Dubbed a “burglars charter”.

Some of you may already know this, but Google has sent cars around the UK to take close-up pictures of houses, road, hospitals and everything inbetween. This mammoth task is being carried out to allow Googles Streetview website to show a 360 degree picture of every UK address of postcode.

There’s one small problem - data protection. People can still be easily identified leaving, say, a sex shop! The Information Commissioners office is so concerneed that they have written a letter to Google  demanding privacy guarantees. Hmm, I wonder if that’s like the strongly worded government letters we hear so much about? I can just see Mr. Horrendous Despot wiping his arse on the letter as we speak (I am in no way suggesting that Google is despotic!)

In addition, checking out access points and weak spots becomes far easier for Mr B. Urglar - I wonder, could you sue Google if it was proven that a burglar used the Streetview service to break into your home? Now there’s something for the Goog to think about.

Popularity: 53% [?]

A snip at £20 million!

It would appear that BT is keen to expand its BT Directories business. Ufindus  currently has a huge number of customers - 20,000+ small and medium-sized business customers and around 1.9 millionlistings in its online directory. In addition, Ufindus offers its services through three directories: SmileLocal, MoreUK and Ufindus. On top of thie, it also runs more than 100 niche directories and provides website design services.

Lancaster based Ufindus had reported revenues of £14m in the year to 31 March, 2007 - that actually looks like a real bargain for BT.

Ufindus is expected to play a key role in the development of BT Directories’s online service offering.

“Through Ufindus’s considerable expertise and experience in online classified advertising, we access further local classified product offerings, significant search traffic and new customers for this fast-growing part of our business.” said David Benjamin, the chief executive of BT Directories.

Interesting news, I’m off to play a game of ‘Monopoly’!

Popularity: 49% [?]

Now, as you may or may not know Hans Reiser, the founder of ReiserFS (Linux file system) was found guilty of his of his wifes murder. Reiser and his wife, Nina, had been going through a bitter divorce battle when she disappeared in 2006.

According to the San Francisco Chronical, police believe that Reiser has lead them to her remains in the hills of Oklahoma, California. As yet the remains have not been formally identified.

Reiser is currently being held, without bail, pending his sentencing on Wednesday.

Popularity: 36% [?]

8,002,530 is the number to beat.

That’s right, FF 3 was downloaded over 8 million times in the first 24 hours of availability following a campaign to mobilise the Open Source community.

“As the arbiter and recorder of the world’s amazing facts, Guinness World Records is pleased to add Mozilla’s achievement to our archives,” Gareth Deaves, records manager at Guinness Worlds Records, said in a statement.

On the day the record was FireFox also notched up 6% of market share; its highest figure so far. Now that’s pretty impressive regardless of how you look at it. Well done, keep up the good work

Popularity: 39% [?]

…hardware market to defy the economy.

I said it yesterday and now Gartner have confirmed it (I feel really good when things like this happen).

The predictions came out of the Gartner IT Hardware Insights forum, which was held at the company’s UK headquarters in Egham, Surrey.

Senior research analyst Errol Rasit said the period from 2008 to 2009 will be marked by a split in the market for hardware. “At the high end and the very low end, we have two very large groups who are spending,” he said. Linux-based systems are a beneficiary of this trend, thanks to the move away from high-end Unix systems to x86-based systems.

It looks like IBM are going to benefit as well. There is renewed interest in the zSeries mainframe as companies seek to achieve economies of scale through the purchase of larger systems. That said, the server market is still dominated by Sun which is good news. I’m a huge Open Source fan and Sun are the number one contributors which makes me very happy.

Popularity: 40% [?]

Trailing the US by a long chalk!

Same old story; the US leads the way in yet another area. The business world is being driven by an information explosion which would have easily swamped traditional methods of computing. The virtualised world provided companies with the ability to side step issues associated with power requirements, physical space and virtualised storage. But the uptake in Europe is slow.

Recent independent surveys conducted in both the United States and Europe indicate that the majority of businesses surveyed in bothregions believe that their existing storage solutions will only be able to scale for the next one to two years.

It is widely recognised that storage virtualisation is the best way to provide a alleviate many current but only 27% of European  respondents are actually implementing
storage virtualisation today as compared with 35% in the US.

73% of US respondents reported that they currently operate a virtualised server environment, and 67% answered that they are considering deploying virtualised storage in their data centres.

