eBay protects its customers against online fraud

Do you feel safe bidding large amounts of money in an online auction? Are you concerned about online fraud? Well, eBay UK has moved to offer more protection to those who do take part in its 'e-auctions'. From today, the UK arm of the Internet auctioneers is to offer customers insurance to the value of ?250 in damages. This will be done through its PayPal payment processing system. ...more

Reports of PDA demise premature, according to Gartner

PDA shipments have risen by an eighth, according to research group Gartner. The 12 per cent rise in shipments for this quarter over last year's marks a decided upturn in the market. Figures had previously been ailing for two and a half years. ...more

BT to double SDSL coverage

BT Wholesale is to double the number of exchanges that can provide SDSL broadband services. By increasing the number of exchanges from 150 to 300, BT will also widen the geographical coverage beyond its current base in the major metropolitan areas. SDSL (synchronous digital subscriber line) provides equal upstream and downstream bandwidth and is primarily suitable for businesses that have large upstream requirements, including email and uploading data to the Web. ...more

The old Bell system might divide to conquer

An old American telecoms giant is to consider splitting itself up, again. The board of AT&T will today consider breaking the company up into four parts, the better to focus on specific segments within the telecom market. Currently, it is under pressure from Wall Street for the underperformance of its shares - they are trading at about half the price of a year ago. ...more

Google claims victory over DoJ

As expected, a US Judge has ordered search engine Google to hand over a random 50,000 URLs in its database to the Department of Justice. However, Google managed to scale down the original request and Judge Wade has also ordered that any request by the Government to disclose the search queries of any users would be denied. Originally the Department of Justice had demanded access to the company's search logs running into billions of URLs and two month's worth of search queries. ...more