The Register

Acorn alumni to toast tech pioneer's 30th anniversary

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 06:43:05 GMT

Reunion bash planned

Some 400 staffers from that flag bearer of the 1980s UK home computing revolution, Acorn, are to gather next month to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the firm's foundation.…

Dabs.com courier goes titsup

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 06:02:03 GMT

BT insists orders will be delivered

Online retailer Dabs.com has told customers to hang fire for a few days while orders due to be delivered by Amtrak are reassigned to another courier.…

Google stretching underwater comms cable?

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:03:31 GMT

To Guam and beyond

It looks like Google is prepping another underwater comms cable.…

Judah 'Visual Voicemail' Klausner sues Google, Verizon, Citrix...

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:03:03 GMT

Rent due again?

Suing communication providers over alleged patent infringements has worked pretty well for Judah Klausner.…

Microsoft and Immersion settle settlement settlement

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 22:02:00 GMT

The semantics of force feedback

Microsoft and the force-feedback technology firm, Immersion, appear to have come to final terms after six years of suing each other.…

Hijacking huge chunks of the internet - a new How To

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:16:50 GMT

It's easy. Those tubes are busted

More evidence that the intertubes are fundamentally broken has been served up by Wired.com in an article laying out a technique to surreptitiously hijack huge chunks of the internet and monitor or even modify unencrypted traffic before it reaches its intended destination.…

Feds cuff blogger for Guns N' Roses leak

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 20:48:29 GMT

Chinese Democracy, American Extremism

The FBI has arrested a 27-year-old American blogger for leaking some unreleased Guns N' Roses tunes to the internet.…

Google's MapReduce suddenly not so backward

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 20:46:46 GMT

SQL tools plug gaps

What was seen as a major hole in Google's MapReduce database technology has been plugged, not once but twice. In the same week.…

AMD's dual-core 'Kuma' specs listed?

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 18:49:58 GMT

German spies Phenom X2

Quite contrary to rumors AMD scrapped its plans to bring dual-core K10 parts to the market, the chip maker may have already begun selling the line to its partners on the sly.…

Finnish blogger amputates Google from Google

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 18:45:27 GMT

A road map for regulators of the future

Getting a head start on the world's antitrust regulators, an astute Finn is offering a bastardized version of Google's search engine that ignores sites served up by Google itself.…

Android's missing Bluetooth: Limitations laid out

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:43:03 GMT

Parlez-vous GoogleTalk? Er, no

Android developers have admitted that Google's mobile phone platform won't support GoogleTalk in its first version, and that Bluetooth support will be severely limited.…

Brit firm to demo serious flying robo-saucer in 2009

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:26:37 GMT

Peterborough Attacks

A small British company developing a unique form of hovering aircraft says it will soon demonstrate a new and much more serious version of its technology.…

MS beefs up WinXP Pro's anti-piracy nagware

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:05:51 GMT

More false positives ahoy?

Microsoft wants to rein in more Windows XP pirates over the coming weeks, by pushing out a new version of its “nagware” which detects when a machine is running a fake copy of the OS.…

British boffins perfect process to make any item '100% waterproof'

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 12:03:46 GMT

Gore-Tex killer?

UK company Plasma Product Innovations (P2i) today demonstrated a chemical process it claims can render any material 100 per cent waterproof.…

Tech repair shop to the UK flees Manchester

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 11:58:34 GMT

130 redundancies at A Novo UK

A Novo UK, which services mobile phones, monitors and set-top boxes, is laying off at least 130 staff and closing its Manchester repair centre.…

Election watchdog makes ID card U-turn

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 11:47:49 GMT

Unnecessary for fraud clampdown

UK election scrutineers are pushing for polling stations to require tougher proof of identity to reduce the risk of ballot-rigging, but do not want voters to be forced to bring photo ID.…

Credit crunch bites into mobile sales

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 11:25:35 GMT

Handset sales continue to soar

Global mobile phone sales will exceed 1.2bn handsets this year, although tough economic conditions are already biting into phone sales, market watcher Gartner has warned.…

Euro guidelines will allow Bluetooth spam

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 11:02:23 GMT

But UK punters still protected

The Mobile Marketing Association has published its guidelines for advertising pushed over Bluetooth connections, and considers anyone who hasn't opted out to be fair game for spammers.…

