Terror alert sparks surge for airline websites

The terror alert, which has week caused the cancellation of hundreds of flights to and from UK airports and thrown the holiday plans of thousands into disarray, also caused a surge of Internet activity as travellers struggled to change their journey plans. Web activity monitoring company Hitwise said that British visits to the BBC News were up 50 per cent on Thursday when the news of the alleged terror plot emerged. The visits pushed the BBC site up the rankings to the 9th most visited Internet site in the world, up from 14th the previous day. ...more

Canon to buy Toshiba's stake in display joint venture

Canon has said that it will buy out Toshiba in their flat-panel display venture to resolve a patent dispute with Nano-Proprietary. in the United States. Canon will now own the unit that was set up in 2004 to develop a new type of thin panels that can be used in TVs to challenge consumer electronics giants such as Samsung and Matsushita. ...more

Nokia plays its game phone

Nokia launches game-centric N-Gage phone. The N-Gage handset showcased yesterday in the UK and Australia. Its boasts a landscape layout that gives it Game Boy ergonomics, so players can get to grips with the action on the 176 x 208 pixel colour screen. ...more

Movie industry grilled in P2P court case

Lawyers for the movie industry faced tough questioning by judges in the first day of the industry's latest legal battle against peer-to-peer file sharing. Movie studios want the US Supreme Court to rule that the developers of the Grokster and Morpheus P2P software should be held responsible for the illegal trading of copyrighted software using their technologies. Judges expressed concern that making P2P software illegal could have a major detrimental effect on future software innovation and asked where the entertainment industry would stop in its pursuit of file sharers. ...more

European publishers back suing Google

European publishers have backed moves by a French news agency to sue Google for copyright infringement. Agence France Presses is suing Google for at least $17.5m because the search engine allows AFP copyright pictures headlines and stories to appear on its Google News service. ...more