The Register

Washington Supremes deliver death sentence to betting site

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 23:31:34 GMT

Betcha.com craps out

Washington state's highest court has delivered a fatal blow to a website that billed itself as a person-to-person betting platform that connected people who wanted to make wagers.…

Google faces antitrust investigation in Texas

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 23:18:49 GMT

EU complaint echoed in US

Google is facing an antitrust investigation in Texas over claims the company unfairly manipulated results on its search engine.…

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It's alive! Duke Nukem Forever breaks out of vapour trail

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 21:46:08 GMT

Balls of steel, baby, balls of steel!

Duke Nukem Forever is the video games world's equivalent of the flying car: mothballed in the garage.…

Ubuntu 'Maverick Meerkat' erects own App Store

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 20:06:12 GMT

Beta mongoose flaunts new face

Review Ubuntu fans, fire up your virtual machines. The beta release of Ubuntu 10.10 is here. Maverick Meerkat, as this release is known, is actually several weeks ahead of the original schedule, and that means Ubuntu 10.10 is on track for its final release October 10.…

Doctor Who goes to the Proms

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 19:28:40 GMT

Music to watch monsters go by

Love Doctor Who, love the theme music - this is hardwired into the DNA of most Brits.…

Unity – iPhone code swap approved by Jobs (for now)

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 19:14:01 GMT

Un-Flash eyes world of Google

Steve Jobs forbids you from building iPhone applications with a language other than Objective C, C, or C++. If that other language is Adobe Flash. What about if it's not Adobe Flash? Are you still forbidden?…

Nigerian man gets 12 years for $1.3m 419 scam

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 18:58:50 GMT

Hunting 'mugu' in America

A Nigerian man has been sentenced to more than 12 years in US prison for orchestrating an advance payment scam that bilked victims out of more than $1.3m.…

Oz school in homosexual kookaburra rumpus

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 17:05:02 GMT

Gay Fun your life must be...

An Oz primary school head is taking a bit of stick after insisting that kiddies should not follow the exact letter of Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree.…

All the week's Reg Hardware reviews

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:57:19 GMT

Can you handle the truth?

In the past seven days, Reg Hardware reviewed many products from the worlds of consumer electronics and mobile communications.…

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Gordon Brown joins World Wide Web Foundation

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:51:22 GMT

That's Doctor Brown to you, says unemployed PM

Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown has buddied up with the Greatest Living Briton by becoming a director of the World Wide Web Foundation.…

Is a HAMR blow falling on Seagate?

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:29:41 GMT

The opposite of NIL desperandum

Seagate may be facing the abandonment of a favoured future technology as the price for hard disk drive (HDD) industry unity.…

Joy Division designer tackles England footie strip

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:24:29 GMT

'I've lost the ball again...'

Football minnows Bulgaria face an uphill struggle in their forthcoming clash with England, because not only will they confront some of the most talented, hard-working and successful players in the history of the beautiful game, but their opponents will be clad in a new strip created by former Joy Division designer Peter Saville.…

Desktop pleasure, desktop pain

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:47:12 GMT

Evolution and management of the client computing environment

Let's face it, the desktop and laptop environment is one of the major points at which the rubber meets the road when it comes to business computing.…

Wells Fargo hops NFC train

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:46:18 GMT

Joins BoA and Visa in trials

Wells Fargo is joining the effort spearheaded by Visa to help NFC break in the difficult American market.…

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Google's Schmidt satirised as privacy pervert

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:42:24 GMT

Run for your lives, kids. The ice cream man is coming!

Eric Schmidt has been portrayed as a depraved privacy pervert by the US-based ConsumerWatchdog.org, which is running an advert in New York’s Times Square that mocks the Google boss.…

IT workers getting back to work - sort of

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:27:46 GMT

June and July not as bad as all that

The US Department of Labor kicked out its monthly jobs report, and there's some good news for once. First of all, private sector employers added 67,000 jobs last month, although the overall economy shed 54,000 jobs as the federal government winds down the 2010 census and lays off temporary workers hired to count heads.…

Paul Allen's patent madness not worth single penny

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:00:02 GMT

Execution wins. Not ideas

Open...and Shut Businesses aren't built on ideas. They're built on execution. Google didn't win because it was the first to the search market. It won because it did search better than anyone else, and devised an ingenious way to monetize it.…

German gov pooh-poohs biometric ID card hack

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:52:18 GMT

Nicht ein biggie

German hackers successfully used off-the-shelf kit to extract personal data from the federal government's supposedly secure ID cards, but the government has downplayed the significance of the attack.…

TomTom drums up upgrade for iPhone app

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:38:04 GMT

Follow that photo!