Nokia 6210 Navigator phone

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 11:02:03 GMT

Modest GPS-enabled mobile from Nokia

Review The upgraded successor to last year’s 6110 Navigator, the 6210 is a tidy slider-design handset, bearing more than a passing resemblance in looks and specs to the recently-launched 6220 Classic.…

Microsoft dishes dirt on IE8 'pr0n mode'

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 10:58:32 GMT

'Off the record' browsing is go

Microsoft has outlined the new privacy tools available in its forthcoming browser Internet Explorer 8 (IE8).…

Portsmouth punts naval boy-on-boy to innocent kiddies

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 10:51:56 GMT

Rum, sodomy and the lash

Avast there and unfurl the Twat-O-Tron ye scurvy landlubbers of Middle England, lest Portsmouth Historic Dockyard make barrel boys of ye all, damn their eyes:…

iPhone passwords not worth the paper they're written on

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 10:42:39 GMT

Push two keys to bypass password

iPhones protected by a password aren't actually protected at all, as just by pressing a few keys a miscreant can access all the phone's functions without needing the password at all.…

Serco buys US government reseller

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 10:20:25 GMT

Playing with the big boys now

Serco is to acquire SI International, an IT reseller specialising in the US federal market, for $423m cash - a 40 per cent premium on SI's closing price on NASDAQ yesterday. Serco is also asssuming net debt of $87.3m, so the enterprise value of the deal is $510m - a multiple of 12.3 on forecast EBITDA for 2008.…

McCain: Keep Shuttle flying, don't trust Russia

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 09:54:49 GMT

Show us the money, says NASA

Presidential contender John McCain and two other bigshot Republican senators have written to George Bush urging that NASA keep the Space Shuttle fleet alive beyond 2010. The politicians are concerned about US reliance on Russia for manned space transport in the early years of the next decade.…

Samsung samples SSDs for SCCs

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 09:54:04 GMT

32GB unit offers speed boost

Samsung has begun punting a compact 32GB solid-state drive card at makers of Small, Cheap Computers.…

Electoral officers oppose edited register

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 09:49:40 GMT

Local gov hates marketeers

Most local authority electoral officers support the information commissioner's recommendation to scrap the edited electoral roll, according to a new survey.…

Dell turns to Linux, Atom for budget biz boxes

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 09:34:49 GMT

Vostro revamped

Dell still hasn't formally announced its Eee PC rival but it did at least unveil some cheap Linux machines today based on Intel's Atom processor - the forecast revamp to its Vostro budget business box line-up.…

Apple slapped for dodgy ads

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 08:56:07 GMT

Jesusphone fails ASA test

The Advertising Standards Authority has told Apple UK not to show an advert which suggested the iPhone contained "all parts of the internet" any more.…

iPhone hackers post latest jailbreak tool

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 08:50:25 GMT

Problems solved?

The iPhone Dev Team has posted PwnageTool 2.0.3.1, a revised version of the iPhone hacking utility released yesterday then quickly removed.…

UK etailer punts bovine coitus thumb drive

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 01:55:02 GMT

'A niche market'

An army of online deal seekers has called for a boycott of Boffer.co.uk, after the "daily deal" site fooled them into coveting a non-existent bovine sex device.…

US data breaches booming in '08

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:22:41 GMT

Have you seen my identity?

The number of personal information leaks reported in the US this year have already exceeded the total amount in all of 2007, San Diego-based Identity Theft Resource Center said today.…

CERT: Linux servers under 'Phalanx' attack

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:13:09 GMT

Stolen keys unlock back door

Attacks in the wild are under way against Linux systems with compromised SSH keys, the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team is warning.…

Houston, we have a virus

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 22:20:42 GMT

Worm infects International Space Station laptops

A computer worm that ferrets out passwords managed to stow away on laptops aboard the International Space Station, NASA has confirmed. It is not the first time a NASA computer has become infected.…

Hackintosh maker bites back at Apple

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 22:14:36 GMT

Calls for death of Mac EULA

Psystar, the company that sells open systems capable of running Mac OS X, plans to fight back against the copyright infringement lawsuit Apple has filed against it.…

