An experiment that began 10 years ago with children living in slums in India being given computers for education has brought about surprising results, according to the BBC. The computers were installed as holes in the wall, much in the way people would expect to find a cashpoint, and children quickly learned to teach themselves [...]

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has bequeathed the majority of his estimated $13.5bn (£8.8bn) to philanthropy after his death according to the BBC. Allen set up a charitable foundation 20 years ago to which he has personally donated $600m. He follows Bill Gates in pledging billion of dollars to charities and projects that help others. Paul Allen [...]

Apple has called a surprise new conference for Friday 16th July to talk about the iPhone 4.  The company has refused to give details about whether they will talk about the antenna issues that have plagued the phone’s users and that have resulted in a great deal of criticism for Apple. The BBC has reported [...]

Following the recent US / Russia spy drama, however Microsoft have now claimed that a 12th spy was working for them.  In an interview with Newsweek, they said that Alexey Karetnikov had worked for the company as a software tester for nine-months.  Russia’s foreign ministry declined to comment. Ten members of the spy ring were [...]

Microsoft is going to release the Facebook social connector for Outlook later today according to Neowin.  The connector allows you to integrate your Facebook contacts into Outlook to view things like their status updates.  It’s a good way to keep in touch with people, though businesses might find the concept irritating. Many people were expecting this [...]

After many months of pressure, social networking site Facebook has agreed to put a panic button for children and teenagers, according to the BBC. The button will reports abuse to the UK Child Exploitation and Online protection Centre (CEOP) and to Facebook administrators. The move follows months of negotiations between CEOP and Facebook, who initially [...]

The femtocell caused a great deal of excitement when the technology was first announced a couple of years ago.  These boxes use your broadband connection to boost the signal for your 3G mobile phone and can be a godsend in those areas where the phone signal just isn’t up to scratch. Now Engadget are reportingthat [...]

The Australian government is delaying the implementation of controversial web-filtering to conduct an independent review of websites that are due to be blocked the BBC has reported. The filter is part of a long-standing plan by the Australian government to block the countries access to dangerous and inappropriate web content, but it has come under [...]

The UKs leading Internet service providers, BT and TalkTalk are set to seek a judicial review of the controversial Digital Economy Act, as reported by the BBC.  The two ISPs are reported to want the UK’s High Court to clarify the legality of the act prior to it coming into force. The act was one [...]

In the last year or so there’s been an explosion in sites allowing you to use a third-party login to access their services.  Every major company except for Microsoft has so far jumped on the bandwagon but it appears we have an outright and runaway winner already. Read Write Web is reporting a study that shows [...]

The BBC has reported that the British government has spent thousands of pounds developing iPhone apps for everything from Foreign Office travel advice to a jobseeker’s tool. The apps, ranging from between £10,000 and £40,000 each.  One of the most expensive is a DVLA (Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency) app that provided a “masterclass for changing [...]

YouTube owner Google has been forced to act quickly to fix a flaw on it’s YouTube video sharing website that allowed hackers to bombard users with pop-up messages, redirecting them to adult websites. The code was placed in the comments section of targeted videos and would run automatically when people watched the clip.

Search giant Google has made a surprise move into the travel business with the acquisition of  flight information firm ITA Software, as reported by the BBC.  The firm provides software that organises fares, flights and journey times.  These are then used by airlines, travel agents and flight comparison websites. Google have hinted that they may [...]

It happens!  Technology moves to quickly and companies have such little time to actually socak test products these days that problems slip through.  Unless you’re Toyota though they’re not usually life-threatening which will come as some relief to Apple. The BBC has reported that Apple have acknowledged there’s an issue with people who “hold the [...]

An unpatched bug in the Windows XP Help and Support system is being increasingly attacked by  virus and malware writers, as reported by the BBC. Microsoft has reported it’s seen more than 10,000 PCs hit by the attack so far and it’s still not been able to find a fix for the problem.

It was only released a week ago, but already 1 million people have downloaded Microsoft’s new Windows Live Messenger software for the iPhone.  This has got to make it one of, if not the, fastest moving software in the iPhone app store. In a statement for Microsoft, Michael Chang, Group Product manager for Windows Live [...]

Google pulled out of China earlier in the year in an argument over censorship that began with rumours that the communist government there had hacked into the GMail accounts of political activists in the country.  The government then, in the ensuing row, went on to censor the search giant until Google eventually had no other [...]

The war of the webmail is raging on with the continued roll out of Microsoft’s new Hotmail service.  Now Google is coming back with new features to it’s own GMail service, the first of which was quietly announced over the weekend. The company has added a one-click preview for the world’s most common file format, [...]

Chinese company Novo first announced their Coloured Glaze Media Centre PC at CES at the beginning of the year but now it’s approaching release, Engadget China have had a close look at it.  But is a small PC with a transparent plastic block on the front gorgeous or a gimmick, and more importantly, where you are [...]

Installing Windows 7 Service Pack 1 seems, on the face of it, much less hassle than with service packs for previous editions of Windows as I discovered today while testing the beta. Here are a selection of screenshots of the service pack, the easy install process and the end result.

The next monster disc is just around the corner but possibly bad news for PC users who have upgraded their machine with a blu-ray writer.  The Blu-ray Disc Association have now published the final specifications for the new BDXL standard. The new discs will come as either triple-layer 100Gb re-writable, write-once or whopping 128Gb quad-layer [...]

Since Windows 7 was launched on October 22nd last year Microsoft has now sold a very impressive 150 Million copies of it and they’re shouting from the rafters.  In a post on the Windows Team Blog they’ve rather triumphantly said… I have a couple of things to tell you about today. First off, we are [...]

I’ve long been a subscriber to Microsoft’s Action Pack which is for small businesses.  You get 10 licences for Windows and Office plus a Windows Server licence or two for £220 a year.  Plus the software never expires. Many people say that subscription software is the way we’re all going but I’ve been making significant [...]

It’s always a worry when you get rid of a PC or hard drive that all sorts of personal data could be sitting on it waiting to be stolen.  This is even more important when it comes to business computers. There have always been a huge variety of hard disk wiping packages available from third-parties, [...]

US phone network AT&T was massively over-subscribed for orders for the new iPhone 4, with many people who tried pre-ordering a device on the launch day being greeted by a series or errors.  The good news though is that the company has begun shipping some of the handsets to customers but mysteriously cancelling other orders. [...]

AT&T has already sold out of pre-order iPhone 4′s, having had some 600,000 people in the US sign up for one of the spangly handsets (though I doubt anyone who finds one in a bar now will get $5,000 for it). Apple say it’s the largest number of pre-orders they’ve ever taken in a single [...]

You know what it’s like when you’re sitting on really great news for several months but you can’t tell anyone?   This is even worse writing for gHacks every day knowing I’m sitting on a great nugget  :} Well after a long period of frustration I can now officially announce that I’ve been signed by Microsoft Press to write [...]

After last week’s security breach in which the email addresses of iPad owners were harvested by hackers, AT&T has now sent letters to apologies to the customers concerned, as reported by Engadget who have a full copy of the letter. Hackers were able to intercept the email addresses because they were sent unencrypted when the [...]

As more and more of us live more of our lives online with banking, shopping, photo galleries and social networking etc. a part of our daily lives, it becomes more and more important to have secure passwords.  But there are problems in remembering complex passwords when there are so many websites you have accounts with.  My [...]

Adobe have today released a patch to sort out the critical vulnerability in Flash that was discovered last week, which is a quick turnaround. The patch, released through version 10.1 of the Flash player is available now from www.adobe.com and there is also a new version of Adobe Air as well.