London Underground mobile plan fails

Plans to deploy mobile phone technology on the London Underground have been shelved after supplier proposals were deemed "not commercially viable", says Computing.co.uk.

A tendering process for a six-month mobile phone trial was issued by Transport for London in 2007 and the pilot was due to start last year for Bank and Waterloo stations, with a view to extending across the entire Tube system.

But reports now suggest that, while Transport for London accepted cellular technology could be rolled out across stations and tunnels, implementation costs would be prohibitive.

A recently uncovered Red Hat patent application for dynamic message routing on XML has some open source advocates theorising the company has quietly forsaken its promise to claim Linux IP only for defensive purposes, reports The Register.

Conspiracies are bubbling out of Slashdot and other sites over a 2007 Red Hat patent application for a "method and apparatus to deliver messages between applications".

Free software watchdogs are concocting sinister designs for why Red Hat didn't simply publish prior art for the technology rather than file a claim with the US patent office.

A second generation of Microsoft's Surface computing device is two to three years away, the South by SouthWest Festival has heard, says the BBC.

Developer Joe Olsen, whose company Phenomblue writes applications for the Surface, said he had been told the device was still in the development stage.

"They haven't even got to a point where they are going to commercialise," he said. Chris Bernard, user experience evangelist for Microsoft, said he could not confirm a release date.