BT cuts broadband upgrades price

BT Wholesale has made a huge cut in the cost of changing the speed of an IPStream-based ADSL broadband connection. Upgrading your line, whether from 500Kbps to 1 or 2Mbps or from 1 to 2Mbps will now cost your ISP ?11 plus VAT. Previously the charge was ?35. ...more

New Awards to honour women in technology

A new awards ceremony is being planned to honour women who have made outstanding contributions to technology. The awards are being organised by the women's networking group Aurora and sponsored by RIM, the company behind the must-have technology for upwardly mobile geeks, the Blackberry. The BlackBerry Women & Technology Awards 2005 will be presented 27 October at the Riverbank Plaza Hotel in London. ...more

Dutch campaign maintains anti-p2p offensive

Dutch anti-p2p campaigners have forced another filesharing website offline, bringing the total number of p2p sites that they have closed down in the past 15 months to 131. BREIN, a coalition of authors, artists and producers, persuaded the hosting provider for dsb-tracker.org to take the website down, after its operators had ignored BREIN's cease and desist notice. ...more

Government inquiry into BBC online advertising

The BBC is facing a Government inquiry, launched by culture secretary, Chris Smith, who has appointed a watchdog to investigate whether the BBC's online sector is competing fairly in the market. The problem centres around the fact that BBC sites which carry advertising can comprise content sourced from the BBC's traditional media, essentially meaning that licence-payers' money is subsidising the sites and giving them an unfair advantage over rival information-based Web sites. This latest move follows the British Internet Publishers' Alliance request to the Department of Trade and Industry last November to ban adverts on the BBC's publicly-funded sites. ...more

Spyware strain dictates browsing

Spyware is evolving from simply tracking your activities to strong arming victims to visit potentially nefarious websites, according to PC Tools. It claims to have found a new strain of spyware that analyses the keywords in links within websites that the victim is browsing. Once the victim clicks a link, instead of visiting the page expected, the spyware hijacks the browser and sends it to a site or a set of search results based on those keywords - many of which are unsavoury in nature. ...more