Ten ways to lose your laptop

Laptops are delicate machines, but - as insurance companies know - they don't always receive tender loving care. As part of analysing laptop insurance claims over the last five years, company staff at Complete Computer Cover have maintained a league table of the strangest and most unfortunate ways in which people have managed to mangle their machines. Entries in the top ten include the woman who left her laptop on the drive and then reversed a car over it and the schoolchild whose mother smashed the screen by dropping an iron on it. ...more

Palm embraces Bluetooth

Handheld maker Palm has announced a Bluetooth SD card to add wireless connectivity to its devices equipped with a Palm Expansion Card Slot. The card enables the handhelds to connect over distances as far as 10 metres with any other Bluetooth-equipped device, such as mobile phones, printers and laptops, and to create a PAN (personal area network) comprising up to eight Palms. Equipped with a Bluetooth enabled handheld and phone, users can dial a phone number directly from the Palm address book and send SMS text messages and emails. ...more

Sony wins PSP grey import battle

A Hong Kong based company has lost its battle to sell Sony PSP consoles destined for the Japanese market to Europe. A UK High Court judge has agreed with Sony that selling grey imports of PSPs and other Playstation gear constituted 'copyright infringement'. Pacific Technology had argued that it was a Hong Kong company having no trading presence in the UK or the EEA and that title to the goods they sold passed in Hong Kong and therefore had no control over who bought the PSP consoles. ...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

A low-down on... Spyware

The Web is oft-quoted as a wonderful resource, but also full of well-documented dangers. Unsavoury sights are waiting to greet the foolhardy browser and the information arteries are crawling with viruses. Most of us have the nous to avoid these pitfalls, but there is a more insidious danger out there. ...more