To Guam and beyond

It looks like Google is prepping another underwater comms cable.…

Rent due again?

Suing communication providers over alleged patent infringements has worked pretty well for Judah Klausner.…

OSNews reader rom508 sent us a note that apparently, Sun has ceased selling all of its UltraSPARC-based workstations, with only their x86 workstation offerings remaining. The Ultra 25 and Ultra 45 workstations, both UltraSPARC-based, are still listed on Sun's website, but are marked as 'end-of-life', with the notice that they are "superceded by the next generation Sun Ultra 24 Workstation [x86]". One must wonder if this means the end of Sun's UltraSPARC workstation line. As a proud owner of an indestructible Ultra 5, I must say, that would be rather sad.

The semantics of force feedback

Microsoft and the force-feedback technology firm, Immersion, appear to have come to final terms after six years of suing each other.…

The IE team at Microsoft has released the 2nd beta Internet Explorer 8. Contrary to the first beta, which was aimed at developers, this one one is aimed at normal people like you and me. The list of new features and changes is decent, all focused around three themes (marketing alert): "We focused our work around three themes: everyday browsing (the things that real people do all the time), safety (the term most people use for what we've called 'trustworthy' in previous posts), and the platform (the focus of Beta 1, how developers around the world will build the next billion web pages and the next waves of great services)." Go get it.

It's easy. Those tubes are busted

More evidence that the intertubes are fundamentally broken has been served up by Wired.com in an article laying out a technique to surreptitiously hijack huge chunks of the internet and monitor or even modify unencrypted traffic before it reaches its intended destination.…

Chinese Democracy, American Extremism

The FBI has arrested a 27-year-old American blogger for leaking some unreleased Guns N' Roses tunes to the internet.…

SQL tools plug gaps

What was seen as a major hole in Google's MapReduce database technology has been plugged, not once but twice. In the same week.…

German spies Phenom X2

Quite contrary to rumors AMD scrapped its plans to bring dual-core K10 parts to the market, the chip maker may have already begun selling the line to its partners on the sly.…

A road map for regulators of the future

Getting a head start on the world's antitrust regulators, an astute Finn is offering a bastardized version of Google's search engine that ignores sites served up by Google itself.…

Dropping profits and stock prices have analysts speculating that Sun could be a target for either acquisition or a restructuring in which the company would sell off parts of the business and focus on a smaller set of technologies. In a July 31 report, the 451 Group analyst firm raised the possibility of Sun being acquired: 'Sun's sunken stock price creates a relative bargain considering its roughly $4 billion cash on hand, sizeable intellectual property and patent portfolio, and of course, its respected technology and products'.

Parlez-vous GoogleTalk? Er, no

Android developers have admitted that Google's mobile phone platform won't support GoogleTalk in its first version, and that Bluetooth support will be severely limited.…

Peterborough Attacks

A small British company developing a unique form of hovering aircraft says it will soon demonstrate a new and much more serious version of its technology.…

More false positives ahoy?

Microsoft wants to rein in more Windows XP pirates over the coming weeks, by pushing out a new version of its “nagware” which detects when a machine is running a fake copy of the OS.…

Gore-Tex killer?

UK company Plasma Product Innovations (P2i) today demonstrated a chemical process it claims can render any material 100 per cent waterproof.…

130 redundancies at A Novo UK

A Novo UK, which services mobile phones, monitors and set-top boxes, is laying off at least 130 staff and closing its Manchester repair centre.…

Unnecessary for fraud clampdown

UK election scrutineers are pushing for polling stations to require tougher proof of identity to reduce the risk of ballot-rigging, but do not want voters to be forced to bring photo ID.…

Handset sales continue to soar

Global mobile phone sales will exceed 1.2bn handsets this year, although tough economic conditions are already biting into phone sales, market watcher Gartner has warned.…

But UK punters still protected

The Mobile Marketing Association has published its guidelines for advertising pushed over Bluetooth connections, and considers anyone who hasn't opted out to be fair game for spammers.…

Modest GPS-enabled mobile from Nokia

Review The upgraded successor to last year’s 6110 Navigator, the 6210 is a tidy slider-design handset, bearing more than a passing resemblance in looks and specs to the recently-launched 6220 Classic.…