UK tenth in the spamming rankings

The UK is the tenth most spamming country in the world according to security experts at UK company Sophos in their quarterly report on global spamming. The company's figures for the preceding quarter didn't feature the UK at all - the first time it had not charted in Sophos's 'dirty dozen' of spamming countries. At the time, Sophos's Graham Cluley put it down to better protection at the desktop. ...more

Dublin protest walk provokes Apple apology

A Dublin man's plan to walk from the Irish capital to Cork in protest at the speed of Apple's customer service has provoked an apology from Apple Ireland - and a brand new iMac. Karl Hayden resolved to undertake the trek to prove that he could walk to Cork in a shorter length of time than it had taken Apple to pickup his faulty Mac. 'I think there comes a time when the only thing that works with these companies is to show them up publicly and shame them into taking you seriously,' Hayden said. ...more

Tablet PCs to hit their stride in 2005

Tablet PCs will have to wait until 2005 before they hit their stride, according to analysts. Industry analysts In-Stat/MDR reckon the cast of Microsoft and its hardware partners, such as Acer and HP, have achieved only partial success with the Tablet PC show, since its launch in October 2002. The firm reckons that as the prices of the pen-based computing devices breaks down through the $2,000 barrier, they will broaden their appeal to a much wider audience. ...more

New Google tools aim to sharpen up News coverage

Google has introduced a Sitemap protocol and new webmaster tools for Google News in order to improve both the 'freshness' of its coverage and to enable webmaster to determine precisely what content they want to appear on the news aggregation service. News Sitemaps tell Google exactly which articles to crawl for inclusion in Google News. The News Sitemaps XML definition lets webmasters specify a publication date and time for each article and to set keywords for each article that determine placement of the articles into the relevant sections on Google News. ...more

Facebook schools success with iTunes giveaway

The world's number two social networking site is giving away 250 million iTunes downloads in a back-to-school promotion. Facebook will hand out one million sampler packs each week for 10 weeks, each pack containing 25 songs pre-selected from a variety of genres. The site currently has around 13 million unique users, around a quarter of the figure for the leading networking site, MySpace. ...more