25th > November > 2009 Archive
Google eyeballs to track Tivo watchers
Google has inked a deal with digital video recorder (DVR) outfit Tivo that lets the search firm snoop on audience numbers as a way of fueling its TV advertising business.
Climate change hackers leave breadcrumb trail
The hackers who leaked more than 1,000 emails from one of the top climate research centers may have used an open proxy to cover their tracks, but that doesn't mean authorities can't figure out who they are.
Billionaire floats eco dream on sailing soda bottles
By now, David de Rothschild is used to being cast as the eccentric visionary whose well-meaning crusade to save the world's oceans is overshadowed by a lack of execution - or at least naiveté.
Apple tops Google as UK 'Thought Leader'
Apple has replaced Google as the top "Business Thought Leader" in the UK, according to a survey of 1,000 Blighty-based "Key Opinion Leaders."
Data Direct offers native file system
DataDirect, a shipper of very high-speed block-access storage to the high performance computing (HPC) and media worlds, is now offering native file access.
ReviewWhile the price and diversity of e-book readers is still some way off achieving the sort of critical mass that put an MP3 player in nearly pocket, the number of devices appearing on the market is increasing at a healthy rate.
Unified networking: Reality or a marketing myth?
We all know that the IT Infrastructure has a life of its own. In the vast majority of organisations the infrastructure evolves over time rather than being designed as a whole. This applie s to all of the underlying components: the servers, the storage and -an area very easy to overlook - the network or networks that tie everything together.
1,024 TV Re-Runs at 1.5GB/sec
As we’re slowly gathering our wits again after a week of supercomputing fun at SC09, a story from Chris Mellor caught our eye this morning. Chris was writing about Fusion I/O and its newest SSD (Solid State Drive) product, the Fusion ioDrive Octal. These units provide up to 5TB raw storage and can push up to 800,000 IOPS.
Feral dromedaries besiege Oz Outback town
An Oz Outback community is battling to regain control of its town from a 6,000-strong feral camel invasion, which has seen the thirsty dromedaries cause "chaos" in their search for water.
Microsoft loses top beancounter
Microsoft is saying goodbye to its chief beancounter, Chris Liddell, after four and a half years in the post.
Eat frozen food and avoid line-caught fish, says eco study
Enviro-profs studying the ecological impact of food production have come out with some counter-intuitive results. According to a new study, it is greener to eat frozen salmon than fresh, and catching fish en masse in nets does less damage to the planet than taking just a few using hooks and lines.
Tivo to return to UK in 2010
Virgin Media has announced impending plans to deliver Tivo to UK homes.
Xiotech definitely not using SSDs in near future
A Xiotech blog post says unequivocally that Xiotech will not be using solid state drives (SSDs) in its Emprise arrays in the near future.
EMC stages $100m international reorganisation
EMC is reorganising its various international operations into a single holding company and repatriating $4bn to EMC USA at a cost of $100m in taxes.
Advertisers say new cookie law met by browser settings
Advertising trade bodies have claimed that a new law passed this week by the European Parliament will not require website publishers to ask permission to put cookies on a user's computer. They argue that browser settings will imply consent.
iPhone comes to Tesco
Tesco is planning to offer the iPhone 3G and 3GS, hopefully before Christmas, proving that Apple's status symbol is now the phone of the people.
MSI preps slim laptop with AMD Neo X2 chippery
MSI has rolled out a new member of its X family of skinny notebooks. This one has a AMD Neo X2 dual-core processor, proving that Intel won't have the thin'n'light laptop market all to itself.
Apple adds Tesco as iPhone partner
It already sells milk, bread, booze, car insurance and furniture. Now supermarket behemoth Tesco is to add the Apple iPhone to its growing inventory.
RIPA III: A legislative turkey comes home to roost
CommentThe first conviction of a man under the draconian powers of RIPA Part III tragically bears out a prediction I made at the time: that these powers would do little or nothing to tackle serious crime or terror, but would create a power the police could use to harass people and undermine their right to remain silent.
The rise of targeted attacks
WebcastEarlier this month Paul Wood of MessageLabs joined Freeform Dynamics’ Jon Collins in the Reg studio to discuss targeted attacks and their affect on the modern business.
HP rolls out business-friendly smartphone
We haven’t heard much about HP’s iPaq 'once PDA, now smartphone' range for a while, but now it’s back – as a “feature-rich...world phone”, whatever that means.
BBC storm cockup: Wrong day's shipping forecast read
Proof, if it were needed, that voice in general and the BBC in particular are foolish ways to transmit important information was provided by Radio 4 earlier this month when an announcer read out the shipping forecast for the wrong day - during one of the stormiest weekends of the year.
Mozilla glares at Microsoft, chews on Direct2D graphics cud
Mozilla has proclaimed that the race is on to beat Microsoft to the post in its efforts to insert Direct2D support into the next version of its Internet Explorer browser.
Fring brings Skype video calls to mobile
Skype-gateway-to-mobile providers Fring have added support for a selection of S60 devices, bringing free video calling to Symbian handsets.
Apple wants life ban for clone maker
Apple is seeking a permanent injunction to stop Psystar ever again selling cloned Mac software or hardware.
Superconductor forcefield to shield re-entering spacecraft?
Space boffins have hatched a plan to test their radical new superconductor magnet forcefield re-entry heatshield technology by firing it into space from a Russian submarine.
