Text and email go airborne

Virgin Atlantic announces it will be the first airline to offer SMS and email to its passengers. Passengers in all classes will be able to send emails and SMS text from seat back television screens to phones or computers on the ground. Messages will be up to 160 characters and cost ?1. ...more

AOL targets three phishing gangs

AOL has filed lawsuits against three phishing gangs in a bid to tackle the growing problem of identity theft and other online scams at the heart of phishing attacks. The suits have been filed in Virginia, whose state laws contain provisions for the prosecution of such attacks. The suits also cite US Federal law covering trademark abuse and spamming and seek damages of $18m. ...more

al-jazeera web site hacked

Soon after Arab TV news network al-Jazeera showed controversial footage of captured and dead US soldiers, the newly-launched English language version of its Web site was temporarily out of action with an overload of requests. This is the latest problem for the arabic news site. An overload of traffic allegedly took the Web site offline earlier in the week. ...more

Adobe tops the tech field in Fortune's best company list

US business mag Fortune has created a new 100 list of the best companies to work for that, even in these lean times, features a few familiar names in the IT industry. At the head of the tech entries, Adobe hits the list at number 5, up from last year and described as a place where 'camaraderie is the byword' and praised for its perks of weekly beer-fests, paid sabbaticals and job rotation schemes. Down at 18, Qualcomm is where the gourmets should be sending their CVs, with free dinners if you work late and a cafeteria that serves sushi. ...more

BT broadband upgrade hiccough calmed

A BT system failure is believed to be caused a backlog of ADSL users waiting to be upgraded from 512Kbps to 1Mbps connections. Some 10,000 are believed to have been affected, with some losing the service, shortly after being upgraded. The outage coincided with the surge in upgrade applications that followed changes to the availability and range of ADSL services. ...more