagger-shoed Russian madwomen, it's fair to say that the world's favourite spy has survived some of the …

   Amazon's Bezos confirms content pays for Kindle

   Finally admits hardware sold at cost

   That Amazon makes little or no money selling its Kindle e-readers has been a popular assumption for some time. But assumption no longer - company chief Jeff Bezos has confirmed Amazon is after content sales profits instead. The first Kindle was launched in April 2008 and cost $399 - £248 at today’s exchange rate - and follow- …

   Flashboys: HEELLLP, we're trapped in a process size shrink crunch

   How can we escape the dreaded NAND-woes?

   The NAND flash industry is facing a process size shrink crunch and no replacement technology is ready. Unless 3D die stacking works, we are facing a solid state storage capacity shortage. The NAND flash foundries are pumping out more and more sub-20nm NAND. Previously they'd mostly produced 2Xnm dies – that is NAND dies with a …

   Hands on with BB10: Strokey dokey

   Preview No time for 'Back' buttons - we're headed into the FUTURE

   There is no back button in BB10, BlackBerry's long-awaited new operating system, because all the screens flow so intuitively you won't need one - at least according to Canadian mobe-makers Research in Motion (RIM). Instead, a series of swipes and pulls will let the user navigate the OS upon which RIM has pinned the survival of …

   Amazon prices up Kindle Paperwhite for Blighty

   Always-on backlight, higher res display

   Amazon has priced up the Kindle Paperweight - sorry, Paperwhite; Freudian slip there - for the UK. The Paperwhite is Amazon’s first e-reader with a backlit E Ink display, the notion being that the illumination doesn’t merely make it possible to read books on the gadget in the gloom, but also that it makes for a higher contrast …

   Inside the mind of a Bond supervillain: Psychotic, autistic - or neither?

   Bond on Film Also - 007's Dr Who style differing personalities

   Without villains there'd be no James Bond. SPECTRE, SMERSH, megalomaniacal industrialists and media tycoons have all contrived fiendish, intricate plots to take over the world, seize its wealth, provoke nuclear war, destroy London’s financial system, eliminate the human race etc etc. These people and their plots have needed to …

   Regulator spanks quiz line with record £800k fine

   Kept eldsters hanging on the line at premium rates

   UK premium-line regulator PhonepayPlus has slapped Churchcastle Limited with the largest fine it has dished to date, ruling the phone-quiz host guilty of misleading and bamboozling callers with impenetrable terms and conditions. After it received 15 complaints, PhonepayPlus found Churchcastle guilty of targeting the elderly, …

   Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch with Glowlight e-reader review

   Review Backlit screen casts Kindle into the shade?

   It’s not hard to imagine how Barnes & Noble’s Nook Simple Touch initial design meeting went. Assorted hardware engineers, industrial designers and marketing types assemble to examine Amazon’s Kindle Touch and work out how they can make something better. And they have. On almost all points, the Simple Touch - and the Simple …

   South Korea on top of the IT world

   UK climbs to fifth as Australia, USA, also take big leaps up league table

   South Korea has once again been named the world’s most advanced ICT economy according to the latest annual study from the International Telecommunications Union, which had good news for the UK too as it crept up into the top ten. The ITU’s Measuring the Information Society 2012 report is intended to provide a snapshot of …

   VR pioneer invents 'illumination-as-a-service'

   VRML man Mark Pesce puts LAMP into lamps that REST at home

   In the wild, early, days of the web, hopes were high that it would spawn or host virtual realities along the lines of those imagined by the likes of Vernor Vinge and William Gibson. One of the most notable aspirants from those days was Mark Pesce, who worked on virtual reality headsets and authored Virtual Reality Markup …

   Asia skills shortages attract job-hunting IT project managers

   Opportunities aplenty if you don't mind long hours

   There was good news today for IT pros keen on a move to Asia, with new data suggesting hiring expectations in the technology sector better than any other and a notable skills shortage emerging in Hong Kong. It's not all happy days out East, though, as experts also warned of long working hours and risk of employee burn-out for …

   Japanese cubesat to flash Earth with Morse message

   Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Nope, it's a small metal box

   Scan the night sky next month and you may witness a rather unusual phenomenon – an tiny Japanese satellite using LEDs to beam a Morse code message earthwards. The message will come from FITSAT-1, or Niwaka, a 10cm cubed satellite weighing just 1.3kg and recently released from the from the International Space Station. Built by …

   Harvey Weinstein wants US to adopt French piracy laws

   Google and Apple get paid - not the actors

   Hollywood power player Harvey Weinstein has urged Big Content to take a “hang ‘em first and talk about it later” stance when it comes to piracy. Keynoting at the BFI London Film Festival, he railed against the online industries approach to piracy, and slammed Apple and Google for “getting paid, not the actors.” "I think we …

   Office 2013 hits RTM, will ship starting in November

   Buy Office 2010 now, get a free upgrade

   Microsoft has put the finishing touches on Office 2013, paving the way for the latest version of Redmond's flagship productivity suite to reach general availability in the first quarter of 2013. An early preview of Office 2013 has been available for download since July, but that trial version lacked some features, including …

   Boffins baffled: HUGE EYEBALL washes up on Florida beach

   Does Cthulhu need an eyepatch?

   A Florida beachcomber has discovered what appears to be a huge eyeball washed up on the beach, and experts are stumped as to what kind of sea creature it came from. Eye, eye, what's all this then? Local resident Gino Covacci found the giant eyeball washed up at the high-tide mark of Pompano Beach on the southeast tip of …

3. Thursday, 11 October 2012

   Cloud company foraged for hard drives to stay afloat

   Backblaze employees banned by COSTCO after PLUNDERING stores

   When floods hit Thailand last year and crimped the global supply of hard drives, US-based cloud storage company Backblaze feared it would run out of storage. The company's fears weren't unfounded - it uses 50TB a day – so it sensibly tried to buy up as many drives as possible to build a buffer against the shortage. That effort …

   Cisco lobbied telco customers to steer clear of Huawei

   Marketing campaign painted Chinese firm as a threat

   Lawmakers aren't the only ones who have been pushing to block Chinese networking companies, including Huawei and ZTE, from bidding on US telecom contracts. According to The Washington Post, some of the strongest pressure has come from the Chinese firms' US-based competitors, in particular Cisco. The networking giant has been …

   Curiosity finds . . . wait for it . . . a ROCK on MARS!

   Tales of an Earth-like igneous rock named Jake

   NASA reports that the first Martian rock it has examined with the Curiosity's arm-mounted Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS) shows curious similarities to a rare form of mineral found on Earth. The rock, named "Jake Matijevic" after a JPL engineer who died just after Curiosity landed on Mars, was lasered 30 times on 14 …

   Apple bags chippery guru from rival Samsung

   Move unlikely to deepen Korean love for Cupertino

   There's already no love lost between Seoul and Cupertino, but that rivalry has surely racheted up another notch now that Apple has reportedly bagged one of the Korean electronics giant's top chip designers. The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Apple has hired Jim Mergard, who joined Samsung last June as one of a …

   Galaxy Nexus cleared for sale by US court

   Lawyers’ roadshow grinds on and on and on and on

   The patent pendulum has taken a small swing in Samsung’s direction, with a US court clearing the company’s ageing Galaxy Nexus phone for sale in the US. The decision, by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, follows a ruling earlier this month that allowed the Galaxy Tab 10.1 to go on sale. District judge Lucy Koh …

   Yale finds second diamond planet

   An astronomer’s best friend

   Astronomy has turned up a second diamond planet, and it’s a relative neighbor to the solar system – a mere 40 light-years distant, circling 55 Cancri. Unlike the diamond planet discovered by Australian astronomers last year, this one didn’t even need a pulsar’s gravity to give it the squeeze. It inherited its mostly-carbon …

   AMD lowers revenue expectations in run up to Q3 report

   It's that darn 'challenging macroeconomic environment' again

   AMD has announced lowered expectations for its third-quarter financial results, with revenues declining 10 per cent from the previous quarter, down from the 1 per cent – give or take 3 per cent – that it had previously projected. "The lower than anticipated preliminary revenue results are primarily due to weaker than expected …

   Reg hack spares blushes at Infrastructure NSW, Cisco

   Wrong document on website means we may have dropped a sysadmin in it

   Here at Vulture South we're always trying to cook up story ideas, and this week one that wormed its way into our cerebellum was whether the recently-released 'First Things First' plan from Infrastructure New South Wales included any thinking on technology's role in infrastructure planning. The plan is a centrepiece of the new- …

   Facebook, Twitter, ordered not to spoil MURDER trial

   Social networks challenged by Oz Magistrate, but show little sign of compliance

   The Deputy Chief Magistrate in the Australian State of Victoria, Felicity Broughton, has ordered Facebook and Twitter must remove material that may prejudice a murder trial. The future trial of Adrian Ernest Bayley will be watched with exceptionally keen interest in Australia, as Bailey's alleged crimes – the rape and murder …

   Google updates Street View with 250,000 miles of footage

   Rubbing salt in Apple's wounds

   Google has released its biggest-ever update to Street View, adding 250,000 miles of updated photography and double the number of image collections from notable spots around the world. "We're increasing Street View coverage in Macau, Singapore, Sweden, the US, Thailand, Taiwan, Italy, Great Britain, Denmark, Norway and Canada …

   Apple files disappearing-feature iPhone patent

   The ultimate in 'aesthetic appeal' – a featureless slab

   Apple has filed a patent application for the ability to hide some of a device's components – such as its camera, biometric sensors, or even its entire display – until they are needed. "Electronic devices are becoming more and more sophisticated, capable of performing a multitude of tasks from image capture to identity …

   Sprint confirms buyout offer from Japan's Softbank

   Rumored $12.8bn deal would give controlling stake

   Sprint Nextel, the third-largest US mobile carrier, has confirmed that it is in talks that could result in its takeover by Japanese mobile carrier Softbank. The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the negotiations, based on a tip by an inside source. Details of the talks were not clear, though it's estimated that the …

   Experts split over regulation for bounty-hunting bug sniffers

   RSA Europe Exploit vuln marketplace grows rapidly

   Security researchers attending the RSA Europe conference are split over regulating the controversial exploit vulnerability marketplace. In recent years several vendors, including Google, Firefox and later Facebook and PayPal have offered bug bounties for security researchers who find flaws in their products or services. …

   Compuware puffs up Outage Analyzer to fight performance anxiety

   Ad serving and web analytics services have high failure rate... who knew?

