Official figures show that the underlying rate of consumer spending has stalled to a clear zero.

As consumer spending has been the engine of UK economic growth in recent years, the news adds pressure on the Bank of England to avoid interest rate rises in the near future.

Everything now depends upon how the housing and labour markets behave over the coming months. As the housing prices fall - which had been powered by property investment - so is the amount of equity available for consumer borrowing reduced.

However, rises in wages could yet add to consumer spending rates, though this would create an inflationary pressure.

A much maligned bill to grant software patents has been rejected by the European Parliament.

Although software is currently protected under existing intellectual rights legislation, the proposed changes would have meant that actual software processes could have been patented.

This could have meant the patenting of common software processes, and there were fears that softwware development could have been greatly restricted under such use.

Popular blogging companies, SixApart and Wordpress, have both brought in changes as part of their ongoing web development.

SixApart has consolidated its websites under the main SixApart domain, with original domains for the recently bought LiveJournal, as well as MovableType, both redirecting to subfolders on the SixApart domain. although their Typepad domain is not currently being redirected, the company is promoting the hosted blog product on a subdomain of the SixApart domain.

Meanwhile, in the inside scoop, the WordPress 1.5 release is detailed. Of specific interest is that although “nofollow” is supported, WordPress have apparently avoided making it a default feature of the release, leaving it to users to decide how to apply such changes to their blog.

Microsoft have issued a press release declaring that a beta-version of Internet Explorer 7 will be available this summer.

Outlinging their ideas in Gates Highlights Progress on Security, Outlines Next Steps for Continued Innovation, it admits to security failings but seeks to address them.

The IEblog at MSN tries to provide more information in IE7.

SearchEngineWatch editor, Danny Sullivan, crunched numbers from Nielson/NetRatings and Comscore to produce two separate but complimentary reports on search engine traffic, usage, and market share, according to both analyst groups:

1) Nielsen NetRatings Search Engine Ratings

2) comScore Media Metrix Search Engine Ratings

Although the statistics were for US markets specifically in December 2004, both reports can be taken as indicative of general trends likely to be effective in UK markets up to near present.

Despite disparity in actual figures, both agree on core general trends - namely, that Google is the clear dominant leader of search, with Yahoo! a distant second, and MSN third.

Nielsen has Google (including through AOL use) as having nearly 62% of search market share, with Yahoo! nearly halfway behind on 32%, and MSN as following close after on 25%.

However, after analysis of comScore research, with distributors fully factored in with suppliers, Danny Sullivan reveals a 3-2-1 distribution of search markets, with Google taking up three times of much of the market as MSN.

Both studies clearly illustratethe market dominance of Google as a search engine in the current climate. However, with Microsoft putting full corporate backing behind its new launched MSN Search, and recent apparent problems with Google search, the market remains open to dymanic changes.

Nominet has won a civil case against internet fraudster, Peter Clifford Francis Macrae.

Peter Macrae was alleged to have datamined the Nominet’s WHOIS register, and then sent out false invoices for re-registration charges under the company name of “Domain Registration Services”.

His dealings are reported by the website http://www.ninet.co.uk/

Symantec and F-Secure, two of the leaders in anti-virus solutions, were both forced to patch their own anti-virus software after critical flaws were discovered.

Earlier this week, Symantec was found to have an error in the processing of its anti-virus library. This meant that a virus could be programmed to be activated, rather than disabled, by the software, as reported in the ISS security response Symantec AntiVirus Library Heap Overflow.

And on Thursday, F-Secure released a bulletin advising on the udpating of 18 of its security products in it’s bulletin: F-Secure Security Bulletin FSC-2005-1; Code execution vulnerability in ARJ-archive handling.

Meanwhile, Microsoft was forced to release one of it biggest patches since offering monthly updates online thus week. The patch covered 12 vulnerabilities, 8 of which were classed as “critical”, and covered applications such as Internet Explorer 6, MSN Messenger, Office XP, and Windows Media Player.

Yet on the same day, Symantec reported three new discovered “high” risk exploits for Microsoft’s core 32-bit operating system - just as Microsoft declared its intention to buy Sybari security.

Technology company, Cisco, is expected to announce significant upgrades to its security suite next week, as part of a bullish move into network security markets.

Although part of the focus will be on updating its packages to keep up with security and technology developments, there will also be feature additions to its Internetwork Operating Software (IOS).

Expected software improvements include better intrusion prevention, as well as upgrades to its secure socket layer virtual private networks, in order to help create “self-protecting networks”.

Usability enhancements are also expected to its SSL VPN release product, to allow users to remotely connect to the corporate network using non-Web applications,such as e-mail on a corporate mail server, as well as changes to Cisco’s PIX Firewall, to help it better recognise and process IP telephony protocols.

Apple have announced a share split, after a 12 months trading has seen the company’s share value rise more than 350%.

Spurred on by massive iPod sales, its share value has risen from $23 to an all-time high of $81.99.

This is the third share split that Apple have entered into, after doing the same in 1987 and 2000. The new announced split will occur on February 28th and will increase the number of Apple shares from 900 million to 1.8 billion.

The purpose of share-splitting is to make the stock both affordable and attractive to smaller investors.

While rumour and speculation concerning a Google browser remains rife, Ask Jeeves have unexpectedly announced that they, too, are looking to develop a Jeeves browser based on Mozilla foundations.

