First lookGoogle has released an iOS version of its free Translate app, and my first couple of hours of using it has shown it to be worth every penny.

An ambulance company in Connecticut has agreed to settle a case that challenged its decision to fire an employee for posting comments on Facebook that referred to her boss as a “dick” and a “scumbag.”

It turns out that Macquarie Telecom wasn’t just supporting its IntelliCenter services when it released research last year citing jurisdictional risk as a problem for cloud computing customers.

The two companies that give the US Patent and Trademark Office the most headaches and paperwork - that would be IT giant IBM and consumer electronics and chip maker Samsung Electronics - have inked a patent cross-licensing deal.

Systems software maker Novell has announced today a special deal for customers building clusters with its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. If you cluster servers with the company's High Availability Extensions, you get those extensions for free.

ReviewThe Android tablets that have appeared lately seem to suffer an identity crisis, often unable to decide whether they’re simply big smartphones or genuine tablet-computing devices. Creative Labs has taken a different approach with its new Ziio, producing an ‘entertainment tablet’ that is essentially a larger version of its existing Zen portable media player.

US identity fraud losses fell sharply last year, bucking a long-running trend.

Comment:Networker blog author Preston de Guise has pointed out a simple and inescapable fact: deleting files on a deduplicated storage volume may not free up any space.

Before we get too excited about reports of a major shuffle among Microsoft's top ranks, let's remember one thing.

CSC Denmark is facing angry union action over the company's use of temporary Indian workers paid a fraction of normal Danish wages.

The Wall Street Journal reckons production of the iPad 2 is already ramping up, concurring with the majority of rumours surrounding the device.

In a webcast for financial analysts yesterday, EMC admitted it was racing to catch up with NetApp in storage for virtualised servers by adding primary block-level deduplication.

Swedish conglomerate Teleca has bought UK mobile shell developer SurfKitchen, promising to keep it as an independent unit.

It's open season in storage right now, but the door is starting to close. If you have something that works with filer or block access protocols then develop away. Servers can use it. The product can work with storage area networks (SANs) or filers and you are free to sell it to customers with servers that use SANS or filers.

Redditch Borough Council has agreed to proceed with its plan to use waste energy from a crematorium to heat a municipal swimming pool.

Been a long time coming, but yesterday the European Commission got its mitts on the first sample of a universal phone charger for member countries.

Basic design flaws on a Labour party members forum exposed the email addresses of users to harvesting.

Last month, the PC press reported big price cuts for the Dell Adamo, an ultra-thin Macbook Air lookalike.

FOSDEM 2011Oracle. Hmm. Maybe not the favourite word in F/OSS right now ... Unlike Java/OpenJDK/etc – where Oracle has not (yet) dropped the ball – in the LibreOffice camp the cats have left the bags, coops have been vacated, and the code has forked right off ...

A senior patent court judge has heavily criticised a law firm that pursued online file-sharers with threatening letters and then ditched its cases against 26 defendants.

RealNetworks confirmed yesterday that it is to reduce its workforce by 10 per cent by axeing 130 jobs at the internet media company.

YouView has confirmed that its set-top box won't now ship until early 2012. A roadmap agreed upon last year, after the start-up had received approval from the BBC Trust, envisaged boxes appearing on the market this spring. A second iteration was scheduled for 2012 ready for the Olympics - the traditional consumer upgrade season for home cinema. (Or "TV", as we used to call it).

A 54 year-old man is accused of underage sex with a young teenager, who he had "married" in the online fantasy game RuneScape.

The Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) has discussed the existence of unpatched flaws in 22 software applications from vendors including Microsoft, CA, EMC, HP and IBM.

Japan's DoCoMo is going to work with South Korea's KT to create a cross-border payment infrastructure, coming in from the cold to embrace and extend the NFC standard.

ReviewThe Genesis S815 is the latest all-in-one (AIO) printer-scanner-copier-fax from Lexmark that brings a radically different form-factor to the product class.