An update for the TomTom app on the iPhone is "coming soon".…

Ex-spook jailed for selling secrets

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 12:50:25 GMT

12 months for CD & USB shenanigans

Ex-MI6 worker Daniel Houghton has been sentenced to 12 months in prison for unlawfully disclosing top secret material, in breach of the Official Secrets Act.…

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Apple TV: Third time unlucky, Mr Jobs

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 12:47:29 GMT

Going down for the last time

Comment This is the day that Apple lost the war for Over The Top content, not only in America, but globally. The winner can’t yet be announced, but this was the shot that Apple had to get it right, and to us it’s bungled it.…

Vulture 1 Mk 2 release mech prepped for testing

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 12:20:02 GMT

Coming soon: Hypobaric chamber - The Revisiting

The Paper Aircraft Released Into Space (PARIS) team is preparing to turn down the pressure with a second visit to Qinetiq's hypobaric chamber.…

Monster Afghan spy airship to feature quad drinking straws

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 12:01:07 GMT

Also: New vid of unsold P-791 Walrus suck-belly ship

US aero-weapons goliath Lockheed, builder of the famous P-791 airship prototype, was beaten to a half-billion-dollar deal to supply spy ships above Afghanistan earlier this year - but the firm is still marketing its P-791 technology aggressively.…

HP and EMC vie for disk storage lead

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 11:32:29 GMT

IBM looking peaky

IDC's latest quarterly disk storage tracker shows EMC and HP competing for the market lead, with EMC growing faster than HP. NetApp is growing faster still but has a lot of ground to make up.…

Wanted: Front End / Client Side Web Developer

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 11:27:18 GMT

El Reg is hiring

Situation Publishing, owner of The Register and Reg Hardware, is looking for a full time developer to primarily work on HTML(5), CSS, JavaScript/jQuery and template engines such as XSLT and Perl’s Template Toolkit.…

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Google Wave washes ashore in soggy cardboard Box

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 11:18:16 GMT

Drops unwanted code in open source developer laps

Google has boxed up its unsuccessful Wave project and handed the unwanted code to open source developers.…

Glasses-less 3D TV by Xmas? Not likely, says 3D TV exec

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 11:11:16 GMT

More like 2013

Toshiba may be gearing up to release a no-specs 3D TV in Japan by the end of the year, but Philips' 3D TV development partner reckons we will have to wait longer. It doesn't reckon any vendor will have one out before 2013.…

Apple Ping unfriends meanie Facebook

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 11:02:55 GMT

Snazzy new social thing walled off

Ping, Apple's latest foray into social networking, won't play nice with Facebook - despite the connection appearing in Steve Jobs's on-stage demonstration and in the documentation.…

Energizer bunny hits iPhone, BlackBerry - wirelessly

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:55:43 GMT

Qi gets branded products

The wireless power consortium, Qi, is celebrating the launch of a solution with a known brand - Energizer - attached, but the technology is still a long way from the mainstream.…

Superhuman Chinese monk does a bunk

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:51:22 GMT

Celeb Taoist conman on the run

A celebrity Taoist monk has gone awol after it was revealed he probably couldn't in reality sit crossed-legged under water for two hours.…

ViewSonic outs Windows/Android 10in tablet

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:48:31 GMT

For OS fence-sitters

Here is ViewSonic's other Android-based tablet, though here the Google OS is secondary to Windows 7.…

Capgemini buys big Brazilian dealer

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:47:47 GMT

£194m shelled out

Capgemini has bought a 55 per cent stake in Brazilian reseller CPM Braxis for £194m.…

Digital Carter returns, uncensored

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:45:06 GMT

Europe's stuck in the mud, says former Ofcom head, comms czar

Lord Stephen Carter, the founding head of Ofcom whose blockbuster report provided the basis for the Digital Economy Act, made a return to the public stage this week.…

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Netgear launches next-gen powerline Ethernet kit

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:21:00 GMT

But no Gigabit performance just yet

Netgear has announced what may well be the world's first consumer networking products based on the as-yet-unratified IEEE P1910 next-gen powerline Ethernet standard.…

Spammers latch onto Ping to pump iPhone survey scams

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:03:02 GMT

Quick off the mark

Spammers have been quick off the mark in exploiting Apple's new iTunes social network to punt survey scams.…

Samsung shows 'airfoil' luxury laptops

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 09:58:26 GMT

Apple flavoured?

