Bush is Google-bombed

President George Bush has been Google bombed, reports the Sydney Morning Herald. A search for "miserable failure" on the popular search engine Google brings up, as the first link, the official biography of Bush provided by the White House.

How is that possible? According to the paper, it can be done because Google does not only search the contents of Web pages, it also counts how often a site is linked to, and the words used. So it is possible for a group of Net-savvy individuals to influence the result of a Google search - a process called "Google bombing" - by linking any number of sites to a chosen one.

Cambridgeshire police say a wave of phone calls from irate consumers has swamped the police switchboard after the department was targeted by an e-mail hoax, reports Reuters.

A spam e-mail message surfaced last week, alerting people that their credit card had been charged lb399 for a new Apple iPod portable music player. To settle the matter, the e-mail advised, the recipient should ring a designated phone number - the Cambridgeshire police switchboard.

The UK`s new anti-spam legislation kicks in on Thursday, slapping a lb5 000 fine on anyone who sends unsolicited e-mail marketing messages to home-based Internet users.

Students and teachers at a French-speaking digital campus in the Senegalese capital Dakar follow courses online, download costly textbooks and enjoy access to a wealth of Internet data.

Their experience will be important input, reports Yahoo News, at a global summit on bridging the digital divide. The World Summit on the Information Society opens in Geneva tomorrow with the aim of reducing the digital gap between rich and poor.

Corporate spending on IT and telecoms equipment is likely to increase modestly among smaller businesses next year while big groups are expected to remain flat, according to a survey published yesterday.

Financial Times reports that software is expected to take priority over new hardware purchases. Security, data storage, wireless local area networks, Linux and business intelligence software were ranked as the top priorities for IT spending in 2004. More than 600 IT decision-makers took part in the survey, conducted in late October by IT consulting firm Gartner and SoundView Technology Group.