• Ericsson flashes wallet, beds hot Wi-Fi and billing bizes

  Now it’s spoiling for a fight against Chinese rivals

  MWC  Ericsson, freed from Sony and getting in its retaliation first, used a Mobile World Congress pre-event briefing to set out its Far East battle plans – which included mobile wallet payments and buying billing biz Telcordia and carrier-cosy Wi-Fi company BelAir Networks.…

• ICO ‘enquiring’ about Google’s system for serving 3rd-party cookies

  Questions after Microsoft slams Chocolate Factory on privacy

  Microsoft has claimed that Google has been serving third-party cookies capable of tracking users’ online behaviour even when those users have adjusted settings in the Internet Explorer browser to prevent it happening.…

• Ten… sub-£100 mono laser printers

  Read the fine print

  Review  Mono laser printers still produce better black text than any inkjet. If you want clean, pin-sharp characters on the page and don’t print colour, buy a laser. If you have a limited budget, look for one at under £100. Here are 10 you should consider, which can print fast, don’t take up much room on the desk and are very easy to use and maintain. They produce waterproof, black print, as good as anything you can produce at home or in a small office.…

• IBM arms robo-sysadmin QRadar with virus know-how

  X-Force gear combs through 13 billion threats a day

  IBM is beefing up its enterprise security offerings by creating a security platform that is aware of real-time virus information, meaning that the system will be much quicker at recognising new threats.…

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• SMS compo firms fined £200k for typosquatting, misleading punters

  Used misspellings of popular sites to lure competition entrants

  PhonepayPlus said R&D Media Europe (R&D) and Unavalley BV (Unavalley) misled consumers into entering the competitions through the practice of typosquatting and that those consumers were then charged for receiving text messages in connection with the competitions being run.…

• Motorola Motoluxe Android smartphone

  Talked up?

  Review  Don’t be confused by the name: it may be seem classy and good-looking but this is a mid-range handset, not a deluxe one. It’s also quite distinctive, which is good at a time when Android handsets are numerous and often me-too copies or unimaginative derivatives.…

• Nasa rocketeers probe aurora borealis solar interference

  Sky shot seeks clues to GPS woes

  A NASA-funded team has shot a sensor package, dubbed the Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Coupling in the Alfvén resonator (MICA), into the heart of a form of aurora borealis to seek clues that could minimize electronic interference from solar storms.…

• Optus snaps up Vivid for 4G build

  Huawei in box seat

  Optus has swooped on the assets of 4G wireless operator Vividwireless for $AU230 million and use the spectrum as a cornerstone of its own 4G network build out.…

  

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• 70 London 999 calls lost due to clock-change IT glitch

  Emergency calls lost in British Summer Time balls-up last year

  The London Ambulance Service trust has confirmed that more than 70 emergency calls were not visible to staff due to technical fault caused by switch from British Summer Time last year…

• IBM, Actifio to help wannabe providers take on cloud giants

  Thin copying partnership

  There’s thin provisioning and there’s thin copying, which Actifio provides. IBM likes what it sees and is partnering Actifio with a get-you-into-the-cloud offer for wannabe service providers. The pitch is that you need far less disk storage and fewer storage-specific applications so that you can offer out cloud services while not paying existing storage hardware and software prices.…

• Football rights value soars in wake of TV Now lawsuit

  Hang on, that can’t be right

  As previously noted by The Register, the rent-seekers of the rights industry and their rentable shills have warned of doom and dire disaster in the wake of the “football versus Optus” court case.…

• Katzenberg takes DreamWorks to China

  Games, movies, merchandise for the Asian market

  Jeffrey Katzenberg’s DreamWorks Animation is moving into China with ambitious plans to launch an Asian transmedia entertainment operation.…

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• Police probing ‘threats’ over Canadian internet privacy bill

  Don’t Toews me bro

  The Canadian public safety minister Vic Toews has called in the police to investigate threats made against him and his family in response to his internet privacy bill, which has also provoked a storm of online protest.…

• PlayStation Vita OS in your phone and telly – Sony’s saviour?

  Now it’s finally shot of Ericsson

  Analysis  Incoming Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai doesn’t have too long to prove himself before shareholders get restive again. Of course, his big challenge is in the TV business*, but he has also spotted the chance to do, belatedly, what rival Samsung has been putting together for years – creating a true multiscreen apps and content platform by extending a common user experience across all Sony’s devices and stores.…

Taken from theregister.co.uk

• [NSFW] Ten… digital adult toys

  The tingle factor

• Sky flaunts F1 app with split-screen functions

  Four-way action

  Sky conveyed details of its Formula 1 coverage today, including news of an F1 app with four-way multiscreen functionality.…

• Microsoft explains bland new Windows logo

  It’s a window, not a flag

  Microsoft has detailed the thinking behind the latest change in its logo for Windows, saying the new design brings the software back to its roots.…

  

• Goldman Sachs developer cleared of code theft

  Coder freed after court rules against government

  A programmer who developed high-frequency trading code for financial powerhouse Goldman Sachs has won his appeal against an eight-year prison sentence, and been released from jail.…

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• Southwest One gets £10m IBM loan amid ‘staggering’ losses

  Joint venture is failing on several fronts, Somerset council leader says

  The leader of Somerset county council, Ken Maddock, has said that Southwest One is failing to deliver, that its accounts show “staggering losses” of £31.5m and “failures to hit modest savings targets”.…

