Tech to pull world from recession

IT spending could help bring the gathering recession to an end, but it will take some time to do so, an analyst has predicted, says Computing.co.uk.

Joseph Brusuelas, a director at Moody's Economy.com, told the New York Times that he expects IT spending to be one of the key areas that would grow first as the economy recovers.

“We're not going to have a consumer-led recovery,” he said.

A teenager from the international financial powerhouse that is Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, was given her marching orders after bosses discovered she'd described her office administrator's post as "boring" on Facebook, reports The Register.

Kimberley Swann, 16, was dragged before the powers that be on Monday morning and summarily dismissed from her job at Ivell Marketing & Logistics, the Telegraph explains. She was handed a letter which read: "Following your comments made on Facebook about your job and the company, we feel it is better that, as you are not happy and do not enjoy your work, we end your employment with Ivell Marketing & Logistics with immediate effect."

Swann described herself as "shocked" at the perfunctory nature of her ejection as a result of the comment "on her personal site". She protested: "I did not even put the company's name, I just put that my job was boring. They were just being nosy, going through everything. I think it is really sad, it makes them look stupid that they are going to be so petty."

British computer hacker Gary McKinnon has lost the latest round of his battle against extradition to the US, says The BBC.

The Crown Prosecution Service refused to bring charges against him in the UK.

McKinnon, 42, from Wood Green, north London, faces up to 70 years in prison if found guilty in the US of breaking into military computers.

Amazon chose to keep secret from much of the publishing sector the text-to-speech feature built into the Kindle 2, reports CNet.

Instead, Amazon sprung the feature on publishers, and the retailer is now taking public relations hits that it might have avoided if it hadn't been so tight-lipped.

Following the debut of the Kindle 2, the 9 000-member Authors' Guild claimed text-to-speech created a derivative work and violated copyright. Paul Aiken, the guild's president, said many publishers were also angered over the speech function, adding that Amazon never consulted beforehand with either of those groups.