   Compuware is taking another stab at making the data gathered from users of its Gomez performance monitoring network available on a freebie basis in a bid to get IT shops hooked on using the more sophisticated and definitely not free tools. The company has also upgraded its application performance monitoring tools for …

   TLC NAND could penetrate biz with flash-to-flash backup

   VMworld Barcelona Who'll lead the dash to flashedy-flash?

   Violin co-founder and CTO Jon Bennett identified a potential enterprise role for three-level cell (TLC) flash at VMworld Barcelona today: flash-to-flash backup. TLC is currently seen as pure consumer technology. The first TLC NAND SSD has been announced by Samsung. But TLC NAND has a short working life, with 500 - 750 phase/ …

   Archos Android update said to brick G9 slates

   Ice Cream creates freeze

   An Archos firmware update - supposed to take the company's budget G9 Android tablet up to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich - has been pulled after users complained that it bricks their hardware. The Archos G9 - which can now be picked up for as low as £115 - actually comes equipped with Android 3.2 Honeycomb, but promises an …

   Foxconn: Worker who lost half his brain in accident must leave hospital

   'Commies made us do it', insists fondleslabricator

   iDevice-maker Foxconn has confirmed to the media that it has been pushing for a Chinese worker with brain damage caused by a factory accident to leave the hospital. Zhang Tingzhen's family said the manufacturer, which makes kit for Apple and other tech firms, has been sending text messages to them since July, demanding that he …

   Woz labels Apple 'arrogant' over iPhone size inadequacy

   Thumbs down from co-founder

   Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has called Apple "arrogant" and wishes the Cupertino firm would produce bigger phones. The bearded innovator offers familiar criticism of the company he helped to form in a podcast session with TalkCentral. Woz says the only reason the iPhone 5 doesn't have a bigger screen is due to Apple's …

   NetApp and Cisco waggle shrunken ExpressPod at Hitachi and friends

   VMworld Get a load of our converged convergement

   It looks like the vendors are sizing each other up for battle in the converged systems world at VMworld: NetApp and Cisco have announced ExpressPod, a pre-packed and tested and downsized FlexPod. Storage clustering has been added into the FlexPod mix and Oracle has announced an RAC/VMware FlexPod. Just one day after Hitachi's …

   How Nokia managed to drive its in-house Linux train off the rails

   Special Report When Meego lost its mojo

   Nokia's strategy to revive its fortunes with its home-grown Linux was derailed by academic theory, bureaucratic in-fighting and a misguided partnership with Intel, a new report reveals. Finnish publication Taskumuro has published an extensive history of the Meego project which contains a mixture of old and new: some …

   Wanted! 4m-plus PC purchases to halt industry decline

   Stop taking the tablets, punters told

   The PC industry needs YOUR help! Dell, HP, Acer, Asus, Sony, Apple, Lenovo, Toshiba and co. require stout - and well-heeled - lads and lasses to pop out and buy just over four million machines before the end of December 2012 and prevent world PC sales slipping year-on-year for the first time in more than a decade. That is …

   Ballmer's lightened pay packet is the least of his problems

   Open ... and Shut What's that smell around Windows 8?

   Citing "slower than planned progress" at Microsoft's online services division and a 3 per cent decline in Windows revenue, Microsoft's board cut chief executive Steve Ballmer's pay to 91 per cent of his plan, or $1.3m. But that's the least of his concerns. Microsoft is about to embark on the biggest shift in its Windows …

   Sony pops pastries as PS3 sales pass 5m

   A bun dance?

   Sony sent us baked goodies today in celebration of selling five million PlayStation 3s here in the UK. Following last month's PS3 Super Slim launch, the Japanese firm enjoyed a huge jump in sales and this week surpassed the 5m mark in Blighty, a figure confirmed by GfK Chart-Track. A second Super Slim edition with a 12GB …

   Steelie Neelie: Settle your Do-No-Track squabbles or else

   I will call in the politicians

   Regulators may impose a Do-Not-Track standard on squabbling tech vendors and web businesses after they missed a deadline to develop their own proposal. EU member states are looking at how to enforce DNT under ePrivacy rules, the vice president responsible for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes said Wednesday. Kroes also hinted …

   Avnet 'evaluating resource commitments' as times stay tough

   'Resource commitments' means your job

   Avnet is looking to cut up to $50m off its expenses bill and reduce the workforce after releasing preliminary results for fiscal Q1 that show a near double digit sales slide. The distributor says turnover will be approximately $5.85bn, down nine per cent year-on-year for the period ended 29 September, and it's the Technology …

   O2 overlord looking to push payments-via-mobile-bill model

   Hard to flog a horse if you've skinned it alive

   Telefonica is gunning for carrier billing, publicly declaring that its UK operation, O2, will give merchants a bigger cut, and signing a deal integrating its BlueVia API with Telenor for cross-operating billing. The increased cut should encourage more transactions to be processed through the mobile-phone billing platform, as …

   Big Blue: Future of our sales - and the channel - lies in ... MSPs

   Channels Forum 'Erm , what exactly do you mean by "MSP"?'

   IBM’s mid-market boss told the Canalys Channels Forum this week that the share of the vendor's business going through the channel will increase by a quarter in the next couple of years as companies move their IT spending to managed services. But some of the mega vendor’s traditional partners at the event seemed unsure about …

   Sites can slurp browser history right out of Firefox 16

   Plug promised today for leaky hole

   A hole in Firefox 16 makes it possible for a malicious site to access a user's browsing history, Mozilla security chief Michael Coates revealed in a blog yesterday. Coates promised a patch today for the vulnerability in the latest version of the browser. Mozilla 16 was released on Tuesday but pulled a day later because of the …

   Government Digital Service to live in 'multi-tenanted' cloud from SCC

   Martha Lane Fox's baby to deliver digital drizzle

   Reseller-cum-integrator SCC has bagged a G-Cloud contract to provide hosting and IT services to the Government Digital Service (GDS). This deal comes less than two months after the Midlands-based firm was the first to be given clearance to punt its nine cloudy services, under the OptimizeCloud banner, to all gov departments. …

   Siemens expected to announce job cuts, closures

   Six hundred suits summoned by chief to hear the news

   Siemens chief Peter Loescher will outline a plan today on how the industrial tech giant will attempt to save up to €4bn ($5.2bn, £3.2bn), one that is widely expected to include jobs cuts and office closures. Despite the German economy's strength compared to the rest of Europe - or even arguably most of the world - global hard …

   HP's PC boss caught napping by Lenovo raid

   Channel Forum Printer accessories don't keep Cador awake

   HP knew Lenovo was coming up quickly from behind, but its EMEA PC chief clearly thought HP had a little more breathing space at the top of the PC market. Last night Gartner crowned Lenovo as the world's largest box-shifter into the channel during Q3, capturing 15.7 per cent of global sales-in to distributors and retailers …

   Six months under water and iPhone 4 STILL WORKS

   Immersion, lake and palm 'er

   If you submerged a phone in two metres of water for any serious period of time, you'd never expect to see it work again, right? So imagine the surprise when one iPhone owner recovered his handset from a lake six months after it fell in - only to find it still works. iPhone owners are well known for dropping their blowers in …

   Facebook says it's LOSING money in the UK ... pays hardly any tax

   90 costly employees put ads firm in the red

   Facebook's UK operation plunged to a £13.9m pre-tax loss in 2011, compared with a £1.1m profit a year earlier, accounts filed with Companies House revealed. The dominant social network blamed a "share based payment charge" of more than £15m last year. It said that profit before tax that excluded that payment stood at £1.5m for …

   Tintri's VDI flash disk mix: The kit that booted 1,000 virtual desktops

   VMWorld Barcelona Legion of clones spawned in just 9 seconds each

   Tintri and VMware showed the virtualisation players how it's done at VMWorld today when they tested a Tintri hybrid storage array booting 1,000 virtual desktops in two-and-a-half hours – nine seconds per desktop. Tintri hybrid flash and disk drive arrays are purpose-designed to support virtual server operations. The test set …

   Schmidt: Google deathmatch with Apple is 'defining' for the tech biz

   Advertiser vs mega-brand ... that's depressing

   Google and Apple are in the "defining fight" of the tech industry today, the advertising firm's chief modestly reckons. Mountain View chairman Eric Schmidt is expecting more than a billion smartphones running Android around the world within a year and he reckons that's gonna tick the fruity firm off even more than it is …

   Serenading mice can sing along if you hum a few bars

   Disney didn't lie after all

   Neuroboffins are claiming that mice can not only sing, serenading at ultrasonic melodies high above soprano, but they can also change their tune. The study has found certain brain features, associated with human and song-learning birds' brains, that show they may be able to learn new songs from each other. Scientists have …

   World+Dog hails 50th birthday of the LED

   But this now commonplace technology is much, much older

   The Light Emitting Diode (LED) is 50 years old. Well, kind of... It’s certainly 50 years since Nick Holonyak, working at GEC’s Syracuse, New York facility, developed what is considered the first LED capable of generating visible light. Holonyak’s LED was also the first to be in form ready for commercial usage. He wrote up his …

   New broom at OCZ: But can Schmitt sweep up this dirtpile?

