Gamers jailed for neglecting children

The parents of four children in Scotland have been sentenced to three months in jail for neglect due to an addiction to Internet gaming, reports The Register.

The Arbroath Sheriff Court heard that both parents had become utterly engrossed in the online gaming world and that the 28-year-old father spent all his waking hours playing online.

Neighbours called the police, who uncovered what has been described as one of Scotland`s worst cases of child neglect.

Police said the youngest was found in a heavily soiled nappy and the other three were dirty and hardly clothed. Two of the children needed emergency dental work, and one had to have all her teeth removed.

Security specialist F-Secure says the first serious outbreak of a mobile phone virus in a company has been detected, reports News.com.

F-Secure says an outbreak of the Commwarrior.B virus occurred at an unnamed Scandinavian company in what is believed to be the first incidence of a mobile virus infecting an organisation.

The Commwarrior virus targets mobile phones that use the Symbian Series 60 operating system, and spreads using Bluetooth and multimedia messaging technology, sending itself to every address in the address book.

Microsoft has increased its presence in the fast-growing Internet phone sector by purchasing Teleo, and according to BBC News, is preparing to enable computer users to make and receive standard phone calls by the end of the year.

Microsoft and rivals AOL, Google and Yahoo all currently allow phone calls between computers, but not yet to a domestic or mobile handset.

However, Yahoo is also in the process of introducing such a system, having acquired Internet phone company Dialpad two months ago.

Three open source projects are teaming up to create an alternative to software-integration products from large vendors.

News.com says the partnership calls for close technical ties and code sharing among ServiceMix, Apache Synapse and Celtix.

The goal of the planned alliance is to create a more cohesive integration offering and attract software developers in the field of open source.

The report says in an attempt to create more momentum around their integration software, the three open source projects are in talks to share code and provide close interoperability among them.

EDonkey is the most popular Internet large file-sharing program, according to a study comparing the top four file-sharing programs.

SFGate says the study shows that EDonkey accounts for the biggest volume of data moving over the Internet, ahead of BitTorrent, Gnutella and Kazaa`s FastTrack file-swapping networks.

The report says since BitTorrent`s rise to account for just over 50% of all file-sharing traffic and 30% of all traffic on the Internet, the entertainment industry has gone after operators of Web sites hosting marker files used by BitTorrent to locate other file-swappers online.

In the new study, eDonkey accounted for 51% of the file-sharing traffic, compared with 34% for BitTorrent.