Sun Microsystems once again has eyes for Intel, and this time it's serious.

The Jack & Jill Children's Foundation has kicked off a month-long drive to recycle over half a million old or unwanted mobile phones. The charity cares for families with terminally ill babies suffering irreparable brain damage, referred to by doctors as SDD. It aims to raise €500,000 from its recycling project.

AMD has pruned the prices of a number of its desktop processors by up to 26.8 per cent, focusing the adjustment on its low-end Sempron CPUs and its Athlon 64 dual-core lines.

Battling supermodel Naomi Campbell was on Friday appointed ambassador for Rio de Janeiro - allegedly the world's most violent city.

CommentAs we bid farewell to 2006 and begin to see the realities of 2007 (ie, no real change to the problems we had in 2006), I thought I would have a look at what could change 2007 into a more interesting year in the IT space.

Intel, Hynix, Micron, Sony and the other companies behind the Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI) have announced the specification is complete and ready to use to break the proprietary link between Flash memory and controller chips. It now plans to make Flash as easy to upgrade as RAM.

So, you're tired of Windows and thinking of trying Linux. There are lots of good distros, RedHat or Novell have all the enterprise cred you might need. And there's a support community too, it's a no brainer....

The Professional Computer Association (PCA) is throwing out two companies for failing to follow its code of practice.

Intel appears to have quietly rolled out a low-end Core 2 Duo desktop processor, the E4300. The part, which supports no more than an 800MHz frontside bus clock and contains just 2MB of L2 cache, went on sale in Japan this weekend.

AnalysisFor years analysts have asked suppliers "so which market are you in - BI or CPM?" Suppliers were somewhat coy about the answer. BI and CPM were perceived as distinct and separate markets.

Belgium's French language newspapers are continuing their copyright crusade and this time want compensation from search engine Yahoo!.

Buyers have begun complaining that the displays Dell installs in its Inspiron notebooks may not be up to scratch, and a groundswell of internet users are asking the computer giant to sort out the situation.

Police hacked into Downing Street computer systems during their investigation into allegations of cash for honours against the Labour Party.

Microsoft has said it could launch its Zune wireless digital media player and online song store in Europe by the end of the year, potentially much earlier than the company previously indicated. New US models may debut in the same timeframe.

InterviewMany people have seen internet maps on walls and in various publications over the years. Federico Biancuzzi interviewed Bill Cheswick, who started the Internet Mapping Project that grew into software to map corporate and government networks. They discussed firewalling, logging, NIDS and IPS, how to fight DDoS, and the future of BGP and DNS.

Nintendo's Wii games console will help you lose weight, at least if you play the bundled Wii Sports title on a regular basis. So claims a North American fan of the machine, and he's posted the results of a six-week weight-loss experiment conducted with the console to prove it.

ReviewIt's a neat trick being able to transmit data around your home or office via the mains power wiring. You get a more stable, less interference-prone connection than Wi-Fi and a potentially faster link too. The downside is that there's no roaming, at least not beyond the reach of an RJ-45 cable and however many powerline adaptors you've got dotted around your house.

Two vendor-backed Linux groups will join forces today to get more sway over the standards and direction taken by the open source OS.

MidemNetSo Microsoft's strategy for its Zune player is becoming clear. Just dig up what Register readers were talking about five years ago.

The US hosted more than one third of the websites containing malicious code identified during 2006. The country also relayed more spam than any other nation last year, according to a study by net security firm Sophos.

Asus has thoughtfully pre-announced AMD's next-generation mobile graphics chip, the ATI Mobility Radeon X2300, which the Taiwanese vendor today said it's planning to build into an upcoming Core 2 Duo-based notebook.

MidemNetReal Networks' CEO Rob Glaser summed up the music business' ambivalence towards DRM this weekend, and said digital music needed the shackles taken off.

IBM polished up another facet of its Lotus product suite today with a promise to turn every corporate network into a bubbling MySpace clone.

AOL Europe has appointed its sixth boss in a year as it repositions itself as an advertising-supported portal business.

BT's wireless broadband router Home Hub may be in breach of the terms of Linux's General Public License, after it emerged the device runs on open source code.

House of CardsOnly days after two former executives of an Isle of Man based online payment service were arrested on money laundering charges, the American government dealt another black eye to the European financial services industry.

Fears have been voiced that last week's unexpectedly early interest rate rise will send more small and medium-sized businesses down the tubes this year.

ExclusiveFlashy chip start-up PA Semi has started losing some of its top executives ahead of the release of its first product, The Register has learned.

Server buffs have spent years wondering when Sun and Intel would finally bury their hatchets in each other's back and form a partnership. Now the deal is done, but it wants for excitement, controversy . . . anything.

The virus writers behind last week's Storm Trojan outbreak showed off some neat tabloid headline-writing skills in a string of similar attacks over the weekend.

MySpace.com has sued self-proclaimed spam king Scott Richter for allegedly using compromised user accounts to send millions unsolicited ads touting ringtones, polo shirts among other things.

I am getting mixed messages about data governance. IBM recently published the results of a survey it had conducted into the use of data governance, which it conducted in conjunction with the NCC. Out of 141 respondents, from companies of all sizes, only seven per cent reported that data governance was neither implemented nor on the planning horizon. Of the remaining 93 per cent more than half had some sort of (at least initial) process in place. Now, admittedly this was a self-selecting set of respondents but this does not fit with my experience.

Silicon JusticeApparently, the blogosphere buys into every press release they read.

Platform Solutions Inc (PSI) the mainframe emulator maker, has come out fighting in its legal battle with IBM, alleging all manner of anti-trust abuses in a suit announced today.

Vonage, the indie broadband telco, is turning itself into a Skype-alike by offering cheap-as-chips long distance and international calls to any Vonage number (or 800 number).