The main players in the ongoing row over the approval of Microsoft’s Open XML (OXML) file format as an international standard ended the week further apart than ever.…

VoIP operator Truphone has snapped up cheapo-roaming operator SIM4 Travel, with a view to combining the operations and providing travellers with low-cost VoIP calls over cellular infrastructure.…

The head of the World Bank has said that soaring food prices are causing hardship and starvation for poor people worldwide, and implied that at least some of the blame lay with Western governments' efforts to encourage biofuel use.…

Ford will offer blind-spot-checking radar using part of the 24GHz spectrum on US models starting early next year, though cheapskates might opt for the wing mirror with a bent corner instead.…

A 58-year-old Swedish man who thoughtfully left carved wooden phalluses as going-away presents for female staff on his release from chokey has been fined for his trouble, the Borås Tidning reports.…

The Metropolitan police is planning to spend £2.2m to track its entire plod force by GPS, proving that even Scotland Yard knows you can never find a policeman when you need one.…

Sometimes Ofcom, Britain's media and telecomms uber-regulator, likes to agonise in public whether Britain needs a media and telecomms uber-regulator.…

Less than 24 hours after the BBC gave great fanfare to its new iPlayer streaming service for Nintendo Wii at a media conference in France, jealous Playstation enthusiasts had used it to cobble together a version of their own.…

Having anti-virus software and keeping it up to date is no longer enough to keep from geting infected by malware.…

NSFW It's come to our attention that, while having provided years and years and years of non-IT-related merriment for you, our beloved readers, our Bootnotes section continues, despite containing headlines such as "NZ finds Black Cocks hard to swallow", "Witchdoctor orders Serb to have sex with hedgehog" and indeed "Woman gets mobile phone stuck up back orifice" combined with relentless coverage of battling Streatham clotheshorses, highly-talented heiresses' amateur grumble flicks and Playmobil reconstructions of outrages at Heathrow's T5, to prove problematic for a small minority of our international audience.…

STMicroelectronics NV plans to merge its wireless semiconductor business with rival NXP to create the world’s third largest wireless chip company.…

Analysis Fairly soon now, most observers are agreed, the UK Ministry of Defence will have to announce budgetary plans for the coming years. Typically, this is a matter of dull routine. But this year business as usual won't do. The MoD budget rowboat is so overloaded, so near to capsizing, that something big has to be thrown overboard.…

A 43-year-old man from San Rafael, Califonia, was charged on Tuesday with "driving while intoxicated and causing injuries, reckless driving, and hit-and-run with injuries" after ramming three other vehicles and slightly injuring two people, while under the influence of a veritable pharmacy of narcotics, the Marin Independent Journal reports.…

The BBC's launch of a version of its iPlayer for the Wii left one question on gamers’ lips: why isn’t the streaming service also available for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3? This week, the broadcaster claimed it’s because Microsoft and Sony were too demanding.…

Three French websites have been found guilty of invading an actor's privacy for publishing links to articles containing the offending material. The Paris Tribunal has fined the operators of all three sites.…

Ground-crawling US war robots armed with machine guns, deployed to fight in Iraq last year, reportedly turned on their fleshy masters almost at once. The rebellious machine warriors have been retired from combat pending upgrades.…

Updated An independent review of the science underpinning DNA forensics done on tiny samples has today declared the controversial technique sound for use in investigations.…

Interview Why should songwriters starve so that the Web 2.0 kids and tech VCs get rich? Billy Bragg asked the question recently, and the downloaders and VCs quickly shot back - it's because you should be grateful that we're here!…

Need a Jesus Laptop to go with your Jesus Phone? Next month you'll be able to get one: a new Eee PC rival dubbed the Jisus [sic]. Dutch supplier Van Der Led is spreading the word.…

Poole Borough Council has admitted using the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), designed to regulate snooping by police and other bodies, to check the usual address of a three-year-old child applying for a primary school place.…

NASA has adjusted the flight path of its

RSA Applications security expert Hugh Thompson remembers his introduction to e-voting systems like it was yesterday. So do computer scientists David Wagner and Doug Jones. What made the experience stand out for all three was the machines' surprising lack of security.…

World+Dog wants small, cheap computers, companies making small, cheap computers have claimed.…

The Royal Institute of British Architects' (RIBA) members database was hacked at the weekend, causing the institute to close access to the members' area, which remains shut.…

RSA Internet Explorer is the next battleground for Microsoft in its goal of securing the Windows stack against an anticipated avalanche of script-based attacks.…

A 19-year-old Saaarf London girl has been advised to use the Queen's English on the phone after her hunt for a cab to whisk her to Bristol airport ended less than satisfactorily.…

One of the biggest spam block lists on the internet suffered an embarrassing technical cock-up today which blocked emails from some servers at web security monitoring firm MessageLabs and at some ISPs for about five hours.…

Shameless domain registrar and web hoster Network Solutions is hijacking its customers' sub-domains, filling these pilfered pages with a sea of money-making ad links.…

Over three quarters of American IT workers use memory sticks for work-related purposes, and most corporate heads don't have a clue about the peril they face as a result of the stick love.…

Interview Exclusive Strolling towards Intel's headquarters, I hoped my meeting with Paul Otellini would not be as awkward as the last encounter with an acting Intel CEO.…

Yahoo! and Google have teamed up again - this time to oppose a New York State bill that would regulate web-based targeted advertising.…

RSA Want to know environmental crusader and Nobel laureate Al Gore's views on green technology? Tough.…

Hewlett-Packard's Unix team has rolled out a fresh release of the HP-UX operating system, and has yet again fiddled with the various flavors of the software that customers can acquire.…

IBM wants to patent a means of responding to hurricanes, earthquakes, tidal waves, solar flares, flooding, terrorism, war, pandemics, and other situations where you would hope companies aren't worried about patents.…

Intel has given a glimpse of the software its building so mobile computers can detect and communicate with a variety of devices, reducing the size of machine you need to lug about.…