Disk demand after Thai floods drains away - unlike Seagate's coffers

Seagate may not have done as well as it had hoped to do in its latest quarter, which was down on the previous three months, but its $1bn earnings are still much, much better than a year ago.

The disk drive dealer also defied industry speculation by failing to announce an OCZ acquisition. But it did say it could buy an SSD supplier.

Western Digital's revenues were higher, of course, but Seagate is still the disk drive industry leader on an annual revenue basis. Seagate has a new SSD is coming, co-developed with Samsung, and more hybrid drives will appear.

More here - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/31/seagate_q4_fy2012/

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Google adds handwriting to mobile search site

Fondleslab not getting enough love? Google has unveiled a new way to tickle your favorite shiny object, in the form of handwriting recognition for its search homepage.
With the new Handwrite feature enabled, punters who visit Google.com with their mobiles can draw with their fingers anywhere on their device screens and have their writing converted to text in the search box, the Chocolate Factory announced on Thursday.

The new feature works only on the mobile version of Google.com, and then only for handsets running Android 2.3 or later, tablets running Android 4.0 or later, and Apple devices running iOS 5 and up.

The handwriting recognition works in addition to the onscreen keyboard, rather than as a replacement for it, and it can be switched on and off via the Settings menu, located at the bottom of the homepage.
The search giant says Handwrite is good for when you're "standing on a busy street corner, in a bumpy taxi ride, talking with a friend, or sitting on the couch" – and presumably anywhere else that fondling seems more appropriate than tapping.

More here :

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/27/google_search_handwrite/

 

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Surface slab WILL rub our PC-making pals the wrong way – Microsoft

Microsoft’s tablet-like-laptop Surface will compete with machines from PC partners, thus jeopardising manufacturers’ commitment to Windows 8. That’s the bottom line revealed in Microsoft’s latest SEC filing for Wall St’s moneymen.
Under the Risk Factors section in Microsoft’s 10-K, here, the company states: “Our Surface devices will compete with products made by our OEM [original equipment manufacturer] partners, which may affect their commitment to our platform."

The company also concedes consumers might hold off buying Windows-based tablets.

More here - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/27/microsoft_surface_threatens_oem_relations/

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RIP Andre Hedrick: The engineer who kept the PC open

Obit Andre Hedrick, a principal engineer and operating system architect at Cisco Systems and a Linux kernel contributor, has died. He leaves behind a wife, four young children and many friends.

Andre made a significant contribution to personal computing history in a way few people fully realise.

In 2000, Andre was working for SuSE in Oakland and was looking after the Linux ATA subsystem, the operating system's interface with industry-standard hard disks. He was also a member of the ANSI sub-committee, T13, which defined the standard for ATA disks.

The committee was presented with proposals to incorporate a sophisticated piracy-thwarting system called CPRM, or Content Protection for Recordable Media, devised at IBM's Almaden Lab. The proposal was tabled by Intel and a group of three hard drive manufacturers: Toshiba, Matsushita (aka Panasonic) and IBM. The cryptographic system proposed was vastly more ambitious than the SDMI watermarking initiative for music, which by then had floundered.

More here - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/26/andre_hedrick/


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Dell uncloaks trio of muscular mobile workstations

Dell has introduced a trio of new Precision Mobile Workstations, with the 17-inch top-of-the-line models offering such goodies as Intel Core i7 Extreme processors, 32GB of 1866MHz RAM, Nvidia 3D Vision Pro technology, a raft of graphics-chippery choices hooked up via third-generation PCIe x16, and four storage bays that support RAID 0, 1, and 5.

"We claim the engineering space," Dell's Precision Workstation marketing director Greg Weir told The Reg, citing users of burly notebooks in such disciplines as automotive and aircraft design, architecture, and jet-engine design. "There's a ton of people in engineering," he said, "so I'm just hitting the highlights."

In addition to engineers, Weir told us that the Precision Workstations have also found fans among media and entertainment content creators, including "roving consultants who go from one studio to the next, plus research scientists, geologists, oil-derrick drill chiefs, and the like – anybody who needs high-performance CPUs and GPUs, but in a mobile package.

More here - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/24/dell_precision_workstations/

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Buzz: iPhone 5 arrives September 21, demand 'unprecedented'

Apple's highly anticipated iPhone 5 – or whatever the marketeers at Cupertino choose to call it – will be released on September 21, according to the iPhone rumor du jour. In addition, a new survey shows the pent-up demand for it to be "unprecedented."
A Monday article on the French-language website App4Phone (Google translation here) cites information from a Chinese source – well, en provenance d'une source chinoise, to be exact – who says its release date will be September 21.

