Google in anti-trust probe

The European Commission (EC) has opened an investigation into Google after other search engines complained that the firm had abused its dominant position, says the BBC.

The EC will examine whether the world's largest search engine penalised competing services in its results. The probe follows complaints by firms including price comparison site Foundem and legal search engine ejustice.fr.

Google denies the allegations, but said it would work with the Commission to "address any concerns".

The first jailbreaking app is out for Windows Phone 7, enabling the installation of unsigned applications, which can now be developed in Visual Basic too, reveals the Register.

The VB addition is from Microsoft, and means developers can create Silverlight apps using Visual Basic, get them signed and run them on a phone. But developers can also now run all kinds of applications without Microsoft's approval, thanks to the ChevronWP7 unlocking tool.

Registered developers can install unsigned applications anyway for testing and development, but the new jailbreaking tool opens that potential to all - with the attendant risks from malware and badly-written software that come when opening Pandora's box.

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who masterminded publication of vast troves of secret US military and diplomatic material, infuriating and embarrassing governments around the globe, has now vowed to go after private enterprise as well, writes Yahoo News.

A big US bank will be the target of his next megaleak. When a Forbes reporter asked him what he wanted to be the result of his promised forthcoming release of bank records, Assange said: “I'm not sure."

The child of footloose Australian parents, Assange had little formal childhood education, living as a sort of new age Tom Sawyer, he told a New Yorker writer in a lengthy profile published earlier this year.

Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a news conference that some of the centrifuges used in its uranium enrichment programme were sabotaged, according to a BBC report, notes Computing.co.uk.

Iran has previously denied that the Stuxnet virus had affected its nuclear programme, but these admissions seem to indicate that it was at least partially successful. "They succeeded in creating problems for a limited number of our centrifuges with the software they had installed in electronic parts," Ahmadinejad told a news conference.

The BBC report adds that the Stuxnet worm was designed to damage motors commonly used in uranium-enrichment centrifuges by sending them spinning out of control.