   'Talking less and hitting harder', says CEO in a talk

   After having pre-announced a revenue shortfall OCZ has now pre-announced an even worse revenue shortfall - and has got a new CEO to drag itself out of the hole in which it currently resides. As expected ex-PLX president and OCZ board member Ralph Schmitt becomes the new OCZ CEO, and he comes in as the second quarter FY2012 …

   Teachers get earful of racy XXX chat in Capita IT cock-up

   'Hello, helpdesk? I need to put my joystick WHERE?'

   Capita's school IT wing is on the naughty step after putting teachers and administrators through to advertisements for adult chat lines. Anyone trying to get through to the support helpdesk for the Capita School Information Management System in the last few days has instead been transferred to wrong numbers, including some XXX …

   November election sends chill down Valley shareholders' necks

   Open... and Shut Obama victory + end of Facebook lock in = share flood

   Across Silicon Valley, internet biz stocks are taking a beating as the market reacts to serious challenges at Zynga and elsewhere. Unfortunately, it may well get worse. Due to the expected rise in US long-term capital gains tax rates under President Obama, the pressure on all technology stocks may hit new highs from the …

   Stick punters' mugs on e-banking pages, that'll end fraud - Schneier

   RSA Europe Crypto guru urges creative thinking from security pros

   Cryptography guru Bruce Schneier called for more creative thinking and a broader perspective as a means to tackle security problems. For example, the music industry, faced with an explosion in online file-sharing, hired security pros to develop anti-piracy measures, such as digital rights management technology. But these …

   Skype worm chats up victims - then holds PCs to ransom

   U mad lol?!

   A worm that locks Windows PC users out of their computers unless they pay a $200 ransom is rapidly spreading via Skype. Once it has secreted itself into a machine, the malware tricks further victims into installing it by using the Microsoft-owned VoIP software to send messages that read "lol is this your new profile pic?" The …

   Russian Christians boosted by Pussy Riot law spank 'sinful' Apple logo

   Nuts replace fruit with crosses

   Apple has been criticised before - but never for promoting original sin. Seemingly emboldened by upcoming national legislation on blasphemy, Russian Orthodox Christians have defaced the logos on Apple products because they consider the bitten Apple to be anti-Christian, says Russian news agency Interfax (in Russian). The …

   ICO tries to justify hefty NHS data breach fines

   Money 'effectively' comes straight from patient care pot

   The UK's data protection watchdog has defended its civil monetary penalty regime after it was criticised for the amounts of fines levied on public health bodies. Earlier this week Christopher Fincken, the chairman of the UK Council of Caldicott Guardians, said that the money NHS bodies were using to pay fines levied on them by …

   Reds in the Routers is routine, not rare

   Communists operate freely in US outfits' China operations, not just at Huawei

   Critics of a recent report by US lawmakers highlighting serious national security concerns with Huawei and ZTE have argued that their internal Communist Party committees, which are slammed in the report, are actually a feature of most foreign firms in China. The House of Representatives Intelligence Committee finally released …

   Jaws restored Blu-ray disc set review

   The great white is back in Blu

   Jaws is back, and the old shark’s gnashers are looking sharper than ever thanks to a painstaking remastering job by Universal’s backroom boffins. The title is being released as part of the studio’s centenary classics program for Blu-ray, which also includes E.T The Extra Terrestrial, The Birds and Frankenstein. The timing couldn …

   China wants more hi-tech importers

   Beijing's deep pockets to the rescue again

   The wobbly global economy is set to further stunt growth in China’s domestic technology market, leading Beijing to offer even greater financial incentives to encourage more hi-tech imports to the country. The Chinese government will offer 2.5bn yuan (£249m) in loan subsidies to importers of unspecified advanced technologies …

   Microsoft really is watching us from above

   The 260-megapixel cameras behind Bing Maps can be yours

   Microsoft really is watching us all from above and even has a new way of doing so, thanks to this week's release of the UltraCam Falcon, a camera dedicated to aerial photography. The UltraCam comes from an Austrian Microsoft outpost that Redmond says “brings more than two decades of photogrammetry expertise to Microsoft’s Bing …

   It’s official: Google shrinks the world!

   To the size of a London bus, roughly

   An anonymous reader has pointed us to this slip in Google Calculator: someone – or something – picked the wrong units for Earth’s escape velocity. If you ask Google – using the search term "Earth Escape Velocity" – and you’ll get the result in the shot below. Is that a comma or a decimal? Google's response to a search for …

   Parliamentary report details German police snoop-spend

   Skype, mail, chat all on the intercept list

   Blogger Anna Roth has accused German police of monitoring Skype, Facebook chat and Google Mail, following an examination of expenditures by the country’s Ministry of Home Affairs. In the wake of last year’s notorious discovery that police were using a Trojan to spy on criminal suspects – legal in limited cases, but according …

   Ubuntu goes fishing for donations with new download page

   'Spare us a quarter for an ISO, sir?'

   From now on, for every download of the popular Ubuntu desktop Linux distribution, parent company Canonical will be passing the hat. Beginning on Tuesday, the download process for the open source OS includes a new screen that gives users the opportunity to donate – or rather, contribute – to the project via PayPal, with a …

   HP says Gartner's wrong, IDC's right, on PC sales data

   Workstation sales matter, says HP, as Gartner awards Lenovo PC sales crown

   HP has taken the very unusual step of issuing commentary on IDC's latest PC sales data, which says the PC market is now nearly a tie between HP and Lenovo. That assessment is in marked contrast to Gartner's most recent effort on the same topic, which has Lenovo at number one. Both analysts' data make for ugly reading. IDC's …

4. Wednesday, 10 October 2012

   Office for Android and iOS to ship by March 2013?

   Maybe, but not in the sense you're hoping for

   A product manager for Microsoft's Czech division may have let the cat out of the bag on Wednesday – almost – when he announced that versions of Microsoft Office for Android and iOS devices may ship as early as the first quarter of next year. After spotting a report on the Czech site IHNED, The Verge was first to cite Microsoft …

   RIM opens BlackBerry 10 marketplace for submissions

   Will $10,000 woo the developers?

   RIM has opened its BlackBerry App World store to applications for its forthcoming BlackBerry 10 operating system, with a truckload of incentives to get developers onside. "This is a huge opportunity to be the first into the store and capitalize on app-hungry BlackBerry users," announced Alec Saunders, RIM’s VP of developer …

   Western Australia powers up 10 MW solar farm

   Pull the switch, Igor!

   Australia’s west is now home to what’s described as the country’s first utility-scale solar power plant. The 10 megawatt plant, supported with AUD$20 million of Western Australian government funding, will deliver power equivalent to 3,000 homes. However, its output is committed to powering the state’s Binningup water …

   NSW contemplates smart licenses

   Shared services a possibility to power Services NSW

   The Australian State of New South Wales' (NSW’s) new Customer Services Commissioner, Michael Pratt, says one of the streamlined service delivery strategies he is considering could see all NSW licences replaced by a single smart card that records multiple licences the bearer holds. Pratt said he can also foresee licences finding …

   Hoosiers to get the world's fastest academic super

   Alley-oop for privately paid for petaflops

   Indiana University is set to rise to the top of the flops among the world's academic institutions as it aims to break through the petaflops barrier with its upcoming "Big Red II" supercomputer using a Cray XK7 hardware - at least as gauged by raw computing power, and specifically those that foot their own bill for machines. …

   Supreme Court confirms telco immunity on spying charges

   As one door closes, the EFF opens another

   The US Supreme Court has effectively ruled that the AT&T and other telecommunications companies are immune from prosecution for helping the National Security Agency (NSA) in a large-scale domestic surveillance scheme covering phone calls, emails and internet use. The court declined to hear an appeal of Hepting v. AT&T, a case …

   Amazon UK leaks Windows 8 retail box, TV ads

   Here's what we're in for as October 26 approaches

   Windows 8 isn't due to launch until October 26, but some over-zealous retailers are starting to give us a feel for the marketing onslaught we can expect once Microsoft's new OS hits retail shelves. Officially, most retailers are still being coy about anything related to Windows 8. For example, searches on Amazon's US site …

   ARM cranks up cache and memory designs for servers

   Gearing up for the x86-ARM war

   ARM Holdings wants chip makers to bring more cores and cache to bear as they craft server chips based on its Cortex family of system-on-chip (SoC) designs, and to that end the company is boosting the on-chip caching and main memory controllers of its current ARMv7 and future ARMv8 designs to make them better able to compete …

   Speaking in Tech: The worst PR in the tech industry

   Podcast Huawei gets hammered by Congress – why is no one defending it?

