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Hard to resist

Review The flourishing Android operating system has appeared on phones made by Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, LG and HTC. Now Google has launched its own handset, though it’s actually made by HTC, which has made the bulk of Android handsets so far.…

Practical Matters discussed live

Webcast: 10am If virtualisation is creeping across your organisation you’ve presumably ticked some of the security boxes, right? Well, whether you have or not, you may still want to tune in to our webcast at 10am today: Virtualisation and Security: Practical Matters.…

Web threats: Why conventional protection doesn't work

Feds cuff JihadJane

A suburban Pennsylvania woman who went by the online alias JihadJane used the internet to recruit Islamic terrorists and to plot the assassination of a Swedish cartoonist who depicted the Prophet Mohammed, according to a federal indictment unsealed Tuesday.…

Offloading malware protection to the cloud

Dual-node MS2 cluster

Criticising the pain of single-silo deduplication products, Sepaton has introduced a dual-node clustered product that can be upgraded to its larger ES2 system.…

What is your recession sales strategy?

The non-iPad iPad clone

The publicity whores at China's Shenzhen Great Loong Brother tablet-PC maker are at it again.…

What is your recession sales strategy?

Doggies digitized for your protection

Even if your beloved Westie is spending her declining years curled up by the hearth, Home Secretary Alan Johnson suggests she should be microchipped for the protection of her potential victims, and you should pony up for dog-attack insurance.…

Case Study: WhatsUp keeps Legoland turnstyles ringing

One stop Google bolt-on shop

The Mountain View Chocolate Factory has unveiled an online marketplace for third-party applications that hook into its Google Apps suite of web-based businessware.…

The power of collaboration within unified communications

With a click of a mouse, cyclists can get the quickest, and flattest, route between Point A and Point B.

The Nasdaq begins its spectacular collapse, signaling the end of the dot-com boom.

Is it real? Or is it Skytap?

Skytap - the Jeff Bezos-backed startup that lets you mimic internal IT infrastructure in the so-called cloud - has introduced a new set of automation tools designed to facilitate the creation of complex network topologies on its floating interwebs service.…

The power of collaboration within unified communications

The recently unveiled secret agreement that Apple makes iPhone developers sign supports what many have suspected all along: Apple is trying to control the universe.

Taking public transit wouldn't just decrease our carbon footprint — it'd also end all that fiddling with the phone while driving, an insanely dangerous problem.

Huge projects that would store wind energy by compressing air in abandoned mines and porous sandstone are gaining steam in the Midwest.

The Nasdaq peaked at 5,049 on March 10, 2000, then it promptly nosedived and hasn't come near that level since. Here’s a look at the era that launched — and crushed — a million dreams.

So, the Location Wars have begun in earnest - Facebook and Twitter have joined Google in launching location based services.

NYT on Facebook:

Starting next month, the more than 400 million Facebook users could begin seeing a new kind of status update flow through their news feed: the current locations of their friends.

Facebook plans to take the wraps off a new location-based feature in late April at f8, the company’s yearly developer conference, according to several people briefed on the project, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss unannounced services.

In preparation for the introduction, Facebook updated its privacy policy last November. The new policy states: “When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post.”

At that time, the company also offered some foreshadowing of the new feature: “If we offer a service that supports this type of location sharing we will present you with an opt-in choice of whether you want to participate.”
The temptation to do opt-out is going to be very strong though.....on past performance it wouldn't be surprising is that "opt-in2 promise is very liberally interpreted,

Twitter too is gearing up - TechCrunch:

The service has just turned on geolocation on its website today for the first time.

While Twitter’s geolocation feature has been live through its API since last November, there was no sign of integration into the main twitter.com site until now. As you can see in the screenshot above, for tweets tagged with location, right next to the source of the tweet there is a location placemarker. When you hover over it, it turns blue, and clicking on it brings up a little Google map showing the location that tweet was sent from.

You can see these maps as overlays both on individual tweet pages, and on tweets in your main stream. In some cases, depending on how Twitter geolocation API is being used, it looks like place names are even passed through to Twitter.
Timing is of course to coincide with SXSWi, where Location startups Gowalla, Foursquae and who knows how many others are trying to get that lifegiving buzz going (Buzz - now there is another location ploy) in the biggest geekfest on the planet. SXSW lends itself to this sort of thing as thousands of hungry and thirsty (for knowledge, natch) geeks seek their networked friends for meals over the 12 or so blocks of Austin Olde Town.

What can we say except be careful - Location based services play faster and looser with privacy than anything that has gone before.

Agrees to safeguard customer data

An Arizona company that sells services designed to prevent identity theft has agreed to pay $12m to settle charges it oversold their effectiveness and didn't adequately protect sensitive customer data.…

Offloading malware protection to the cloud

Through interviews with a brainy crop of musicians and scientists, a new documentary probes the connection between body, mind and music.

You're carrying around a video camera in your pocket (it's that thing attached to your mobile phone) so be prepared and learn how to start streaming video to the web at a moment's notice.

It's from 1934, and it doesn't look like a car, and it doesn't look like it would fly.

It’s a sadly familiar story from the high-flying market of the past few years: Speculator thinks values will continue to go up, up, up. Overbids for a hot property. Can’t keep up with the payments. Lender is forced to foreclose. Only this isn’t about real estate — it’s about the most expensive domain name in the history of the internet: sex.com.