Hackers target leading climate research unit
The email system of one of the world's leading climate research units has been breached by hackers. Emails reportedly from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), including personal exchanges, appeared on the internet late last week. A university spokesman confirmed the email system had been hacked and that information was taken and published without permission. An investigation was underway and the police had been informed, he added.
BBC News

YouTube introduces automatic captions for deaf viewers
YouTube's parent company Google has announced on its blog that automatic captions are to begin to roll out across the site. The machine-generated captions will initially be generated in English. At first they will only be found on 13 channels. These include National Geographic, Columbia, as well as most Google and YouTube channels. The software engineer behind the technology, Ken Harrenstien, is deaf.
BBC News

Facebook acts on follower trade
Facebook has threatened legal action against a service that sells friends on the social networking site. It said it would take the action against marketing firm USocial unless it stopped violating Facebook's rights. It also wanted USocial to stop helping members break the site's terms and conditions, specifically letting people profit from their profile. In response, USocial agreed to a change in its practices but would not shut down its service.
BBC News

Adobe refreshes Acrobat.com
Adobe today updated its Acrobat.com hosted applications service with a new user interface and mobile access functionality designed to enhance user productivity and collaboration. Acrobat.com is Adobe’s attempt to offer users access to an online file organiser, office applications, PDF creation and web meeting tools. The rich internet applications firm said it has incorporated over 35 customer-suggested features into the new version of the site. These include support for Flickr and Google images, allowing users to include them in online presentations, integration with Adobe’s Kuler colour scheme tool, and enhancements to Buzzword and Presentations and Tables previously found in Acrobat.com Labs.
V3

Laptop containing patient records stolen from Scottish Ambulance Service
A laptop containing 600 patient records has been stolen from the headquarters of the Scottish Ambulance Service. The data, which was unencrypted but password protected, includes the patients' names, addresses and details of their treatment. Scottish Ambulance Service spokesman John Morten said, "We have been running a policy of encrypting 230 laptops, of which there are 12 left to encrypt." Chris McIntosh, CEO at encryption specialist Stonewood, said it was possible that the data could fall into the hands of criminals.
Computer Weekly

Microsoft to exploit GPUs for IE9 boost
The next version of Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), will offload image and text rendering chores to the PC's graphic processor. The company is adopting the techniques to increase the browser's overall performance, said Microsoft's top IE manager. But Microsoft won't be alone. Rivals including Mozilla, which makes Firefox, and Norwegian developer Opera, are working on ways to use a computer's graphics processor unit (GPU) to accelerate their browsers.
Techradar

iPhone users take action to force Apple to reveal source code
iPhone owners charging Apple and AT&T with breaking antitrust laws asked a federal judge this week to force Apple to hand over the iPhone source code, court documents show. The lawsuit, which was filed in October 2007, accuses Apple and AT&T of violating antitrust laws, including the Sherman Act, by agreeing to a multi-year deal that locks US iPhone owners into using the mobile carrier.
Techworld

Lenovo slams latest laptop reliability study
Lenovo has hit back at a recent study that claims its laptops are less reliable than a number of its competitors. TechRadar reported on the recent SquareTrade study earlier this month, which claimed that Asus and Toshiba were the most reliable laptop brands on the market right now. Lenovo didn't come out too well in SquareTrade's comparative analysis of laptop brands, with the company now hitting back and attempting to discredit the research methodology.
Techradar

Seesmic launches Twitter apps for Android and BlackBerry
Seesmic has announced the launch of Twitter apps for Android and BlackBerry handsets, to complement its existing desktop and web clients. The apps are available now, and allow Twitter users to monitor and post from multiple Twitter accounts, as well as searching Twitter. The BlackBerry version also supports geo-location tweets, showing a user's current location to the world, as well as the new Twitter lists - which let users create lists of other Twitterers around themes.
Mobile Entertainment