The government has been advised to further postpone the introduction of ID Cards until it can be sure the scheme will work.

"Did you have fun with your robot buddy?" --Homer Simpson to Lisa Simpson, on Stephen Hawking's departure

Sun Microsystems is targeting Borland Software's corporate developers in its campaign to encourage JBuilder users to migrate applications to NetBeans.

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is upgrading its websites to handle surges of enquiries about food scares.

In the first half of 2006, some $118bn worth of semiconductors were sold. In H1 2005, the figure was $109bn, yielding a year-on-year increase of 8.3 per cent.

CommentSome say the technical platform future lies with commodity-based blade computers.

Time Warner’s struggling AOL business is to cut over a quarter of its 19,000 staff as part of its latest self-reinvention.

The disappearance of easy-to-find flaws in the major operating systems has pushed vulnerability researchers to branch out from finding security issues in core system software and instead concentrate on the device drivers and client-side agents present on all PCs, security experts said on Wednesday at the Black Hat Briefings.

Expect Apple to upgrade its MacBook Pro to include Intel's mobile Core 2 Duo microprocessor - better known by its codename, 'Merom' - at the end of the month or early September, Mac buyers have been told.

CommentIBM has announced the latest high-end servers in its System p family, the IBM System p5-590 and System p5-595, both equipped with POWER5+ processors, and up to 32 cores and 64 cores respectively.

Apple is "likely" to restate its financial results from 29 September 2002 onwards following the discovery of further evidence of "irregularities" concerning stock options granted between 1997 and 2001, the company warned yesterday.

HTC has knocked its 3G music phone, codenamed 'Muse', on the head, it has been alleged. The handset first surfaced in November 2005 as an HSDPA-equipped device with 4GB of built-in Flash memory for music storage.

LettersExcuse us, but what colour is the sky out there? Is this Earth? Have we stepped through some kind of Stargate-esque parallel universe mirror? The reason we are so confused, is that so many of you have written in in support of Microsoft. Yeah. Really. Mindboggling stuff.

Horizon Technology has bought a fellow Irish IT company WBT Systems Ltd.

Book reviewSubtitled "Game Development for Beginners", The Game Maker's Apprentice is just that, a guide to developing your own games using the free Game Maker games development software (available for download here, if you don’t buy the book).

Taiwanese gadget maker Kinpo launched its iDo smart-phone brand in July 2005 and is preparing a trio of new devices to supersede its launch product, the S600. One, dubbed Saturn, features a landscape-oriented QWERTY keyboard not unlike the one on the T-Mobile Sidekick III or the HTC TyTN.

A faulty definition update from Symantec left vicars in a quandary after it identified a popular ecclesiastical application as spyware.

MP3 player maker Creative this week upgraded its Zen Neeon line of Flash-based digital music players with a second-generation product that sports a bigger display and more storage capacity but at the cost of a shorter battery life.

And we thought we'd got away with it.

A study has revealed drinkers in the north are guzzling their way to an early grave compared to their rosé-sipping southern counterparts.

AnalysisAt Black Hat yesterday, security consultant Lukas Grunwald of German company DN-Systems demonstrated the cloning of a biometric passport, observing beforehand to Wired that the "whole passport design is totally brain damaged." But should we be surprised? Not exactly, because that's precisely what it says on the tin.

Also in this week's column:

Also in this week's column:

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A security consultant has shown how to clone electronic passports based on internationally agreed designs due to begin distribution this year.

Also in this week's column:

Worried Pipex customers who pay by direct debit can relax - they are not about to be cut off.

A man who had receieved radiotherapy set off alarms at US airport security and was detained, interrogated and strip searched.

Lenovo bounced back into the black in Q1 – just. But a slump in European sales took the shine off an otherwise reasonable quarter for the world's number three PC maker.

UK colleges and universities routinely consider open source solutions to IT problems - even when official policy might not support it.

Prisoners rights campaigners have accused BT of profiteering on the back of the UK's prison population.

Tourists from Australia and New Zealand are among an estimated 48,000 victims of a highly-organised credit card fraud ring in Thailand.

Imagine CupWe're down in Reading at the moment, flying out to India tomorrow morning for the Imagine Cup World Finals.

Into the ValleyA new, rather high mark has been set for those hoping to secure lasting fame here in Silicon Valley. You have to die, be modeled out of wood, have a GPS device secured to your back and hitchhike your way around the country.