48-hour strike for HP

Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union members working for HP in several northern regions of the Department of Work and Pensions are to hold a two-day strike over redundancies and pay freezes next Monday and Tuesday, reports Computing.co.uk.

The 48-hour action, on 8 and 9 March, by 1 000 HP staff, will coincide with a strike announced by up to 270 000 Civil Service staff for the same date.

Some 63.4% of PCS union members voting in a national ballot were in favour of strike action, with 81.4% favouring "action short of a strike", which means an overtime ban in practice.

A robot-aeroplane inventor with successful designs behind him has come out with a radical new kind of skydroid which, he says, offers long range combined with vertical takeoff and landing, and automated ground support, writes The Register.

Tad McGeer started a company called Insitu - in classic style, in a Silicon Valley garage - in 1992, out of which came the ScanEagle drone.

This was originally intended for such purposes as helping fishermen to track shoals of tuna, but in fact it has seen greater take-up by the US Navy. Insitu was sold to Boeing for a hefty sum.

Security experts are split over the effectiveness of Microsoft's efforts to shut down a network of PCs that could send 1.5 billion spam messages a day, says the BBC.

The firm persuaded a US judge to issue a court order to cripple 277 Internet domains used by the Waledac botnet.

Botnets are usually armies of hijacked Windows PCs that send spam or malware.

According to the Boston Globe, thieves are using every technological means at their disposal to fool those who sell the bridal dream and those who buy it into parting with their money, states CNet.

These criminals set up a Twitter page, Twitter.com/TheBoston411, on which they claimed the event, starting 5 March, would be the biggest home and bridal show in New England. They created a Facebook page, which has since been taken down. They set up a Web site, even though they clearly had nothing to do with The Boston 411 information site. They even claimed they were raising money for Haiti.

Police estimates suggest that around 5 000 people used PayPal to pay these tricksters around $15 per person. In addition, around 200 businesses paid exhibitor's fees of between $350 and $4 000.