A landmark exemption to US copyright law allowing Americans to unlock their cell phones should be strengthened to prevent trampling on the right of companies that recycle and refurbish handsets, their attorney told the Librarian of Congress Tuesday.…

The Eclipse Foundation has published a roadmap putting a strong emphasis on Web 2.0, cloud computing, and rivalry with Windows — particularly Vista.…

Chip maker Intel, computer manufacturer Lenovo, and security-software publisher Absolute Software today announced a joint program to equip select Lenovo laptops with anti-theft technology.…

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Video footage of counter-terrorism police searching the parliamentary offices of MP Damian Green has been released on the Tory party's WebCameron website today.…

Battlestar Galactica, the hit sci-fi thriller about humans searching the galaxy for a planet to call home, will be spun off into a prequel that is set 50 years before androids rebelled against their makers and destroyed civilization as it was known.…

Intel was tilting at the internet rumor mill this morning as word circulated that its newly-launched Core i7 chips suffer from a technical glitch similar to the one that previously dogged AMD's Phenom and Opteron cores.…

As state and local governments across the U.S. starve for revenue during the ongoing financial meltdown, AMD and its Abu Dhabi-based partner, Advanced Technology Investment Co., were yesterday unanimously voted $1.2bn in tax and cash incentives from New York's Empire State Development Corp., according to a report published in Albany's The Business Review.…

Database maker Oracle and host bus adapter maker Emulex today announced that they have contributed code to eliminate silent data corruption to the open source Linux operating system. The two also said this code has been accepted in the 2.6.27 kernel, which is the latest stable release.…

Blogging software maven Six Apart has acquired and killed a minor outbreak of Web 2.0rhea.…

'Leccy Tech More signs that all is not well at Tesla, maker of the leccy Roadster. Posting on his own blog Tesla Senior VP Darryl Siry has revealed he is parting company with the Silicon Valley-based car company immediately “due to some disagreements in strategy”.…

Another browser-based operating system is joining the netbook gold strike.…

Three months after they were said to be on the horizon, Apple today announced availability of the dual-driver in-ear headphones with remote and mic ($79) and single-driver earphones with remote and mic ($29).…

A former IT executive for a Canadian marketing firm has been accused of taking a computer backup tape containing personal information of 3.2 million customers that could net as much as $10m on the black market, according to court records.…

Only a few weeks ago, we told you how the analysts at IDC had trimmed their forecasts for global IT spending. Well, now IDC is providing a little more detail about the IT spending situation across the Europe, Middle East, and Africa region, and the news is not exactly good.…

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Adobe MAX Europe Adobe Systems has provided more details on a research project that converts and compiles C and C++ to ActionScript and brings raw speed to the Flash virtual machine.…

An advertising network used by the Daily Mail website is being used to serve up malware.…

Back in November, at the annual Supercomputing event that was held in Austin, Texas this time around, a bunch of supercomputing researchers released the semi-annual Top 500 rankings of the fastest supercomputers in the world. Now, another set of nerds has added power metrics to the list and done a sort on how efficiently the supers deliver floating-point performance. What is immediately clear from the Green 500 ranking is that performance and power efficiency do not bear much relation in supercomputing - at least not yet.…

The Department for Transport (DfT) this week gave police, and motorists, an early Christmas present in the form of new equipment and software to support the annual drink drive campaign.…

Interpol is seeking the missing boss of a bankrupt Danish IBM reseller IT Factory, who is suspected of frauds totalling $85m.…

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A new hi-tech credit card from CryptoCard bundles two-factor authentication onto the plastic in a bid to clamp down on phishing and other forms of banking fraud.…

A robot’s been cooking up a storm in Japan, where its maker – Yaskawa Technology – has taught the drone to bake the perfect Japanese omelette.…

Dynamic demand technology, in which domestic appliances adjust their drain on the national grid so as to smooth out collective spikes and dips, is to get a widespread UK trial next year.…

According to the findings from our recent Platform and Operations monster survey, most organisations told us they ‘get’ the notion of an application platform. Around a quarter of respondents told us they have formally adopted one, and over a third said that they had adopted one in the sense of having a natural tendency to re-use platform components.…

A few years ago, I was talking to a quite senior chap in a well known IT outsourcing firm. “Trouble we have,” he said, “is that we’ve got all the good people.” Seeing the flummoxed expression on my face, he went on to explain. “It meant there was nobody left inside the organization to work with, who had any clue what we were doing.”…

