Ay Carumba: microchipping middle-class Mexicans

It would appear that wealthy Mexicans are so worried about being kidnapped that some are prepared to be microchipped in order for them to be traced in such an eventuality...

Madonna and Paris Hilton slug it out in online virtual porn battle

Paris Hilton is 27 years old and pretty much made her name for two things: being the heiress to the Hilton Hotel fortune, and starring in a home made porno flick that ended up on the Internet. OK, make that famous for one thing, being the heiress to the Hilton Hotel fortune who starred in a porn film.

Reddit blames black holes for downtime

Even in these always-on times when business continuity translates into keeping your website up, it is not that unusual for the occasional downtime to occur. Most sites do not blame black holes for downtime though...

Criminal blunder as UK government loses 84,000 prisoners

The UK Home Office has admitted that a memory stick with the data concerning every single prisoner in the country, all 84,000 of them, has managed to escape. Of course, this being the UK government, the data was not encrypted...

Microsoft granted Page Up Page Down patent

If patenting the obvious is considered something of an art form in the world of IT, then Microsoft is undoubtedly an old master. The Page Up Page Down patent it has been granted would seem to confirm this...

Universal Music was wrong about YouTube dancing baby

A US federal judge has ruled that fair use rules do apply to YouTube video clips and must be taken into account before issuing takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Which means the dancing baby can keep going crazy to Prince after all...

How many developers does it take to build Windows 7?

That's the question I had not thought of asking, nor really given much thought to at all, until now. What prompted the question was the appearance of the Official Engineering Windows 7 blog.

Rumour: Xbox 720 and PS4 release dates

The Games Convention Developers Conference in Leipzig, Germany has not been the most exciting of events. Apart from one fleeting moment during an otherwise uneventful keynote presentation the future of gaming graphics. Could Cevat Yerli have inadvertently announced the expected arrival dates of the Xbox 720 and PlayStation 4?

I'm too sexy for your Nintendo

Think geek and sexy girls (or guys for that matter) with very little on does not usually come to the front of your imagination. That could all change as controllers built into underwear make pressing all the right buttons much more interesting...

274 million digital TV households by 2012

Western Europeans and North Americans are switching off old fashioned televisions and switching on to digital TV in their millions as analog transmissions fast approach that final termination deadline...

Is eBay fed up with the auction business?

eBay is cutting the costs of fixed-price sales and giving buyers additional financial protection. Does this signal the end of the online auction site and a drive to become the shop window of the web instead?

Yahoo! tells Digg and Reddit to Buzz off

It has taken Yahoo! six months to recruit, it claims, 5 million users for the Buzz social news service which has now finally opened its doors to all comers for the first time. Should Digg and Reddit be worried?

Google says: Hack the Android!

Google has released the 0.9 SDK Beta and admits that its ambitious project to produce the first complete, open, and free mobile platform is "converging on a final Android 1.0" release. It has also taken the bold step of posting an open letter to the security community which, in effect, invites them to hack the Android...

An Inconvenient Truth: Spam Sells Lots of Sex and Drugs

It is the question that everyone who stops to think about the amount of spam they get asks at least once: does anyone actually buy this stuff? The answer, it seems, is that 29 percent of us do and we are buying sex and drugs...

Is that a hot iPod in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?

Two iPod related news stories stopped and made us think today. First there are Japanese trousers catching fire as iPod batteries allegedly overheat. Then there is the murder involving Indian iPod porn...

Vodafone screws users over call costs, senior executive stabbed to death

Mobile phone network operators are pretty much like banks, for all the wrong reasons. Not least that if they are found to be indulging in rip-off charging scams and are forced to stop it by regulators they find another way to claw the money back. Which explains why Vodafone is screwing extra money out of its contract and pay-as-you-go customers as from next month...

iPhone OS 2.0.2 released, 3G reception problems fixed?

We all knew it was coming, but the speed with which Apple has released the latest iPhone firmware update was a little surprising. Could this be the much anticipated 3G reception problem fix?

Olympic flash of gold for Microsoft

Could it really be that the Beijing Olympics are the Saviour of Silverlight? Well I’m pretty damn sure the Games of the XXIX Olympiad are not going to do it any harm in the getting the word out stakes.

How to kill the Apple iPhone killswitch

Nobody likes the iPhone kill switch that was recently confirmed by Big Brother Apple as being very much a reality. Want to know how to kill it?

Indian Apple iPhone 3G launches without the 3G

File under: what is the point of that then? Both Bharti Airtel and Vodafone are set to start selling the Apple iPhone 3G later this week, but it will be missing one important component - the 3G network to run it on.

Talking Turkey: bloggers ban themselves in protest over banned blogs

More than 200 bloggers in Turkey have taken the decision to ban their own blogs in protest at the Turkish government which has already banned hundreds of websites for insulting either the government or Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Turkish Republic.

Apple pulls Push Notification Service support in latest iPhone Firmware Beta

The iPhone Firmware saga continues as Apple seeds 2.1 Beta 4 to developers. This time the big talking point would seem to be not what has been added but what Apple has taken away...

Sex choice adverts banned from search engines in India

Internet censorship has many and varied faces. The latest revealed itself in India as the Supreme Court ordered Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to stop serving up adverts for sites that promote sex selection services.