Global Tech News
From: The Register
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/
Floating IT lab mimics multi-tiered networks
Is it real? Or is it Skytap?
Skytap - the Jeff Bezos-backed startup that lets you mimic internal IT infrastructure in the so-called cloud - has introduced a new set of automation tools designed to facilitate the creation of complex network toplogies on its floating interwebs service.…
Fraud-prevention service ponies up $12m for 'false' ads
Agrees to safeguard customer data
An Arizona company that sells services designed to prevent identity theft has agreed to pay $12m to settle charges it oversold their effectiveness and didn't adequately protect sensitive customer data.…
Pillar juices flash drive box
Reliability boost roadmap
Pillar Data Axiom storage arrays can go a whole lot faster, use less energy, and be more reliable, thanks to a range of new features from flash drive enclosures to pre-emptive copies.…
Apple's draconian developer docs revealed
The first rule of iPhone Club is...
In the 1999 movie Fight Club, Brad Pitt famously tells a huddle of pugilistic aspirants: "The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club."…
It's official: Adobe Reader is world's most-exploited app
The new Microsoft
Adobe's ubiquitous Reader application has replaced Microsoft Word as the program that's most often targeted in malware campaigns, according to figures compiled by F-Secure.…
Cisco 'forever changes internet' with...a router
322 Tbps of bandwidth (not quite) here
How will Cisco "forever change the internet"? With a new router.…
Google tests TV set-top search, says report
Satellite TV meets YouTube meets online ad machine
Google is privately testing a television set-top box that lets users search satellite TV programming as well as video websites like its very own YouTube, according to a new report.…
New Internet Explorer code-execution attacks go wild
IE 6 and 7 users targeted
Online thugs are exploiting a security bug in earlier versions of Internet Explorer that allows them to remotely execute malicious code, Microsoft warned on Tuesday.…
Dell intros restyled biz laptops
Vostro 3000 line debuts
Dell has introduced a set of new Vostro notebooks, pitching the products as "a range of new thin, lightweight and durable laptop computers".…
FA launches security probe after England team bugged
Lancaster Gate-gate
Reported attempts to sell recordings of conversations between England squad players and coaches have sparked a security breach investigation at the FA.…
Terracotta's Ehcache back-ends Hibernate
Web Sessions gets some tweaks, too
If you want to make money, and perhaps especially in the open source software racket, you have to keep improving your software to help it get more widely adopted among enterprise customers who get nervous if they don't hand over big wads of cash to someone to babysit the code. That's why Terracotta, a maker of systems programs that help Java applications scale, has made a number of acquisitions and has tweaked two key programs in its portfolio.…
Smartphone app botnet experiment blows up a storm
WeatherFist shows phone vulnerability, devs claim
Security researchers fooled nearly 8,000 iPhone and Android users into joining a mobile smartphone "botnet" under the guise of installing an apparently innocuous weather app.…
Nokia killed free navigation, alleges EU complaint
The fall of Nav4All
A customer of the late Nav4All has filed a complaint with the EU, alleging that Nokia abused its market position to drive the competition out of business.…
Doctors tell government to stop the health records roll-out
SCR ain't ready for primetime
The British Medical Association is calling on the Department of Health to suspend the roll-out of summary care records.…
Open source boss quits Sun Oracle
Simon Phipps rides out of Ellison town
Sun Microsystems' veteran Simon Phipps quit his chief open source officer post at the Oracle-owned company yesterday.…
Tories ask: Why BBC3, BBC4?
Is this the wrong question?
Conservative culture front bencher Jeremy Hunt is asking what’s the point of BBC3 and BBC4? It’s a good time to ask the question. In an interview with the Independent, Hunt queried why £100m was being spent, merely to attract "very, very small" audiences.…
Northerners give up ID cards for Lent figures suggest
Has gov gotten cold feet on ID scanning centres?
Comment The initial rush to join the government's ID card scheme appears to have eased, with applications from people in the Northwest running at an average of as little as 14.5 per working day.…
Android - the winning formula for tablets and netbooks?