• Philips intros dual-view telly tech

  Seeing double

  Philips went tellytastic today and revealed a vast range of TV sets, several of which include the dual-view display mode that essentially makes splitscreen gaming redundant.…

• Steelseries SRW-S1 PC gaming steering wheel

  Taken for a spin

  Review  Admittedly, until recently my idea of a racing game was Super Mario Kart as I don’t play too many driving games. However, the Steelseries SRW-S1 steering wheel certainly had me intrigued enough to want to take it for a spin.…

• Twitter gets hit with defamation suit downunder

  Social media’s scarlett woman Marieke Hardy starts chain reaction

  Twitter has been hit with a potentially ground breaking defamation suit from wrongfully accused Australian Twitter ‘stalker’ Joshua Meggitt.…

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• Euro data protection: Great for punters, not for biz – MoJ wonk

  Whitehall man seeks views on ‘disproportionate’ draft law

  Comment  A colleague of mine went to a lecture on the European Commission’s proposed Data Protection Regulation last week*. One of the speakers was John Bowman, Head of International Data Protection and Policy at the UK’s Ministry of Justice. His opening question to the floor was: “How many of you here represent consumer groups?”…

• Archos 35 Home Connect

  Net savvy Android clock radio, anyone?

  Review  After having built a DECT home phone around the Android operating system doing the same for the humble bedside clock-radio probably seemed like a logical move for Archos so here we have the 35 Home Connect.…

• Apple bitten as builder goes titsup

  800-square-meter Brisvegas emporium imperilled

  Apple’s plans to open its first mega retail store in Brisbane have been derailed by the collapse of building and construction firm Kell & Rigby.…

• Dwarf galaxy yields up middle-sized black hole

  HLX-1 reveals a violent history

  Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope to confirm X-ray observations first published in 2009 have turned up the first observational evidence of mid-sized black holes.…

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• Child abuse files stolen from council worker in PUB – £100k fine

  Another council coughs £80k for HAND-DELIVERING kid’s info to neighbour

  The UK’s data protection watchdog has fined two English council bodies a total of £180,000 after finding they had failed to keep “highly sensitive information” about children secure.…

• Intel 520 240GB SSD

  Sandforce inside

  Review  The rumour mill was working overtime throughout 2011 with suggestions that Intel was considering forsaking the Marvell controllers it had used for its previous generation of consumer SSDs, the 510 series. The story went that the company was jumping into bed with another third party controller manufacturer, namely Sandforce, for the next generation of its solid state drives.…

• Heartland Institute documents leaked

  Koch-up or konspiracy?

  Gifted amateurs and interested activists the world over are poring over documents published on the Desmog blog and elsewhere, which appear to detail the US think-tank the Heartland Institute’s budget and anti-climate-change strategy.…

  

• Mobile internet devices to outnumber humans this year

  Skynet’s plans proceeding well

  The number of mobile devices will outstrip the global population in 2012, according to Cisco’s latest Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast.…

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• Sepaton plans to crush mid-range boxes

  ‘Kill the rabbit…’

  Sepaton, the large enterprise deduping storage vendor, reckons its big boxes can replace lots of those pesky, seemingly continuously accumulating Data Domain mid-range boxes with a single system that does the job properly.…

• FIVE more councils say soz for exposing people’s privates

  ‘Disclosing details about someone’s social housing status can be upsetting’

  The Information Commissioner’s Office has found that five local authorities have breached the Data Protection Act by failing to protect personal information about citizens.…

• Prada Phone by LG 3.0

  Diallers are a girl’s best friend?

  Review  Why is black and white classier than colour? And should we want our phones, with their increasingly glorious screens, to mute their rainbow hues? It’s the arrival of LG’s third collaboration with Prada that’s raised these questions – a handset that favours an interface dressed mostly in black and white.…

• HP previews ProLiant Gen8 servers

  Project Voyager launches Xeon E5s

  You can look at HP’s new ProLiant Gen8 servers, but you can’t touch. At the company’s Global Partner Conference in Las Vegas this week, HP previewed some of the forthcoming machines’ capabilities, but – much to the chagrin of hardware enthusiasts – didn’t talk about the processors, system boards, and other “slots and watts” stats of the Gen8 iron.…

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• The God Box: Searching for the holy grail array

  Latency killing super spinner

  It’s so near we can almost smell it: the Holy Grail storage array combining server data location, solid state hardware speed, memory access speed virtualisation, and the capacity, sharability and protection capabilities of networked arrays. It’s NAND, DAS, SAN and NAS combined; the God storage box – conceivable but not yet built.…

  

• TDK SD-700 High Fidelity headphones

  Cans do

  Geek Treat of the Week  These headphones from TDK owe something of their design to Beats’ Solo cans. The black TDKs aren’t as stylish as the Solos but they exude class.…

• Mobile customers still sprout in Aus

  Optus scores growth

  Despite heated competition and with an ailing third competitor in Vodafone, Australia’s dominant mobile carriers continue to cram customers onto their networks.…

• Telstra gets mail with Microsoft

  Dumps BigPond platform

  Telstra is to dump its current BigPond email platform and supplant it with Microsoft’s Windows Live products.…

Taken from theregister.co.uk