After its online efforts to broker off-line television ads were spurned by the major cable networks, eBay is trying the same trick with radio ads.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz may have let the cat out of the bag on Apple's plans for Mac OS 10.5 Leopard's file system. While showing off the Zettabyte File System in Sun's 'Thumper' hybrid storage/server platform at a company event in Washington today, Schwartz let it drop that Apple too has big plans for the open source file system.

Intel has followed Sun Microsystems by releasing development tools to optimize the performance of applications running on multi-core, multi-threaded chips.

The US House of Representatives on Wednesday overwhelmingly passed legislation designed to protect PC users from spyware despite the strong objections of internet-based businesses that warned the measure could interfere with many legitimate online activities.

Brazilian boffins have developed a peer-to-peer grid computing system called OurGrid, which enables members to freely donate and use spare compute cycles.

Apple's Apple TV costs $299 in the US - and not much less to make, according to a price list of the parts that has been produced by market watcher iSuppli. The cost of materials and manufacturing: $237.

The ability to deliver usable applications to employees anywhere they happen to be will define the future of IT says Mark Templeton, chief executive officer of infrastructure software specialist Citrix.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has begun volume shipment of the Travelstar 7K200, a high-capacity, high-performance laptop hard drive with new optional data encryption technology. The new drive features up to 200GB capacity, a 22 per cent overall performance improvement over its predecessor, and improved shock tolerance, among other technical improvements. The 7200RPM Travelstar 7K200 has power consumption, heat emission, and acoustics comparable to its 5400RPM counterparts and features a Serial ATA 1.5GBps, 1.5GBps encrypted, or 3GBps interface.

Sony's PlayStation 3 is falling further behind Nintendo's Wii in the Japanese sales stakes, the latest figures from local market watcher Enterbrain have revealed.

The Office of Government Commerce (OGC) has appointed a new chief executive to lead its transformation agenda.

Child truancy alerts and virtual tour of colleges or universities for teenagers are among the most wanted online services, according to a survey commissioned by Directgov.

Intel appears increasingly set to challenge AMD and Nvidia's dominance of the discrete desktop graphics chip arena with an alternative to ATI Radeon and GeForce GPUs.

A TV advert for the Toyota Prius has been banned for misleading viewers about the car's green credentials. The Saatchi and Saatchi-produced ad has been taken off air by regulators over its misleading claim to emit one tonne less CO2 than other cars.

Western Digital has rolled out a bus-powered pocket hard drive that provides a whopping 250GB - pretty big for a product of this kind.

Companies should order all employees not to smoke in any work vehicle and should follow the Scottish "no smoking" sign requirements because they are the most stringent when the English smoking ban comes into force one month from today.

Dell has brought its carbon-confounding Plant a Tree For Me scheme to Europe, allowing buyers to make a small donation to help counter the emissions arising from keeping their computers powered up.

Children are becoming tech-savvy from a younger age, a new study has discovered.

Nearly a third of medium-sized companies in the UK have no IT strategy and a further third work to an "informal loose plan".

Samsung has turned to one of the world's leading - apparently - industrial designers to remould its latest handset as a "pragmatic work of art" rather than a run-of-the-mill candybar.

ActiveX controls - so often the source of Internet Explorer flaws - are the font of two newly discovered flaws in Yahoo! Messenger.

Student Emily Parr was this morning removed from the Big Brother house for using a "racially offensive word" to a fellow housemate, the BBC reports.

Google has added to calls for immigration authorities to allow more skilled foreign labour into the US, as the Mountain View firm struggles to keep pace with its own expansion.

Centrinet is claiming zero-carbon energy emissions and military-grade security for its Smartbunker underground managed hosting service.

A Worcestershire builder's bride-to-be looks likely to be walking up the aisle alone after her other half was jailed for two months for jumping naked into a fountain during a drunken stag night in Slovakia.

Retail giant DSG has poached Tesco's operations development boss John Browett who is to join the firm as its new group chief executive.

The US patent system is set for a thorough review, according to reports, with the aim of improving the quality of patents awarded, and thus reducing the number of patent lawsuits.

Richard Granger, the director general of NHS IT, is warning iSoft and CSC that if they don't sort out their differences he will consider ripping up contracts and finding alternative suppliers.

The South African justice committee is considering making foreign travellers register their name, passport number, and address with a local provider before being allowed to use the local GSM services.

Elton John is once again taking some stick from true believers in the run-up to his planned 16 June charity gig in Ukraine's capital Kiev, Pravda reports.

