Global recession hits IT hard

A series of reports and job cuts announced over the past week prove technology spending worldwide is under extreme pressure and IT vendors are being forced to review their plans, reports Computing.co.uk.

Analyst Forrester Research forecasts that spending on IT products and services will fall by 3% in 2009 ‑ the first such drop since 2002.

Gartner is slightly more optimistic, predicting IT budgets will remain flat this year, with an average increase of just 0.16% globally and 0.4% in Europe.

A former system administrator, who pocketed several million dollars by scamming Cisco's part replacement programme, has been sentenced to five years in prison by a federal court in New Jersey, says The Register.

Michael Kyereme was a network troubleshooter for the city of Newark between 2002 and 2007, where he was authorised to buy replacement parts from Cisco.

The 41-year-old was arrested and later admitted to falsely ordering replacements for faulty networking gear, and requesting swaps for gear that was more expensive than what the city actually owned. He then resold the merchandise in California and kept the profit.

Do-it-yourself broadband schemes are springing up around the UK as communities refuse to wait for big firms to roll out faster networks, reports The BBC.

That is the conclusion of a new report into the state of broadband in Britain. The Communications Consumer Panel, an advisory body, has mapped over 40 local broadband projects.

They range from a scheme in Hampshire to run fibre to just 30 houses, to one in Yorkshire that will connect around 550 000 homes.

The US Department of Justice has been trying since 1998 to convince courts that a federal anti-porn law targeting sexually explicit Web sites was constitutional, says CNet.

No longer. Yesterday, the US Supreme Court rejected prosecutors' last-ditch defence of the Child Online Protection Act (Copa), meaning the law will not be enforced.

Copa was enacted during the anti-Internet porn scares of the late 1990s, in part as a narrower answer to a previous Internet censorship law that also met its demise in the courts. The law is surprisingly limited, and applies only to material delivered "by means of the World Wide Web".