OFT and EU keep the spotlight on spam

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) and the EU are holding a two-day spam 'summit' in London starting today, to encourage greater co-operation between governments and commercial companies in combatting and prosecuting spam operations. More than 60 public and private sector organisations will attend today's event from more than 27 countries. The organisations are members of the London Action Plan on spam. ...more

A browser for your head cassettes

Futurism is in the air at Comdex... ...more

Nokia and Sony start communicating

Nokia and Sony have announced they will work together to develop an open and common middleware platform to achieve interoperability between mobile handsets and consumer devices. The aim of the cooperation is to look at various technologies, including new user interfaces, content downloading, multimedia messaging, open digital rights management and IPv6 compatibility. Jorma Ollila, Chairman and CEO of Nokia, said: 'Nokia and Sony share a vision of a future in which many types of devices work together exchanging data and content in a seamless and interoperable way. ...more

ISPs take on mantle of spam prevention

Yahoo!, AOL, Microsoft and Earthlink - members of the Anti-Spam Technical Alliance (ASTA) - have published their proposal to combat the growing problem of spam - the result of more than a year's work. The recommendations for ISPs include securing their networks. This includes configuring proxies and open relays - or mail servers - that are exposed to the Internet so that they cannot be used by others, such as spammers. ...more

Panasonic calls back 6,000 laptop batteries

Panasonic has joined Apple and Dell in recalling laptop batteries, amid concerns that they may overheat. Unlike the worldwide recalls affecting several million batteries that Apple and Dell announced, Panasonic's recall covers just 6,000 lithium-ion batteries installed in Let's Note CF-W4G laptop sold in Japan in April and May 2005. Akira Kadota, a spokesman for Matsushita, Panasonic's parent company, said that the problem is caused by the battery covers which could work loose because of a fault in the design of the latch. ...more