   It's another one of El Reg's enterprise tech casts, where we get into the nitty-gritty of everything that went down in the past few days in the world of electronics, mobile, services and more. This week your hosts are Greg Knieriemen and Sarah Vela as Ed Saipetch is playing hookie. The pair discuss the Congressional smackdown …

   US boffins get Nobel for work on cell receptors

   'I didn't believe it till I heard five Swedish accents'

   US boffins have bagged the Nobel prize for chemistry for helping to figure out how cells sense their environment. Robert Lefkowitz of Duke University and Brian Kobilka at Stanford School of Medicine won for their work on G-protein coupled receptors, which snake in and out of cell's membrane and are one of the main methods of …

   Googorola yoinks Android mobes off German shelves

   Apple, Microsoft patent warfare forces European retreat

   Motorola Mobility's global smartphone market share shrank faster than usual yesterday when the mobe maker pulled all but one of its products from Germany. Patent infringement lawsuits launched by Apple and Microsoft against Moto have demanded a sales ban on the Google-owned handset biz's Android tablets and smartphones in …

   Sarah Brightman plans International Space Station gig

   Soprano evidently did lose heart to a Starship Trooper

   Singer Sarah Brightman has announced she's off to the International Space Station, from where she'll become "the first professional musician to sing from space". The classical superstar, 52, is the best-selling soprano in history, so she's obviously not short of the few quid it will cost to be lifted heavenwards atop a Soyuz …

   Google AND Yahoo! hijacked in Ireland after domain namespace grab

   Human error or something more sinister?

   Google and Yahoo!'s Irish domains were briefly hijacked on Tuesday afternoon, the IE Domain Registry (IEDR) has confirmed. Fraud officers from the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation are said to be investigating how malefactors were able to take the websites offline for several hours after mischievously changing both Yahoo.ie …

   Microsoft fast-tracks Windows 8 Service Pack updates

   No year-long wait for Metro fans

   Microsoft has broken with tradition on a new version of Windows by rushing out changes to the Release To Manufacturing (RTM) code on people’s PCs. Early recipients of Windows 8 are getting updates made by Microsoft to the client code in the months since its release to partners on 1 August. Changes include extended battery …

   Gavel fails to fall for Apple 1

   Auctioned micro misses reserve price

   An original Apple 1 made by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak failed to sell at an auction in London this week after bidders refused to meet its reserve price. The 1976 computer - which comes without a screen and a mere 4KB of memory - was expected to be snapped up for £80,000. However, the top bid of £32,000 wasn't high enough to …

   ISS crew fling out arm, grab SpaceX Dragon capsule

   First commercial delivery docks with the station

   The first contracted SpaceX Dragon has successfully docked with the International Space Station after being snagged with the Canadarm2 robotic arm. The Dragon berthed with the Earth-facing side of the Harmony node at 14.03 BST (9.03 EDT) today. Around two hours earlier, Japanese flight engineer Aki Hoshide and NASA 'naut Suni …

   Bloomberg's bomb: How SEC shredded Facebook's pre-IPO claims

   I'm under regulatory scrutiny, bitch

   According to a recently publicised set of emails, US financial watchdog the Securities and Exchange Commission found that important claims made by Facebook were unsupportable and forced the company to disclose key weaknesses in its business plan before its 18 May IPO. The highlights are outlined in this lengthy report from …

   RSA boss demands revamp of outdated privacy, security regs

   RSA Europe Hackers have moved on, business red tape hasn't

   Corporate security policies that simply adopt regulations and obsess over privacy are stuck in the last century, according to senior execs at security biz RSA. Tom Heiser, president of the EMC-owned outfit, told delegates to the RSA Europe conference that efforts to comply with red tape and standards is fruitless as the rules …

   PGP founder's mobile privacy app goes live

   Updated Zimmerman & Navy SEAL pals unveil safe comms, at $20 a month

   Silent Circle, the secure mobile communications app backed by Phil Zimmerman, has gone live - offering protection from all but the most determined of government departments. Silent Circle comprises a handful of iOS/Android/PC apps facilitating secure phone calls, text messaging and video calling, with secure email promised …

   German ebook firm aims low with cheap 'n' simple €10 ereader

   Companion kit only for Android mobes... for now

   German ebook developer txtr has just announced an ultra-cheap, simple e-ink-based ereader, the txtr beagle, which it intends to retail at less than €10. It plans to achieve that price by piggybacking on the functionality already built into a mobile phone. For the moment that phone will have to run Android, but iOS software is …

   UN locks Apple, Google, Microsoft in a room for patent peace summit

   'You're meant to encourage innovation, not stifle it'

   Tech titans including Apple, Nokia, Google and Microsoft will today argue the toss at a UN confab on whether patent law is stifling innovation. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) arranged the get-together to assess the effectiveness of allowing companies to sort out the licensing of patents crucial to building …

   New top boss for flash upstart OCZ appears on radar

   Eyes are on Ralph Schmitt as he legs it from PLX

   A new CEO for flash storage startup OCZ has possibly emerged from the mists: Ralph Schmitt has resigned as chief exec of PCI electronics biz PLX - and he sits on OCZ's board. OCZ ousted CEO Ryan Petersen last month, on the back of revenue shortfalls and a kerfuffle over a will-they-won't-they acquisition by Seagate. Alex Mei …

   Report: Google offers to 'brand' search results in Euro antitrust probe

   Horse-trading continues down at Choc Factory ranch

   Google is continuing to try to convince the European Commission not to proceed in taking formal action against the company's alleged "abuse of dominance" in the search market – by reportedly offering to brand its web search results. According to the Financial Times, which cites sources familiar with Google's package of …

   Apple to spice up Blighty iPads with 4G

   But Mini to be limited to Wi-Fi

   Apple will refresh its current iPad with support for Everything Everywhere's 4G network, while the upcoming 'iPad Mini' will be limited to Wi-Fi connectivity, moles maintain. Industry whisperers have told the Guardian that an iPad Mini announcement is imminent. However, a 3G-compatible version is unlikely. This should allow …

   Ballmer aims chair at Apple after Windows package miss

   Windows failures shrink CEO's fiscal reward

   Steve Ballmer is eyeing up an Apple-style future for Microsoft of device manufacture and support, just as he’s been personally dinged for underperforming in one of the company’s cash cows: Windows. Microsoft’s chief executive has evangelised devices as the future opportunity for Redmond in his annual letter to shareholders, …

   Boffins build program to HUNT DOWN CO2 polluters where they LIVE

   Mapping shows Barry and Clive did climate change

   Environment-loving boffins have developed a software capable of pointing the accusatory finger of carbon-emitting blame at individual buildings. The program, named Hestia after the Greek goddess of the home, can map CO2 emissions across urban landscapes and narrow them down to streets or certain homes using public databases, …

   Copper-obsessed BT means UK misses out on ultrafast fibre gold

   New research finds Blighty languishing at bottom of FTTH pile

   BT has once again been blamed for Britain's failure to penetrate the Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) market, leaving the country lagging behind its European neighbours. New research shows that, as of June 2012, only 0.05 per cent of households in the UK were connected to the superior technology. But the figure is hardly surprising …

   Lenovo unfolds smaller Yoga tablet-laptop hybrid

   11-incher still weighty and pricey

   Lenovo has announced an 11in version of its still-to-ship Yoga tablet-laptop hybrid. Part of the IdeaPad line-up, Yoga is so named because the hinge on its clamshell casing allows the screen not merely to be lifted up from the keyboard and folded flat against the desk but can be pushed further round to form a tablet. Lenovo …

   Canada: We'll boot 'security risk' firms from gov network bid race

   We won't say Hu(awei), but...

   The Canadian government has said that it will be invoking a "national security exemption" as it hires firms to build a secure network, hinting that Chinese telco Huawei could be excluded. The exemption allows the government to kick out of the running any companies or nations considered a security risk, which coming in the wake …

   Big Blue bigwig: Tiny processor knobs can't shrink forever

   HPC blog You cannae break the laws of physics - and 7nm is the limit

   While at IBM’s Smarter Computing Summit last week, I had the great pleasure of hearing Big Blue's Bernie Meyerson talk about limits to today’s tech, and the associated implications. Bernie is IBM’s VP of Innovation and one of the rare technologist-scientist types who can clearly and directly explain highly technical concepts …

   Samsung says 'yes' to iPhone 5-sized Galaxy S III

   No enormo-handsets please, we're Europeans

   Samsung has confirmed that it’ll launch a 4in version of its Android-based popular Galaxy S III smartphone in Germany tomorrow. The scaled down device is being pitched at Europeans unhappy with the existing, 4.8in S III and would prefer something a little easier to hold and use in one hand and fits in pockets better. Something …

   Japanese cellco drops veil on futuristic hands-free video phone

   Life in cartoon motion

   Japanese mobile operator NTT Docomo has unveiled a pair of hi-tech video phone glasses which could finally answer the problem of dodgy web cam video calls. The hands-free specs contain six 180 degree, 720p cameras which capture the user’s face live before altering your mug in real-time to take account of close-up distortion …

   BBC unveils UltraViolet DVDs, BDs

   Latest Doctor Who series to come with download copy

   The BBC has announced a set of Blu-ray Disc and DVD releases that will support the UltraViolet online video locker service. Upcoming Doctor Who, Top Gear and David Attenborough releases will support UV to allow owners signed up to the service to stream and download versions of the discs’ content to mobile devices, computers …

   Hitachi Data Systems dons converged system cloak

   Anything EMC and NetApp can do ...

   Hitachi Data Systems has announced its UCP converged server-storage-networking system both in integrated system and reference architecture form, taking on EMC and NetApp while partners Cisco and VMware triumphantly play the field. The Unified Compute Platform comes in Pro and Select versions, 11 versions in all. The UCP Pro is …

   Warner Music daddy chucks €130m at Spotify rival Deezer

   Zut alors!