The trick to avoiding spending millions of dollars on new data centres is to make do and mend the existing ones, according to Dell.…

Game Group saw sales growth slow to 11.4 per cent in the 44 weeks ended 29 November, down from 44.1 per cent in the same period last year but recent trading has been substantially worse - for the last 18 weeks of the period like-for-like sales fell to just 1.5 per cent.…

Asus is to take on the $199 OLPC XO laptop with a $200 Small, Cheap Computer for the developing world.…

A French court has ruled that foreign retailers must warn consumers to pay the country's so-called "iPod tax" copyright levy on MP3 players ordered online.…

BT is trumpeting figures that show Wi-Fi usage has doubled since last year, with users clocking up more than a million minutes a day during September - but all is not quite what it seems.…

Red Hat's CEO said the firm has put together a five-year strategic plan for the first time in its history, which will see it jack up its sales management as it looks to expand beyond its traditional markets.…

Every Wii nets Nintendo $6, but the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 don’t produce any profit for Sony and Microsoft, a market analyst has claimed.…

Review Samsung is getting serious with its cameraphones. Having recently landed its first eight-megapixel phone in the UK, the i8510, it's now doubled its tally with the Pixon M8800, its debut 8Mp touchscreen phone.…

The UN nuke agency has called for the world to make greater efforts to feed its starving millions, by increased efforts to produce enhanced, mutant super-crops developed using gamma rays.…

Nokia wants applications for its smart home box, but it's also sniffing around for companies interested in selling the Linux-based home-automation gateway with their own branding.…

Another study coming out of the University of Utah Applied Cognition Lab has concluded that driving while talking on the phone is a really bad idea, even if using hand-free kit.…

Nokia has enough on its hands without acquiring a basket-case internet company. CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo ruled out a purchase of Yahoo! here in Barcelona today, saying Nokia can do just as badly in web services on its own, with its Ovi strategy. Of course, he didn't quite put it like that.…

For the first time, Apple is recommending the use of anti-virus tools to protect Mac systems.…

Updated Nokia's iPhone rival for 2009 will have a familiar feel to it - the phone giant is borrowing designs first brought to market by rivals such as HTC with its N97, announced in Barcelona today. However, Nokia's superior engineering means that it's considerably smaller than devices from its Asian competitors, weighing in at 150g and just 55mm thick. I've had a hands-on since filing earlier this morning, and it's positively svelte. The photos don't really do it justice.…

The country's top transport police officer has been appointed by the Met to investigate the decisions that led to its arrest of Tory front bencher Damian Green last week for leaking Home Office documents to the media.…

The European Commission has proposed (pdf) a series of measures, including changes to the VAT Directive, to prevent and detect VAT fraud.…

The controversial "Mosquito" noise device, originally designed to move on groups of tiresome youths by emitting high-pitched sounds only they could hear, has been upgraded. The annoyance machine can now target all ages, and has drawn further protests from concerned groups.…

A British Standard will give business owners and marketing managers new guidance for building and maintaining web content that is accessible to disabled people. A draft version of BS 8878 was released for public comment today.…

Intel has won Hitachi Global Storage Technologies as an OEM seller of its flash-based solid state drive technology. The two companies will jointly develop and deliver enterprise-class SAS and Fibre Channel interface products for sale to storage and server suppliers.…

Lord Mandelson of Foy has announced a £30m fund to invest in small and medium UK technology firms.…

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Review Music production has quite an armoury of spatial effects to tease the ears with but, typically, for the best experience, the listener needs to sit in the sweet spot. The Orbitsound range is designed to deliver a spatial soundfield anywhere in the room and now, with the T3 mobile stereo speaker, you can take that soundscape wherever you go.…

Microsoft's search bribery machine shut down for several hours on Black Friday, continuing to exhibit a unique talent for online comedy.…

The next version of Microsoft's C# will see interoperability between languages for the enterprise and web, and with Microsoft's legacy COM architecture.…

The number of Windows users surfing the web fell below 90 per cent for the first time, making for Microsoft's biggest market share drop in the past two years, according to new statistics.…

When Apple gives something away, you can be sure that they're investing in their own best interests.…

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We've known for years that graphics based on Adobe Flash and other third-party programming software can be clunky, time-consuming affairs that put our security at risk. Now comes new research suggesting they needlessly consume more power too.…