Embarcadero rallies on Windows and web with CodeGear

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:58:00 GMT

Microsoft not the only fruit

Embarcadero Technologies has updated its recently acquired CodeGear Rapid Application Development (RAD) suite and languages for Windows.…

Hardware hackers get second Bugs bite

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:53:25 GMT

Modular Linux goodies return

Hardware hackers can soon start building their own Linux gadgets with a fresh batch of Lego-like building blocks from Bug Labs.…

AT&T freshens tourist-trapping iPhone data plans

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:33:49 GMT

'You want savings? Pay us an extra hundred'

US telco giant AT&T has announced two new international data plans for the Jesus Phone, saying they'll save Americans "hundreds of dollars" on journeys abroad. But we all know this is just another way for the company to hold your wallet hostage.…

EMC's Celerra starts smaller and gets cheaper

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:30:43 GMT

Entry-level replaces Fibre Channel with SAS

Just 12 months after introducing the Celerra NS20, EMC has increased its capacity by 50 percent, and replaced its entry level role with a cheaper NX4 model.…

China pardons iTunes (but not Sting)

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:45:37 GMT

Music store returns - minus 'Songs for Tibet'

The People's Republic has pardoned iTunes after access to the online music store was apparently blocked in reaction to selling a new Tibet-themed album during the Olympic games.…

Crypto guru thinks outside the box with Cube attack

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:17:51 GMT

Stream ciphers easily split (maybe)

Senior cryptologist Adi Shamir is developing a new attack for rooting out potential weaknesses in encryption ciphers, dubbed the Cube Attack.…

Scumbags punt Trojan with baby kidnap lure

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:11:15 GMT

A new low

With a sick email malware campaign, pond dwelling scumbags are claiming to have kidnapped the children of would-be targets of infection.…

Apple goes auntie over slasher comic

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:00:32 GMT

Murders Murderdrome

Murderdrome is a comic published exclusively for the iPhone and iPod Touch, which makes its removal from iTunes something of a problem for publishers Infurious and bodes badly for their comic-rendering application.…

DARPA in Tom'n'Jerry robo-brain quest

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:09:21 GMT

First they came for the mice; and I said nothing

Pentagon boffinry chiefs are on the verge of inking a deal which could see US forces equipped with "neuromorphic" imitation brain modules, each potentially as intelligent as a cat.…

Fringe box office FAIL pushes sales down 10%

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:46:33 GMT

Bad weather, Olympics, leaves on line credit crunch blamed

Ticket sales at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe were down ten per cent this year, in part because of the technical failure of its box office system.…

Minister warns of national grid hack threat

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:52:28 GMT

And theft of commercial secrets

A UK government minister has warned that cyber-terrorists were attempting to take out the national grid.…

Amazon goes on Shelfari

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:40:28 GMT

Acquires facebooky wooky start-up?

Amazon.com is buying Shelfari – that is, according to the Seattle social networking start-up, but for now the online retail giant is keeping mum about the deal.…

Joss-sticks increase cancer risk: Official

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:35:24 GMT

Scientists issue incense fug health warning

Researchers have warned that burning joss-sticks and incense is associated with "an increase in some types of lung cancer, and cancers of the upper respiratory tract, such as throat and mouth cancer", the Guardian reports.…

Wind turbines put bats under (low) pressure

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:09:07 GMT

Scientists probe barotrauma fatalities

A research team from the University of Calgary has found that a large percentage of bat fatalities at wind turbine sites are caused by a sudden drop in air pressure around the turbine blades, the BBC reports.…

Citrix tries to woo crowds with XenApp 5

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:39:21 GMT

Lands next month

Citrix Systems yesterday announced the imminent release of XenApp 5, in its latest attempt to strengthen its hold on the data centre and desktop virtualisation market.…

Kindle fails to set light to unsold e-book pile

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:11:43 GMT

Rumours of death of paper greatly exaggerated

The humble paper-based book isn't burnt just yet. Amazon is keeping schtum as to how many e-books it has sold, but evidence is mounting that predictions of iPod-grade sales and billion-dollar revenues were a smidge optimistic.…