   Access Industries will invest €130m in the Gallic Spotify-rival Deezer. The music streaming service has been a hit in its native France and launched in the UK a year ago – with rather less impact. The big record labels are major investors in Spotify, with Universal Music rarely missing an opportunity to talk it up. The Swedish …

   Linux on ARM breakthrough to take away Torvalds' arse pain

   One kernel to boot them all and in the darkness bind them

   A single Linux kernel build that can run on various ARM-powered kit from competing manufacturers has come closer to reality, much to Linus Torvalds' relief. Unlike the world of x86 PCs, which has standardised and well-documented hardware, there is little consistency across ARM-compatible systems beyond the basic processor …

   Google cash brings all the cold TV leftovers you can eat to YouTube

   Mockney belly-robber, netmums and mouldy old BBC gumble

   For years, some pundits have touted YouTube as the future of TV - so you may be interested to see what this future might look like. The picture is now clearer after Google confirmed funding for 60 UK telly producers to make YouTube clips. And so the future of television will look like… a low-budget cable channel serving up …

   Want to know what 5G mobile is? Ask this British university

   In a bit, when they've worked it out themselves

   Surrey University has scored £11.6m in government cash, and £24m from the industry, to fund the development of next-generation telecoms in a shiny new 5G Innovation Centre. The government money comes from the UK Research Partnership Investment Fund, by way of the Higher Education Funding Council, but the bigger portion comes …

   Why will UK web supersnoop plan cost £1.8bn? That's a secret

   Anyway this is gov IT, we've got no idea what it'll cost

   The Home Office has refused to fully justify the £1.8bn price tag attached to its contentious draft Communications Data Bill, which if passed will massively increase online surveillance of UK citizens. In response to a Freedom of Information request from Zoe O'Connell, who regularly blogs about the bill, the Home Office argued …

   UK bungs £250m to factories stung by climate-change policy

   Taxpayers cough up as rules send bills soaring

   The heaviest energy users are being asked to shape a proposed £250m compensation package designed to help reduce the impact of energy and climate change policies on the cost of their electricity. The new consultation, which sets out the design of the scheme, follows on from the Government's call for evidence on the issue in …

   View 21 
IPTV Freeview+HD DVR review

   iOS telly addicts, look no further

   The Freeview+ HD market has suddenly sparked into life. Having spent an age coasting on the coattails of Humax’s HDR-FOXT2, there are suddenly a slew of better-specified recorders hitting the streets. The View21 VW11FVRHD50 is one such newbie, mixing Freeview+ HD with IPTV connected services. While it doesn’t offer full-on Catch …

   Unisys pumps up ClearPath mainframes with Xeon E5s

   Just about all Intel Inside and all done with homegrown CPUs

   Unisys has been on a quest to get out of designing processors for its ClearPath mainframes and porting its MCP and OS 2200 operating systems from its respective Libra (Burroughs) and Dorado (Sperry-Univac) machines to Intel's Xeon processors for almost as long as Intel has been serious about the server racket. And, with the …

   Iran says its infosec defences foiled oil hack

   Alleges Israel tried to take down oil platforms, with Chinese involvement

   Iran is claiming to have successfully deflected yet another large scale cyber attack on critical infrastructure in the country, this time targeted at its offshore oil installations. A brief report on the Iranian Students’ News Agency site on Monday seemed to accuse Israel and China of being behind an attack on the National …

   Mystery martian object is relic of (our) civilisation

   Curiosity will spend another day checking strange shiny thing just to be sure

   NASA has decided the mystery shiny object on Mars merits another day of probing, but is fairly sure it is a piece of plastic from the Curiosity rover. The space agency's explanation for the object says: The rover team's assessment is that the bright object is something from the rover, not Martian material. It appears to be a …

   Microsoft to devs: Bug users about security … now!

   Redmond reveals how and when it decides to remind you about security

   Microsoft has revealed the guidelines it gives its own developers to help them decide when users need a rude reminder to stop putting themselves at risk of security problems. Redmond's rules boil down to being neat and spruce, but the two adjectives are acronyms rather than items in a dress code. NEAT stands for the following …

   Apple Maps too good for Taiwanese military

   Cupertino told to blur images before China spots radar ... Oops

   Apple’s much-derided maps app which caused widespread user consternation when it effectively replaced Google Maps in the latest version of iOS, has come under fire yet again, but this time for being too accurate. The Taiwanese government has formally requested that Cupertino uses only low-res satellite images when detailing …

   Is lightspeed really a limit?

   Solving super-luminal Special Relativity without breaking Einstein

   We don’t (yet) have any way to test this, but University of Adelaide applied mathematicians are suggesting that an extended version of Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity also holds true for velocities beyond lightspeed. One of the main predictions of Special Relativity is that the speed of light is treated as an absolute …

   Microsoft trials Digits finger-sensing bracelet

   Power Glove for the new generation

   Microsoft Research has been showing off Digits, an attempt to build a sensor bracelet that can track the movement of fingers, replacing the need for a physical mouse or finger-covering gloves. Touchy-feely computing from Microsoft The Digits system uses a bank of infrared (IR) LEDs to reflect off the fingertips, coupled …

   IBM takes on Oracle with PureData appliances

   'Watch out, Larry, here we come'

   Big Blue is getting sick of Larry Ellison taking up all of the oxygen in the data center when it comes to appliance servers tuned for specific workloads, and so it is expanding its line of PureSystems preconfigured machines with a family of boxes called PureData that take on some of the same work that Oracle is chasing with its …

   Analyst warns BlackBerry 10 won't be out until March

   Still enough to beat off WinPhone 8 threat

   RIM's share price took another hit on Tuesday after a senior analyst warned investors that the Canadian firm's BlackBerry 10 operating system may not be out until March of next year. "We had hoped for a Jan launch (guidance is for a CQ1 launch) but now see a March launch as more likely," said Jeffries and Co. analyst Peter …

   Microsoft: Pirates at high risk of malware infection

   Freetards have only themselves to blame

   Web-based attacks are on the rise, but according to Microsoft security researchers, the risks involved with casual browsing are nothing compared to the dangers of downloading and sharing illicit software, videos, music, and other media. In the latest edition of the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report, published on Monday, …

   British Library tracks rise and fall of file formats

   Analysis of 2.5 billion online files suggests software obsolescence slowing

   File formats and the software capable of reading them are living longer than previously thought, according to a British Library and UK Web Archive study. Formats over Time: Exploring UK Web History (PDF, slides as PDF) considers 2.5 billion files author Andrew N Jackson retrieved with the help of the Internet Archive and the …

   Cisco, Netgear, Moto let fly at patent troll Innovatio

   Cry ‘havoc’ and let slip the lawyers of war

   Last year, finding vendors like Cisco and Motorola uninterested in complying with its Wi-Fi patent trolling, Innovatio IP Ventures decided to direct its demands against end users instead. Its approach was to seek small settlements against business Wi-Fi users on the basis that they were less likely to dig in and fight. Now, …

5. Tuesday, 09 October 2012

   Kernel crimps make Windows 8 a hacker hassle

   The kernel is the new battleground, says ReactOS and iOS co-author Alex Ionescu

   Windows 8 will make hackers' lives hard, says Windows internals expert, security researcher and co-author of Apple's iOS and the open source Windows XP clone ReactOS, Alex Ionescu. Now chief architect at CrowdStrike, a security company focused on nation-state adversaries, Ionescu says Windows 8 builds on the usermode exploit …

   MIT team sketches nanotubes with special pencil

   This should put the lead in

   Researchers from MIT have demonstrated a technique that allows them to draw a line of carbon nanotubes – with a mechanical pencil. Their aim is to develop a production technique for nanotube-based sensors for detecting hazardous chemicals in the environment. Nanotubes are good at this, but expensive and difficult to produce …

   Judge goes postal on Kim Dotcom extradition appeal

   US court rejects the 'I never got that letter' defence

   Kim Dotcom’s attempts to escape US prosecution on the grounds that his company Megaupload was not based in the country has been thrown out of US District Court. Judge Liam O'Grady deemed Megaupload's dismissal demands to be "extreme" and denied the request. Federal prosecutors argued that team Megaupload’s line of reasoning “ …

   Mobile phone downloads now a blip on the radar: ABS

   From miniscule to a little less miniscule

   Downloads to handsets are growing fast in Australia – albeit off a tiny base – but still failing to make a dent in the Great Australian Fixed Broadband Data Slurp. The latest Internet Use, Australia report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics1 seems to demonstrate not a fixed-mobile substitution, but a change in mobile …

   ZTE slams Congress spying claims, doubles down on sales ban

   'Ban all Chinese hardware and see where it gets you'

   ZTE has defended itself against claims that its hardware is a security risk and has suggested that if Congress is that concerned, it should recommend not buying any Chinese-manufactured equipment, which would include tech sold by Western companies who have outsourced their manufacturing. On Monday the US House of …

   ARM upstart Calxeda pours $55m into server chip war chest

   Hints at future 64-bit processors

   ARM chip upstart Calxeda is lining its coffers as it prepares to do battle with its 32-bit EnergyCore ECX-1000 processors, and two more cores in its roadmap, to conquer some corner of the server world. Calxeda now has more than 100 employees, who work in its Austin, Texas headquarters as well as in development labs in Silicon …

   Quantum computer boffin 'had to sit down' on getting Nobel Prize call

   Deserved glory, trouserfuls of cash for French/US pair

   The Nobel Prize for physics has gone to French and US boffins for their work quantum manipulation. Serge Haroche of Collège de France and David Wineland at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the University of Colorado will share the prize and the £744,000 winnings that go with it for work on single photons …

