A trio of vendors today announced which notebooks they planned to ship with Intel's latest mobile chips.

Microsoft has dished out more than $16 million in political handouts over the last three years - and the software giant has upped such contributions since its legal wrangles with the US government.

Freebie bar-code scanner CueCat, which enables users to swipe bar codes in print media and have their browser immediately directed to related information on the Web, uses software which transmits all the information that maker Digital:Convergence would need to record every bar code that every user scans, and which could be used to profile users, an advisory by the Privacy Foundation explains.

AnalysisThere are lots of good and even wonderful things about being in Asia, close to what the CEO of Via calls the Greater China Manufacturing Engine, and one of them is you can watch the rest of the IT world as it wakes up to the news.

Many thanks to Rambusite, an independent Web site that follows the comings and goings of the Mountain View intellectual property outfit, for drawing our attention to three different developments in the continuing saga of Rambus versus The Rest.

AMD has some new embedded processors for thin clients, point-of-sale terminals and telecom gizmos. The new AMD-K6-2e and K6-IIIe MPUs are available at 350 and 550 MHz and in low-power variants.

The merger agreement between GlobalNetFinancial.com and Telescan has collapsed, with the two financial dotcom sites hurrying to unwind shareholdings in each other. GlobalNetFinancial is also stumping up $250,000 to pay towards merger expenses incurred by Texas-based Telescan.

A jubilant Palm yesterday unveiled its latest quarterly fiscals, which saw its revenues double and profits beat Wall Street expectations.

Space Invaders, the seminal computer game, is to make a comeback on WAP-enabled phones.

Rage Software supremo Paul Finnegan today added his voice to fellow computer games magnate Ian Livingstone, head of Eidos, and warned that the trade is in for a rough time over the next six months.

The Euro took its toll on the spot market last week, but Taiwanese brokers are taking up the slack. There's also movement, or lack of movement, let's say, on hard drives, writes Marco Fumagalli.

Symbian yesterday called on alliance member Motorola to reaffirm its support for the smartphone platform after the mobile phone giant announced its decision to work with Symbian rival Palm on a pair of smartphones.

Pro-Napster band The Offspring have knocked on the head their plan to offer their next album in MP3 format ahead of the CD release via the trouble music sharing service.

Energis has been singled out as the ringleader among rival telcos looking for the best way to give BT a bloody nose.

In a move straight out of Dilbert, HP is trying to save money by making its staff work in more cramped conditions.

More than half of British adults has never accessed the Net, according to the latest number crunching from the National Statistics Office.

Does your hardware have driver support?

San Jose-based IP outfit Palmchip has trousered first-round venture funding of $13 million from a syndicate led by Index IT, a division of Beeson Gregory in London specialising in funding emerging semiconductor and IP companies in the UK and US.

Real-time OS developer QNX has released version 2.0 of its Neutrino operating system, mere hours after we looked on QNX's Web site and found no sign of it.

Shoppers that check out a company's Web site spend a third more in stores than those that don't bother with the Internet, according to the National Retail Federation. Almost a third of those surveyed also used the Web to look at or buy something they had seen in a shop.

For the past few months mobile phone giant Vodafone has been running a handy little service in the UK. You can get free Web email via vodafone.net, and the service can link into your mobile phone, so you can get 'you have mail' alerts sent via short message, and you can also get news headlines, lottery numbers, horoscope and so on.

Mitsubishi and Hokkaido University have completed a latest round of experiments in quantum cryptography over optical fibres. The two organisations say that their quantum cryptographic system is a success, and could have important implications for optical fibre networks already in use.

A can of worms appears to be inexorably opening following our story earlier today HP downsizes workspace.

The big boy mobile manufacturers Nokia, Motorola and Ericsson have moved to control the issue of location commerce with the creation of a new standard forum.

A Web- and WAP-enabled chat and dating service - an online lonely hearts column in other words - will go live early next year. The site will be called findablinddate.com.

The Federal Trade Commission has closed the file on its investigation of Intel's business practices. It has also closed its examination of the anti-competitive implications of the acquisition of Chips &Technology and the equity stake in Real3D held by Intel.

On the very day that the FTC ended its investigation into Intel Story: Curtains finally close on FTC Intel gig, the FBI's file on the notorious Spinola family was also finally closed.

Overclocking action over at HardOCP today, as the one-gig versions of the Athlon and the PIII get water cooled and investigated more thouroughly that Richard Nixon. Click here to find out why your money is better spent on the slower versions.

Computer Resale, a franchising company for second-hand PCs, has ceased trading and is expected to call in Chantrey Vellacott as receivers by the end of the week. Many of the creditors are franchisees of Computer Resale, who paid up to £25,000 a year for the right to its name and support.

Microsoft today won - in the words of the Department of Justice - a further year's reprieve from the battery of remedies imposed by Judge Jackson earlier this year. The Supreme Court voted 8-1 in favour of the company's proposed course of action, that its appeal against Jackson's verdict should be dealt with by federal appeals court, rather than being expedited straight to the Supreme Court.

Lucky London dotcom Webswappers has netted investment from "leading Internet visionary" Nicholas Negroponte.

IBM has launched yet more additions to its product range - this time it's the turn of Big Blue's shiny desktops.

PreviewContrary to weekend reports, Sun Microsystems will preview one server and one workstation featuring its spanking new UltraSPARC III processors tomorrow.