Apple today apologised for selling a "small number" of video iPods infected with the RavMone.exe virus. Pox-ridden ipods accounted for less than one per cent of the video iPods hitting the streets after September 12.

Oracle today published the mother of all security patches containing 101 fixes for flaws in its database, application server, E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft and JD Edwards applications.

AllofMP3.com may hail from Russia, but the rebel retailer is the North Korea of the music industry. The record labels accuse it of online piracy and hate what it does, but only now are they figuring out how to deal with this internet phenomenon.

The boss of UK police technology has warned that government attempts to use surveillance and databases to impose law and order could backfire unless those with access to the system are prevented from abusing the power it gives them.

Motorola took a kicking yesterday night when analysts decided a 17 percent rise in third quarter sales just wasn’t enough.

The Queen has ended her search for an IT director, with applications for the post closing on Monday, and the advert already removed from her website.

Intel will next year extend its Core 2 Duo desktop processor line, rolling out four CPUs in the Q2 2007 timeframe, three with support for the 1,333MHz frontside bus speed due to be introduced with the 'Bearlake' chipset series, it has been claimed.

Computer problems played a significant role in the chaos affecting England's Rural Payments Agency (RPA), according to a report by the National Audit Office (NAO)

A Microsoft campus billboard has confirmed that Vista does exist and may even ship to manufacturers later this month.

Grumpy naysayers will argue that SGI shouldn't have bothered. It should have put the purple logos away, handed its old contracts to IBM or Sun Microsystems and called it a day. Never mind this bankruptcy emerging business.

McAfee has dismissed Microsoft's release of information to allow security vendors to build products that will interoperate with Vista.

NEC's LCD Technologies division will next year begin mass-producing its latest low-temperature poly-silicon TFT displays for PDAs and other handheld gadgets, the company said today. The devices' unique selling point: the circuitry is embossed on the glass.

An Austrian roofer who slipped on the job ended up nailing himself to the roof - through his wedding tackle.

Logicalis will offer environmental training to its customers in an effort to reduce their carbon footprints.

Intel's era of openness continues. The company this week freed up some homegrown technology for improving the networking performance of servers.

The Department of Constitutional Affairs is urging local authorities to pilot e-voting schemes in the May 2007 local elections.

So how much are Intel's upcoming quad-core processors going to set you back? Top dollar, it seems, according to reports coming out of Taiwan citing industry sources who've seen the chip giant's latest roadmap.

Twelve operators have announced their support for the GSMA-sponsored "3G for All" programme to develop a cheap 3G handset with video, music, instant messaging and fast(ish) internet access.

A US casino mogul has blown a deal to offload a Picasso painting for £74m ($139m) after accidently sticking his elbow through it, the BBC reports.

Online games enthusiasts are up in arms over Electronic Arts's (EA) decision to bundle monitoring software with its latest game. Retail packages of Battlefield 2142 come with a leaflet explaining that the game comes with an adware package. The software, developed by IGA Worldwide, is used to deliver in-game advertising so that users traveling through the virtual environment will see billboards advertising real-world brands.

EMC's Tuesday job cull would have been long expected by many in the company.

Sports car outfit TVR has announced it will cease production in the UK, meaning redundancy for the 250 workers at its Blackpool plant, the BBC reports.

Internet overseeing organisation ICANN will vote later today on whether to introduce a new system aimed at closing a loophole in domain name rules that enables speculators to register thousands of domain names effectively for free.

Orange has got its broadband network back up and running, with access restored early this morning.

Officially, 802.16e - or Mobile WiMAX as the vendors insist on calling it, even though its greatest advantage is that it spans fixed and mobile operations - is almost with us.

Controversial game designer Rockstar will not see its take on Bash Street, Canis Canem Edit - aka Bully - on sale in shops owned by UK retail giant DSG, it has emerged. The reason? The chain believes the title is "not appropriate" for its "family-friendly image".

Hackers have created a bogus Internet Explorer 7 download site that attempts to load Trojan code onto the PCs of visiting surfers.

Enterprise uptake of wireless Lans (WLan) has never taken off at the speed that was anticipated a few years ago, and the equipment vendors face the unpleasant prospect of margins plummeting before they have achieved sufficient volume to compensate.

