EU reaches compromise on mobile roaming charges

Telecoms operators may get a summer reprieve, worth hundreds of millions of euros in revenue this year, under a compromise proposal on mobile phone roaming charges put forward by EU lawmakers on Thursday. The final compromise, backed by all factions in the European Parliament, would give the telecoms industry three months' grace before EU-wide caps on charges for cross-border mobile calls are automatically put in place, lawmakers said. The European Union legislature has been working out details of regulation with the executive European Commission and member states, but they failed to reach agreement in two days of talks and a vote scheduled for next week has been delayed. ...more

Spring IDF 2006: Intel reveals reign of Tera

Intel today announced its ambitious Tera-Scale Computing Research Program, as part of its build-up to the spring 2006 Intel Developer Forum (IDF). According to Justin Rattner, Intel chief technology officer, this research could one day lead to software with human-like characteristics and cars that drive themselves. 'It doesn't take a lot of arithmetic to realise that the ongoing progress of Moore's Law will lead to a time when cores are counted in the tens and possibly the hundreds per die,' said Rattner. ...more

US tech companies snub China talks

Efforts in the US Congress to agree on ways to halt the ease with which the country's tech companies bend to the demands of Chinese authorities ran aground today, when four of the biggest names turned down an invitation to discuss how best to go about it. Red Herring reports that the Congressional Human Rights Caucus interest group had set up a briefing on how to deal with human rights and Internet issues in China and invited Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and Cisco among others. However, all four said they were unable to attend despite the poor image this sends out at a time when these companies claim to be thinking long and hard about how to deal with these very issues as they march into China. ...more

US consumers lose $2.4bn a year from hacked bank accounts

Hacking into bank accounts via the Web is costing US consumers $2.4bn a year, according to research group Gartner. From a survey of 5,000 web users in April of this year, Gartner has worked out roughly two million consumers in the US have their passwords and authentication stolen and used to access funds from online and telephone accounts every year. ...more

Russia agrees to shut down AllofMP3.com

Russia has bowed to US demands and agreed to shut down music websites including AllofMP3. In an agreement signed earlier this month but only now made public, Russia has committed to taking action against intellectual property 'piracy' on a number of fronts, including the Internet and disc counterfeiting. The intellectual property rights (IPR) agreement forms apart of a bilateral market access agreement between the two countries that will hasten Russian membership of the World Trade Organisation. ...more