More laptops have been announced at the IFA show by Samsung. This time it's the "premium" QX series - given a "airfoil design exterior" that's aluminium clad like as certain fruit-branded manufacturer's notebooks.…

UN steps into Blackberry debate

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 09:22:50 GMT

Firms will just have to get used to it

The secretary general of the International Telecommunications Union has stepped into the lawful interception debate, saying that companies are just going to have to provide governments with access somehow.…

Symantec Snoop Dogg rap contest site rickrolled

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 09:09:25 GMT

#hackiswacked

Symantec's attempts to link up with Snoop Dogg to launch a cybercrime rap contest have descended into farce after it emerged that vulnerabilities with a dedicated site can be easily rickrolled.…

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Virgin punts cheap BlackBerry Curve

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 09:06:16 GMT

Yours for £12 a month

Virgin Media is offering the BlackBerry Curve 8520 - reviewed here - in what it claims os the "most competitive" pay-monthly package this smartphone can be found on.…

Toshiba warns of fiery laptops

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 09:05:07 GMT

Worldwide recall of ball burners

Toshiba and US and Canadian consumer watchdogs are recalling three laptop models after receiving reports that people have been burned by the AC adapters.…

'Rock star' spewed guts after emitting vast pearl necklace

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 08:39:53 GMT

Prehistoric luminary's explosive antics revealed

The equivalent of a "rock star", having lived a "fast, flashy life and died young" apparently exploded with unimaginable violence in the year 161,000 BC and spewed "guts" across an enormous area. The exploding prehistoric luminary had previously ejected a "string of pearls", according to investigating boffins.…

Phone bugging scandal reignited as NotW suspends reporter

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 08:30:11 GMT

The story that refuses to die

New allegations of phone hacking at the News of the World have resulted in the suspension of one of the Sunday paper's reporters, pending legal and disciplinary action over allegations of tapping into the voicemail messages of an unnamed television personality.…

Ubuntu 10.10 released to beta

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 08:20:14 GMT

Maverick Meerkat skips Alpha 4

The beta instalment of Ubuntu's Maverick Meerkat has arrived slightly earlier than expected.…

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Nokia seeks to tap the X-Factor

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 07:08:25 GMT

Ovi could do with the support

Nokia is backing ITV's X Factor with a dedicated application and exclusive content, but it will take more then Auto Tune to make Ovi a Christmas number one.…

Acer Stream Android smartphone

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 07:01:02 GMT

PMP trickle-down effect

Review Typically, smartphones make less than satisfying PMPs, especially given the issue of video formats, with very few phones supporting the good old AVI container or Xvid/DivX codecs. Also, sound quality is usually a bit iffy and there is often little in the way of external controls for media navigation that you can use without looking.…

Chrome celebrates second b-day with sixth release

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 22:05:08 GMT

Remember the Googasm

Google is celebrating Chrome's second birthday by releasing a new stable version of its rapidly evolving browser, offering a slightly simpler user interface, an automatic form filler, and the ability to synchronize extensions and form data across machines.…

Semi biz starts to cool off

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 21:11:09 GMT

Mobile chips warming up as PC chips chill

While chip makers are not white-knuckled with fear as they were during the economic meltdown of late 2008 and early 2009, they were hoping that the recent boom in chip sales would hold for a couple of quarters — and it probably won't.…

Microsoft freshens retro code lock-down tool

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 21:01:58 GMT

Teaching old apps new tricks

Microsoft has released a new version of a software tool that developers and administrators can use to harden older applications against common vulnerabilities.…

Jobs moves to the heavens with Apple TV

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 20:58:07 GMT

You rent from his cloud

Analysis With its Apple TV revamp announced Wednesday, Apple dipped its toes into the entertainment cloud — if you'll forgive a muddled metaphor. It's a tentative baby step, but expect more cloudy offerings from Cupertino if the experiment is a success.…

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Microsoft buffs Silverlight for HTML5 video contest

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 20:01:05 GMT

'We're more consistent. And we're here'

Microsoft has tried to justify its Silverlight media player in the age of HTML5.…