FTC spotlights Google's DoubleClick deal

Google's $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick is now being looked at by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which has asked for additional information about the deal, the search giant confirmed today. Following news of Google's intentions to buy the web ad specialist its rivals came out in droves to voice their concerns about how it could affect the market and, ultimately, users. ...more

UK woman virtual hits virtual jackpot

A businesswoman from Surrey has scooped an incredible ?98,000 prize from an online casino. It is the biggest-ever online casino win in the UK and Carol Andrew's $137,000 win came when she was playing the Cashsplash game on the US site King Solomon's Online Casino. The payment was made the next day but Mrs Andrew didn't receive her win until a week later after the sum had been converted from dollars to sterling. ...more

OS X Server upgraded

Apple has released version 10.1 of its OS X Server software, designed to deliver, "system-wide performance enhancements, increase reliability and substantially faster file transfer times". Apple lists the major improvements as: System-wide performance enhancements that increase reliability, launch server-side applications faster, speed printing times, increase administration response and reduce file transfer times; the latest advancements from the Open Source community, with the most reliable releases of Apache, Samba, PHP, MySQL, Tomcat and OpenSSL; RAID support for disk striping (RAID-0) and disk mirroring (RAID-1) allowing flexible storage configuration, data redundancy and improved disk read performance; A new release of QuickTime Streaming Server, version 3. ...more

PayPal scamming worm asks for bank details

Sophos has alerted users of a new variant of the Mimail virus, which is designed to appear as a PayPal email. Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said Mimail variants were not being used by different authors, unlike the various authors of the Blaster virus. 'We believe the Mimail viruses were written by the same person, or group of people. ...more

Virgin Media cuts broadband speeds for heavy downloaders

Virgin Media has confirmed that it has begun implementing traffic shaping for around five per cent of its broadband users. The ISP, formerly ntl:Telewest, said that it occasionally moderates downstream speeds for subscribers 'downloading an unusually large amount' of data, sometimes as much as 3GB, during the peak 4pm-to-midnight period. 'Our boffins recently ran a trial to see how much our service was being affected,' it explained. ...more