The Register reveals that “[t]he [British] communications regulator has found that fewer than half the UK population has used online government services. In a report published on 20 March 2009, Ofcom says that 42 per cent of those interviewed had used the internet to search for information about government or local council services, or used online services such as paying for road tax or registering for Child Tax Credits. Among people who have the internet at home, this figure rises to 55 per cent.”
The Register also reports that “Facebook's privacy chief today urged customers of BT, Carphone Warehouse and Virgin Media who are unhappy about their ISP's plans to work with Phorm in monitoring and profiling web use to ‘make their feelings known.’ Chris Kelly was speaking at the e-Crime Congress in London this morning. Asked for a response to the open letter Facebook received this week from the Open Rights Group, he declined to say whether the firm would insist its traffic is not intercepted.”
Bnet.com writes that “[t]he industry has been closely monitoring the Tafas v. Doll (formerly Tafas v. Dudas) lawsuit over whether the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office would be able to make rule changes that would significantly limit patent applications. Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) announced its ruling, and the net result won’t leave any of the interested parties in unqualified cheer. That is because a split court agreed that the USPTO had the necessary authority to impose the rules, but that one was in conflict with existing patent law and that a lower court needed to review whether the drafting and review process had been proper.
According to Internetnews.com, “[t]he chief executive of Dell said on Tuesday that talk of IBM possibly buying Sun Microsystems was providing an ‘enormous opportunity’ to the world's No. 2 PC maker in the corporate server market. Michael Dell said such talk created uncertainty over the future of Sun's Solaris-based servers and accelerated a customer migration to the servers based on standard industry components, known as x86 servers, which are Dell's mainstay product.”
Internetnews.com also has an interesting article weighing the odds of more Google acquisitions this year.