More here !  - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/23/iphone_5_release_date/

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Lazy password reuse opens Brits to crooks' penetration

The average Brit maintains 26 online accounts but only uses five different passwords to keep them secure.

A poll of 2,000 by Experian found that one in four people uses a single password for the majority of profiles, and one in 25 stick with the same one for ALL their accounts. In addition to chronic password reuse, failing to close unused accounts poses an addition privacy risk.

Two-thirds of those surveyed (66 per cent) copped to having defunct profiles which hold valuable personal and financial information – including social network profiles (26 per cent), email addresses (18 per cent) and shopping accounts (21 per cent).

Leaked personal information opens the doors to identity fraud, a crime suffered by an estimated two million UK citizens. About 90 per cent of the 12 million pieces of personal information illegally traded online globally between January and April this year involved password and login combinations, according to figures from Experian's identity web monitoring service.

More here - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/20/password_reuse_survey/

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Microsoft picks October 26 for Windows 8 launch

Mark October 26th down in your diary: that's the day Microsoft has chosen to release Windows 8 into the wild.

Windows leader Steve Sinofsky revealed the release date at Microsoft's annual sales meeting today and Redmond quickly emitted an organic, engaging, and convincingly human blog post with the news and the image below to confirm the date.

More here !  - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/19/windows_8_general_availability_october_26th/

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iPads And Downturn Hammer Intel PC Chip Sales

Intel, the world's biggest silicon chipmaker, has reduced its growth forecast amid fears that the wavering global economy will continue to dampen computer sales.

Intel said shaky economies in Europe and the United States, and a growing consumer preference for Apple iPad tablets had been taking a toll on the PC industry.

Revenue growth forecasts for Intel have been cut from between 3 and 5%, down from a prior forecast of "high single-digit growth".

Intel chief financial officer Stacy Smith said consumer spending in Europe and the United States appeared softer than previously thought.

She said: "At the beginning of the year, we would have expected, along with most economists, that economic growth would start picking up and that would lead to an increase in consumer sales.

"Those expectations are now more muted."

More here - http://news.sky.com/story/961684/ipads-and-downturn-hammer-intel-pc-chip-sales

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'Messiah' Virus Hits Computers In Middle East

A mystery new malware campaign has infected hundreds of computers in the Middle East.

The virus is nicknamed Mahdi - a term referring to a prophesied Islamic messiah - and has hit computers in state buildings, engineering firms, financial houses and centres of academia.

Once installed, it records every move the user makes, stealing login details, taking screenshots of computer activity like email or social networking exchanges, and recording audio.

Over the past eight months, multiple gigabytes of data have been collected from at least 800 computers, according to researchers at anti-virus firm Seculert.#

More here - http://news.sky.com/story/961718/messiah-virus-hits-computers-in-middle-east

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Microsoft pops preview of 'biggest, most ambitious' Office yet

Microsoft has released the last preview of its latest build of Office – the first release of one of Redmond's biggest cash cows.

"This is the first round of Office designed from the get-go for Office to be a service," said CEO Steve Ballmer at a press conference in San Francisco. "We've transformed Office to embrace design concepts shown in Windows 8 and Phone 8 and in Metro. This wave of Office is the biggest and most ambitious we've ever done."

More here - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/16/office_2013_preview_release/

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Yahoo! fixes! password! leak! vulnerability!

Yahoo! has fixed the flaw that allowed hackers to scrape the unencrypted passwords of over 450,000 of its customers' accounts.
"We have taken swift action and have now fixed this vulnerability, deployed additional security measures for affected Yahoo! users, enhanced our underlying security controls and are in the process of notifying affected users," Yahoo! said in a statement. "In addition, we will continue to take significant measures to protect our users and their data."

More here ! http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/13/yahoo_fixes_password_hole/

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O2 outage outrage blamed on new Ericsson databas

2 has fixed its poorly mobile network, so now everyone can start asking what went wrong and what the company is going to do about it.

O2's press office isn't responding to queries. However, our understanding from various sources is thatthe day-long outage was caused by the transition from using a traditional Home Location Register (which stores details of the subscribers authorised to use the network) to Ericsson's Centralized User Database (CUDB).

The CUDB is supposed to consolidate user records, supporting additional applications, and provide a single point of access – but on this occasion it appears that it also provided a single point of failure. With the database unavailable, mobiles and other devices were gradually booted off the network.


