MI6 recruits spies via Facebook

MI6 is using social networking site Facebook to recruit employees in its most recent attempt to diversify its base of applicants, says Computing.co.uk.

For some years, the UK secret service has been attempting to recruit more women and people from ethnic backgrounds with a series of high-profile advertising campaigns, which eschew its Oxbridge "tap on the shoulder" image.

The latest pop-up ads on Facebook state: "A career in world events? Help influence world events [and] protect the UK. Operational officer roles collecting and analysing global intelligence."

Washington state's top law enforcement official has filed suit against a man accused of bombarding end-users with misleading messages designed to trick them into buying software to fix PC problems that don't exist, says The Register.

The complaint, filed in Washington state court by attorney general Rob McKenna's office, names James Reed McCreary IV, of The Woodlands, Texas, and two of his companies, Branch Software and Alpha Red.

They stand accused of pushing a software package called Registry Cleaner XP by sending end-users messages falsely claiming their PCs have corrupted or damaged registry settings that must be repaired immediately. The software sells for $40.

Phone firms, chipmakers and PC manufacturers are uniting to push mobile broadband on laptop computers, says The BBC.

The alliance will build wireless modules into laptops to make it much easier to use the gadgets on future high-speed services.

Laptops with the wireless chips built-in will bear a service mark, which shows they will work with the third- and fourth-generation wireless technology.

AMD is set to roll-out its next-generation "Shanghai" chip, minus the mistakes of the last generation, says CNet.

The company stresses that Shanghai is not Barcelona. The latter chip was rolled out in September 2007 to great fanfare only to be delayed for eight months (or more, depending how the delay is calculated) due to production glitches and bugs.

The chip was also hampered by speed (core clock frequency) limitations. This gave Intel an opportunity to regain ground it had lost to AMD in the server chip market.