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Google continues its dominance of the U.S. search marketplace in September, with its sites accounting for 64.9% of the search market share, according to ComScore. Microsoft, which launched its Bing search engine in June, also recorded a slight gain, moving to a 9.4% search market share from 9.3% in August. Yahoo kept a solid hold on its second place ranking with an 18.8% share of the market, down half a percentage...

HM Revenue & Customs is facing fresh criticism over its security policies after users complained that its tax self-assessment web site reveals their password in the URL address bar.
Anyone filling in the online tax forms would be at risk of allowing others to access their personal details because the username field has an auto-complete function.

Richard Clayton, a security expert at Cambridge University, and adviser to the House of Lords committee on personal internet security, said that such a fault...

Gary McKinnon’s lawyer and family will plead for a four-week stay in his trial tomorrow as the case finally comes to court.

McKinnon’s mother, Janis Sharp, said in a televised interview that her son, who is fighting extradition to the US, has apparently won the support of the UK’s new director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, who has agreed to re-examine the case.

If he is extradited, McKinnon faces up to 70 years in...

Employment in the IT suport sector is likely to weather the economic storm this year, although there will be losers in some areas, according to new figures from the National Computing Centre (NCC) released today.

Nearly half of respondents to the NCC’s Benchmark of Salaries and Employment Trends in IT support 2009 survey said they expect the number of IT support staff employed at their location to increase over the next two years – the same response as last year.

Expected growth...

One-third of Americans feel anxious about losing their jobs, but 61% of employed Americans said they have resolved to find a new job this year, according to a report released this week.

Yahoo HotJobs found that older workers and those in health care were the least anxious among the 940 people who responded to the annual survey in December. Younger workers and those in manufacturing had the most anxiety related to job security,...

Sector skills body e-skills UK said around 140,000 vacancies a year need to be filled across IT professions, yet pointed out the UK only has around 12,000 computer science grads annually.
A large majority (72 percent) of the survey respondents also believed the skills gap is growing year-on-year. Asked why there is a skills shortage in the UK, more than half (55 percent) of respondents cited rapid changes within the IT sector, with...

A Hong Kong resident has pleaded guilty in a U.S. federal court for his part in a scam where tens of millions of spam emails were sent, artificially pumping up the stock price of Chinese companies between 2004 and 2006.
According to media reports in the U.S., How Wai John Hui, a resident of Hong Kong and Vancouver, was the CEO of U.S.-based China World Trade, one of the companies whose stock...

IBM, Tesco and Dell have taken the gold, solver and bronze positions in a new league table assessing firms’ response to climate change, released last week by the Ceres coalition of investment firms.

The study, authored by analysts RiskMetrics Group, assessed the climate change governance and reporting practices of 63 of the world’s largest consumer-facing multinationals, including firms from across the technology, retail, pharmaceutical and clothing sectors.

The report calls on firms to embrace a raft of...

Australia and America are fighting similar battles at the moment to keep the internet free from filtration. In the US, The Bush administration has announced that it is opposed to a ‘free internet for all’ service that would be funded by advertising and feature what is essentially a smut filter.

It is an idea that is being bandied round by the FCC (Federal Communications Commission), where they have put together a plan to auction off some of the United...

Medion is once again stalking the supermarket shelves, with the Akoya 8610 notebook offering big-screen Blu-ray for a seriously tempting price.

The 18.4-inch 1680 x 945 display isn’t quite up to full HD, but with the aid of your HD-ready TV and a HDMI cable, you can still enjoy your high-def flicks in all their glory. Or you can watch a slightly scaled-down version on the go – the battery should just...