October, 2007 Issue

The Australian competition regulator said on Tuesday it would not block the $3.1bn (£1.5bn) acquisition by Google of DoubleClick, a US web-advertising supplier.

Google will unveil its long-anticipated plan to bring its software to mobile phones within the next two weeks, The Wall Street Journal reported late on Monday, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter.

Adobe says that most of its applications are compatible with Leopard without the need for an update.

U.S. Federal Trade Commission says that a bill stalled in Congress would give it the tools it needs to fight spyware.

Perhaps it's a bit unusual to be thinking of the Frito-Lay Company as a software developer. But since it officially issued a challenge for developers to create an Xbox Live game that "brings to life the bold spirit of the Doritos brand" was issued, five contest finalists have been working with professional development teams since August to realize their visions.

Rockstar's controversially violent game Manhunt 2 finally hits shelves on Halloween, with toned-down violence and some scenes removed.

Apple has apparently instituted a credit card-only policy for iPhone sales at its retail stores in order to guarantee supply for the holidays and frustrate potential resellers, according to multiple reports.

The Pirate Bay said Friday that it was working on bringing back OiNK, a BitTorrent tracker that featured music files from "hundreds of thousands" of music albums.

The social networking site strikes a deal with Oberon to provide multiplayer games in profiles.

Although Windows Vista has been on sale for nearly nine months, Microsoft has yet to seriously market the operating system, letting a certain rival control public mind share on a number of fronts. That's all about to change, as the Redmond company attempts to make Vista more compelling to consumers.

Bugs happen. They happen in Windows, OS X, various distros of Linux, whatever. But this bug unfortunately, is the saddest thing I have ever heard of. As the piece points out, Microsoft responded and said they are taking this very seriously. Great, but knowing how poorly activation has worked in the past, both from user experience side of things and simply because it’s so easy to bypass, maybe it’s time to get back to the drawing board?

Microsoft Corp. has delayed the release of the next version of Dynamics NAV, one of its ERP applications for mid-size companies, company executives said last week.

The UK government may crack down on ISPs over illegal file-sharing, a senior government official has suggested.

Motorola on Thursday posted third-quarter earnings above Wall Street estimates and forecast a profit for the fourth quarter, raising expectations the mobile handset maker had begun to turn its business around.

Europe is now the biggest market for outsourcing, while demand in the US has softened as a result of a shift in focus to smaller deals.

While a class action lawsuit is definitely one way to get Comcast to behave, another perhaps more productive way to do so is to have politicians step in and regulate.

AT&T Inc. hasn't decided whether it will bid for the highly-desirable 700MHz band because it doesn't know if it can build a profitable business given the open-access rules set for the wireless spectrum by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission in July.

Former Google employees say that the company's founders are concerned about the prevention and extermination of evil.

HelioVolt, which specializes in copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) solar cells, has raised $24 million more, bringing the total injected into the company to over $100 million. The latest investors include Sequel Venture Partners, Noventi Ventures, and Passport Capital.

Radio scientists at IBM Research and MediaTek are teaming up to develop a wireless transmission protocol that will deliver files more than 100 times faster than WiFi.

The Storm Worm botnet has been shrinking steadily and is about 10 percent of its former size.

WiMax has effectively been folded into 3G's future development, after the International Telecommunication Union decided on Friday to include it in the IMT-2000 set of standards.

Flickr has 42 million photos with geotags--information called metadata that records the location where a photo was taken--and now it's trying to let users get more out of them.

In the IT industry, Microsoft and its "ecosystem" of parters are big--on the order of 40 percent of the market. And if any policy makers around the world doubted its influence, it now has the data to prove it.

Keeping the good tradition, we want to offer the new Nokia N810 Internet Tablet to the most active contributors of the maemo community, as soon as possible and as affordably as possible. The N810 maemo device program starts *now* with 500 discount codes entitling their fortunate owners to get a device for 99€ (or equivalent price in other currencies).

If you're buying a wireless network, then you should be buying NAC too, claimed Trapeze Networks as it stitched a deal with NAC specialist Mirage Networks to sell an integrated secure WLAN system in the UK.

Nokia cut this week cut around 15 percent from the price of its 3G phone model E65, one of the top sales and profit generators for the world's largest mobile-phone maker, market data showed on Friday.

The Health Protection Agency has announced a research programme into the possible health implications of Wi-Fi technology.

Discovery of a vulnerable university server results in discipline for 'mishandling' data when reporting the hole.

'Great Whale Trail' monitors humpbacks by satellite across the Pacific Ocean.

The private equity firm backed by U2 frontman Bono, which recently invested $325 million into Palm, has received a hefty return on its $300 purchase of game developers BioWare and Pandemic. EA has agreed to acquire the two studios from Elevation Partners, with 10 games in development, for $620 million in cash and another $205 million in stock.

Spammers are exploiting YouTube's "invite your friends" facility to send spam containing a Storm Trojan from the video-sharing site.

The European Union's data watchdog will take another few months to decide whether Google or other web search engines may be violating EU privacy laws, a participant in the watchdog's meeting said on Wednesday.

A malicious hacker broke into an eBay server last week and temporarily suspended the accounts of a "very small" number of members, the company said.

ScriptLogic customers worried about migrating to Vista have been offered a new tool from the company to help spot potential problems.

Google is expanding its AdSense program so that Web site publishers can display and make money off embedded video clips from YouTube content partners that have targeted banner or text ads, in addition to the traditional text ads that Google offers.

The improved security in Microsoft's newest software products may leave some security researchers looking elsewhere for work.

Move over Microsoft. Google is beefing up its outsourced e-mail offering aimed at corporations and universities, adding security features that large companies demand.

Bowing to pressure from customers and computer makers, Microsoft plans to keep Windows XP around a little longer.

European and US antitrust regulators tried to calm a transatlantic storm on Thursday over a European Court ruling that Microsoft used monopoly power to muscle rivals, but did not back down over policy differences.