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BT insists orders will be delivered
Online retailer Dabs.com has told customers to hang fire for a few days while orders due to be delivered by Amtrak are reassigned to another courier.…
Bad weather, Olympics, leaves on line credit crunch blamed
Ticket sales at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe were down ten per cent this year, in part because of the technical failure of its box office system.…
Offshoring blamed for cash bonanaza
The IT skills shortage in the UK is being made worse by the routine offshoring of entry-level tech jobs.…
Blackberry v iPhone v Windows Mobile
It used to be pretty simple. If you were a large organisation with a hard-core mobile email requirement, the only serious option from a security, robustness, manageability, usability and ease of deployment perspective was Blackberry. If you had a need to develop custom applications, then provided you were happy to construct your own middleware and management stack, then Windows Mobile was the accepted way forward.…
Tragedy of errors
The software outfit behind the chaotic implementation of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe’s box office system has gone titsup.…
.ohdear
Network Solutions - the company that resells top level domains like .com and .net - seems to have misplaced its own website.…
Bringing down the house
Edinburgh Fringe organisers will wait until after the last acts have packed up and gone home before picking over the bones of its box office system fiasco.…
Don't they teach BCC at PR school?
We've almost got bored of stories about people sending emails to lots of subscribers without using the BCC field, but not when the mail is sent to 20,000 people.…
Joke system leaves promoters baying for blood
Officials at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe are to launch an independent inquiry into the failure of its box office system.…
Standing on the shoulders of clowns
The Edinburgh Fringe festival gets underway a week on Saturday (3-25 August) but ever since tickets went on sale the box office system has suffered several major technical cock-ups.…
Large suppliers make hay from greater pricing pressure
Big IT firms are likely to do better from the credit crunch than smaller suppliers, as greater economies of scale allow them to offer cheaper prices.…
The password? Can't say? Won't say?
The sysadmin accused of locking the San Francisco city council out of its computer network was back in jail yesterday after pleading not guilty to four counts of computer tampering.…
US call centre workers can team up
Dell is facing a class action case from 5,000 call centre staff in the US who claim the computer giant has underpaid them since 2004.…
Mayor says bricked IT system won't affect ability to govern
San Francisco’s officials were squirming with embarrassment today as it emerged that they are still paying the salary of the banged-up sysadmin accused of locking down the city’s IT network and refusing to divulge the password.…
City 'doing everything necessary'
Hapless municipal bosses in San Francisco have been locked out of their network by a disgruntled sysadmin charged with computer sabotage.…
Follows the money offshore
Barclays is to axe 1,800 IT jobs in the UK as part of a major business overhaul to set up technology centres in key offshore locations around the world, with 700 workers being forced out by September.…
A header to save the internet
Updated As the AVG LinkScanner continues to spew fake traffic across the internet, web masters say they've uncovered a reliable means of filtering these rogue hits from their log files.…
OMG!
Social networking site Facebook is mainly unavailable this afternoon.…
Web 2.0-up your regs
Dealing with staff who misbehave on the web may be hampered by office policies written without Web 2.0 sites in mind, an employment expert has said. The warning follows disciplinary action against 18 police officers who boasted about crashes on Facebook.…
'Bang, bang, click, click, click'
Exclusive Budget airline easyJet.co.uk has warned Expedia.co.uk to stop selling its flights via its website or face the possibility of legal action.…
'Nobody expects thieves to break into locked drawers'
Providing proof, if it were needed, that every single piece of personal data in the UK has now been lost - probably several times over, by multiple corporations and government offices - news has just broken of another theft of laptops crammed with easily accessed info. This time the there-but-for-the-grace-of-god bonehead users were hospital staff at St George's hospital in Tooting.…
Whoops, there go my trousers customers
Edinburgh Fringe festival organisers admitted yesterday that their box office system is still out of action more than 48 hours after tickets went on sale.…
No laughing matter
Comedy lovers hoping to get their hands on tickets to this year’s Edinburgh Fringe festival have lost their sense of humour after discovering the company’s box office system went titsup on Monday.…
Agency staff granted more equal rights
The British government today secured landmark European Union agreements that will allow UK citizens to work more than 48 hours a week, and bring temp workers into line with permanent staff.…
We draw up a handy list of excuses for civil servants
This week Fujitsu pulled out of the £12.7bn National Programme for IT - the government's enormous project to introduce national patient records for NHS patients leaving BT, CSC and iSoft still involved.…
(Office)spy versus spy
The UK may have more CCTV cameras than anywhere else in the world but US workers are kept under even closer tabs over internet use at work, according to a new survey.…
Primed for business
Reg Research The Register’s Technology Primer series of white papers provide a basic grounding in some of the hottest topics in tech today. They’re all freely available, and some of the latest and greatest are listed below for your downloading pleasure.…
IT workers get credit crunched
Barclays Capital is forcing its IT contractors to choose between a 10 per cent pay cut or a quick exit from the company.…
Must! Love! The! Reg!
