US authorities can get access to EU citizens’ data on phone calls, sms’ and emails, giving a recent EU data-retention law much wider-reaching consequences than first expected, reports Swedish daily Sydsvenskan.

The EU data retention bill, passed in February after much controversy and with implementation tabled for late 2007, obliges telephone operators and internet service providers to store information on who called who and who emailed who for at least six months, aimed at fighting terrorism and organised crime.

Source: euobserver.com

Two teenagers were charged with setting fires in suburban Washington after they bragged about the blazes on MySpace.com, authorities said.

“The significant thing is they posted on the Internet, and bragged about the fires, and that certainly allowed us to break the case,” county Fire Chief Thomas W. Carr Jr. said. “They posted photos of these fires.”

Source: AP

Microsoft has revealed a surprising new feature for Word 2007: built-in blog publishing.

The big surprise is this: the HTML that is generated is actually not that bad. ‘Joe Friend, a lead program manager has posted an entry on his blog regarding an interesting new feature being implemented for Word 2007: direct publishing of blogs to the web from within the program.’

Source: Slashdot

A dean at one of China’s top universities has been fired after his claims to have invented a new computer chip turned out to be a fraud, the school announced Friday.

The scandal at Shanghai Jiaotong University, the alma mater of former
President Jiang Zemin, is an embarrassment for Chinese leaders, who are trying to promote homegrown technological advances to match the country’s economic progress.

Shanghai Jiaotong found that Chen Jin faked research on the Hanxin digital signal processing chip and that it couldn’t perform functions that he claimed, such as verifying fingerprints, the university said in a statement on its Web site.

Source: AP

Startup Ajax13 Inc. is looking to do to Linux what Microsoft Corp. is doing to Windows — dissolve the operating system into the Web.

Under the shadow of Microsoft’s enormous task of making all of its desktop products available as Web services, the small San Diego company is getting ready to launch in a few weeks what it calls AjaxOS, a desktop application that would link a
Linux-based computer to Web applications that mimic some of the most popular desktop software used today.

To date, Ajax13 has launched as services word processing and spreadsheet programs, an application for building graphs and charts, a music player and an editor for mixing video, music and photos. More Web services are coming, but the company won’t say what they are or when.

Source: TechWeb

Nearly 200,000 identities may have been exposed to criminals in three separate incidents in a two-week period, Ohio University said Thursday, marking the latest in a string of data breaches to hit American schools.

According to details posted by the university’s IT department, the break-ins, which were discovered on April 21, April 28, and May 4, involved systems that recorded detailed information on current and former students, faculty, and staff that included Social Security numbers, names, and dates of birth.

Source: InformationWeek

Softbank, the fast-growing Japanese Internet and telecommunications group, will work with Apple Computer to jointly develop mobile phones that have iPod music players functions, a report has said.

Softbank President Masayoshi Son and Apple Chief Executive Officer
Steve Jobs met and reached a basic agreement on this partnership in cell phone handset operations, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun said, without citing sources.

The new handsets are to be released in Japan sometime this year at the earliest, the Nihon Keizai said.

Source: AFP

U.S. antitrust authorities on Friday rejected concerns that a search feature in the new version of Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer browser would give the company an unfair advantage over Google Inc.

The Justice Department said it had investigated and found no basis for concerns that a new search box included in the Internet Explorer 7 browser would give an unfair advantage to Microsoft’s MSN search service.

The department said the new Internet search box in Microsoft’s browser “respects users’ and (computer makers’) default choices.”

Source: Reuters

A researcher at Tohoku University has developed a wearable braille sensor using fingertip glove-like device that can recognize and decode raised dots that are often hard to learn for elderly people with visual impairment.

The device developed by Mami Tanaka, an assistant professor at the Tohoku University graduate school, is built with a special sensor that reads raised dots and sends the information to a computer that deciphers them into preregistered letters.

Source: crisscross