Password hints easily snaffled from Windows PCs

Punters' password hints are easily extracted from the latest Microsoft Windows machines, security researchers have discovered.
TrustWave SpiderLabs uncovered a key called "UserPasswordHint" during wider research into how the Redmond operating system stores password hashes. Subsequent studies showed it was easy to extract and decode password hints from the registry on both Windows 7 and Windows 8 machines. The value stored is obscured with the addition of zeros but not encrypted.

More here - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/23/password_hint/

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It's not just crap PC sales: Dell's storage revs are also slipping down

Has the spark has gone out? Despite acquisitions Dell's storage revenues have been declining for over a year. The effort to develop synergies between the products hasn't delivered the sales goods yet. Is it time for a re-think?

Dell has just announced second fiscal 2013 quarterly results with revenues 8 per cent down year-on-year. The overall quarterly revenue picture is of a company flat-lining at the $15bn/quarter level, as the chart shows:

See more here - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/22/dell_quarterly_storage_revenues/

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Office 2013 to eat own file-format dog food

With the upcoming release of Office 2013, Microsoft is finally offering full support for the Open XML document standard, a format that Redmond itself created and has been promoting for nearly seven years.
"Microsoft continues to lead in giving customers choice and flexibility in file format standards and interoperability," writes Redmond's Jim Thatcher in a blog post announcing the change – although the actual history has been somewhat different.

More here - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/15/office_2013_strict_open_xml/

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Surface tablets rumored to ship with $199 price tag

If the latest Redmond rumors are to be believed, Microsoft's ARM-based Surface tablet models could arrive priced as low as $199, positioning them as heavyweights in the burgeoning low-cost tablet category.
Engadget reports that the $199 price point was unveiled at the recent TechReady 15 conference, an internal technical event for Microsoft employees, during a session that gave details of the Surface launch.
The $199 retail price is only said to apply to the ARM-based Windows RT version of the device, which will ship on October 26, the same day as Windows 8. Surface devices running full Windows 8 on Intel won't arrive until 2013.

More here ! http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/14/surface_199_price_tag/

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Burglar steals $60,000 of computers from Steve Jobs' home

Police have arrested a man accused of breaking into the former home of Apple icon Steve Jobs and stealing over $60,000 worth of "computer equipment and personal items."
On July 17, Job's former home on Waverley Street in Palo Alto was broken into and turned over, AP reports. Santa Clara County Deputy District Attorney Tom Flattery, a member of the high-technology crimes unit, declined to say what exactly had been stolen but confirmed the police had a suspect in custody.

More here - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/14/steve_jobs_burglar/

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Acer dishing out 16,400 cheap OLYMPIC laptops to schools

Acer plans to flog 500 "Olympic" laptops to school children in North East London after the Games close.
The Taiwanese firm has also promised that the other 15,900 computers they put into London 2012 will be packaged up and sent into schools around the UK

More here - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/12/acer_olympics_school_kids/

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Oooh-la-la! 'iPhone 5' bares all, strokes tiny nano-SIM in pics

Apple's leaky supply chain has doled out pictures of the insides of what's claimed to be an iPhone 5, indicating that the forthcoming mobe will take nano-SIMs.
Photos of what appears to be the next-gen handset fresh off a Chinese assembly line appeared on French site Nowhereelse.fe, and revealed the presence of a nano-SIM drawer as well as a larger screen and new 9-pin connector for hooking the gadget up to a computer or power point

More here - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/09/iphone_5_photos_nano_sim/

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HSBC brands EVERY Apple iPhone 'an insecure PC

HSBC's iPhone app for online business banking warns customers that their reassuringly expensive Apple mobiles are in fact PCs - and insecure ones at that.

In a surprising cock-up, the bank's app incorrectly identifies the shiny phones as Windows PCs, and scolds fanbois for not having security watchdog software Rapport installed. Anyone attempting to download Rapport for PCs onto an iPhone would suffer a frustrating experience, to say the least.

More here ! http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/07/ios_glitch_/

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Microsoft dumps Metro from Windows 8

Microsoft has dropped "Metro", the name given to the squaretastic user interface for Windows 8 and Windows Phone, claiming it was just a code name all along.
Litigation, though, may be the real reason as it seems the word may be owned by a European company or individual that objected to its use.

The change comes late in the day for Microsoft: just this week the software giant gave the final build of its Windows 8 operating system to computer manufacturers so it can be installed on new machines. Third-party developers are due to get the release version on 15 August, and Windows 8 PCs tablets are due to go on sale on 26 October.

A spokesperson for Microsoft confirmed the switch to The Reg. In a statement the company said: “We have used Metro style as a code name during the product development cycle across many of our product lines. As we get closer to launch and transition from industry dialog to a broad consumer dialog we will use our commercial names

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Facebook: 83 million IMPOSTERS stalk our network

Facebook is still racking up false accounts even as it continues to try and flush out imposters on the dominant social network, which is seeing its value close to being halved on Wall Street.

The Mark Zuckerberg-run company disclosed during its first public quarterly earnings report last week that it now has 955 million monthly users actively posting on the site, of which 543 million people were accessing Facebook via mobile devices.

But, tucked away in a 10-Q filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the network has revealed that 83 million Facebook accounts were duplicates or fakes.

It obviously didn't provide that number q

More here !  - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/02/facebook_10q_filing_fake_accounts_shares_slide/

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