A lawsuit aiming to stop rental company Aaron’s in the US from installing spyware on its machines – whose capability includes taking images of users with a PC’s webcam – has hit a setback, with a judge refusing to grant a preliminary injunction against the practise.

Expanding out from InfiniBand to Ethernet switches through its acquisition of Voltaire last November is paying off on the top line for switch and server converged networking adapter maker Mellanox Technologies, but it's hurting the bottom line in the short-term.

With Wednesday's release of Mac OS X Lion, Apple has definitively leapfrogged its rivals by offering an operating system with state-of-the-art security protections that make it more resistant to malware exploits and other hack attacks, two researchers say.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini says that the failed CULV (consumer ultra-low voltage) laptops of a few years back were merely a "trial run" for the Next Big Thing™ – ultrabooks.

ReviewIn recent years aerial combat games have been in free fall. The genre stalled after the seminal Il-2 Sturmovick and has struggled to pull out of a seemingly irrecoverable nosedive. But, contrary to their dubious quality, the continuing popularity of the Ace Combat and Hawx series proves interest remains sky high for the genre.

Australia’s gaming industry may be rewarded with a more sophisticated classification system following a meeting with state and territory attorneys-generals today in Adelaide.

Nasuni is offering a 100 per cent uptime guarantee for data access through its cloud filer gateway appliance.

AnalysisThere is a flash furore going on, with flash announcements coming in at a furious rate, both product announcements and flash foundry expansion. Here's a round-up of what's going on.

Before you ask, this is not an iPhone being used to fry a full English. It is in fact one of the fugliest mobile cases I've ever seen.

The UK High Court is to ask the European Court of Justice (ECJ) if streaming live TV programmes over the internet is an act subject to copyright laws after provisionally ruling that it is.

The cargo bay doors on space shuttle Atlantis have been closed ahead of a planned return to Kennedy Space Center this morning.

Microsoft saw more tablets ship with one of its operating systems during Q2 than RIM shipped BlackBerry PlayBooks.

Canadian police have arrested a man accused of planting key-logging malware on hundreds of computers across the world.

DC Comics has grabbed the cybersquatted domain name manofsteel.com, just a month before shooting is due to start on the next reboot of the Superman movie franchise.

I was invited to the Campus Party in Spain last week. After being told it's the biggest tech show on the planet, I could hardly turn the offer down. And, following some manic days at the show, I have to agree: there's nothing quite like it.

HM Revenue and Customs is aiming to save £235m from changes to IT services as part of plans to cut its running costs by some 25 per cent over the next four years, says a report by the National Audit Office.

It has been nine years since Google debuted its experimental website where it dumped prototype products for netizens to play with. But the company has now announced the end-of-the-line for its Labs project.

Panasonic has unwrapped a couple of new cameras today: the FZ48, a super-zoom model and the LS5 compact, both under its Lumix brand.

The Office for National Statistics said non-store retailing jumped 24.4 per cent in June – the biggest such leap it has ever recorded.

UpdatedThe US's space shuttle programme wrapped today at 09:57 GMT, as Atlantis touched down at Kennedy Space Center.

Controversial law firm ACS:Law – or someone posing as the firm – has returned with threats to sue alleged filesharers, this time outside the UK.

Acer is making a play to build out its own cloud infrastructure after forking out $320m for US firm iGware.

Boffins at GE have come up with a material that might one day be used to record 20 Blu-rays' worth of data on a single disc at the same speed that data is recorded on BD-Rs today.

CommentIf children didn't believe in Santa, thousands of grown men wouldn't dress up in fur-trimmed red jumpsuits, put on false beards, and give children unwanted gifts in tents every year. Perhaps some would, but they'd probably be arrested.

Dell has described the acquisition of Force 10 Networks as a requisite "shot in the arm" to beef up its networking portfolio for both resellers and direct sales staff.

iOS App of the WeekThe holiday season is upon us, and a good phrase book can be a very useful addition to your collection of apps when you’re travelling abroad. Of course, most language apps tend to focus on one specific language, so I was tempted by My Translator Pro as it can translate typed-in phrases into more than 50 different languages and is currently on offer for a mere 69p.

A Hubble Space Telescope search for possible rings around Pluto has turned up a diminutive fourth moon orbiting the dwarf planet.

The chaps behind rough telephone network Free Libyana are now up and running in recently-retaken Misurata, bringing much-needed mobile connectivity to Libya's third-largest city. The engineers arrived by fishing boat, having endured a 30-hour ride from Malta.

Seagate's 4th quarter results beat expectations, but profits are substantially down and cost pressures rising. It beat the Street but the outlook is bleak.

