Who's been a naughty boy then?Anti-virus vendors Symantec and McAfee have been slapped over the wrists by the New York Attorney General's office, and have agreed to $375,000 (£228,787) in fines to settle charges that they automatically charged customers software

Telecoms and services hit hardest.Analyst house Gartner has confirmed the gloomy outlook for the IT industry after finding that nearly half of businesses reduced their IT budgets, in the first quarter of this year.

But will novelty soon wear off?Microsoft's Bing search engine has got off to a healthy start, according to a report by ComScore, an online market tracker.

Partner use, a sign of things to come.SaaS ERP vendor NetSuite has announced a new financial planning module that customers can use to perform budgeting, forecasting, reporting and "what-if" analysis.

Techspeak to the forefront in the growth of the language.Roll over Shakespeare. Back of the line Milton - the millionth word in the English language has just been coined and it's "Web 2.0"

Libguestfs allows sysadmins a view inside the machine.A new Linux tool has been launched to offering better management of "guest" operating systems running as virtual machines on hypervisors.

But experts angry at secret patching.Adobe has begun its first regularly-scheduled security update, after issuing patches to fix at least 13 critical flaws with Acrobat and Reader.

To reduce cooling and shipping costs.In an effort to make its equipment more attractive to the data centres market, Hewlett-Packard has introduced a new line of x86 servers that uses a "skinless" design in order to optimise cooling and reduce

Time to get tough says EC.The European Commission is seeking to strengthen cooperation between law enforcement and industry worldwide according to a senior EC official. The commission is also looking to increase penalties for cyber-criminals.

Not longer able to 'show me the money'.Microsoft is to scrap another underperforming product, after revealing that it plans to stop selling Money, its financial management software, at the end of the month.

New way to handle VPNs too.Palo Alto Networks has launched the latest version of its operating system, PAN-OS. The firewall vendor said that the new enhancements would improve the options available for enterprises, offering them new ways to handle applications.

Revolutionary cloud-based beta could have Oracle quaking.Google is looking to launch a new type of online database that's set to shake up data management, according to an analyst. The new database, called Fusion Tables, has been designed to sidestep the

SDs get a massive boost.A new generation of memory cards could boost storage of consumer electronics to as much as 2TB, according to the SD Association.

SDs get a massive boost.A new generation of memory cards could boost storage of consumer electronics to as much as 2TB, according to the SD Association.

Product to be sold browser-less in Europe.Microsoft will sell Internet Explorer without a browser in Europe, in an effort to avoid further anti-trust action by the European Commission.

Tragic turn after malicious intrusion.A highly damaging hack at UK-based web hosting company VAserv has taken a tragic turn for the worse after it was revealed that the boss of the Indian firm whose software was at the centre the

It's been "optimised".Kaspersky Lab has announced an anti-malware product specifically designed for netbooks, the first to fill a potentially lucrative new software niche.

We are the weakest link...A new survey has confirmed what every IT manager already knows, that internal staff members are continuing to ignore corporate security policies, and are engaging in activities that could put the company at risk.

New world order' proclaimed.A new version of the Linux kernel, 2.6.30, has been released that contains of hundreds of changes from the previous version, including a new architecture for suspend and resume which according Linus Torvalds, switches the kernel to

Received wisdom is wrong about SMB interest claims Forrester.Received wisdom is that small-scale businesses are more interested in cloud computing than large enterprises: guess what? Received wisdom is wrong,