   STONEHENGE: Attack of the RAYGUN HISTORIANS

   Hmm, just as we thought. No sign of aliens after all

   Laser-toting historians have found that Stonehenge was architecturally rigged to show off the solstices. The UK government's adviser on the historic environment, English Heritage, used 3D laser scanning tech to analyse the pillars of Stonehenge, with results that back up the idea that the monument is all about the winter and …

   Integrated storage hardware is DEAD, software firm says

   VMworld It's the food and the service that count, not the plates

   Nexenta, the ZFS-based storage software company, is successfully avoiding becoming a storage hardware supplier - although that could make life easier. But it believes hardware storage companies are doomed in the long run. The future is open storage software running in servers that abstracts and commoditises storage hardware. …

   Edge-of-space skydiver grounded by ANOTHER bout of bad wind

   Updated Baumgartner's mission still on hold

   Skydiving Felix Baumgartner, his mind filled with dreams of reaching supersonic speeds in the highest-ever free fall attempted by a human being... is still sitting in the desert twiddling his thumbs. Adverse winds over New Mexico, where he will attempt to land after his death-defying plummet from the edge of space, have once …

   Google finds MORE slurped Street View data down under

   Ad giant unearths two more disks down back of sofa

   The Australian wing of Google has found yet more disks containing slurped payload data - including emails and passwords - its Street View spycars gobbled from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks across the globe. The advertising giant wrote to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner on Monday confessing that it had …

   'It's not a post-PC world: Just a post Windows one, maybe'

   Channels Forum Redmond is like Apple - it makes distributors cross too

   Channel watchers Canalys celebrated the launch of Windows 8 this month by declaring we are now in the "post Windows" era. Canalys CEO Steve Brazier kicked off the Channels Forum conference with a state of the industry keynote which questioned how much success Redmond could expect on the back of the Win8 launch, particularly as …

   Natwest's Get Cash app pulled, but NOTHING to do with frauds

   Yes there were frauds, yes it is pulled, but NO NO NO

   Natwest has pulled a feature on its banking app that lets users get cash without a bank card. The removal of "Get Cash" from the app comes two days after reports that a fraudster used the feature to "get cash" - from another person's account. The BBC reported that a Natwest customer had been diddled out of £900 through a thief …

   BT Infinity customers hit by outages at 'third party peering network'

   Telco cops to five-day-long 'major packet loss'

   BT Infinity customers have been complaining about peering issues that have prevented some of them from accessing popular websites for nearly five days. And now, after some haranguing, the national telco has said sorry for the service disruptions its punters have been moaning about. BT said in a statement to The Register: We …

   iPad Mini pics spied on Twitter

   Mock-up or real deal?

   We don’t who Sonny Dickson is - a “tech enthusiast” and “9to5Mac researcher”, apparently - but he’s just posted a small set of iPad Mini pictures on his Twitter feed. Alas, there isn’t a shot of the device working, so the unit on his desk may simply by one of the many mock-ups that have been doing the rounds of late. Certainly …

   VMware crams more cloudy calories in vCloud Suite's cakehole

   VMworld Europe Chubby control freak now with more to grab hold of

   VMware's vCloud Suite is not even two months old and just started shipping a month ago - yet the virtualisation titan is already stuffing more wares into its cloudy tool suite, which does not have the vRAM memory tax but rather simple per-socket pricing. At the VMworld Europe shindig in Barcelona, Spain today, the updated …

   Red Hatters seal chumship with Zend on OpenShift PHP cloud

   Now you can Zend it like Beckham

   Red Hat is still only previewing its OpenShift platform cloud, and one of the reasons why is because it had not yet inked a deal with Zend Technologies, the commercial entity that is to the PHP programming language as Linux Torvalds and Red Hat together are to the Linux operating system. But that is all going to be fixed now …

   HP: PC industry has forgotten how to innovate

   Windows 8? Oh, that. Listen, check out this 'sleekbook'

   HP told a meeting of dealers and distributors today that the PC industry has itself to blame for a lack of growth over the last five years due to a paucity of innovation. Eric Cador, Senior Vice President and General Manager, EMEA for HP, took to the stage at the Canalys Channels Forum in Barcelona to lift the sheets on the …

   'Small' upheaval at McAfee, not many fired

   The guy who knows how many, we already sacked him

   Intel-owned security firm McAfee is planning to lay off some of its 7,000-strong global workforce, a company spokesman in the US has said. The No 2 maker of antivirus software would not give any further details about the planned redundancies, only admitting that a "small percentage" of staff would be axed. The US spokesman …

   'Apps are replacing people everywhere', says Canalys chief

   Channel Forums But not Channel guys delivering apps, so be one of them!

   Forget the recession - the reseller channel is in rude heath and there are a raft of biz opportunities coming into sharp focus, according to the chief at bean counter Canalys. At Canalys' Channel Forum 2012, CEO Steve Brazier said times were tough in the first half of this year, but distributors and the top 12 vendors - …

   That horrendous iPhone empurplement - you're holding it wrong

   'Grip your digital tool correctly, all will be well'

   ALL iPhones put a purple flare on photos they take, Apple has admitted, but only if they are held incorrectly. The tech giant has responded to complaints that snaps are marred by a thistle-tinted haze - but blamed incompetent fanbois rather than coughing to a hardware fault. Punters experiencing purple flares, hazes and spots …

   O2 flogs logs of mobe locations to anyone with a wallet

   This anonymised guy lives here, works there ...

   Telefonica, the owner of the O2 brand, has set up a new division to exploit its massive heap of customer data. This means selling punters' movement patterns and the number of people ambling through a particular spot to anyone with the cash. Telefónica Dynamic Insights will sift through the data to see what's worth selling, …

   Campaigners roll out political-correctness Voight-Kampff CAPTCHAs

   Works on (truthful) unrighteous - but not so well on bots

   Politically correct security experts have come up with a Voight-Kampff version of CAPTCHAs, the popular but sometimes irritating challenges designed to make sure that a human and not a bot is behind a request to sign-up for an online service or post a comment on an online forum. The Civil Rights Defenders CAPTCHA asks …

   New British tax-cuts-for-patents scheme criticised

   Consultants and lawyers think it's just spiffing, though

   A new tax cut tied to the number of patents a business owns could lead to a wave of trivial patents being filed, favour big businesses over small businesses, and distort research priorities, speakers at the London Patent Summit warned today. Businesses have broadly welcomed the Patent Box tax scheme that will see them getting …

   SpaceX Falcon 9 flameout leaves commercial satellite in wrong orbit

   ISS cargo on track, private sector customer looking blue

   The Falcon 9 rocket from upstart rocket firm SpaceX, which lifted off yesterday with supplies for the International Space Station, will deliver those supplies successfully following loss of an engine during launch. However a commercial satellite which was also aboard the rocket has been placed into a lower orbit than planned as …

   Rover spots 'possibly artificial' MYSTERY SHINY OBJECT on Mars

   Might be a piece of Curiosity, speculates NASA

   Martian nuclear tank Curiosity has spotted a bright metallic-looking object sparkling on the planet's surface as it went in for its first soil sample, which could be a piece of the robot rover itself. The rover was scooping sand for the first time with its robotic arm when its camera picked up on the object. NASA boffins have …

   Face-recognising spy drone tech tapped up by... Quantum

   Storage giant jumps into live video processing game

   Quantum's StorNext file system could be used in the hunt for terrorist suspects in the near future. The storage giant has invested in video search tech biz NerVve so images and footage - such as material recorded from military surveillance drones - can be indexed and retrieved from StorNext vaults. StorNext is a suite of …

   HTC profits lobbed off a cliff by rivals Samsung and Apple

   And revenue plunges in Q3 as mobes fail to impress punters

   Troubled Taiwanese mobe maker HTC suffered another body blow on Monday as it announced a whopping 79 per cent drop in Q3 net profits year on year. The once proud smartphone giant admitted its net income tumbled from NT$18.64bn (£397m) in the third quarter of 2011 to just NT$3.9bn (£82.9m) in the same period this year. Revenue …

   Citrix XenServer 6.1 fires live VMs from cannon across servers

   Wanna avoid downtime? Well, just put this helmet on...

   Citrix Systems is still in the server virtualization hypervisor racket, although it doesn't make as much noise about it as it used to. The company has released XenServer 6.1 with a bunch of new features that make it competitive with VMware ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V, which is good for existing Xen customers but probably will not …

   Don't delete that email! Why you must keep biz docs for 6 YEARS

   Comment Don't be caught out when lawyers knock on the IT dept door

   Companies should retain project emails and documents in a central repository for more than six years before considering deleting the information, an expert in resolving IT disputes has said. Ian Birdsey of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com, said that organisations should consider retaining the information for …

   IBM wrestles controls, pulls midrange array sales out of death dive

   EMC strato-jet looks down as other flap wings, gasp

   IBM's move away from legacy DS3000/5000 storage arrays to newer XIV and StorWize midrange arrays is paying off with growing sales. A graph of vendors' external disk array revenues, drawn up by Stifel Nicolaus analyst Aaron Rakers, shows an IBM upturn in the last quarter. IBM and EMC are the only two enjoying a rise, everyone …

   Borderlands 2 review

   Smash and grab

   Loot and shoot, shoot and loot: Borderlands 2 in a proverbial nutshell. Thank goodness then that it’s looting and shooting of the highest order, as another intrepid gang of vault hunters get tooled up and head into the wastelands, with the lure of untold wealth at the forefront of their minds. Crash and carry Like its …

   Huawei says US probe had 'predetermined outcome'

   Argues Congress found no “clear information or evidence” of security risk

   Huawei has hit back at the US Congress'House intelligence Committee report labelling it a business US companies should avoid if they value their privacy and security. In a canned statement, the company says “... despite our best effort, the Committee appears to have been committed to a predetermined outcome.” The company says …

