Aztech PC Services News Feed

Logitech V550 Nano wireless laptop mouse

The first mouse you can clip to your computer

Review Logitech's latest cordless mobile mouse offers a neat solution to the problem of where you put the thing when it's not being used: this one you clip onto your laptop.?

MySQL daddy quitting Sun?

'Technically, there is no resignation letter'

MySQL co-founder Micheal "Monty" Widenius may quit Sun Microsystems, less than seven months after Sun paid $1bn for his free database outfit.?

World goes mad as Bill and Jerry eat churros

Microsoft's Seinfeld ad ignores Microsoft

Microsoft has debuted the first commercial starring its $10m Vista pitchman, Jerry Seinfeld.?

'Jules Verne' begins final voyage

Europe's space freighter undocks from the International Space Station after completing its mission to the orbiting platform.

Japanese researchers check IDs with eyeball twitch

'Spoof-proof' biometrics

Biometric identity scanners are attracting more attention as safe way to handle user authentication and security. But a team of Japanese researchers claim current methods are bunk if approached by a sufficiently sophisticated intruder.?

Crimeware giants form botnet tag team

Rock Phish's big, fat, fast-flux network

The Rock Phish gang - one of the net's most notorious phishing outfits - has teamed up with another criminal heavyweight called Asprox in overhauling its network with state-of-the-art technology, according to researchers from RSA.?

Yahoo! shares! hit! five! year! low!

Microhoo! chances 'negligible'

Yahoo!'s share price dipped to $17.75 on Thursday, hitting its lowest point since October 2003.?

EA Europe struggles squeezing out Spore

Login problems at launch

US startup launches online airwaves market

Secondhand spectrum swap

Spectrum trading - the ability for licence holders to sell on, or sub let, their frequencies - has been broadly endorsed by both the FCC and Ofcom, so now a US company has done the obvious thing and set up a market for the buying and selling of radio frequencies.?

Orange can't find BlackBerry maps

But will sell you their alternative

Punters getting themselves a BlackBerry Bold from Orange are finding the in-built mapping application absent, and are being asked to pay for the Orange alternative despite the original adverts clearly stating the in-built app would be included.?

Price cutting rivals eat into Nokia's market share

Shares fall sharply on falling market share

Nokia has signalled an end to its uninterrupted growth, predicting that its market share would shrink, slightly, during the current quarter - though it will of course still increase over the whole year.?

Blazing Vaios: Sony's hot-tops hit the UK, too

Burning laptops not just in US

Sony secretly wrote to its UK channel partners earlier this week warning them that the company planned to recall some Vaio TZ-series laptops, The Register has learned.?

America's CTO: We have a winner

The people's choice vs Larry

Poll Results In one of the tightest contests ever seen in a Reg poll, columnist and software developer Ted Dziuba has emerged as the people's choice to be Barack Obama's "Chief Technology Officer". Dziuba beat off a stiff challenge from Hans Reiser, the fallen Linux guru who was sentenced to 15 years for murder in an Oakland, Ca. court last week.?

DARPA funds radical disco-copter concept

Spinning-platter switchblade chopper takes wing

Pentagon boffinry chiefs, not content with the existing panoply of wacky new whirly-copter concepts, are to fund still another radical rotary wing project - the "DiscRotor".?

MS preps four critical updates for September

Patch Tuesday train chugs into view

Microsoft plans to release four security bulletins next Tuesday as part of the September edition of its monthly Patch Tuesday update cycle.?

Cheap as chips

Hi-tech expo shows off low power toys

Sun and NetApp gain market share

Gartner data bad news for top 5 external storage vendors

Sun showed everyone a clean pair of heels as it grew its external disk storage market share faster than any other vendor in the second quarter of the year according to Gartner. IDC's quarterly disk disk market tracker also shows Sun way out in front.?

Ten tweaks for a new Acer Aspire One

Take charge of Linpus

Hands on Acer's Aspire One is ready to go out of the box, but if you've opted for the Linux version and you're new to the OS, you may be wondering how to started. Here are ten things to try.?

Debian components breach terms of GPLv2

You want source code with that?

A top Debian contributor has been left "pretty disappointed" by elements of the Debian community for failing to comply with the conditions of the GNU GPLv2 license.?

Sophos DNS snafu creates update problems

Bad hair day nothing to do with hackers

Domain name system problems left some users of Sophos unable to get security updates on Friday. The same issue, blamed on a mistake by one of the security firm's service providers rather than hostile action, left many surfers unable to access its main sophos.com website.?

Police quiz BT on secret Phorm trials

RIPA? Never heard of it officer...

City of London police questioned BT earlier this week as part of a probe into the covert wiretapping and profiling of the internet use of tens of thousands of BT customers during tests of Phorm's adware system.?

EA free petrol stunt triggers north London gridlock

Shoot-em-up promo creates real life car chaos

Another great moment in the annals of computer game PR stunts today - Electronic Arts caused gridlock this morning by offering �40 of free petrol to punters in Finsbury Park, north London.?

DNA database costs soar

Prying is pricey

Home Office figures show that the cost of running the national DNA database has more than doubled since 2002-03.?

Boffins use heartbeat to thwart wireless implant hack

Chinese cardiac crypto

Interfering with wireless medical implants sounds like a movie threat plot rather than a real risk - but if there is a threat, Chinese boffins have come up with an ingenious solution for combating it.?

