IT a key terrorist tool

According to one of the UK Labour Party's favourite think tanks, the embedding of IT in the UK's critical national infrastructure, and the country's increasing reliance on that infrastructure, poses serious national security concerns for the country, reports Computing.co.uk.

In addition to forming the backbone of the communications infrastructure, IT is now also heavily embedded in the running of more traditional infrastructures such as water, power and transport systems.

"The significance of this is all the greater when one considers the extent to which we have become an infrastructure-reliant society more generally," says a report by the Institute for Public Policy Research.

Exclusive EDS UK- and Ireland-based employees will face compulsory firings if HP does not hit its targets for voluntary redundancies for the first half of its fiscal 2009, says The Register.

HP confirmed last month that it would axe 3 378 jobs in the UK. Around 90% of these are understood to be EDS staff. The vendor plans to trim its global workforce by 25 000 over the next two years.

HP hopes to slash 2 081 jobs through the voluntary redundancy process during its H1 period, which runs from November 2008 to April 2009, according to a memo sent to EDS staff working in the ITO-BPO and applications department.

European telecommunications chiefs have backed plans to make it cheaper to access data while on a mobile phone abroad, says The BBC.

The measures will slash the cost of sending a text while abroad and reform the way phone operators charge for data calls made when customers roam.

The changes to charges are due to come in to force across the EU's 27 member nations from July 2009.

A new front has opened in the ongoing arms race between Apple and iPhone hackers, with one hacker group making the iPhone boot with a Linux 2.6 kernel, reports CNet.

The announcement of the successful kernel porting was made on the Linux on the iPhone blog, complete with instructions and source code.

Although a bootloader, kernel and a Busybox terminal can be loaded, many features of the iPhone remain unimplemented: touch-screen, sound, accelerometer, networking. Input to the terminal must be made via a USB interface from another device to which the iPhone is attached.