More here - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/13/o2_outage_cause/


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Anger As O2 Mobile Outage Enters Second Day

Thousands of O2 customers are unable to use their mobile phones for a second day after overnight repair teams failed to fix a fault with the network.

The problems first developed yesterday afternoon at around 1pm and O2 cannot say exactly how many of its 23 million customers are affected.

Customers reported problems with making and receiving phone calls and text messages as well as accessing data services such as the internet.

An O2 spokesperson said overnight: "We can confirm that the problem with our mobile service is due to a fault with one of our network systems, which has meant some mobile phone numbers are not registering correctly on our network.

"We, and our central supplier, have deployed all possible resources and are working through the night to restore service as soon as possible."

More here - http://news.sky.com/story/959137/anger-as-o2-mobile-outage-enters-second-day

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O2, GiffGaff network goes titsup for unlucky punters

Parts of the O2 network have fallen over leaving customers and GiffGaff punters unable to make calls, send texts or surf the web from their phones.
An O2 spokesperson told The Reg that its phones masts were having problems detecting handsets since lunchtime today.

"Our engineers are dealing with the problem as a priority and we hope to restore full service as soon as possible," he said.

The outage isn't discriminating by geography as customers as far apart as London, South Wales and Buckinghamshire were posting on O2's community boards that their phones couldn't find a signal.


More here ! - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/11/o2_giffgaff_network_issues/


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Cisco backs down on cloud control of routers

Cisco has completed its climb-down over who gets to control Linksys routers, it or the people who bought them.
At the start of this week, Cisco updated the firmware of the Linksys EA4500, EA3500, and EA2700 routers so that they could be fully configured using only its Connect Cloud service rather than via local management software, excluding functions such as parental controls and USB storage.

More here - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/06/cisco_connect_cloud_linksys/

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Seagate fscks up: Disk drive sales fall short by $500m

Seagate will miss its fourth quarter's sales target as its competitors recover faster than expected from floods that knackered hard drive supplies.

The storage biz also had a quality-control issue with an enterprise disk product, which reduced shipments by 1.5 million units to 66 million, and increased costs. It issued a preliminary set of quarterly results to prepare Wall Street for the shortfall, adding that it expects to report $4.5bn (£2.9bn) revenues instead of $5bn (£3.2bn) and a 1 per cent fall in its gross margin to 33.6 per cent.

More here ! http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/06/seagate_q4_fy2012/

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NSchanger shutdown may kick 300,000 offline on Monday

An estimated 300,000 computer connections are going to get scrambled when the FBI turns off the command and control servers for the DNSChanger botnet on Monday.

The FBI took control of the botnet in November after identifying its command servers and swapping them out for their own systems – as well as arresting six Estonians accused of running the scam. But it left the botnet running, since shutting it down would have disrupted the connections of the infected systems, which at the botnet's height accounted for over four million computers.

Read more here - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/05/dnschanger_botnet_shutdown/

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Computer error triggers mass rocket launch

Americans love their fireworks on Independence Day, but it is possible to have too much of a good thing. That's what spectators got on July 4 in San Diego, California, when an errant computer triggered every rocket in the city's annual display to launch at once.

See more here ! http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/05/fireworks_computer_error/

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Security boffins brew devilish Android rootkit

Computer scientists have identified a weakness in the Android mobile operating system that allows users to be tricked into silently installing hidden malware.

A research team led by Xuxian Jiang at North Carolina State University discovered that they could redirect a fandroid's touchscreen taps - a technique known as clickjacking - to inject a rootkit that can evade detection and maliciously alter the operation of the device.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/04/poc_android_clickjacking_rootkit/

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Apple pays $60M for iPad trademark in China

Apple has agreed to pay $60 million for ownership of the iPad trademark in China, as part of a settlement with a little-known Chinese firm called Proview that had tried to ban sales of the tablet in the country, according to a local court.


More here - 


http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9228702/Apple_pays_60M_for_iPad_trademark_in_China


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Microsoft silently kills silent, automatic Skype install via Updates

Microsoft has pulled the plug on a Windows update that snuck Skype onto business PCs.
Corporate admins got a nasty surprise on Wednesday when Skype 5.9 was automatically and silently installed on work machines via Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) - including PCs that did not have the voice chat software previously installed.

IT bods on this microsoft.com forum complained of hundreds of computers infected by the update and scrambled to remove the VoIP client centrally from PCs.


More here ! http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/02/microsoft_skype_silent_install/


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