Attack of the Tweats

Micro-blogging site Twitter had to temporarily suspend accounts belonging to Barack Obama, Britney Spears and other celebrities after they were hijacked by miscreants and used to spread scandalous and false information that appeared to come from their owners.…

She'll be back

Saved by a giant head

Repeats download model

The secret to business according to Sun Microsystems' chief executive Jonathan Schwartz is to first build volume and then figure out how to make money from the audience you've created.…

Q4 takes a bit of a haircut

The economic meltdown has put a damper on a lot of things, but it seems to have been less of a wet blanket for investors in startups in the green technology and renewable energy in 2008 - if you exclude the final quarter of the unusually dismal year.…

Xbox beats PS3 to second slot

Doesn't virtualization fix this?

The religion of virtualization may be all over the IT trade press, but apparently the data centers of the world haven't heard the good news yet and have been buying up PCs, servers, and storage gear like crazy to support their application and data loads. And if data from British IT consultancy Compass is any guide, IT budget growth over the past four years has been driven by capacity needs, which are outpacing price/performance improvements.…

Dot-com crash a 'cake walk'

Compared to the current job market, IT professionals should recall the collapse of the dot-com bubble with a fondness for the good ol' days.…

Watch out Windows and Solaris, says Zemlin

With the new year under way and all of the problems in the old year still largely unsolved, people in the IT sector are looking around for a little good news and some prospects for growth. There are a lot of clouds out there right now, and Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, thinks the rain is going to be good, particularly for Linux.…

Curse of the ROMmon

A researcher has discovered a way to reliably exploit a known security vulnerability in a wide class of Cisco System routers, a finding that for the first time allows attackers to hijack millions of devices with a single piece of code.…

Suggests OS X adoption

Backs up PCs and plays digital media files

Iomega has announced a home storage and media server that backs up files on connected PCs and plays digital media content to connected output devices.…

Last orders at the Missile Defence saloon?

Rumour suggests that some parts at least of the controversial US missile-defence programme are doomed, with the axe set to fall as soon as President-Elect Obama takes office. Nonetheless, the last days of 2008 saw a $400m contract award to one of the most controversial missile-defence weapons of them all - the Groundbased Midcourse Defence (GMD) rocket interceptors.…

First tech casualty of 2009?

UIQ has finally thrown in the towel and reportedly applied for bankruptcy in the Swedish courts.…

Letter explains hormone imbalance

Ever since Steve Jobs said he would not be giving the keynote speech at MacWorld, there have been lurid rumours that his health had taken a serious turn for the worse - but the Apple bigwig has finally had a go at putting the world straight.…

There's no such thing as a free, chummy lunch

Friends Reunited could see its carrying value slashed by ITV when the television channel releases its year-end review of past acquisitions.…

No change to police rules...yet

The Home Office has denied it has made any change to rules governing how police can remotely snoop on people's computers.…

Big IT bill sweeps through - or does it?

Or NASA-ise the military

President-Elect Barack Obama may seek to save money and advance America's space presence by promoting closer cooperation between the US military space programme and NASA, according to reports.…

New clampdown on 'vulgar' content

China has announced a new clampdown on websites accused of "threatening morals by spreading pornography and vulgarity" - including Baidu, Google and Sina.com.…

4 Corfe Close also for the off

Lewes District Council has attracted the attention of the Daily Mail with a proposed new street naming and numbering policy which, if agreed tomorrow, could see the end of "names which encourage defacing name plates", such as Cockshut Road, Cracknuts Lane and Juggs Road.…

Redmond working on seawater-proof product key sticker

The Royal Navy's plan to fit most of its fleet with command systems based on Windows boxes continues, with the commencement last week of a programme intended to replace the existing commandware of the Service's Type 23 frigates. The Type 23s will make up the majority of the British surface fleet for the foreseeable future.…

Have a heart for your hardware

Those among you who are prone to vocal outbursts of rage at cantankerous kit should be aware that hardware has feelings too, and directing your ire at disk drives can provoke "unusually high disk I/O latency".…

Cancer corral considered

Aussie nature-boffins have a new scheme to prevent the extinction of the Tasmanian Devil by the simple means of a great big fence.…

