OFT gives green light to Telewest and BSkyB acquisitions

The Office of Fair Trading has given the go ahead for two major UK broadband takeovers. NTL's ?3.4bn purchase of rival cable operator Telewest and BSkyB's ?211mn acquisition of leading LLU wholesaler Easynet have been approved and will be completed later this year. ...more

Apple to dominate music labels in new contract negotiations

Apple will re-negotiate its contracts with the major record companies next month, and is likely to be looking for further moves towards selling music without copy protection. The owner of the market-leading iPod digital media player and iTunes online music store has already cut an early deal with EMI, the third-largest record company, and enters talks with the other labels from a position of strength, according to music industry executives. That leaves Vivendi's Universal Music Group; Sony BMG Music Entertainment, which is a joint venture of Sony and Bertelsmann; and Warner Music Group in a tough spot. ...more

Bank's hacked server supports phish attack

Phishing is a familiar online threat, but news has emerged from China of a bank's webserver being used to host phishing sites. The Shanghai branch of the China Construction Bank, reports Network World, was hacked in order to host the phishing sites, which attempt to dupe visitors into revealing their bank details. The illegal sites were in hidden directories on a server with IP addresses belonging to the state-owned bank. ...more

Transmeta on the road to IPO

Chip manufacturer Transmeta has filed for an initial public offering (IPO), through which it aims to raise $200m. The company started the ball rolling yesterday by registering a form S-1 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing discloses neither the number of shares to be offered nor the proposed price range, and Transmeta has yet to give a date for the IPO. ...more

Spam threat rises as Christmas nears

Spam is reaching record levels in the run up to Christmas, report security firms. According to the latest figures from web security provider IronPort Systems, the figure has doubled month on month, with October showing 61 billion spam messages a day in circulation. The company expects this to increase further in December to average 78 billion a day. ...more