In the US, 45% of businesses surveyed stated that they would realise
operational cost savings between 20-40%, which is the main driver of
storage adoption. In Europe that figure was near identical on 48%.

Other significant results from the survey include:

• 59% of respondents believe that at the current growth rate, their existing storage solution will be able to scale for only one totwo years; way ahead of the European market, which was on 40%

• Half of US respondents believe that simplifying management is the most important consideration when choosing a storage virtualisationsolution. In Europe the figure was far higher on 60% of the sample.

• 45% of US respondents consider 20-40% operational cost savings to be the number one motivation to switch from their current file storage solution to virtualised storage. In Europe the figure was comparable at 48%.

I guess it’s time for European countries to get their act in order; we wouldn’t to fall behind the US, would we?

Popularity: 39% [?]

All together now, ‘ENCRYPTION’!

Yes, you’ve already guessed what I’m going to say but what the hell; an NHS trust hospistal has 21,000 patients details. The data was stored on unencrypted laptop lost by the Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust.

Details of patient names, dates of birth, postcodes and treatment details, were on the laptop which was stolen from the car of a Colchester trust manager. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) will investigate whether the organisation breached the Data Protection Act by failing to encrypt patient data.

Trust chief executive Peter Murphy stated that there is “very small chance that patient details can be accessed” and that the trust believes “the data will almost certainly by wiped by the thief” - or so they hope!

So, another case of your data being lost by those entrusted to keep it safe. Another day, another cock up!

Popularity: 37% [?]

Confirming what Yahoo have already said!

Comments made by Bill Gates in a TV interview would suggest that the deal is dead in the eyes of both Yahoo and Microsoft.

The acquisition question was put to Bill Gates by Tom Brokaw of the NBC network on Friday to mark his last day of full-time work at the software company.

Brokaw asked Gates: “Do you think in a year from now, when you’re down at the [Bill & Melinda Gates] Foundation offices, you’ll look up at Microsoft and see Yahoo as a permanent wing of Microsoft? Do you think the deal will get done? ”

Gates responded: “No, I don’t think so. But there are plenty of decisions ahead that Steve [Ballmer] will get to make about what he invests in, R&D, and what kind of deals he does.

“I don’t think that one’s likely but there are plenty of others that will get done and I’ll look on with great respect.”

Microsoft recently abandoned a $47.5 billion takeover deal after lengthy discussions with Yahoo who were pushing for a higher price per share. More recently, Microsoft had considered buying a 16 per cent stake in Yahoo. This would allow MS to effectively buy the Yahoo search business thereby giving Microsoft a much greater share of the search market and advertising revenues.

Bill Gates depature from Microsoft will allow him to devote most of his time to his philanthropic ventures.

Popularity: 38% [?]

More work required.

RadioFrame Networks has launched market research into how small medium businesses (SMB) use mobile communications for day to day work. The research, carried out by Quocirca, gathered data from 240 SMB’s in the UK, Germany, Sweden and France. Here’s a general overview:

• More than a third of SMBs have problems using their mobilephones at work, and even more so when working from home. However, for many the mobile phone is their first choice when making a call, even when provided with a fixed phone ( SHOCK, HORROR - some small organizations don’t even provide workers with a fixed phone).

• 3G is on its way, but not quite here - over half of allrespondents have no plans to implement 3G phones, but 17% plan to introduce 3G laptops in the coming year, adding to the third that havealready done so.

Research suggests that even though there are many reliable data products on the market there is still a huge demand for high quality voice services. Stands to reason really. Personally, I prefer to talk to another person rather than using email and other messaging services.

Popularity: 39% [?]

Work completed for as little as £5 per project!

I’m not endorsing this. The subtitle is a statement of fact. But many of you know that already and has been comfirmed by Birmingham City University who have detected 1,000 cheating students since 2004.

Students have contracting out coursework for to bidders from countries such as India and Pakistan via sites such as scri… - I’ll let you work it out.

The practice, which is difficult to detect, seems to be growing in popularity with sites springing up on a regular basis in places like Romania and India.

Lecturers have called for academics to pose questions on the content of coursework handed in by students as a means to combat cheating - something that will require a lot of time and effort.

Don’t you just love capitalism? No wonder the UK tech industry is in such a poor state.

Popularity: 37% [?]