Plans to ship CE3100 with Flash Lite support by mid-2009

Adobe has teamed up with Intel to port the software giant’s Flash platform to Chipzilla’s Media Processor CE 3100.…

But Cabinet minister goes for individual title

Ministry of Defence staff are responsible for the vast majority of security passes that have gone AWOL since 2001, research by the LibDems has revealed.…

Flip-flop fiddling

NEC has announced the development of a memory circuit element that, it claims, will allow chips to consume no power when they're put in stand-by mode.…

Zero chance of WD buying Fujitsu's hard drive business

Fujitsu did not give Western Digital a Christmas present - in fact it said 'No deal'.…

Cyber Range Pandora's Box goes live in '10

Pentagon plans to develop a Matrix-style simulated computer world in which to try out the cyber WMDs of tomorrow appear to be moving forward. Reports indicate that the ambitious plans for a "National Cyber Range" - in which weapons-grade government malware would be test-fired much as missiles are on a normal firing range - have now moved forward to the stage of contracts.…

Opportunity and Spirit demonstrate the right stuff

NASA's Mars rover Spirit last Saturday passed the fifth anniversary of its arrival on the Red Planet on 3 January 2004 - an achievement which will be matched on 24 January by its twin Opportunity.…

Matt Smith handed keys to Tardis

The BBC has announced that 26-year-old Matt Smith will be the 11th Doctor Who, hitting screens in the fifth series in 2010 as the youngest actor* to tackle the role.…

Snapping up SourceLabs?

Government flies kite

Communications minister Lord Carter is to free BT from its universal service obligations - its legal duty to run a phone line to every home in the country, as well as provide payphones and other basic services available at a reasonable cost.…

Lotus doing it for itself, for a change

'Leccy Tech British sports car makers Lotus and Ginetta have both announced they are to build road-going electric cars. As announcements go, we reckon there are worse ways to start a new year.…

A DSLR and an HD camcorder

Review Life can be a confusing business. You’ve got mobile phones that double up as cameras, and cameras that record video. Well, prepare to be even more confused as cameras begin to capture HD video. Nikon’s D90 proudly claims to be the world’s first DSLR to record HD video.…

Step one, inflate the size of the problem

Comment The British Government plans to make it illegal to have sex with a prostitute if said tart has been trafficked, or is being controlled. Nor will this crime will be limited to offences committed in the UK - it will apply to what British men get up to wherever in the world they may be.…

But it's a beta

Wales' personal begging earns last $2m

A personal plea for cash by Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, has melted enough hearts to keep the ubiquitous online encyclopedia running for another fiscal year – and then some.…

"Pull my finger" has a whole new meaning

Now looking to book Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes

Virgin Galactic has signed with the state of New Mexico to build the nation's first rocketplane spaceport for flinging wealthy customers out of Earth's atmosphere.…

Numbers are bad, but they've been a lot worse

The passengers are revolting

As Sodor wakes to a new year, Thomas and his friends notice some very disturbing things...…

How much would you bid for a bid?

Management reshuffle expected

Chinese computer maker Lenovo looks set to axe 200 jobs at the firm’s headquarters in Beijing.…

Antonio de Carli, come on down

The voting has not yet closed, but kamikaze ballooning Brazilian priest Antonio de Carli looks a dead cert to secure the 2008 Darwin Awards crown for the most impressive contribution to improving the gene pool by removing himself from it.…

First ISS lifter comes together at Cape Canaveral

Not a word, so far

Comment Did you have a quiet Christmas? What about New Year? While New Years Eve is the busiest time for text messages, maybe you didn’t get any. And if you're a Nokia user, there may be a reason for that.…

US viewers get SpongeBob Savedpants

Time Warner Cable customers have been saved - they'll still be able to watch SpongeBob Squarepants and other shows from Viacom.…

If we build it they will come

Microsoft is set to release the first beta of its upcoming operating system Windows 7 at some point this month, but ahead of that release the trial version has already – unsurprisingly – landed on BitTorrent sites.…

A very wobbly framework

Almost one in ten records within the Inland Revenue's frameworks database contain errors, the government has admitted.…