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Cellphone maker Motorola has sued former executive Michael Fenger for allegedly violating a non-compete agreement and threatening to reveal its trade secrets by taking a job with Apple iPhone division. Fenger accepted "millions of dollars in cash, restricted stock units, and stock options" in exchange for agreeing not to join a competitor for two years after leaving Motorola, where he oversaw mobile devices in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, the lawsuit said. However, contrary to the terms of his agreement, he took the iPhone job on March 31, less than a month after leaving Motorola.
Fenger, who now serves as vice president of global iPhone sales, also hired away two high-level Motorola employees who have access to Motorola’s trade secrets and customer relationships, the suit said. Unsurprisingly, an Apple spokeswoman said the company had no comment on the lawsuit, and Fenger could not be reached for comment. Motorola has demanded damages and repayment of stock options given to him in exchange for signing the non-compete agreement.

View: Full Story at Reuters

Europeans suspected of putting movies and music on file-sharing networks could be thrown off the web under proposals before Brussels.

The powers are in a raft of laws that aim to harmonise the regulations governing Europe’s telecom markets.
Other amendments added to the packet of laws allow governments to decide which software can be used on the web.
Campaigners say the laws trample on personal privacy and turn net suppliers into copyright enforcers.
MEPs are due to vote on the so-called Telecom Packet on 7 July. The core proposals in the packet were drawn up to help European telecoms firms cope with the rapid pace of change in the industry.
Technological and industry changes that did not respect borders had highlighted the limitations of Europe’s current approach which sees national governments oversee their telecoms markets.
"The current fragmentation hinders investment and is detrimental to consumers and operators," says the EU document laying out the proposals.
View: BBC News

A new undersea fiber-optic cable linking Japan and Russia went into service this week providing the first direct link between the two countries and an alternate cable route between Europe and Asia.
The Hokkaido-Sakhalin Cable System (HSCS) runs between the two islands, Japan’s Hokkaido and Russia’s Sakhalin, and has a capacity of 640G bps (bits per second). Construction of the 570 kilometer cable was carried out by Japan’s NTT Communications and Russia’s TransTeleCom Company and started and completed last year.
Until now traffic between Japan and Russia, which share a sea border in the Russian Far East, had to run via traditional cable routes through Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean to Europe.
View: The full story @ PCWorld

Hitachi has announced plans to have a commercial 3.5-inch hard drive on the market that can hold 5TB. They hope for this to be available by 2010.
Hard drive specialist Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is continuing to push HDDs to the limit, with a strong emphasis on increasing capacity and with a clear goal in mind.
The space will be achieved using ‘current perpendicular-to-the-plane giant magnetoresistance’, or in short, CPP-GMR.
CPP-GMR pushes data density above 1TB per square inch, a long-awaited threshold that promises drives many times larger than those available today.

View: TechRadar

A group of software and online payment companies are teaming up to find a better way than passwords to protect, and prove, your identity online. Problems with passwords are well known - people require ever more passwords which means they either get forgotten, or people use the same word for several different services which is a security risk. The new group will seek to find open standards to make it easier to prove your identity online without using dozens of passwords and usernames.
Equifax, Google, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle and PayPal will work together to create "Information Cards" - online cards like those in your wallet. Different cards can contain different levels of information and can be used to log in to different websites instead of using a username and password. Some may contain just a user name and password, others address information.

View: The full story @ The Register

Internet regulators voted to loosen restrictions on internet names, a move that could allow thousands of variations of suffixes beyond the basic .com or .ca. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) overwhelmingly approved the new guidelines on Thursday in Paris after weeklong meetings. The guidelines represent one of the biggest changes to the internet in its 25-year history.
New names won’t begin appearing for several months and ICANN won’t be deciding on specific ones. The organization must decide how much the new domain names will cost. The names are expected to cost over $100,000 apiece to help ICANN cover up to $20 million in costs. The new guidelines could allow for domain names that have been requested, and denied by ICANN, for years, such as .xxx for adult websites and .post for postal service websites. Companies with well-known names like eBay, Apple or Google could also end up requesting domain names if the new rules are approved, snatching up names like .ebay, .mac and .goog.

View: Full Story at CBC.ca

The civil service’s systems will be subjected to new attacks by independent white hat hackers in a bid to spot weaknesses in government data handling before catastrophic losses occur, it was announced today.
The white hat programme is one of a suite of targets, training and scrutiny measures that Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell hopes will bring about a "culture change" across the civil service and restore public faith in the government’s competence in handling sensitive data. He said: "The risk we must counter is that citizens and business lose trust in the Government to handle their data effectively. It would be foolish not to acknowledge that the lapses in data security have affected this confidence."

View: The full story @ The Reg

Web content management firm SDL Tridion has released the results of its research into what elements of web site design most turn off internet users, coming in top is pop up advertising. Seventy-eight percents of respondents said that this type of advertising was the most frustrating web experience, complaining that ads appeared at inappropriate times and were difficult to get rid off. SDL said that this kind of annoyance was indicative of what it called "bimbo web design", saying that sites were often "attractive, but with no substance."
“First impressions count and no company wants bimbo characteristics on its website,” said Erik Aeyelts Averink, President SDL Tridion. “All ‘fluff’ and no content drives website users mad. Don’t push customers away and annoy them for no reason.”

View: The full story @ vnunet

There are now more than one billion PCs in use worldwide and this number will double by the year 2014, according to Gartner research. The figures relate to computers that are actually being used, as opposed to those that have merely been shipped over a period of time. Over half of these PCs (58 per cent) are based in established markets such as Western Europe, Japan and the US.
But these regions only account for 15 per cent of the world’s population. Users in emerging markets will play an increasingly large role in driving global take up, said George Shiffler, research director at Gartner. “We expect per-capita PC penetration in emerging markets to double by 2013,” said Shiffler.

View: The full story @ vnunet

As Bill Gates prepares to end his full-time work at Microsoft, he tells the BBC in an interview that it wasn’t just what Microsoft did, but what his rivals didn’t do that let Microsoft get ahead. "Most of our competitors were very poorly run," he tells Fiona Bruce, for The Money Programme. "They did not understand how to bring in people with business experience and people with engineering experience and put them together. They did not understand how to go around the world."
Sir Alan Sugar, one of Britain’s computer pioneers with his Amstrad range, testifies to Microsoft’s global mobility even as a comparatively small company in the 1980s. Amstrad, in Brentwood, Essex, was visited by a Microsoft salesman - or "mid-Atlantic smoothie" as Sir Alan describes him - who came to sell Microsoft’s MS-DOS operating system.

View: Full Article @ BBC News