Posted in Mozilla’s On Fire on the Ask blog, developer Tuoc Luong explains how he discussed three specific issues with the Mozilla foundation:

1) Open-source development of Ask desktop search
2) Development of Ask browser
3) Application of Ask’s Octopus software in conjunction with Mozilla’s use of the XUL platform.

This marks a continued period of aggression by Ask Jeeves in the search market, after also recently announcing the acquisition of bloglines, which is the world’s most popular RSS feed aggregator.

Hewlett-Packard chairman and chief executive, Carly Fiorina, today resigned.

In response, investors raised the value of the company by over 10% at one point.

Although she had been established with the company for six years, she had personally pushed through a merger with Compaq in 2002, which had been unpopular with both board staff and investors.

With the ever decreasing profits from lower margins on PC hardware repeatedly disappointing investors, Carly Fiorina was variously criticised for pushing so hard on a merger that has failed to deliver to investors.

One of America’s most powerful business women, she cited a dispute with the company’s board over future strategy as her reason for leaving.

Mastercard is launching a new scheme, where suspicious purchasing can send out a warning text message to the holder within minutes.

The intention is to catch credit card fraud as close to start of use as possible, minimising the damage fraudulent spending can do.

Normally, a manual check and a phone call is required, and this can take days for the purchases to be queried to a user.

According to the BBC’s report MasterCard’s new anti-fraud plan, the text messaging will be handled by mBlox.

The FTSE 100 briefly broke past the 5,000 point barrier today.

This marks part of a general upward trend in UK stocks, that have been rising surely but surely over 2004. It also represents accomplishment of a major psychological milestone.

With falling house prices in the US and UK, and forex highs in South and East Asia, the achievement reflects what has been a generally bullish mood by investors since the start of New Year trading.

The FTSE-100 reached a high of 6,950 in December 1999, before the dotcom bubble burst and stocks slowly plummeted to a low of 3,287 in March 2003.

Controversial Google blogger, Mark Jen, has been reportedly sacked from the company.

As covered in Google censors staff?, he was a new employee to Google, and had made critical remarks about relocation procedures, internal organisation, and finance benefits after salary - only for his blog to disappear - then reappear in slightly edited form.

Now he has been reportedly sacked over the episode.

The case acutely raises the profile of rights of speech among company employees. For example, is it ever acceptable for an exployee to be even mildly critical of their employer in public? To what degree is an employee determined to be responsible to their employer, even after hours?

Popular Yahoo! blogger, Jeremy Zawodny, discusses how Yahoo! approaches such issues in A Chat with Mark Jen, indicating that at least mild public criticism from high-profile staff is tolerated.

However, what worked probably worked especially against Mark Jen’s favour is his commenting of financial information, especially with regards to imminent stock reports.

Ultimately this will be a lesson for both parties involved - but it also serves as a very public reminder of how potential conflicts arising between employee responsibility and employer tolerance in the blogosphere.

About.com is up for sale, and today is when the final bids come in.

Published by Primedia, offers have been suggested as in the range of $350-500 million.

Internet giants Google, Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, and AOL, as well as the New York Times, are believed to have entered bids.

phpbb.com, the open source forum software development project, has suffered a serious hack attack and is still closed at present.

The hack apparently occured not through the troubled phpbb software itself - which was recently targeted by the Santy Worm - but instead through use of an Awstats exploit reported on January 17th.

The phpbb.com site is currently closed, with a single page message explaining that a group with apparent political motives hijacked the site server and has locked all access to it.

The issue is reported in
phpBB Site Cracked, Developers Locked Out

Google lost a second important ruling in France, in which it was held to have been wrong to allow bidding on company trademark.

The story is covered in Google loses trademark case in France, and explains how fashion design company, Louis Vuitton Malletier, took Google to court over advertising on its name.

This comes as an additional blow to Google in France, after an earlier court ruling, reported in Google appeals French trademark judgement, found Google guilty of similar practices.

Small but significant search engine Ask Jeeves is strongly rumoured to have bought out Bloglines, the world’s largest RSS feed aggregator.

If proved true it could prove a major coup for Ask, and put them at the heart of information generation.

Although Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher had already talked about monetising bloglines to Jupiter analyst Eric Peterson, one of the potentially biggest features of Bloglines is the scale of personal user profiling that can be mined from Bloglines subscribers.

The announcement has yet to be made public, but has already been broken out by Mary Hodder in Ask Jeeves Buys Bloglines at Napsterisation.

The news would continue a sudden warming by the search engine to blogs - recently they launched their own Ask company blog.

According to an internal memo, presented in an Australian legal battle between Kazaa developers Sharman Networks and music coporations, Kazaa employees dislike installing Kazaa software on their machines.

In the CNet report Kazaa’s a drag at its own company, the internal memo from chief technical officer, Phil Morle, warns that too much AdWare bundled with Kazaa software is slowing down employee machines, and that many literally “hate” it running on their machines.

AOL, the controversial internet division of Time-Warner, has reported losses of over 2 million subscribers in the US alone, with a net loss of nearly 50,000 in Europe.

While churn is not unusual in company subscriptions, this presents an embarrassingly high figure of nearly 10% in their home country.

However, despite a dip in subscription revenues, strong growth in advertising lead to 1% increase in revenues for thr year, taking it to ��4.6 billion for the company.