Forgotten TechThere's nothing new under the sun, some folk say, and that's certainly true of Palm's recently announced Foleo. It's the palmtop reborn in a slightly sexier, slightly larger form. Even its name is reminiscent of that bygone arena - it's rather like the Atari Portfolio, the world's first palmtop PC, released in June 1989.

Dell is looking more and more like David Cameron's Tories. Like the Tories, Dell used to be popular but has recently been in the doldrums, and CEO Michael Dell is busy ripping up some of the direct seller's articles of faith (just like Dave and his recent pronouncements on grammar schools) to get back in everybody's good books.

CA has updated its anti-virus software to guard against a brace of flaws that created a means for hackers to turn the security protection software against its users.

Vodafone is telling customers that VoIP services are insecure - even as Sky News is reporting that VoIP calls threaten our war on terror because such calls can't be intercepted.

Google UK has extended its ban on adverts from gambling sites to include non-cash games and gambling tutorials.

Paris Hilton has been released from chokey after just three days of her 23-day sentence for violating probation on a drink-drive rap, TMZ.com reports.

Hackers have been able to load malware onto the official Mercury music awards site, as well as hundreds of other sites, after breaking into the systems of US-based hosting firm DreamHost.

Clean (read green) technology is the new investment hot spot, according to a report on US venture capitalist spending in 2006.

EU member states have approved the introduction of the Euro tariff for mobile roaming.

Amnesty International is asking web surfers to get involved in monitoring genocide in Darfur by checking images of villages taken by satellite cameras.

Xerox has climbed on board the crowded Web 2.0 ship with the introduction of solutions-based document management for its customers.

Bank of Scotland (HBOS) is telling 62,000 customers they could be at risk of identity theft after it stuck an unencrypted disc in the ordinary post, which was subsequently lost.

We're not sure who found it first, but a patent has been issued in the US (numbered 20070123309), which highlights just how Sony might allow the PlayStation Portable to become a cellular handset.

The US Navy has recently affirmed support for open source software, in pursuit of "an interoperable net-centric environment...which will improve the warfighter's effectiveness through seamless access to critical information".

CommentThe Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) report makes fascinating reading every year, mostly because it points to the sheer scale of the industry, but also because it highlights just how big the trends we have been following have already become and how big they are likely to become in a few more years, projecting out to 2010.

Those with stuff they just have to get off their chests now have a new venue: Friction.tv. The site has been running in public beta, but had its official launch this week.

Hackers rather than an inside job are being blamed for an attack on an Illinois state agency's server that left thousands of property market workers potentially exposed to identity theft.

Israeli boffins may be on the road to building artificial, living human brains which can function without a body to support them. Honest.

Yes, Amazon already offers a movie download service, but that won’t stop the world’s most famous web retailer from buying NetFlix, the movies-through-the-mail company that recently built an online service of its own. At least, that’s what the Associated Press is reporting.

The majority of European IT professionals say that a failure to finish projects on time would not pose a risk to their job. Under a quarter of IT workers in the US felt safe enough to say the same.

In a clear shot at rival SWsoft, VMware has started hyping a new pricing model for its VMware Infrastructure software suite aimed at hosting service providers.

IBM and HP are neck-and-neck for the second place position in the external disk storage market but remain well behind EMC for top billing, according to the latest report by research house IDC.

A Best Buy lawyer has admitted to falsifying court documents in the longstanding racketeering case against Microsoft and Best Buy, which recently reached a Superior Court in Seattle.

Vietnam telecom officials estimate it will take at least a month and cost over $5.84m to fix damaged undersea fiber-optic cables stolen by fishermen for salvage.

There was good news on the jobs front this week for Northern Ireland, with the announcement that Fujitsu Services is to create 400 new jobs in Derry and Belfast.

Microsoft is to issue four critical security fixes for this month's Patch Tuesday. Three of these affect either Windows Vista or Internet Explorer 7, which the software maker holds out as a paragon of its conversion to secure computing. In all, Microsoft will push six high-priority updates this Tuesday, the company announced today.

Ultra-fancy chip start-up PA Semi today revealed a rather predictable customer - Mercury Computer Systems.

GraphOn, the Santa Cruz, CA software maker has filed a lawsuit against Juniper Networks, alleging infringement of three patents related to firewall technology.

The US International Trade Commission has barred the import of new cell phones that use chips made Qualcomm, following a legal determination they infringe a patent held by competitor Broadcom.