Europe needs to bridge the digital divide

Europe needs to do more to accelerate the broadband revolution according to a report by the European Commission. The document 'Bridging the Broadband Gap' says that Europe should pull together EU telecoms legislation and structural and rural policy to ensure that the more remote and rural areas of the Union are not left behind in the rush to faster Internet access speeds and associated applications. The European Commission reports that the broadband penetration rate at the end of 2005 is estimated at 13 per cent of the population, which equates to about 25 per cent of households, reaching almost 60 million lines throughout the EU. ...more

Branson breathes life into Virgin Mobile, NTL merger

Flamboyant entrepreneur Richard Branson has offered to forgo a ?42 million payday in order to finalise a deal with cable company NTL. Last month an $817m bid for the Virgin Mobile phone business was rejected by the board even though Branson, who owns a 71.3 per cent stake in the business had given the deal his backing. ...more

Nvidia introduces 'standard' graphics connector for PCI notebooks

Graphics developer NVidia has agreed a 'standard' graphics interface for the forthcoming next generation of PCI enabled notebooks. The new standard to be known as Mobile PCI Express Module (MXM) will enable notebook manufacturers to design a single motherboard and drop in a graphics solution from any manufacturer without having to redesign for every different GPU. The specification was developed by Nvidia and a number of notebook developers. ...more

Amazon and IBM settle patent dispute

Amazon and IBM have announced that they have settled all patent lawsuits between them. Amazon will make an undisclosed payment to IBM and the two companies have agreed a long-term patent cross-license agreement. IBM filed two patent infringement lawsuits against Amazon in October 2006, relating to e-commerce technology used by its online sales service. ...more

Eavesdropping security threat emerges

A new kind of computer security threat has been identified that could pick up passwords and bank details without installing anything on the target machine. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a method to detect the text typed on a keyboard with 96 per cent accuracy, just by listening to the sound of keys being hit. Li Zhuang, Feng Zhou, and J D Tygar have released a paper identifying a method of categorising the different sounds made when the typist hits each key, and then using a variety of factors, such as the probability of clusters of letters appearing together and grammatical constraints, to work out what was typed. ...more