FBI uncovers cybercrime network

There have been more than 100 arrests after the FBI uncovered a cyber crime ring following an investigation that kicked off when the FBI noticed a pattern of suspicious bank transactions in Omaha, reports the BBC.

The FBI says it has cracked a major international cyber crime network after more than 90 suspected members of the ring were arrested in the US. The suspects worked as so-called mules for fraudsters based in Eastern Europe who hacked into US computers to steal around $70 million.

More people were detained in Ukraine and the UK, local police said. The FBI said the arrests were part of “one of the largest cyber criminal cases we have ever investigated”.

Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer missed out on a maximum bonus in the company's last fiscal year, after he failed to move quickly enough against Apple's iPad and lost market share in the mobile phone biz, says The Register.

The unsuccessful launch and speedy demise of Microsoft's doomed social networking mobile device Kin also kept Ballmer's piggy bank a little lighter than he might have hoped for in the year ended 30 June.

Despite record sales, the 54-year-old CEO only picked up a cash bonus of $670 000, which was equal to his annual salary. According to a US Securities and Exchange Commission proxy filing, that payout represented only half of the maximum bonus Ballmer could have received if he had successfully pursued “innovations to take advantage of new form factors”.

Three years after a supposedly show-stopping release, SAP has signed barely more than 80 new customers to the next-generation version of its enterprise applications - a far cry from its stated goal of 10 000 customers by 2010, notes Computing.

SAP's Business ByDesign, which was launched with great fanfare in 2007, was intended to catapult the software giant into the fast-growing software-as-a-service (SaaS) arena.

Its release was described by the then company chief executive, Henning Kagermann, as “the most important announcement I have made in my career”.

New PCs could start in just seconds, thanks to an update to one of the oldest parts of desktop computers, reports the BBC.

The upgrade will spell the end for the 25-year-old PC start-up software known as Bios that initialises a machine so its operating system can get going.

The code was not intended to live nearly this long, and adapting it to modern PCs is one reason they take as long as they do to warm up. Bios's replacement, Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, will predominate in new PCs by 2011.