IBM has deployed its lawyers to scrutinize a possible acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

Readers expecting the long-awaited and landmark "Girls Aloud" obscenity trial to start last week in Newcastle will have to wait a little longer.

Vodafone and Telefonica, which trades as O2 in the UK, have signed a massive network sharing deal to work together across Europe.

CommentI’ve written before about the demise of competition in the Old Kent Road/Mediterranean Avenue end of the mobile market, but I’ve always thought that the Park Lane/Park Place and Mayfair/Boardwalk end was safe. We’ve got Symbian, Windows Mobile, more flavours of Linux than Ben and Jerry could dream of, Palm with two OSes and more - but the portfolio of Android devices seems to mean that there will be a winner.

A report on the Database State (pdf) claims that 40 out of 46 key government databases are not fit for purpose, and 11 of those are "almost certainly illegal under human rights or data protection law and should be scrapped or substantially redesigned".

UpdateOnline backup service supplier Carbonite is suing Promise Technology, a supplier of disk drive array technology, for failing to protect data as it promised it would.

The Eclipse Foundation will soon be unwrapping the first release of Swordfish, an open source Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) run-time framework that's taking aim at the market's many proprietary approaches to SOA.

SAN drive array supplier Compellent is going to offer solid state drive storage (SSD) in its arrays with active and inactive data being transferred to and from the SSDs automatically.

Roll up, roll up to the The Register’s third annual Good, Bad and Ugly IT Vendor survey. In previous years, we have garnered many thousands responses. We'll compare this year's views with past surveys to measure how things are changing. But we need your input.

American brainboxes funded by NASA say they have found a way to deal with one of the most severe problems of space flight - that is, the way one's bones gradually become as flimsy as dry twigs after long exposure to microgravity.

Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph has apologised to right-wing Oz politician Pauline Hanson over the publication of nude photographs it claimed were of the One Nation party founder, admitting the whole thing was "one giant con".

BT has released new details of its fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) rollout, including a list of the first 29 exchanges to be upgraded to offer faster broadband in early 2010.

Much has been written about LG’s upcoming Arena smartphone, but panting punters have never been told when they can get their mitts on the handset - until now.

Data Domain has introduced another quadcore deduplication array, the DD660, slotting underneath the top-end DD690 and replacing the older DD580 product.

It's evident that Google is having a busy time of it down on Blighty's mean Street View - pulling dodgy content left right and centre as quickly as net wags gleefully pinpoint outrages against common decency.

ReviewThis update of Apple’s Time Capsule Wi-fi access point-cum-NAS box went rather unnoticed amid the recent barrage of Mac revamps. However, it works well and boasts an ease of use that justifies its slightly above-average price tag.

Asus has confirmed that its Origami-style folding laptop will be available to buy later this year.

Struggling data protection vendor Overland Storage has avoided being booted off the main Nasdaq index because of its weak share price and market capitalisation. It's now off the delisting hook "because the company currently meets an alternative maintenance standard."

Bletchley Park will tomorrow fire up a replica Turing Bombe to celebrate the Engineering Heritage Award which recognises the 13 years of hard graft which have gone into recreating the legendary Enigma-busting kit.

The growing trade in rogue security software is being driven by the gaming of search engines to direct surfers to sites peddling scareware.

The German powers that be are investigating a kids' miniature Mickey Mouse radio which apparently entertains nippers with police radio traffic.

Nikon’s Coolpix range of compact point-and-shoot compact snappers has expanded with the creation of a new feature packed model - the S225.

'Leccy TechRegional development agency One North East (ONE) continues to try to make the north east of England the centre of 'leccy car stuff in the UK.

OpinionA privacy campaigner has vowed to bring a legal challenge over the launch of Google Street View in the UK. It is understandable that some people are uncomfortable with Google making an enormous photo album of 25 towns and cities, but that doesn't make it illegal.

iiNet, Australia's third largest Internet Service Provider, is withdrawing from the government's censorship trial.

Becta has warned that a three-way communication breakdown between schools, parents and kids could have a harmful affect on individuals’ educational performance.

