IBM targets Africa with chocolate

Lured by the sweet taste of chocolate, IBM hopes to use the cocoa plant as an avenue to improve its business prospects in the emerging economies of Africa, reports PC World.

The company views Africa as a growing region, where it recently invested $120 million to build the region's infrastructure over two years. It also opened a cloud-computing centre in Johannesburg this week, the first such centre in Africa.

The company's scientists are now going after the heart of Africa's economic problems, launching an effort to crack the genome of cocoa, a plant that forms the livelihood for many people, especially in parts of West Africa.

The Information Commissioner's Office has issued two central government departments with enforcement notices following serious breaches of the Data Protection Act, says Computing.co.uk.

HM Revenue and Customs lost two discs containing the financial details of 25 million families, while the Ministry of Defence lost a laptop containing the personal details of 600 000 people.

To comply with the notices, the departments must adhere to all the recommendations on the respective Burton and Poynter reviews into the incidents, published today.

The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear an anti-trust case that alleges AT&T squeezed out small Internet service providers by charging too much for wholesale access to its phone network, reports ITWorld.

In 2003, linkLine Communications and other small California ISPs sued predecessors of AT&T in a federal district court in Los Angeles and said they were forcing small competitors out of business by setting wholesale prices too high.

"It's one of those cases where the wholesale price is higher than the retail price, which makes competition virtually impossible," said Maxwell Blecher of the law firm Blecher & Collins, which is representing the plaintiffs.

A technology director, who was fired from her job, has been accused of hacking into the organ donation company where she worked and deleting donor information and accounting files, says The Register.

According to a federal indictment, Danielle Duann, 50, of Houston, illegally accessed the database belonging to Life Gift Organ Donation Centre over two days in November 2005. She then deleted numerous programs and database files. The intrusion cost the centre $70 000.

The damage figure could have been much higher had the centre not adequately backed up its computer systems. There was no interruption of clinical operations because the agency was able to retrieve all of the allegedly deleted information from backup systems.

Exclusive BT, the UK's largest broadband provider, has begun threatening subscribers with disconnection from the Internet if it is told they are sharing copyright music over peer-to-peer networks, reports The Register.

The firm recently sent an e-mail to one of its four million retail broadband customers, who asked not to be named, alleging that she had illegally participated in a network sharing of Biology, a song by Girls Aloud.

The e-mail purports to show she used the open source file-sharing program Ares in May to infringe sound recording copyright.