A competition has been launched to find better ways of exchanging information between copyright holders and end users, giving companies in the UK the chance to win up to £37,000, to bring their ideas to life.

The Smartphone Champ blog has publicised a major security flaw within Google Wallet that can give hackers access to your Google Prepaid Card through the simple act of resetting your PIN. The blog discovered the flaw when it noticed that the Google Wallet Prepaid Card is not connected to a user's Google account, but rather, to the user's device.

Japan's largest mobile operator is prepping an elaborate testing centre, with hundreds of handsets monitored by streaming web cameras, to help software developers debug their apps on the growing morass of Android devices and software versions.

Still some way to go to reach one-in-four target

JANET, the UK’s government-funded research and education network, has announced its first cloud infrastructure framework, incorporating technology from eight selected suppliers.

Momentum is building for the Graal project, an implementation of a dynamic compiler in Java to produce excellent code quality without compromising compile time and memory usage in the Java Virtual Machine.

There are only a few days to Valentine's Day. Those of you who are shocked by that revelation are prime targets for Valentine's Day related spam and phishing attacks as hackers hope to catch you with your guard down for this day of romance.

Google is planning to enter the home entertainment market with a Google-branded wireless device that streams music within a house, according to reports in the US.

Microsoft has released technical design details about the new version of Windows for devices that use ARM chips, outlining in a lengthy blog post different ways in which this OS, called WOA and still in the works, will be alike and different from existing versions of Windows.

The UK Department for Transport is urging businesses in London to adopt flexible working practices ahead of the London 2012 Olympic Games, in order to avoid “ life in the slow lane”.

Microsoft is set to deliver nine security updates next week, four of them critical, to patch 21 vulnerabilities in Windows, Internet Explorer (IE), Office, .Net and Silverlight.

Supercomputer company Cray has created a new division that will sell big data systems, the company has announced. The division will market its offerings to large enterprises, which will be a new kind of client for the company.

The FBI has made public a background investigation of Steve Jobs in 1991, when he was being considered by the George H. W. Bush administration for a spot on the President's Export Council.

Oracle is buying cloud-based talent management and employee recruitment software vendor Taleo for roughly US$1.9 billion, the company announced Thursday. The move comes shortly after SAP's move to acquire SuccessFactors, a close competitor of Taleo, for US$3.4 billion in a deal that has yet to close.

Security company Trusteer has discovered a ‘factory outlet’ selling user logins for Facebook and Twitter harvested as a sideline during attempts to steal online bank credentials.

Raspberry Pi Foundation's £20 PC will become available by the end of this month, and buyers hope it could fill in as a low-power desktop, while being an alternative to more expensive open source hardware.

A computer Trojan that targets online banking users is evolving and spreading rapidly because its creators have adopted an open-source development model, according to researchers from cyberthreat management firm Seculert.

Google plans to remove online certificate revocation checks from future versions of Chrome, because it considers the process inefficient and slow.

Almost three-quarters of data centres now have energy management policies in place – a massive leap since before the launch of the government’s CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme in 2010.

Chrome for Android will not run Flash Player, the popular software that Apple has famously banned, Adobe confirmed.

Pinterest has been accused of secretly embedding code in user content to generate revenue just as the new social networking site is enjoying a surge in popularity.

Spammers are impersonating well-known Android software developers in order to distribute rogue apps through the official Android Market.

UK PC sales dropped a recessionary 20 percent in the final quarter of 2011 with only one branded vendor, Apple, increasing sales, according to Gartner’s latest figures.

Microsoft is looking at creating a bridge between Lync, its enterprise IM, voice and video communications product, and Skype as part of its broader initiative to extend the Office platform, a company executive said on Wednesday.

Researchers at a university in Bochum, Germany claim to have cracked encryption algorithms of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) that are used to secure certain civilian satellite phone communications.

When two Boston-area organisations rolled out an interactive data visualisation website last month, it represented one of the largest public uses yet for the open-source project Weave - and more are on the way.

Large numbers of data breaches are being initiated by targeted malware that antivirus software simply can’t detect, an analysis of 300 real-world incidents from 2011 has suggested.

European researchers may have found a way to speed up data storage 100-fold, breaking one barrier holding back how fast data can be transferred.

Enterprise coders can now use an open source web application that lets them consolidate software vulnerability data from a range of scanning and test tools. With a centralised view and reporting and management tools, ThreadFix speeds the work needed to fix software bugs and vulnerabilities, including those in proliferating mobile apps.

Word, Excel and PowerPoint may get all the attention, but OneNote has quickly become the gem of the Microsoft Office suite. Microsoft is now extending the reach of OneNote with an app for Android smartphones and tablets.

Online dating sites such as Match.com and eHarmony may not be offering potential mates chosen through rigorous scientific methods despite their marketing claims, a group of psychologists and sociologists have charged.

Maingear is chasing the laptop performance crown with its latest Titan 17 laptop, which can be configured to include Intel's fastest desktop processor and up to 1.8TB of solid-state drive (SSD) storage.

Enhancements to IBM's XIV Storage System include an SSD caching option that can increase system performance by up to three times.

Adobe next plans to tackle Microsoft's Internet Explorer in its ongoing work to "sandbox" its popular Flash Player within browsers, Adobe's head of security said today.

Oracle is hoping to carve out a prominent place in the world of R, the open source statistical modelling language with roots in academia but an increasingly high profile in enterprise IT shops. It has announced a new Advanced Analytics product that ties R to its database and family of software/hardware appliances.

UK-based mobile billing and analytics company Bango has signed an agreement to provide payment services to the world's biggest social network, Facebook. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

Sony will merge its PlayStation online gaming service into its broader online platform from Tuesday.

A British member of the European Parliament has been given the job of evaluating the controversial ACTA agreement as more European countries shy away from the deal.

Apple may have been working on porting the Mac OS X Darwin kernel to the same ARMv5 chipset architecture used by the iPhone and iPad, it has emerged.

Juniper Networks this week has unveiled access routers designed to provide an on-ramp to the service provider network from residential, business and mobile networks.