   New Zealand issues Hobbit money

   Previousss coins have horrible exchange rate

   New Zealand has issued coins, all legal tender, marked with ElvenDwarven runes and bearing images of scenes and characters from the new Hobbit film trilogy. The coins are of course collectibles, but New Zealand Post describes them as “legal tender commemorative coins.” That means you could plonk them down on a Kiwi bar and …

   Pakistan blocks 20,000 sites in wake of anti-Islam vid

   YouTube just the start for anxious censors

   Pakistani authorities have revealed that a whopping 20,000 web sites have been taken offline as part of a nationwide crackdown on “objectionable” content. The purge took places as part of government efforts across the Muslim world in the wake of widespread anger at “Innocence of Muslims” – a film ridiculing the Prophet …

   NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson expects toothbrush commerce

   Also says Big Data is really about Little Data

   Toothbrushes will go online and encourage you to buy new ones once their bristles wear out, according to Zach Nelson, CEO of software-as-a-service outfit NetSuite. Speaking at an event in Sydney today, Nelson occasionally suggested he and NetSuite's founders may be a candidate for consideration as a “genius visionary.” He wasn …

   Patent troll targets ZTE

   Legal hit lands after US congress adds ZTE, Huawei, to security risk list

   Chinese telecoms kit maker ZTE was hit with more bad news on Monday when intellectual property firm Vringo announced it was suing the firm’s UK subsidiary over patent infringement. Vringo, which claims it has an IP portfolio of over 500 patents and patent applications in the telecoms space, said it had asked ZTE in September …

   AMD unveils 'sweet spot' processor for 'sexy' tablets

   Z-60 aims between Atom and Core i3 for Windows 8 fondleslabs

   AMD has released its new Z-60 microprocessor – called in company parlance an APU, for accelerated processing unit – which it aims to squeeze into the Windows 8 tablet market above Intel's Atom line and below Chipzilla's lowest-power Core processor, the i3. The Austin, Texas, chip designers just might have a solid offering for …

   Fossil reveals spider in mid-strike

   Predator and prey, together forever

   A hundred million years ago, an amber flow spoiled a spider’s day: it had waited, possibly for hours, to ambush a wasp in its web, and just as it decided to strike, spider, wasp and web were all trapped forever. The good news for us is that it’s turned up at a dig in Myanmar's Hukawng Valley, and here's what it looks like: …

   iOS 6 Alarms bug hits Australia

   USA, UK, seemingly spared daylight savings SNAFU

   An iOS 6 bug that added an extra instance of 3:00AM and 3:00PM to Australians' iDevices seems not to be something users in other nations need to worry about. The bug in question, first spotted by an an alert Gizmodo Australia reader, saw iDevices running iOS6 decide that 3:00AM happened twice on October 7th. That day is …

   HP doubles up SAP hard-hearted HANA appliances

   Scaling out and adding failover clustering

   Everybody – especially server makers without much of a software business – wants to peddle SAP HANA in-memory databases, and HP is no exception: they're taking its AppSystem for SAP up another notch with a disaster-tolerant configuration for supporting HANA. In a blog posting, Mary Kwan, global business manager for SAP …

   USAF declassifies ‘flying saucer’ design

   Spiked 1950s project had high hopes

   If it had ever got off the ground, the US Air Force’s 1950s flying saucer would have gone a long way off the ground: all the way to 100,000 feet. A paper recently declassified and made public at America’s National Archives details the project: a few million spent assessing the design feasibility of a flying saucer. The USAF' …

   Surprise! Microsoft patches latest IE10 Flash vulns on time

   Issues fixes same day as Adobe's patch

   Microsoft surprised Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 users on Monday by issuing a patch that fixes 25 security vulnerabilities found in the Adobe Flash Player component of Internet Explorer 10, mere hours after Adobe issued its own patch for the Flash Player plug-in used by other browsers. Unlike earlier versions of Internet …

6. Monday, 08 October 2012

   40,000 sign petition to oust Rep. Paul 'pit of hell' Broun

   Politician applies Bible to science, space, and technology

   A petition asking from the removal of Representative Paul Broun (R-GA) from the House Science, Space and Technology Committee has garnered well over 40,000 signatures in the two days since a video of his views on the topics he oversees was made public. "All that stuff I was taught about evolution, embryology, Big Bang theory, …

   Lunar water-prospecting rover rolls closer towards launch

   Company seeks the $20m Google Lunar X Prize with two candidate craft

   Astrobotic Technology, a privately funded spacecraft developer, has announced that its has completed a full-size prototype of its second Moon rover, Polaris, which is scheduled to fly in October 2015 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Polaris is one of two Moon rovers under development by Astrobotic in competition for the Google …

   Turnbull upends bucket on data retention proposal

   Escaping the ‘digital dungeon’

   Australia’s opposition communications spokesman Malcolm Turnbull has made his strongest statement yet against the proposed data retention regime, asking an audience in Melbourne whether people are casting themselves into a “digital dungeon”. Delivering the Alfred Deakin lecture, Turnbull has created a poser for Australia’s …

   Tech rivals team up for free web dev docs

   Wiki site aims to be 'comprehensive and authoritative' – but don't we all?

   Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft may seem like strange bedfellows, but the four have joined forces with six other organizations to create Web Platform Docs, a community-driven site that aims to be a one-stop shop for free web-developer documentation. "When you want to build something for the web, it's surprisingly …

   SpaceX confirms Falcon rocket suffered engine flame-out

   Video Kept calm, then corrected, and carried on

   SpaceX has confirmed that one of the engines on its Falcon rocket flamed out mid-flight during the launch of its resupply mission to the International Space Station. Around one minute after takeoff, the SpaceX team noted an anomaly on one of the first stage Merlin engines and shut it down. The Falcon is equipped with nine …

   Cisco drops ZTE after claims of sanction-busting Iran sales

   Ruckus over reselling to the wrong people

   Cisco has confirmed that is has ended all sales agreements with ZTE, reportedly in response to an internal investigation into whether the Chinese firm was selling American hardware to Iran in defiance of sanctions. According to Reuters, an investigation by Cisco determined that its hardware was being shipped to Iran illegally …

   10 million iPad minis to 'outshine' their big brother this quarter

   Will we learn more on October 17? Maybe so, maybe not

   Reports have surfaced that Apple is planning for over 10 million iPad minis – or whatever they'll be called – to be available in the fourth quarter of this year, and that the design of the new 7.85-inch fondleslab could "outshine" its bigger brother, the iPad itself. The Wall Street Jounal reported on Sunday that sources among …

   Foxconn denies factory labor strike reports

   Says iPhone production not at risk – honest!

   Foxconn has denied reports that a mass strike last week shut down its Zhengzhou, China factory, one of two Chinese plants where the Taiwanese manufacturing giant assembles Apple's latest iPhone. On Friday, New York–based labor rights group China Labor Watch had claimed that as many as 4,000 workers had walked off the job at …

   Bing is the most heavily poisoned search engine, study says

   Man, this Kool-Aid is chock full of payday loans

   Bing search results are more affected by poisoning than those of other search engines, according to a study by SophosLabs. Search engine poisoning attacks are designed to skew results so that dodgy sites - anything from malware infected websites to payday loan sites - appear prominently in the index of sites related to popular …

   Stem cell discoveries land Nobel gong for Brit, Japanese boffins

   Top brains jingling with cash after Stockholm decision

   Blighty's Sir John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka of Japan have won this year's Nobel Prize for medicine or physiology for reprogramming adult cells. The boffins bagged the award and the £744,00 winnings for their research into nuclear rejigging, where adult cells are told to form early stem cells that can then be used to form any …

   VMware brings out new madly complicated enterprise buyer plan

   EPPic rulebook on Monopoly-money token scheme pops out

   VMware wants to leverage its dominance in server virtualization inside of corporate data centers into juggernaut status for enterprise private clouds, and to help that process along the company is rolling out a new enterprise purchasing agreement that will presumably get some grease to the skids and the palms as companies look …

   Swivelling Eye-of-Sauron style WiFi maker preps $100m IPO

   Crazy fools are making and selling actual stuff

   Wi-Fi signal booster biz Ruckus Wireless has set in motion a $100m stock market debut, and hopes to be listed early next year. The company requested the stock symbol RKUS but didn't specify how many shares will be sold nor which exchange will host the listing - the fields are blank in the initial public offering paperwork …

   Lancashire man JAILED over April Jones Facebook posts

   Three months' porridge for 'grossly offensive' trolling

   A young man was jailed for 12 weeks today, after confessing to posting "grossly offensive" comments on Facebook about missing five-year-old April Jones. He posted some bad taste jokes culled from Sickipedia on a support group for April Jones's family and friends, according to press reports. Among the comments was: "I woke up …

   Only buy Huawei or ZTE if you like being SPIED ON - US politicos

   Exhibitionists needn't listen to protectionists

   Huawei and ZTE, China's top makers of telecoms kit, should be locked out of the US market because their technology poses a security risk, a US House of Representatives group said today. The Intelligence Committee believes there is a threat of Chinese state influence on the two companies that would make them a liability in the …

   Guidelines issued for Qi wireless gadget charging in cars

   Worries over drivers stunned by flying plugless mobes

   The Wireless Power Consortium has published its recommendations for plugless in-car charging, primarily aimed at ensuring key fobs don't warm up and that phones don't become projectiles. Guidelines (pdf, as dull as one would imagine) from the custodian of the Qi wireless-charging standard require physical restraints on the …

   I can't wait for Pano to thrust some hard 3D love into size-zero models

   Sysadmin Blog Trevor Pott turns on latest super-thin clients

   Around this time last year I reviewed Pano Logic's Zero Client Solution, a sort of super-thin-client set of kit. I was test-driving the company's first-generation hardware and a software suite two versions behind the latest release. I've now had a chance to review the second-generation hardware with its latest software, and I …

   Assange chums must cough up £93,500 bail over embassy lurk

   Wikileakster still living on sofa in small diplo flat

   While Julian Assange™ continues to sun himself under a SAD lamp in London's Ecuadorian Embassy, the supporters who put up his bail money - and so kept him out of British custody and free to hole up in the embassy - have been ordered to cough their cash up. Nine supporters of Assange have been told by judicial authorities to …

   Register SPB hacks mull chopping off feet

   Should SI Units rule supreme in the Reg space programme?