A brief history of virtualisationVirtualisation is the in-thing in corporate IT. You’d think it was some kind of shiny new concept that had never been done before, a panacea for all computing ills. Everyone seems to be doing it.

ReviewYou can argue all you want about the merits of the various mobile operating systems but it’s undoubtedly Android that has put smartphones into the hands of the impecunious masses and in numbers that would have been inconceivable just eighteen months ago.

Shale gas extraction in Western Europe will dramatically change the geopolitical landscape, according to a report by a think-tank backed by the US Department of Energy. The Baker Institute estimates that with shale as little as 13 per cent of Europe's gas imports will come from Russia by 2040, compared to 27 per cent today.

Three in five parents snoop on their teenager's email and calling habits, but teenagers themselves are almost as guilty of checking out the communications history of their partners.

TalkTalk may be earning plaudits in Whitehall for being the first major UK ISP to implement network-level anti-malware blockers on its service, but the company's customers aren't so easy to please.

Here's Fujitsu's latest phone that - wait for it - runs Windows 7. No, not Windows Phone 7, but the complete Microsoft PC platform.

"He's a little bit too eager to bend over backwards to be politically respectable," is how Richard Dawkins describes the celebrated snail biologist and broadcaster Dr Steven Jones.

Computacenter (CC) has expanded its European footprint by splashing out £5.4m for a majority stake in Swiss IT service provider DAMAX AG.

Alcatel Lucent has confirmed it is investigating the best way forward for its enterprise biz, which could include offloading it to a third party.

Nokia posted a large operating loss of €487m today, only its second quarterly loss in 19 years. And without the royalty settlement with Apple it would have been much worse: the settlement gifted Nokia a one-time bonus of €430m.

Managing software licensing has to be one of the least fun aspects of an IT professional’s life. For one thing, it is medically proven* that there is no better means of inducing a headache than trying to read the whole of a software licence.

LulzSec has abandoned plans to release a cache of News International emails it claimed to have acquired during a redirection attack on The Sun website earlier this week. Instead the group says it plans to release select batches of the emails via a "partnership" with select media outlets, an approach akin to that applied by WikiLeaks to its controversial US diplomatic cable and war log releases last year.

CommentSo the hacktivist collective Anonymous, parts of which have recently tangled with News International title The Sun and may have looted an explosive trove of emails from Rupert Murdoch's media empire, also say they have a big stash of classified material stolen from NATO. As evidence they have released two documents marked "NATO RESTRICTED".

WD has announced it is shipping its Scorpio Blue 1TB capacity hard drive for notebooks. This Advanced Format spinning disk spins at 5,400rpm, has an 8MB cache and a 3Gbit/s SATA interface. WD claims it is the highest capacity 2.5-inch hard drive available for mainstream notebook use.

Some stories are so unusual, you immediately wonder if they're too good to be true. On Tuesday, a Western NGO in China posted a remarkable tale, reporting that ingenious Chinese retailers in a medium-sized provincial city called Kunming had cloned an Apple Retail Store, faithfully reproducing the staff T-shirts, furniture, display material, and name tags.

Collectors take things to extreme measures, such is the nature of their interest. Videogame enthusiasts have a similar mentality. Therefore, imagine what happens when the two combine.

Cisco has confirmed the new worldwide channel structure as it works towards laying off thousands of staff, and the changes appear to favour its indirect business with resellers.

Apple has revealed that it paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $2.6bn for its share of the recent Nortel patent-acquisition deal.

One day after Apple's Mac OS X Lion was released into the wild, Steve Jobs' bête noire, Adobe, has released an extensive list of wounds that the big cat has clawed into its products.

A critic of academic publishers has uploaded 19,000 scientific papers to the internet to protest the prosecution of a prominent programmer and activist accused of hacking into a college computer system and downloading almost 5 million scholarly documents from an archive service.

The server business went great guns again for chip giant Intel in the second quarter, with its Data Center Group raking in $2.44bn in revenues, up 15.2 per cent from the year ago period.

Amid mumblings and grumblings that it had lost its mojo, Microsoft surprised Wall Street by reporting revenues and earning for its fourth fiscal 2011 quarter that exceeded the moneymen's expectations.

Australia’s Scoopon founders and group buying millionaires, Gabby and Hezi Leibovich, have settled a prolonged legal battle with group buying giant Groupon.

The big story about the meeting of Australian attorneys-general happening today (July 22) is that they’re going to reconsider Australia’s classification system, and might revisit the question of R18+ game classifications. However, it has emerged that the nation’s lawmakers will also consider the vexed question of privacy on social networks like Facebook.