Job cuts consultation underway Government services firm Serco is looking to cut up to 500 jobs from its IT division, with satellite offices and its Birmingham HQ all likely to be hit.?

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Friday 4 July 2008. 14:30:00 Wins the lottery 44,000 times a day A BRITISH ANTI SPAM company has released a list of the five most spammed people in Britain, with the number one spot going to a guy who gets over 44,000 unwanted mails a day. Int...

Tony Dennis the Inquirer, Friday 4 July 2008. 13:12:00 We remain to be convinced ARIESO's DR Konstantinos Stavropoulos claims a growing number of people are using their mobile phone instead of the fixed at home by signing up for 3G. The catch is that coverage is sometim...

Next gen network quid pro quo tabled The boss of Ofcom has given the clearest indication yet that regulators are ready to offer BT more control over a next generation UK broadband infrastructure in exchange for investment.?

Dekortage writes "The NYTimes has a piece up about the paradox of privacy: 'Normally sane people have inconsistent and contradictory impulses and opinions when it comes to their safeguarding their own private information.' More specifically, it's all how you ask: if you...

And be damn grateful about it, worms Well, I was actually hoping to spend this Friday performing my usual duties, perhaps enjoying a little light banter with my colleagues, and then sauntering out at lunchtime to get society-endangeringly drunk.?

Claims targets exceeded, but fee income tiny Government plans to position the Identity & Passport Service as the UK's de facto identity services broker seem not to have entirely caught the imagination of the private sector, figures in IPS' annual report and accounts sug...

We're taking the day off to celebrate the US Independence Day holiday. We intend to reflect on traditional American values such as freedom of speech and religion, fairness, justice, respect for the rule of law, the right to pursue happiness, standing up for the underdo...

Military celebrate limited-disaster triumph The UK Ministry of Defence has received some qualified praise for its ongoing, enormous effort to replace hundreds of different internal IT systems comprising scores of thousands of machines with a single integrated infrastructure.?

wooferhound sends along an amusing piece about thieves who got run over by technology and never knew what hit them. "A Rain Master Eagle-i Irrigation Controller recently stolen out of a housing development just outside of Tucson traveled nearly 80 miles before rescuing ...

Nick Booth the Inquirer, Friday 4 July 2008. 13:31:00 Oi lardy, hands off that pie! IF THERE'S ONE THING WORSE than intrusive Orwellian technology, it's rude intrusive technology. Now Samsung has invented a machine which passes judgement on you as you walk down the stre...

Egan Orion the Inquirer, Friday 4 July 2008. 13:08:00 Internet Explorer losing its stranglehold MOZILLA FIREFOX now holds 19 per cent of the web browser market, according to web survey company Net Applications. Less than one per cent of Firefox's increase in popularity ...

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Friday 4 July 2008. 13:16:00 Boomerangs on its plans AUSTRALIAN EBAY SELLERS were celebrating victory last night after the online auction site waved the white flag and backed down from plans to ram Paypal down users' throats. The move came jus...

Like déjà vu all over again Wall Street shut down for the long July 4 weekend pondering a puzzler. It emerged yesterday that Verisign CEO Bill Roper had suddenly quit the firm to be replaced by the firm's founder and chairman, Jim Bidzos.?

Bringing digital to Scart-free tellies Review Thousands of Brits are going to find their analogue TVs incapable of picking up a signal come 2012. Clearly, that doesn't concern too many of us, since we're still buying plenty of analogue tellies.?

Stewart Meagher the Inquirer, Friday 4 July 2008. 12:31:00 Just an arm and three quarters of a leg now, Airheads THE KINDLY FOLK at Cupertino have lopped £300 ($500) off of the price of the top-spec Macbook Air. Still the thinnest notebook in the world, and guaran...

For Google, ready Privacy: That could be the subliminal message Google wants to send by replacing its name on i...

Liberties sacrificed for 'an illusion' Interview As polling day approaches for the Howden and Haltemprice by-election, voters and observers are left with an eerie sense of déjà vu as Labour once again refuses to debate its civil liberties record with David Davis.?

Seller fury prompts backdown eBay Australia has given up on its attempt to force virtually all payments through its subsidiary PayPal.?

quanticle writes "As you may recall, France previously threatened to cut off broadband access for file sharers. However, after lobbying by the public, the legislation failed in the National Assembly. Now, the government of Nicolas Sarkozy is trying to revive the the mea...

Stewart Meagher the Inquirer, Friday 4 July 2008. 12:02:00 Parents unaware of new threat IN-GAME COMMS have brought a whole new layer of fun to many multi-player console games, but parents may be unaware that sexual predators, who have more commonly used traditional Int...

Tony Dennis the Inquirer, Friday 4 July 2008. 12:16:00 Reliance unlikely to merge with MTN HIGH HOPES of a deal between India's Reliance Communications and Africa's MTN have been dashed by recent events. It's quite feasible that MTN might pull the plug on the deal entir...

'Bulge' wave power - a hard one to swallow? British professors have secured government research funding for their plans to generate energy using gigantic black rubber snake-like devices moored off the UK coasts.?

Banana republic, sceptic isle redux Popstar turned humanitarian Bob Geldof has thrown his unkempt weight behind David Davis' by-election campaign.?

And mystery code injection flaw Opera released an update to the latest version of its browser on Thursday.?