Spore start

Will the new game from Will Wright be a hit or a miss?

Chaos at �20,000 petrol giveaway

There are reports of chaos at a petrol station which gave away �20,000 of petrol to promote a video game.

Now we are 10

As Google turns ten it looks to its next decade

I was a government guinea pig, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt

Gargantuan US child health study - all take?

What will the US government owe the hundreds of thousands of Americans it will swab, prick, track and trace over the next 21 years, in the largest children's health study ever? So far, the answer from the National Children's Study is "not much".?

Chubby crims more likely to leave dabs

'You're nicked, fatty'

Obese criminals are more likely to leave their fingerprints at crime scenes because of the amount of salty food they eat.?

Pure Digital Evoke Flow internet radio

Pure entertainment pleasure

Review After two years in development, Pure Digital has created what it hopes will become internet radio?s first genuinely iconic product.?

Chairborne

Reinventing the wheel to help disabled people

Hadron boffins: Our meddling will not destroy universe

No 'strangelet soup' for you

Boffins preparing to fire up the most powerful particle-smasher ever built have released another reassuring report which says that their machine will definitely not destroy the universe - nor even the planet Earth.?

Employee has no privacy on company computers, US court rules

What's yours is ours

Employees do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy for material stored on computers owned by their employers, a US court has ruled.?

Columbia set to resurrect Ghostbusters

Egon, your mucus - again

Columbia Pictures has asked The Office co-executive producers Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky to work up a script for a third outing of Ghostbusters, Variety reports.?

My name really is Ivan O'Toole, admits Ivan O'Toole

Parents, eh?

The regular readers among you will know we're a bit fond of stories relating to parents who slap their sprogs with ill-advised or downright perverse names, as evidenced by the cases of 4Real, Metallica, @, John Blake Cusack Version 2.0, Renault Megane and, spectacularly, Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii.?

North Korean Mata Hari in alleged cyber-spy plot

Tales of sex, spying and spyware

Updated South Korea has accused its neighbour North Korea of cyber-espionage during the trial of a suspected Mata Hari-style spy. However some political commentators are suggesting that the case against alleged spy Won Jeong Hwa is unsupported by evidence and riddled with inconsistencies.?

Facebook - The Movie! Exclusive storyboard peek

White-knuckle rollercoaster of a movie in prospect

The recent shock news that Sony had commissioned West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin to knock together a screenplay about how Facebook redefined just about every paradigm open to redefinition was greeted with a mixture of horror, disbelief and out-and-out jaw-dropping incredulity among Reg readers.?

Enough is enough! Plasmon board recommends sale

$25 million private equity bid approach supported

Enough's enough! Get me outta here. The Hanover Investors-backed Plasmon board has had it up to here and is pulling the plug.?

Wireless music streamers

Sends songs to your hi-fi with these four systems

Group Test The Roku Soundbridge M1001, Logitech's Squeezebox Duet, Philips' Streamium NP1100 and the Sonos Digital Music System all offer ways to get the music on your hard drive to pump out of your stereo.?

How Chrome puts the skids under Nokia

What does Gears mean for the mobile web?

Analysis Google's first web browser is here, and I've been trying it out.?

Government told: Release secret Iraq documents

Additions to sexed-up weapons docs

The Information Commissioner Richard Thomas has told the government that it should release draft versions of a dossier about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction and comments made on it by spy chiefs.?

One Laptop signs up with Amazon

Online retailer Amazon will help the One Laptop Per Child organisation with its plans to sell its XO laptop in the US.

Those old timer sign results in full

And the winners are...

It's hats off to you, our beloved readers, for your massive response to our challenge to create an "Elderly people" sign to replace the current couple of cripples hobbling down to the bingo - an image which doesn't much impress campaigning old timers organisation Age Concern.?

Dell plots worldwide factory sell-off

Outsource to compete

Dell is trying to offload ownership of its factories worldwide as part of an overhaul of its production strategy, reports say.?

NetApp brings StoreVault home to mom

StoreVault becomes standard NetApp product available world-wide

NetApp has brought its separate low-end StoreVault product range in-house, as a standard NetApp S family product available to its worldwide resellers.?

Carbonite muscles alongside Mozy in Lenovo

Cloud backup for IdeaPad notebooks

According to a report, Lenovo, which picked EMC's Mozy cloud backup for its SL business notebook line, has rejected EMC and picked competing Carbonite cloud backup for its consumer IdeaPad notebooks?

HDS revving AMS

Monterey mid-range storage refresh coming

The wires are humming that Hitachi Data Systems is going to update its AMS mid-range storage array line with three new Monterey models. We should expect an announcement quite soon.?

Bosch strategy boutique fails greenwash test

Saving the planet, one space shuttle launch at a time

The marketing robots at the UK tentacle of remorseless Teutonic engineering firm Bosch haven't quite mastered the art of eco-friendly promotion guff.?

7-year-old faces M&S Inquisition

Not just data protection, this is M&S data protection

Calls by the Information Commissioner for organisations to stop hiding behind the Data Protection Act (DPA) fell on deaf ears this week as Marks and Spencers insisted on a seven-year-old giving official permission before an operator could talk to his mum.?

Samsung set to buy SanDisk?

Checking out 'various opportunities'

The flash memory market is abuzz as Korean news sources, along with Reuters and Bloomberg, are reporting that Samsung Electronics is thinking about buying SanDisk.?