In yo’ face, HP
The pre-Macworld Expo rumor machine has been in low gear this year – perhaps due to Apple’s SVP Phil Schiller taking over keynote duties from His Steveness – but thanks to 9to5Mac, we have a new bit of speculation to report: an internet-based media server from Apple.…

More than expected
AMD laid off 600 people in the fourth quarter of 2008, rather than the 500 it expected to let go.…

Mark your diary
Fraudsters are using Google’s Calendar service as a means to develop a new strain of phishing scam.…

And a litter of dual cores
Intel has birthed a recession-friendly quad core mobile processor. And you can find one at the heart of a new Acer laptop. Maybe.…

Patent application stretches multi-touch
On Christmas day, the US Patent & Trademark Office slipped a little present under our collective trees: an Apple patent application entitled “Swipe Gestures for Touch Screen Keyboards.”…

Upgrade Cycle v Meltdown
With some 2 million-plus physical boxes still being shipped every quarter on a global basis, the server racket is still a pretty good one. In the first three quarters of 2008, vendors peddled some $40bn in gear, and if you use IDC data as a gauge, they’ve collectively managed to boost revenues by 3.5 per cent for the year so far. For all intents and purposes, the fourth quarter of 2008 is done in terms of server sales, but we won’t know how well or how poorly …

Free advice for rich deaf ears
Ian Tree, the chief architect at IT consultancy Hadleigh Marshall Netherlands b.v. of Eindhoven, The Netherlands, has some free advice for IBM’s Software Group: Take the Notes/Domino groupware stack open source with a community-developed programming model. The idea is to keep the Notes client and the Domino server relevant in a world becoming more accustomed to open source products.…

Free advice for rich deaf ears
Ian Tree, the chief architect at IT consultancy Hadleigh Marshall Netherlands b.v. of Eindhoven, The Netherlands, has some free advice for IBM’s Software Group: Take the Notes/Domino groupware stack open source with a community-developed programming model. The idea is to keep the Notes client and the Domino server relevant in a world becoming more accustomed to open source products.…

You’ve been iframed
Christmas gifts of Samsung Digital Picture frames could come with the unwelcome gift of malware, Amazon has warned.…

Snafu highlights wider trust problem
Security researchers have uncovered weaknesses in low-assurance digital certificates that create a means for miscreants to mount more convincing man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks.…