UK.gov rejects calls to open up on ContactPoint security
The UK government has turned down an opposition request to explain why it has refused to publish a full security report into ContactPoint, the controversial child protection database.
Offline Gmail kisses up to attachments - at last
Google has sat up and listened to users griping about the lack of an attachments feature in its offline version of Gmail by finally adding the option.
OCZ promising USB 3 desktop SSD
The dreary wait for slow desktop and notebook booting could be halted in its tracks for those with USB 3 interfaces and and cash, as OCZ is developing a fast and large capacity USB 3 SSD.
US senators tell EC: Butt out of Oracle-Sun
John Kerry, Orrin Hatch and 57 other senators have written to the European Commission accusing it of taking too long to approve Oracle's takeover of Sun in order to deliberately damage US business.
Nokia E72 smartphone
ReviewThe E72 is the latest in Nokia’s line of Qwerty handsets, beefing up the popular E71 with a slightly sleeker look, improved software and some interface tweaks. It’s very slim – only just over 1cm thick, 58.3mm wide, and 114 tall, weighing 128g. The 2.36in screen is only QVGA, though arguably on a unit this size, a higher resolution wouldn’t make much difference.
US Air Force orders 2200 Sony PS3s
The US Air Force plans to buy a whopping 2200 PlayStation 3 games consoles which it will use to expand an existing PS3-based supercomputer.
Cathay Pacific clobbered by kaput khazis
Airbus and Cathay Pacific engineers are "looking into" a series of blocked lav incidents on the airline's A330 and A340 aircraft - the worst of which saw one flight diverted with all its toilets out of commission.
Police Intelligence may be a thing of the past
The days of police unlawfully collecting and holding personal information on individuals exercising their legal right to protest may be drawing to a close.
Freesat to get BBC iPlayer on 7 December
Freesat, the free-to-air satellite TV service, has said BBC iPlayer support will be introduced on 7 December.
'Whales can't even hear naval sonar' says Navy boffin
A boffin funded by the US Navy has used a gigantic CT scanner, normally employed for inspecting space rockets, to X-ray the head of a whale. The results apparently indicate that naval sonars can't be the cause of whale beachings, as the mighty cetaceans are unable to hear the relevant frequencies.
Nigel Lawson: Climate science has turned into religion
InterviewOne thing is missing from the Global Warming Policy Foundation, launched at Westminster on Monday, chairman Lord Lawson admitted. Mrs Thatcher's Chancellor for six years acknowledged that there aren't many young people on board. The average age of the Trustees is 74. You could almost say it pits the Old Aged vs the New Agers.
iPhone anti-malware stuck in state of denial
The blaze of publicity that accompanied the release of the first iPhone worms this month has sparked interest in selling anti-malware products for the device. However no such security products currently exist and Apple shows little inclination in licensing any that do get developed.
Man guilty of selling fake chips to US Navy
A 32-year-old California man has pleaded guilty to selling thousands of counterfeit computer processors to the US Navy.
Satyam investigation jacks up fraud bill by 40 per cent
The Satyam Computer Services scandal has flared back into life with allegations that the fraud perpetuated at the firm was 40 per cent bigger than previously thought.
'Black box for buses' datachip survives 900° conflag
Dastardly terrorists and/or incompetent drivers can no longer hope that the evidence of their catastrophic misdeeds, recorded by security cameras aboard public transport, will be erased in the hellish conflagrations following train wrecks and bus crashes.
9/11 pager messages released on Wikileaks
Over half a million intercepted pager messages sent on 11 September 2001 are being released by Wikileaks.
Strap-on jetwing birdman does an Icarus into Straits of Gibraltar
Renowned backpack birdman Yves Rossy has suffered yet another mishap during an attempt to fly across the Straits of Gibraltar. Windy conditions were blamed by organisers after the Swiss daredevil plunged into the sea minutes after leaping from a small aircraft above Morocco, having intended to land in Spain.
New York to beam disaster alerts to Xbox gamers
Evading terrorists and nuclear attacks on your Xbox 360 looks set to become a real-world challenge as well as a virtual one. New York State (NYS) has begun trialling use of the console as an emergency broadcast system for disasters.
Evaluating enterprise application software
A seasoned ERP salesman coaching a junior colleague once said: “The trick, my boy, is to avoid the IT department like the plague for as long as possible, as they’ll just make your life complicated by asking lots of irrelevant geeky questions. Win the hearts and minds of the business people first by convincing them the software will meet their needs, then IT will have no choice but to follow."
Wikipedia bans Volvo's IT over racist rants
Wikipedia has banned editing from machines inside Volvo Information Technology - the outfit that operates the Swedish auto maker's IT infrastructure - after someone in the organization vandalized the free encyclopedia with a pair of profanity-laden racist rants.
Reg readers reveal their holiday toilet texting plans
As our US readers get ready to head home for the holidays and our UK readers face up to the fact that Christmas/Yule/2010 is just around the corner, it's time to deliver the final word on the issue of toilet texting.
Apple sues over knock-off power bricks
Apple has sued a California company for alleging infringing a laptop AC-adapter patent granted to Cupertino in 2003.
Why can't Google be more like Microsoft?
Jeff Haynie has a wish. He wishes that when building an operating system, Google was as open as Microsoft. Or at least as open as Apple.
ICANN condemns registry DNS redirection
The group that oversees the internet's address system is taking a hard stance against domain name registries that redirect internet users to third-party sites when a non-existent URL is typed.