Gillian Law

Southampton City Council in Southampton, England, will begin a smart card-based e-government scheme this month, allowing citizens to apply for housing and to follow housing repair requests online, it said Wednesday.

The European Parliament looks set to impose even stricter rules than previously proposed regarding the disposal of electrical and electronic waste.

British employers may not be allowed to monitor their employees' private e-mail or Internet use at work in the future or use hidden cameras without staff knowledge unless a criminal investigation is under way, according to a draft Code of Practice on data protection from the U.K. Information Commission published on the Financial Times (FT) newspaper's Web site.

Three satellite communications companies are investing EURO200 million (CDN$280 million) in a new venture which will offer broadband telecommunication and Internet services to European customers by the end of the year.

IBM Corp. and SuSE Linux AG are to work together on providing Linux support and service to their corporate customers under an alliance announced March 27.

The HyperTransport Technology Consortium expects another 30 members to join its ranks by the end of the year, bringing the total number of participants to over 70, said Gabriele Sartori, president of the consortium and "technology evangelism" director for AMD.

A growing number of businesses are choosing to do their own research into cybercrime rather than go to the police, and are signing up for forensics training to help them uncover employee misdeeds and security breaches, according to Guidance Software Inc.

Handset manufacturers must be laughing as they make more and more replacement phones for the U.K. market. Not only do people here regularly leave their phones at the pub or have them stolen -- an estimated 1.3 million went missing last year -- but they also throw them into drinks, drop them down the toilet and stick them in the washing machine (presumably after the toilet incidents).