Gmail forbidden in Germany

Travellers to Germany will no longer be able to access Google's Gmail the easy way, due to the firm's long-running trademark lawsuit with German businessman Daniel Giersch, says The Register.

As from Friday, German Gmail users and travellers in Germany are greeted with the following message: "We can't provide service under the Gmail name in Germany; we're called Google Mail here instead. If you're travelling in Germany, you can access your mail at http://mail.google.com."

The above URL is not accessible either, reports The Register. German businessman Giersch started using the name G-mail in 2000 to label his own physical mail service. Google didn't launch its mail service until 2004.

The Scottish Ambulance Service has lost data relating to almost a million emergency calls, including the name and addresses of patients, in the latest public sector data loss scandal, reports Computing.co.uk.

The disc went missing while courier TNT was transporting it to MIS Emergency Services, the company that supplies the IT system used in the ambulance service's three centres.

The disc - which was encrypted - contained a copy of records of 894 629 calls to the service's Paisley centre since February 2006, including the addresses of incidents, some phone numbers and some patient names.

Sony and Sony Ericsson have come out on top of the latest Greenpeace Guide to Greener Electronics, although most companies saw their scores drop due to a new ranking system based on wider criteria, says IT World.

"A lot of companies in the industry are taking steps towards greener electronics, but it's about time we raised the bar and challenged the companies to race towards a greener industry," said Omer Elnaiem, a Greenpeace spokesman in Amsterdam.

Until now, Greenpeace has ranked companies on issues related to the use of hazardous chemicals in their products and the responsibility they take, through take-back and recycling schemes, for obsolete products. The new list widens the focus beyond the products, to encompass corporate policies and practices toward climate change and energy issues.

Almost half the Web sites pushing malware are hosted by just 10 networks, according to a new report that adds new support to the growing argument that a relatively few number of actors are responsible for most of the Internet-based threats, reports The Register.

The report from StopBadware.org also showed a dramatic rise in China's role in the malware epidemic. Six of the 10 networks were Internet service providers or backbone providers based in China and hosted more than 41% of the malicious Web sites.

Not that US companies weren't also contributing to the problem. Three American companies also made the list, including Google, whose blogs hosted 4 261 sites, or about 2% of the booby-trapped destinations.