"About one in four Internet users have downloaded a movie," begins a recent, much-publicized report on online file-trading. Thing is, the statement is not even almost true.

Apple is close to signing a deal with major players in the UK independent music label community, sources familiar with the talks' progress have claimed.

mmO2 and coffee chain Tchibo are teaming up to establish a virtual mobile network in Germany. mmO2 claims 1.39m German customers already, but the Tchibo joint venture will target lower-spending pre-pay customers.

A Los Angeles court has dismissed Paris Hilton's $30m invasion of privacy lawsuit against the Internet company which owns the rights to the infamous skin-flick of the hotel heiress getting down-and-dirty with her former squeeze. The reasons for the dismissal are unclear, Reuters reports.

PollWe at Vulture Central are completely shocked, nay flabbergasted, this morning by the revelation today that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has been a little "creative" with its figures regarding illegal movie downloads.

Merrill Lynch (ML) has issued a bearish warning to holders of chip industry stocks: sell your shares or risk further declines in value.

Chip-making equipment manufacturers together expect sales to grow 63 per cent to $36.2bn this year, from 2003's $22.2bn total, the Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International (Semi) organisation, said yesterday.

Egg, the UK e-bank, is fleeing France and 450 employees. The cost of extricating itself from this debacle is €170m.

Weblog search engine Technorati says it is now tracking over three million weblogs, with 8,000-17,000 new blogs created every single day. That means that a new weblog is created somewhere in the world every 5.8 seconds. Of these, a reported 36 per cent irritate friends or family with their twitterings, while a staggering 12 per cent attract the attention of lawyers with their biting commentary.

Sony will unveil the PlayStation 3 early next year shortly after its PlayStation Portable (PSP) goes on a sale in Japan and just before the handheld console ships in the US and Europe, the consumer electronics giant revealed yesterday.

ILM, or Information Lifecycle Management as it likes to be known formally, is employed in the areas of storage and storage management. At heart ILM is the management of tiered storage to provide cost effective, robust management of data as it ages. And it is becoming an increasingly popular TLA (three letter acronym). Why? As everybody knows, the volume of data generated in everyday business is mounting at a pace that exceeds even that of the increasing capacity of storage systems. The data itself and the information it holds are of enormous value to businesses; and it is vital that it be held safely.

In briefSymantec has bought TurnTide, an anti-spam start-up, for $28m cash. The acquisition comes on hot on the heels on Symantec's much larger deal to buy spam filtering firm Brightmail for $370m.

In briefCisco will provide VoIP equipment to create a unified voice, video and data networks for Boeing. The US aircraft maker has run a VoIP trial since 2001 using 4,500 Cisco IP phones in Missouri, Texas, Utah and Washington. It expects make significant maintenance savings with the converged network, but no value was put on the contract. The company employs 150,000 people in 70 countries.

Letters:Let's kick off with a 419 letter. We reported on the closure of the online front of a UK-based 419 advance fee fraud gang, following our investigation of a scam recently run by the group.

ExclusiveIBM is to move 500 UK jobs to India as part of a reorganisation of its outsourcing business, according to internal memos seen by The Register.

Google is to trade its shares on NASDAQ, ending months of speculation. Some had favoured the New York Stock Exchange, which has redoubled efforts in recent years to lure big technology companies seeking to avoid associations with new economy rivals and the tech sector in general, which was tarnished by the downturn.

BT broadband customers are unable to access Geocities websites. The sites have been inaccessible for several days, according to BT Openworld customers who have written to The Register. Customers using dial-up accounts can access the site as normal.

It was five years ago today...In the heady days of the infancy of e-commerce, the fate of the well-worn leather wallet bearing fivers seemed sealed. Cash? Soon to be a thing of the past:

Sony was slapped with a patent infringement lawsuit and application to the US International Trade Commission (ITC) to ban the import of its PDAs and digital cameras.

Sharp will begin shipping Symbian-based handsets next year in a bid to grow its share of the mobile phone market outside Japan.

Anyone trying to pay a Barclaycard bill from an Apple Mac in the last six weeks or so, has run into a small problem. The site won't take their money.

Red Hat is changing the way it accounts for revenue from software subscriptions. The Linux specialist's new accountants, PricewaterhouseCoopers, objected to the way it counted subscriptions on a monthly basis. From now on it will recognise such revenue on a daily basis. And it will restate its accounts for the financial year ended 29 February 2004, 28 February 2003 and for 28 February 2002.

Japan's Fair Trade Commission (FTC) has ordered Microsoft to remove restrictive clauses from OEM contracts with PC vendors and to ensure that it does not add such restrictive clauses again. But it is not fining the software giant, which has until 26 July to appeal the decision

FoTWFlames, like all works of art, are very personal things.

AMD's notebook CPUs have taken a hammering in Europe this year, market watcher Context revealed today.

French hard drive maker LaCie last week announced the latest in its line of colossal external drives: a 1.6TB (1600GB) monster.

EDS and the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT) have reached an "amicable" settlement over the termination of the IT services giant's contract to manage email for the 1m NHS staff. Cable & Wireless is to take over the contract.

UpdatedThe UK's Ministry of Defence has banned Apple iPod music player as a security risk, Reuters reports. It thinks the high-capacity devices could be used to steal sensitive data. The digital music player is a number of devices the MoD will no longer allow into its offices in the UK or abroad.

The launch of the Telesat Anik F2 satellite has been postponed, apparently due to an anomalous data check. Arianespace has not yet announced a new launch date. The satellite was to provide Broadband connectivity to much of the North American continent, including distance learning and e-health services.

IBM's already strong Unix server line just got stronger today with the announcement of a new line of Power5 processor-based systems.

Google and Yahoo! have spiced up their search and portal operations via acquisition.

TorontoMicrosoft is to build an online marketplace to help customers find approved vendors of hardware and software.

VeriSign is to rapidly update Domain Name System (DNS) records every few minutes instead of only twice a day. From 8 September changes in the .com and .net zones will take an estimated five minutes to propagate across all 13 .com/.net authoritative name servers. The old systems will remain there for those who don't want to make the leap forward.

TorontoSteve Ballmer has seen the future, and it’s Danish. At least, he’d like it to be.

Financial institutions with critical systems and cash on the line are reorganizing to deal with the closing gap between the hole and the patch.

Motherboards and flash memory sales drove Intel to a strong second quarter, as total revenue jumped 18 per cent year-over-year, the company reported today.

US telecoms equipment maker Lucent Technologies has signed a $5bn contract to supply Verizon Wireless with equipment, network management software, and services, the companies announced today.