Big brother's high-tech home

Philips has opened its HomeLab - a home of the future - where occupants can enjoy the latest prototype technology while their movement and behaviour are analysed by Philips' researchers. The motive behind the HomeLab is to create an environment where researchers can monitor consumers' responses to new products for sustained periods of time, rather than give them the product to play with for a few hours. This is particularly useful for technologies that are essentially hid behind the scenes, with their use of wireless connections rendering them relatively unobtrusive. ...more

HP goes big on grids

HP has announced plans to further embrace grid computing. HP says that it is committed to using open grid standards, such as Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) across its range of enterprise products. And in the 'next few years', according to HP, it will grid-enable a wide range of products, from handheld devices to computers. ...more

Tiscali denies UK Net business for sale

Tiscali has firmly denied reports that it has put its UK Internet access business up for sale. Several newspapers and websites repeated the claim in yesterday's Independent on Sunday that the Italian company was asking for ?600 million for its 1.4 million broadband subscribers plus the 50,000 pay-TV customers that it acquired with the purchase of Video Networks in August. ...more

Mozilla browser makes it to 1.2

The Mozilla organisation has released a complete 1.2 version of its browser. Yesterday's release sees plenty of new ways to make the browser easy on the eye - it supports most native GTK themes (a GUI for Linux) and the ability to show browser icons as text or a mix. ...more

Spam rage man arrested in California

A man who threatened to shoot, kidnap, castrate and drill the head of an alleged spammer has been arrested in California. Charles Booher was driven to distraction by a series of emails he received offering 'penile enlargement'. After identifying the sender as Douglas Mackay, the President of DM Contact Management, Booher began issuing threats to Mackay and other employees of his company. ...more