Sue Decker wants you to know that Yahoo! is the only Fortune 500 company with an exclamation point in its name.…
Small fine, humiliation by press release
A Pittsburgh computer consultancy is paying $45,000 in civil penalties over claims it discriminated against legal US residents by advertising only for developers on H-1B visas.…
Service-oriented mammalians to survive IT recession
Interop 2008 Day two of Interop Las Vegas 2008 opened with a modest IT proposal from Mark Templeton, President and CEO of Citrix.…
Worse than dotcom losses
The City of London could lose 20,000 jobs in the next two years as the credit crunch starts to bite.…
But not with you in them - yet
Iconic clothing store American Apparel is to start putting radio tags into every item of clothing, tracking it from factory to stockroom to store shelf and possibly beyond.…
Exclusive rights to pandemics
IBM wants to patent a means of responding to hurricanes, earthquakes, tidal waves, solar flares, flooding, terrorism, war, pandemics, and other situations where you would hope companies aren't worried about patents.…
Mystery database glitch blamed for extended outage
HSBC UK managed to get its beleaguered e-payments system back online yesterday evening after the second extended outage in less than a fortnight.…
Calls for compensation from bungling bank
Merchants are furious at HSBC UK after the bank's e-payments system fell over for an extended period for the second time in less than a fortnight.…
Will customers get soaked on transformation journeys?
Hewlett-Packard has claimed the current financial storm blowing out of the financial sector and into the wider economy doesn't make it a really bad time to launch its cloud computing strategy into Europe.…
Guess what happened next?
HSBC has admitted that it has misplaced 370,000 customer details, which were put in the post a month ago on an unencrypted disc.…
Someone's going to get the sack
Royal Mail’s three main websites have been unavailable since last night, forcing millions of customers to get used to the taste of glue while guessing where their registered post might be.…
Slickly does it
Royal Dutch Shell has claimed that no more than 30 jobs will be axed following the firm’s decision to outsource more than 3,000 worldwide IT staff.…
We're in the money. Not really
The SIIA (Software & Information Industry Association) calls it "whistleblowing." And we call it "disgruntled peons ratting on their bosses." But whatever label you use, dobbing on your own company for cutting corners on software licenses can be a lucrative sport.…
Oil-y company
Royal Dutch Shell today inked three outsourcing deals – worth $4.2bn over five years – to spin out IT and telecoms operations.…
Web programmers meet web jobs market
Call it compassionate capitalism or a desire to do good in these darkening times, but one US manager has placed a "for hire" ad online touting his developers' skills just one day after being forced to axe them.…
Easier to manage? And the three bears...
Here's a nightmare vision of a technology-driven future:…
A hard charge to make stick...
Are computers bad for the planet? As a consumer of power, IT equipment is certainly all too visible, and is shaping up to become a prime whipping boy for governments striving to get a lid on their CO2 emissions. After anything that burns petrol, PCs, chargers and that arch eco-criminal, standby mode, now come pretty close to the centre of the crosshairs.…
Reg prepping Moon on a stick campaign
Number crunchers at Gartner have decided that businesses should allow their workers to access Facebook and all manner of web guff "securely", via the company network.…
More like an upgrade?
…
'Unexpected technical issues'
Five of 15 IT projects run by the Department of Health and its agencies are costing £247,000 more than expected.…
Flying today? Not with those cases you're not
Heathrow's Terminal 4 was yesterday hit by a software glitch which affected its baggage-handling capacity, the knock-on effect of which means that some passengers travelling have been told to leave any hold baggage at home.…
Young man, there's no need to download
The Village People have joined forces with pint-sized popster Prince in an effort to slap The Pirate Bay with yet another copyright infringement lawsuit.…