TechRepublic examines just what went into one of the most famous personal computers ever manufactured--and what tech was like in 1991.

During a visit to the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla., CNET News.com's Daniel Terdiman gets to see the high-performance pilots up close.

Corporate Rainmen avoid panic attack over word count Google has finally added a link to its privacy (or lack thereof) policy on its homepage following pressure from privacy advocates.?

News.com reporter Daniel Terdiman visits Florida's Naval Air Station Pensacola, home of the Blue Angels.

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Friday 4 July 2008. 11:20:00 Ringing in a new era of downloaded music AS CD SALES PLUNGE, the mobile device music market soars according to a new report by research outfit Emarketer which claims that music on mobile devices will be a $7.3 bill...

Nick Farrell the Inquirer, Friday 4 July 2008. 11:28:00 Millionaire musicians barely staying alive POPULAR BEAT COMBO warbler Robin Gibb, claims that standardising music royalties across Europe would be a 'tragedy' for musicians and the songs they write. EC mandarins ar...

US consumers eye Apple smartphone More than half of US consumers looking to buy a smartphone in the next three months will opt for Apple's 3G iPhone.?

Doing it for charidee What could be more insincere than a bunch of marketing types concocting a fake blog to pimp their company's services by hitching them to worthy causes??

Fernando Cassia the Inquirer, Friday 4 July 2008. 10:54:00 Hands On Kiss the WinXP Language Bar goodbye YOU DON'T have to struggle with the default key maps provided with Windows. Yet few people venture to redesign their own keyboard map with Microsoft's freeware utilit...

EIF 2.0 draft ruffles some proprietary software feathers An open standards row is brewing between the EC and a lobbying group for software multinationals over a proposed European framework on interoperability ? a draft of which is due to be published on 15 July.?

Redmond security gnomes get tough Critical bug fixes are on the agenda for this month's monthly patch update from Microsoft.?

Offshoring ahoy! Treasury minister Yvette Cooper yesterday announced a plan to look for wide-ranging cost cuts in government budgets.?

Free from Applications Unlimited During its trumpeted webcast on plans for BEA Systems, Oracle's top brass stressed their commitment to middleware to keep the new flock happy. So it purchased BEA to expand Oracle's presence in Asia and Japan - that wasn't the point.?

Soft buildings: require no foundation of hard facts Architect Watch Heavens be praised* - the energy security/climate/fuel-price crisis has been solved by an MIT professor. Remarkably, not a professor of engineering or science either - but an architecture prof. Sheila K...

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Friday 4 July 2008. 10:30:00 Terminal laptop loss TWELVE THOUSAND LAPTOPS ARE carelessly lost on a weekly basis in US airports and most companies never even bother to disclose the losses according to a new report. The study, sponsored by Dell ...

Stewart Meagher the Inquirer, Friday 4 July 2008. 10:22:00 You can't keep a good Yank down GEORGE DUBYA BUSH recently tried to kick-start the American economy by sending each and every tax payer in the States a cheque for twelve hundred bucks. The hope was that patrioti...

INQUIRER staff the Inquirer, Friday 4 July 2008. 10:21:00 Q1 server revenue growth estimate cut back INDUSTRY SHAMANS at Gartner Group have rejiggered industry numbers for the first quarter, cutting estimates of server revenue growth from 4.3 per cent to 2.5 per cent an...

4WebChimps writes "As featured previously on Slashdot, the KOffice project is working towards a cross-platform, open source office suite for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. The most recent release, KOffice 2.0 Alpha 8, achieved that goal by being the first release for all ...

Overnight, £300 cheaper Apple's MacBook Air - still the world's slimmest laptop; VoodooPC's Envy isn't shipping yet - just got cheaper. Well, sort of. Apple's knocked £300/$500 off the price of the solid-state drive model.?

Nick Farrell the Inquirer, Friday 4 July 2008. 09:19:00 That is what his mates say A BLOKE ACCUSED of leading a terrorist group was a bit dim and lacked the computer skills with which he has been attributed, an Aussie court was told. Algerian-born Abdul Nacer Benbrika, ...

Nick Farrell the Inquirer, Friday 4 July 2008. 09:25:00 All a bit of a laugh THE CASE AGAINST the German family which stuck its kid up for sale on Ebay has been dropped. The new-born boy was taken into care while humourless German coppers investigated allegation of chil...

The first maintenance release to the Ubuntu "Hardy" release is available. They've fixed a number of issues, but not all of them... "While we have fixed a number of audio-related issues, including a scheduler problem that caused audio stuttering under load, other audio ...

Cher Price the Inquirer, Friday 4 July 2008. 08:56:00 Ups his stake by nearly $100 million DELL FOUNDER and CEO Michael Dell bought nearly $100 million worth of the company's stock last week, an SEC disclosure revealed Tuesday. The regulatory filing reported that Mr Del...

Stewart Meagher the Inquirer, Friday 4 July 2008. 08:17:00 They want details of every clip you've ever watched THE WORLD'S MOST VISITED website is being forced to hand over the details of every clip watched by every use... ever. Google, which snapped up Youtube for $1.6...

How to prevent more government data disasters A panel of experts in data protection was beaten yesterday by a simple question from the floor: "Can you give us an example of good data security practice by the British Government?"?