Cyber-bully faces 20 years

A Missouri woman, accused of pretending to be a smitten teenage boy on MySpace and driving a 13-year-old girl to suicide with cruel messages, faces federal charges that could lead to 20 years in jail, reports The Independent.

Prosecutors say Lori Drew, 49, and others, created the fake persona of a 16-year-old boy to woo her neighbour, Megan Meier, for weeks on the social networking site, then suddenly ended the relationship, telling her the world would be better off without her.

Megan hanged herself in her room, hours after she read those final messages two years ago, prompting worldwide calls for sites such as MySpace to crack down on cyber-bullying.

Sun Microsystems has taken the wraps off its first Sun Fire and Sun Blade servers powered by AMD Opteron quad-core processors, says VNUNet.com.

The Sun Fire X4140, X4240 and X4440 servers are the latest additions to Sun's 64-bit x86 server line. The new servers come with a choice of operating systems, including Solaris 10, OpenSolaris, Linux and Windows.

"Sun's new x64 systems with quad-core AMD Opteron processors offer increased performance, scalability and energy efficiency, and ultimately more value than similar servers on the market," said Lisa Sieker, VP of marketing for the Systems Group at Sun.

Nearly half of iPhone users changed carriers in order to use the device, according to a survey of 460 iPhone users by Rubicon Consulting, a technology consulting firm. The survey found the average iPhone user was paying $19 more in phone bills than before, reports The New York Times.

"The numbers are big enough that clearly this thing is profitable for AT&T," said Michael Mace, a principal at Rubicon.

"The big financial leverage is on the people who switch carriers. It's not like you have to add new cell towers for them; they're almost all profit. And those people are hard to come by, because you have to switch them off somebody else's network."

Sprint kept the WiMax ball moving down the court on 15 May, declaring its XOHM 3G mobile broadband network has cleared testing and industry standards. Sprint plans to begin service in the Washington-Baltimore region by the end of the year, according to eWeek.com.

XOHM president Barry West said Sprint has created a proven WiMax ecosystem that can "deliver this new technology to the marketplace well ahead of any feasible alternative".

WiMax promises faster download speeds than the current cellular networks and holds the potential to be a competitor to fixed-line broadband like DSL.