School bullying by new technology

Some children are turning to new technology in order to bully their victims. Professor Peter Smith, a leading Government adviser, said that children are using SMS text messaging and e-mail to threaten other children. Professor Smith is head of the Unit for School and Family Studies and noticed the new trend after looking at the results of a recent survey into bullying. ...more

Napster bets on free MP3 player

Napster has begun offering a free MP3 player to new subscribers to its digital music service in the UK. Anyone taking out a minimum three-month subscription to Napster To Go will receive a 512MB version of the SanDisk Sansa m230 portable music player, which in addition to providing space for 512MB of WMA or MP3 files has an FM tuner, built-in microphone for voice recording and a backlit LCD display. Napster said that the offer is an attempt to replicate the success of the mobile phone market, where network providers built their business by selling subscriptions on the back of free handsets. ...more

Gigabyte to offer ATI RX330-based motherboards

Gigabyte Technology will be the first motherboard company to feature the discrete ATI RX330 chipset, with the board to be released by the end of this month, according to market sources. The ATI RX330 supports Intel's Pentium 4 processors and will compete in the same market segments as Intel's 865PE chipset, the sources noted. The RX330 also features an 800MHz FSB and dual-channel DDR memory, but does not include PCIe support. ...more

German music service backs DRM-free downloads

Germany's leading alternative to iTunes as a source of music downloads has decided to abandon DRM for music from independent labels, with some success according to Jupiter Research. MusicLoad is the most successful ISP music store in Europe; so successful that Apple only recently claimed to be the market leader in Germany. Although it has long added DRM to its downloads in order to secure content from the major record companies, it recently revealed that such copy protection accounts for three quarters of complaints by its customers, noting that DRM 'makes the use of music quite difficult and hinders the development of a mass-market for legal downloads'. ...more

BT moves out of Japan, sells to Vodafone

BT has agreed to sell Vodafone its share in Japan Telecom and Spanish firm Airtel Moviles for ?4.9bn. The deal will make Vodafone the majority shareholder in Japan Telecom and will give it a sizeable (55 per cent) chunk of cellular offshoot J-Phone. ...more