Shareholder meetings look set to become the next battleground in tech and internet companies' fight with US politicians over net neutrality.

InterviewThings haven't had turned out as expected, agrees David Wood, executive VP of research at Symbian. Symbian phones dominate the smartphone market, but last week we suggested a number of reasons why the device category hadn't reached the volumes once predicted. And in many cases, where people have one, they really aren't using the features.

It would seem, to the casual observer, a relatively simple thing to keep track of something with a mass millions of times that of our sun, but astronomers are having trouble locating supermassive black holes in neighbouring galaxies.

Intel has taken a sharp knife to its price list, slashing what it charges for its microprocessors by up to 61 per cent as the company makes way for its Core 2 Duo desktop and mobile CPUs. The chip maker also introduced some old-style Pentium D parts.

In a meeting that will go down in internet history, the United States government last night conceded that it can no longer expect to maintain its position as the ultimate authority over the internet.

Intel has published the details of the first 'Merom' mobile Core 2 Duo processors, though the chips will not ship in notebooks until toward the end of August, the chip giant revealed this morning.

A new satellite survey of coral reefs has shown that less than two per cent of them are within environmentally protected areas.

A UK organisation is to lead an EU project on the long term preservation of digital data on culture and science

Apple has acknowledged problems with its Intel-based portables that buyers have been banging on about for some time. In two support documents, the company informs suffering users to contact its AppleCare customer service team.

BT brought in revenues of £4.8bn in the first quarter ended 30 June 2006 - up three per cent on the same period last year and in line with analysts' expectations.

Every few years, we hear a surge in the talk about "the SMB opportunity" and what IT vendors can do to exploit it. Yet smaller organisations have been using IT for a long time now, and there is a well established community of suppliers that has been servicing their needs for many years.

Another day, another Samsung slimline slider phone. This one - it's just 1.4cm thick - also extends the company's long line of handsets capable of picking up satellite-sent Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB) television pictures.

A rationale for Brazil's inglorious exit from the World Cup has emerged. England's arguably even more inglorious exit in Germany was variously blamed on a combination of manager Sven Goran Eriksson's tactical ineptitude, the side's continued inability to take penalties, and Portuguese winker Cristiano Ronaldo1.

A predictable new MySpace-alike has been launched, this time targeting the adult market.

A Russian rocket carrying 18 satellites crashed on launch in Kazakhstan late Wednesday.

Memorex is preparing an iPod accessory that converts the diminutive digital music player into one of those portable DVD display machines - minus the optical drive, of course. Dubbed the iFlip, the unit connects a stowed video-capable iPod to an 8.4in, 480 x 234 widescreen LCD.

The Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA) is close to agreeing on a legal settlement with file-sharing network Kazaa.

Microsoft has announced plans to offer Internet Explorer 7 as a high-priority update to customers as soon as the long-awaited browser update becomes available.

Reg Reader StudiesWhen we asked about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in the last big reader research study, we weren't sure what kind of response we would get. We knew that in some quarters SOA had been discussed as mostly vendor hype, and we also suspected that stories of widespread adoption were probably a little exaggerated.

The Mozilla Foundation has released an updated version of Firefox following the discovery of multiple security vulnerabilities involving the popular browser software.

There are two primary concepts that are used extensively within Java (and indeed other OO languages) to promote reuse - inheritance and componentisation.

ReviewAlthough Reg Hardware published benchmarks for the new Intel Core 2 Duo and Extreme chips almost two weeks ago, it has taken that long for Intel to launch the product formally. If you've got the cash, you should be able to pick one up today. But the question many folk - particularly those with a preference for AMD's processors - are still asking is, why? There's no doubt that Intel has produced an impressive successor to the Pentium D, but can it beat AMD's latest offerings?

The European Commission is investigating the harm that mobile phones do to children.

That old cliché – the trouble with standards is that there are so many of them – could also be applied to the world of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) with real justification. There are many software vendors out there claiming to offer SOA solutions so the coming together of some leading players, towards the end of last year, in an attempt to generate some specifications (if not yet official "standards") to which they could all work arguably fell into the bracket of being "a good thing".

Sony will tomorrow launch its PlayStation Portable-oriented Wi-Fi hotspot network, though with only 11 sites, perhaps 'network' isn't the right word, particularly given the 7,500 hotspots that are part of rival Nintendo's Wi-Fi Connection for the DS.

The very early stages of planet formation could be responsible for putting the brakes on fast-spinning young stars, according to astronomers using the Spitzer infrared space telescope.

Samsung will ship 1, 2, 4 and 8GB MMC memory cards later this year, the South Korean giant pledged today. It claimed they will not only be the biggest capacity MMCs on the market. Others in the line-up will offer the fastest data transfers, it said.

Kazaa and the Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA) have settled out of court in a deal which will see the P2P operation hand over $100m to the industry. It'll now join fellow former industry pariah Napster as a fully paid-up digital music distributor.

Capita has appointed an insider to its group board, and reshuffled the boardroom to create a new joint role.

Headset specialist Plantronics has unveiled its autumn collection of Bluetooth earphones and mics, including an iPod Shuffle-like dongle designed to provide wireless stereo audio in a way that's still phone friendly.

Carphone Warehouse's overall Q1 revenues were up a tasty 42.1 per cent on 2005, painting a fairly rosy picture for the ever-diversifying group.

Record temperatures have been recorded in California and Europe over the past week, with power outages returning to the Golden State for the first time since the Enron era.

AnalysisRather than conforming to rivals' software licensing schemes, IBM has decided to go it alone and price software that runs on multi-core chips in a proprietary fashion. IBM argues that its scheme provides a more accurate picture of how different chips perform, although one could claim that IBM is adding extra confusion to an already complex problem.

Having alarmed Wall Street with its $2bn spending plans, Microsoft mounted a charm offensive at its annual financial analyst summit Thursday to try and convince stockholders that investments in search, internet advertising and search will pay off.

Comment"Because my background is physics and economics, I tend to go for data rather than speculation and hand waving," Chris Anderson told an interviewer recently. [ * ]

Microsoft's chief operating officer has preached the virtues of corporate-wide score cards as a tool to maintain customer satisfaction levels and thrash the competition.