It's the only game in town, says the maker of the other iPad
What might the iPad have been? Apple announced it as a Magical and Revolutionary Device, defining "an entirely new category". But it actually only addresses a small part of the yawning gap between mobile handsets and notebook computers, where there's still a lot of defining to be done. There's space there for dramatically different reimaginations of the iPhone, for counter-attacks from handset companies, and for diverse devices based on Google's Android.…
Critical bug does a Custer on Apache for Windows
Old warrior clobbered
Older versions of the Windows flavour of Apache's web server software are vulnerable to a critical code injection flaw as well as a pair of lesser security bugs.…
UK still lousy on electronic nosiness
Report shows state of international surveillance heavyweights
A new report highlights a depressingly consistent drift towards ever greater control of the population using new technologies.…
Cisco promises to 'forever change the internet'
Stock jumps as rumors fly
Today will see Cisco making an announcement that it claims will "forever change the internet". The stock market certainly believed it, sending the IP giant's shares to their highest level in more than a year ($26.34) yesterday. Given Cisco's heritage and product strategy it has more likelihood than most of delivering on its claim, but remains tightlipped about the details - sparking rumors from a gigabit wholesale network to an extended wireless core play to a set-top box.…
Kentucky woman breastfeeds sheriff's deputy
Third degree assault rap for 'biohazard' mam squirt
A Kentucky woman cuffed for public intoxication added a third degree assault charge to her rap sheet after allegedly squirting breast milk into a sheriff's deputy's face.…
Employers call for end to Mickey Mouse degrees
Send fewer to uni, charge 'em more
A recruiters group is calling for an end to government targets to get 50 per cent of school leavers involved in higher education.…
Windows 7 speculation claims SP1 will land in Q4 2010
Pretty much slotting into Microsoft's typical roadmap, then...
Microsoft has pulled the release of Windows 7 Service Pack 1 forward to the final quarter of this year, according to a speculative report.…
What's so bad about Samsung's Bada?
Samsung's iPhone pitch comes to life
Samsung has been showing its first Bada phone, able to download applications from Samsung's version of iTunes and nowhere else. But will Bada really challenge Apple and the iPhone?…
Toshiba Satellite U500 Ducati Edition
Superbike performance?
Review When you think of Italian superbike marques, you think of the colour red - a vigorous, powerful, thrusting hue. Yet Toshiba has chosen to deck its Ducati-themed Satellite U500 out in - dare we say it, slightly feminine - white.…
Vodafone ships Mariposa-infected HTC Magic
Android phone comes riddled with bots
Updated Vodafone has been blamed for shipping Mariposa botnet malware and other nasties on a HTC Magic Android smartphones it supplied.…
Tories promise medals not money for science and R&D
Hooverpreneur promises cultural change
James Dyson's policy review for the Tory party calls for cultural changes to put science and engineering at the centre of British society.…
Florida woman prangs car while shaving her privates
Muff driving incident astounds Highway Patrol
A Florida Highway Patrol officer has admitted his incredulity at a woman who pranged her car while shaving her privates.…
Virtualisation and the private cloud
At last, the C word
Lab IT, like every industry, is from time to time compelled by those with PR budgets to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous marketing. Over the course of the last two years we have witnessed one of the most over-hyped marketing terms being pushed with such vigour that it is today almost impossible to speak with any vendor without them claiming their solutions are designed to help customers make an inevitable transition to using cloud services.…
Intel Euro boss pledges Brussels-friendly marketing funds
Still got a whole lot of love for white box sellers
Intel will continue to offer coop marketing funds and discounts to the channel on Europe whatever the outcome of its appeal against a Brussels ruling that it had abused its monopoly.…
Vodafone cuts more staff
More shop assistants, fewer management
Vodafone will be 375 heads smaller by the end of March, though in the next few months company will apparently be recruiting an additional 170 "customer facing" individuals.…
Daily Mail commentard out-tw*ts the Tw*t-O-Tron
Indignation logic short-circuit threatens democracy
Fans of the Twat-O-Tron will be delighted and disturbed in equal measure to learn that one Daily Mail commentard has managed to surpass the hideous turdspurts which emanate from Middle England's automated indignation generator.…
Mobile-phone wallet stymied by lack of understanding
Either that or people just don't care
The financial industry's lack of understanding is what's preventing us from using our phones to pay for things, so the Mobey Forum is going to educate it.…
Tilera wins VC from Broadcom, Quanta, NTT
Cash for homegrown multicores
Last November, El Reg told you about how multicore chip maker Tilera was lining up its third round of venture capital funding, a $25m pile of cash that would include $10m from Taiwanese PC maker and server wannabe Quanta Computer. On Monday, when the funding finally closed, it turned out that chip maker Broadcom and the financing arm of Japanese telco NTT are also kicking in some dough.…
Yellow Dog Linux licks CUDA
Nvidia GPUs sit up and bark
Remember Terra Soft and its Yellow Dog Linux for Power processors?…
Nazi-doodlebug-powered father of all paintball guns patented
Invention made in 'exploding turnip' town. Coincidence?