Officials in Fort Wayne Indianna have balked at naming the city's latest civic building after its most successful mayor – Harry Baals.

Capgemini has won a £10.5m contract with Tube Lines – the engineering company behind London Underground.

DatacentreLower costs are the basic attraction of all enterprise technologies, and virtualisation promises that in spades. In particular, it reduces hardware maintenance costs via what is now a fairly simple process of packaging physical servers up and hosting several of them on one large server.

A Time Out poll of 150 film movie industry experts has declared Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now the best British film ever.

Walmart, America's biggest retailer, is to sell Verizon flavor iPhone 4s in 600 US stores from tomorrow.

An 11-year-old boy has landed his mother in debt , after splashing more than £1000 on Xbox Live, without her knowledge.

US security officials are reportedly worried that a new generation of drug-smuggling submarines - able, unlike their predecessor semi-submersibles, to travel completely submerged beneath the waves - might be used to carry out terrorist operations.

FOSDEM 2011This was my first FOSDEM, in Brussels, and it was a goodie.

A security researcher has demonstrated how it might be possible to perform autorun-style attacks against weakly secured Linux PCs.

The Wireless Application Community won't be properly launched until Monday lunchtime, but Filipino operator SMART couldn't wait and has jumped the gun with the first WAC-compatible handset.

GAME, the British retailer, is selling downloadable Xbox content over the counter in a six-month trial at 40 stores.

In response to our iOS game reviews, many readers highlight how on-screen controls for such titles are considerably impractical. Behold the iControlPad, which went on sale today and could be the solution we've all been waiting for.

An Alabama sex shop owner has decided to do her bit for peace and luuurv this Valentine's Day, and is offering customers the chance to trade "Guns for Toys".

The Trades Union Congress and small business groups are doubtful that George Osborne has tamed the British banks or extracted a meaningful promise on business lending.

It used to be that a large part of owning a cellphone, using it a lot, and being on the road involved hauling around a massive charging unit. When your plan expired, you got a new phone – and along with that came a new car charger, a new brick to plug in at home and a second one to be wrapped up in a ball and shoved in your briefcase or purse.

UpdatedMicrosoft's first service pack for Windows 7 will, according to speculative reports, reach the company's MSDN and TechNet subscribers this time next week.

Two more executives are being shown the door at chip maker Advanced Micro Devices – but two others will be getting juicy bonuses.

Someone has noticed that the Starbucks' iPhone application can be copied with a screen grab from a neglected handset, enabling the thief to gorge themselves on free coffee*.

Microsoft has found a replacement for Bob Muglia – the company's server and tools biz president who was pushed out by MS boss Steve Ballmer last month.

Software giant and server newbie Oracle and IT conglomerate and long-time Sparc partner Fujitsu said late Tuesday that they have extended their collaboration on Sparc platforms.

HP has unveiled a trio of new webOS devices, including a pint-sized smartphone known as the Veer, a beefier business phone dubbed the Pre3, and, yes, the first Palm tablet: the HP TouchPad.

Oracle has squashed a decade-old bug in its Java programming framework that allows attackers to bring down sensitive servers by feeding them numerical values with large numbers of decimal places.

CommentMicrosoft's promotion of Satya Nadella puts an engineer who's been championing – and coding – Bing against Google in charge of the company's earth-bound server and tools business.

An official Sony Twitter account has leaked the PlayStation 3 master signing key at the heart of the company's legal offensive against a group of hackers being sued for showing how to jailbreak the popular game console.

The headlines say all you need to know, surely? As reported all over the place, Australia’s NBN (National Broadband Network) has been rated as too expensive and relying too much on government support, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit.

CommentGoogle built a multi-billion-dollar advertising empire atop a service that does little more than copy information from other sources. And yet it chastises others when they do the copying.

Australia’s mobile market remains the key battleground for the country’s largest carriers, with both Telstra and Optus announcing growth in mobile subscriber numbers today.