   Weary special-projects-bureau operatives at El Reg have decided the time has come to consider exclusively adopting the International System of Units (aka SI Units), and ditching the mile, pound and related measurements. It's a royal pain in the backside working with two systems, which results in sentences such as "Baumgartner …

   Crazed Microsoft robot accuses BBC kids' channel of Win8 piracy

   DMCA autocannon tries to blast HuffPo, CNN off Google

   Microsoft falsely branded BBC CBeebies, CNN.com and other websites as Windows 8 piracy haunts - and ordered Google to remove them from search results. Pages belonging to the Beeb's children’s telly service CBeebies, film reviews site Rottentomatoes and US cinema chain AMC Theaters - as well as web articles by the BBC's …

   Red Hat stalks VMware in field sport ambush

   Pic Gets message out to VMworld via grassroots channels

   Red Hat, you cheeky, cheeky monkeys Red Hat wants to grab the attention of delegates to VMworld Europe in Barcelona with a guerrilla marketing stunt that deploys the biggest hashtag we have seen. For its "Red Hat welcome", the vendor daubed the Shadowman logo, measuring 60x60 metres, in a massive field located directly …

   Zynga cracks open can-o-gloom all over 2012 outlook

   OMG, OMGPOP went pop

   Zynga's shares took a dive after the social gamer announced that it was writing off half the value of OMGPOP, the developer of Draw Something acquired earlier this year. The social gaming firm cut its outlook for the year for the second time and said it expects a loss in the third quarter while also slashing up to $95m off …

   Skydiver Baumgartner's 120,000ft spacesuit leap delayed by bad wind

   'Sorry chaps, we'll try again tomorrow, eh?'

   Titanium-testicled skydiver Felix Baumgartner is poised to make his attempt on the world's highest free-fall record. The Austrian - who described himself as "like a tiger in a cage waiting to get out" - was due to leap from his Red Bull Stratos space capsule today at a planned altitude of 36,576m (120,000ft) over the New …

   UK's first 4G network just switched on - and it's not from EE

   Southwark, Reading and Swindon leapfrog rest of Blighty

   While EE's 4G mobile network won't be switched on until the end of October, Blighty's other 4G network went live over the weekend. ISP UK Broadband uses 4G LTE to beam high-speed internet connectivity wirelessly to homes and offices. However its coverage is limited to Southwark, Reading and Swindon, so the plan is to compete …

   Brussels 'set to clear' state cash for UK broadband deployment

   Loads of competition going on in rural broadband, seemingly

   Europe's competition commissioner has reportedly signalled that he will allow state investment by the UK to improve rural broadband within the next few weeks. According to the Financial Times, only "minor changes" are required by Joaquin Almunia before the plan is granted approval from officials in Brussels. Other …

   Motorola whacks laptop-like phone dock

   Webtop topped

   No one wants laptop-style keyboard accessories for their phones. Or, rather, no one wants Motorola Mobility’s version. The Google-owned handset maker last week admitted it had canned the product. The system debuted in 2011 as an add-on for Motorola’s Atrix smartphone. The handset docks into the accessory to provide processor, …

   Iran X.25 terrorists actually BANKERS

   Venerable network protocol probe bumble rumbled

   An innocent explanation has emerged after a security expert linked a group of Islamic extremists to Iran after supposedly discovering the crew on a list of state-sanctioned leased telephone lines in the Middle East nation. Mike Kemp, a co-founder of UK-based Xiphos Research, found two entries for "Ansar Al-Mujahideen" in a …

   Man charged over alleged April Jones Facebook trolling

   Prosecutors still unsure where red line lies

   Lancashire police arrested a man on Saturday for allegedly offensive remarks he posted on Facebook about missing five-year-old April Jones from Machynlleth, Wales. Officers said they had arrested and later charged Matthew Wood, 20, of Eaves Lane, Chorley, "with sending by means of a public electronic communications network a …

   Stars spotted dancing superfast tango around black hole handbag

   'Whoa, look at 'em go,' applaud excited boffins

   Astroboffins have found a star whipping around our galaxy's central supermassive black hole so fast that it completes a circuit in just 11.5 years, which could help test Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. The orbit is the shortest known orbit of any star near a black hole, taking the star close enough to help figure out …

   Amazon to buy its Seattle HQ from Paul Allen for over $1bn

   'Most expensive single office purchase EVER'

   Colossal etailer Amazon is going to buy its corporate headquarters in Seattle for $1.16bn, according to a company filing. The internet giant told the Securities and Exchange Commission that it's planning to snap up the complex of 11 buildings, around 1.8m square feet of office space, by the end of this year. The property is …

   Windows 7 overruns NHS Scotland

   Open sourcers sent homeward to think again

   NHS Scotland has snubbed open source alternatives to re-engage with Microsoft after signing an Enterprise Agreement covering the deployment of Windows 7 on nearly 100,000 desktops. The three year contract penned this summer is estimated to be worth around £5m in total with 17 of the 22 health boards in Scotland signing up. …

   Target Silicon Valley: Why A View to a Kill actually made sense

   Bond on Film Bond villain Zorin's plan wouldn't work today, though

   A View to a Kill is generally regarded as one of the least successful Bond movies. Yet it stands out for two things: a suave villain who is deranged in an entirely believable way, and a villainous plot that appeared both logical and plausible. While its box office performance was passable at $152m, on a budget of $30m, even …

   Sony Vaio T13 Ultrabook review

   Sony making ultrabooks more affordable? Remarkable!

   It’s only natural that manufacturers want to show off their biggest (or in this case, smallest) and best but Sony has spotted the flaw in this plan. By thrusting their fabulously lean but powerful sexy bits in your face all the time, Ultrabooks have gained a reputation for being the Page 3 girls of computing: naughty, vigorous …

   The Big Data revolution: Big Bang or loud noise?

   Analysis Reg survey looks at data analytics, 'magic software'... and much more

   Anyone currently employed in any area of the IT business will be aware, however reluctantly, of the considerable amount of effort being put into marketing ‘Big Data’. Well brace yourselves, there's more of this to come. During August and September of 2012 Freeform Dynamics surveyed 502 IT professional readers of The Register …

   Don't panic, but UK faces BLACKOUTS BY 2015

   Spare electricity supply dwindling - Ofgem

   The UK risks energy shortages by 2015 or 2016, energy regulator Ofgem has predicted. The shortages will primarily be caused by EU environmental legislation forcing the early closure of coal and oil-fired power stations, it said. Its first annual Capacity Assessment [93-page / 1.9MB PDF] projects that electricity margins, or …

   Psst! Don't tell anyone, but HP is silently improving its IBRIX filer

   This is strictly between us

   HP has quietly released a three-times faster IBRIX filer, the X9730, replacing the previous model. HP bought IBRIX and its parallelised scale-out file server technology for an unrevealed price in July 2009. The technology appeared in HP's X9000 line of products. These compete with EMC's Isilon scale-out filers, and also with …

   EU green-lights 'copyright land grab' law on orphan work

   Euro states ordered to join free-for-all

   EU ministers backed new laws to allow libraries, museums and universities - among other organisations - to digitise works that have become "orphaned" from their creators. The Council of Minister's formal adoption of the EU's Directive on orphan works [29-page 154KB PDF] means that member states will now have to implement the …

   Google launches credit card in UK

   Business-only Barclaycard-in-disguise will encourage AdWords purchase

   Businesses in the United Kingdom have become the first in the world to have the chance of obtaining a Google credit card. The Google AdWords Business Credit card” to give the plastic its formal name, is a tool the Chocolate Factory hopes small business will use to rack up big bills for online ads they don't have the cash to …

   IT shops boycott Bangalore strike

   Wipro office targeted by protestors as dispute over water rights rages

   India's IT capital, Bangalore, ground to a halt on Saturday after protests over the allocation of water. The reason for the protests is a decision that one Indian State, Karnataka, must allocate water from the Kaveri river to another State, Tamil Nadu. Karanatakans think that's a bad idea as the State has a water shortage. The …

   WoW cities wiped out by 'exploit'

   Blizzard pounces after thousands 'die'

   World of Warcraft players in Europe experienced an unpleasant Sunday afternoon, after an "exploit" resulted in the death of every character in several cities. Within hours of the incident, the game's publisher Blizzard issued a statement declaring it an “exploit” that has “has ... been hotfixed, so it should not be repeatable …

   Deep-sea worm recalls Star Wars favourite

   This Yoda, no spine has

   A deep-ocean research mission along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge has yielded up an oddity: an invertebrate that called to mind the venerable Jedi, Yoda. Yoda purpurata – that is, purple Yoda – is one of three new species of acorn worm the mission discovered, as reported in the current issue of Invertebrate Biology. Don't whisper …

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