Intriguing and/or terrifying news from the world of paintballing today, as it has emerged that an inventor in America has been granted a patent on a fearsomely powerful new paintball gun, powered by the same "bunker buster" principle as secret World War II Nazi superweapons.…
Android native code kit apes iPhone game 3D
Graphics beyond Java
Google has opened the door to iPhone-like 3D games on certain Android handsets, offering support for the OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics standard with its latest Android Native Development Kit (NDK).…
US spreads Web2.0rhea to Iran, Sudan, Cuba
This Tweet kills fascists
US citizens are now free to invite Iranian, Sudanese, and Cuban citizens into the Web2.0rhea revolution.…
Microsoft rejiggers EU browser ballot after complaints
Random choices now random
Microsoft has updated the algorithm used to generate the browser ballot screen it's pushing out to certain Windows users in the European Union, after some complained that the ostensibly random ballot was far from random.…
Thailand approves extradition of credit card hack suspect
Losses top $153m
A criminal court in Thailand has approved the extradition to the US of a Malaysian man suspected of participating in credit card thefts of more than $152m, according to a local news report.…
Open source webdesktopmobile kit refreshes for iPhone, Android
Appcelerator appcelerates
Appcelerator has taken the beta tag off its open source Titanium development kit, a means of building native desktop and mobile applications using traditional web-development tools such as JavaScript, Python, Ruby on Rails, html and CSS.…
Steve Jobs says 'No' to iPhone-to-iPad tether
(One) word from the mountaintop
Steve Jobs has spoken: Apple's "magical and revolutionary" iPad will not allow iPhone-to-iPad 3G tethering.…
Intel investigates after retailer sold fake CPUs
'Sochet' LGA not as good as real thing
Updated Intel says it's investigating the sale of fake desktop processors by online electronics retailer Newegg in a scandal that's prompting outrage among customers and recriminations among sellers.…
'Crazy' man cuffed for plotting cyber extortion scheme
Threatened to drag firm 'through the muddiest of waters'
A California man was charged with extortion after he allegedly threatened to send millions of emails and social networking messages that maligned a large life insurance company unless he was paid almost $200,000.…
iSuppli: Semi recovery a 'false spring'
2010 revenues to barely exceed 2007
A consensus is evolving that the semiconductor industry is going to recover mightily in 2010. But the analysts at iSuppli want to remind everyone that things are only going to feel so good this year because they were so bad in late 2008 and through 2009.…
ASA to take over Facebook, Twitter regulation
Remit to include social media
Advertising regulator the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) will take over the regulation of companies' social networking pages by the end of the year, according to advertising industry proposals.…
UK.gov urged to slash DNA retention plan
Database rejig 'not enough' for human rights
Government plans designed to bring the National DNA Database in line with human rights legislation have been criticised today by an influential group of MPs as not going far enough.…
Ubisoft undone by anti-DRM DDoS storm
Protests over anti-piracy controls hobble games firm
Ubisoft has confirmed its rights management servers were hit by a fierce DDoS attack over the weekend that left some customers unable to play its games for much of Sunday.…
BBC protects 'unique' 1Xtra listeners from radio cull
All gone a bit Pete Tong Logan's Run at 6Music
The BBC has justified 1Xtra’s survival in the Corporation’s recent biz strategy cull by claiming that the station’s “unique” audience, which is made up of fewer listeners than death row candidate 6Music, is worthy of more investment.…