Spending on support services for VoIP will hit $1.27bn by 2010, analysts at IDC say.

Ladies and gentlemen, the world has another UMPC. The latest is the Vega from Japanese supplier Brulé - the crème de la crème of ultra-mobile PC providers, perhaps? - which is based around a 4.3in, 800 x 480 display and an AMD Geode LX800 processor. There's 512MB of RAM on board and a 4,200rpm 30GB hard drive.

Armed forces Procurement Minister Lord Drayson, recently described as "quite preposterous" by fellow peers, has kicked off a £10 million ideas competition to accompany this week's launch of the UK's Defence Technology Strategy. The Strategy itself starts from the premise that "Current threats emphasise that science and technology is fundamental to UK military capability", and that the Ministry of Defence "must own and control key technologies", while the briefing documents for the ideas competition provides more specific indications of the tech-led road the MoD wishes to follow.

LettersFor HSBC, keeping thousands of customers from their money is just part of doing regular business with the bank. The company explained away Sunday's multi-hour ATM and credit card outage by telling us that it resulted from a "standard server" issue. HSBC issued no apology and called the whole kerfuffle "a minor" incident.

BriefBridgeHead Software has done a worldwide distribution deal with Quest.

Comment"It is a rare occasion when a President can sign a bill that he knows will save American lives; I have that privilege this morning," US President George W Bush trilled as he consigned 200 years of judicial oversight to the scrap heap of history.

Storage ExpoNetApp punted a new virtual tape library (VTL) offering today, as it continues to perform noisy running bombs into a growing pool of custom the really big lads have so far just dipped a toe into.

Spamhaus has switched legal tack and decide to appeal an $11.7m judgment against it by a US court obtained by a firm it labelled a spammer. The London-based anti-spam organisation had argued that the court has no jurisdiction over it, but the threat of domain seizure has forced it to take action.

Storage ExpoWhen two of the last two swingers in tape town tied the knot earlier this year, some interpreted the move as the bell tolling for independent tape vendors. When Quantum bought ADIC for $770m in May, the move was not well received on Wall Street.

With a well revamped server line behind it, Sun Microsystems has reached a point of contentment. You can tell that Sun is happy with itself because the company has started flinging lots of far out concept gear. The best and most recent example being the White Trash Data Centers announced earlier this week.

A leading MySpace executive has said it is extremely unlikely that there will ever be integration between social networking websites.

Web viruses fell by half in September, despite recent high-profile Microsoft vulnerabilities. But spyware infections grew 21 per cent over the same period last month, according to a study by UK-based web filtering firm ScanSafe.

Chemical AlleyBe now assured that America is safe from a drug addict trying to make a weapon of mass destruction from castor oil, a laxative. This comes by way of the example of Casey Cutler, a drug addict from Mesa, Arizona, who wound up in the Department of Justice's 2006 count of WMD terror cases broken up by the government. It was reprinted in "Congress's Vigilance in the Five Years Since 9/11: Making America Safer," a propaganda sheet issued by Senator John Kyl on August 6, chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, in anticipation of the five year rehash and memorial.

The internet is a dangerous tool of radical ideologies, according to the US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. He said that last summer's attacks on London was an example of a domestic terrorist threat in action.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is suing the US Department of Justice to learn more about the FBI's new monster database, called the Investigative Data Warehouse, or IDW.

The public fears losing their fingers to ruthless biometric ID thieves in the fingerprint-controlled future, apparently. Or at least, so says Frost & Sullivan analyst Sapna Capoor, who argued unconvincingly that "A dead finger is no good to a thief."

A jump in sales and income for Microsoft partner Citrix Systems last quarter was accompanied by increased costs, following M&A and product launches.

AMD has turned in a good Q3 with sales of $1.33bn and net income of $134m, or 27 cents a share. Processor shipments rose 18 per cent from Q2 and revenues climbed nine per cent from Q2 and, on a like-for-like basis, 32 per cent from Q3, 2005 (last year's figures included the lossmaking memory business, since spun off).

Steve Ballmer has pitched into the row over Microsoft's willingness to cough up vital Windows Vista APIs for partners to lock down the operating system against attack.

Symbian ShowBorn and hyped in the USA, mobile VoIP over Wi-Fi looks set to create waves everywhere … except the USA.