Technical snags continue to bedevil one of the key new technologies being installed aboard the International Space Station (ISS): one critical to plans for larger crews. We speak, of course, of the troubled urine-recycler space drinks machine - intended to turn golden astronaut juice into cool, lipsmacking refreshments.

The latest addition to the growing netbook market has emerged: a colourful, stylish machine, courtesy of Samsung.

More circumstantial evidence has emerged linking the Russian authorities to cyber-attacks on Georgia that coincided with a ground war between the two countries in July and August last year.

Privacy activists have urged top web firms to ensure they tell Phorm not to monitor communications with their users, ahead of BT's proposed deployment of its interception and profiling system.

Intel has formally responded to Psion's countersuit, itself launched in response to a lawsuit from the chip giant in a bid to have Psion's Netbook trademark revoked.

Google’s visual design leader quit the company on Friday because he was irked by the web giant’s obsession with performance data.

A reported 22,000 card records have been exposed through cached copies of data stored on a defunct cybercrime server.

As the EU finalises the demands it's going to make of mobile phone operators in Europe, Viviane Reding has posted a passionate video arguing for 24-hour number portability across Europe.

Microsoft may have failed the Acid3 test with the release of its Internet Explorer 8 browser, but that hasn’t dampened Redmond’s spirits a jot – in fact the company is busy making all sorts of noises about its new-found web standards credentials.

The shortlist of possible bidders for Satyam is likely to be finalised this week, after the companies made their final "expressions of interest".

The government's child protection database, which will have entries for 11.3 million people who have contact with children or vulnerable adults, has been delayed again.

It has emerged that Australian pub boozers occasionally while away an idle hour monitoring drug smuggling and illegal immigration on the US southern border over the internet.

If your toaster’s nearly had it, then why not follow in one weirdo’s visionary’s footsteps by turning your crumbly old bread-warmer into a games console.

Video-sharing moneypit YouTube has launched a new mobile client, for S60 and Windows Mobile devices, providing mobile access to more than 30,000 videos of dancing cats.

Oracle has quietly jacked up software prices on IBM's Power6 iron by 33 per cent, after removing a multicore scaling factor that was in effect to reduce prices.

The rise of the 10in, 1024 x 576 netbook continues. This time, it's LG's X120 now officially said to be out over here in April.

TomTom has belatedly joined a patent holding company, which champions the Linux ecosystem, in a clear message that the GPS maker won’t take its escalating legal spat with Microsoft lying down.

Apple has apologized for breaking Perl with its latest Mac OS X security update, saying it will distribute a solution to the problem with a future update.

HD has officially entered mainstream consumer conscience, because the UK's Office of National Statistics (ONS) has added Blu-ray Discs to its list of everyday purchases.

Twitter has become Salesforce.com's latest Web 2.0 darling, with a plug-in to the company's customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Intel will freeze the salaries of its top five officers for 2009 and restructure its stock-option plan, allowing employees to exchange their overpriced options.

Rumors about the next-generation iPhone continue unabated, with the latest focusing on doubled internet-connection speeds and - finally - video-capture capability. And maybe more iPhones.

Free-software activist Richard Stallman has warned the open-source community against falling into the trap of downloading Javascript code that's not "free".

GDC 09A California-based startup backed by Qualcomm is launching a 3G-enabled home game console for emerging markets using hardware normally intended for high-end smartphones.

Spoiler AlertNear the end of last Friday's finale of Battlestar Galactica, two of the characters most responsible for touching off the genocidal campaign that nearly wiped out civilization - or their "angels," if you believe in that kind of thing - reflect on the events taking hold on Earth, the planet called home since taking refuge there 150,000 years earlier.

So, Google is now using your surf history to tailor online ads to your particular online interests. It's a rather creepy thought, but that's not the problem. The problem is that Google won't say how much of your surf history it's capturing - or how long it plans on keeping this potentially ginormous data hoard.

An obscure mainframe software company called Mantissa Corporation bragged last summer on the IBM VM listserv - which is dedicated to virtual mainframe environments - that it was creating a product called z/VOS that would allow slices of a Windows operating system to run atop z/VM, the hypervisor-as-operating system for IBM mainframes. The product was due in the first quarter of this year, and the story of its impending release has been making the rounds.