Motorola and Apple defied expectation by failing to showcase the new iTunes phone at the CeBit show.

The two companies had publicly stated their working partnership last July, as the Register announced in Apple licenses iTunes to Motorola, in a deal that would see Apple adapt iTunes jukebox software for Motorola handsets.

However, although expected to be nearly ready for development, incomplete agreements with carriers mean that the companies both held off from showcasing the new Motorola iTunes enabled phones.

Accordint the Register report Motorola: iTunes phone no-show due to Apple:

Motorola sources told us that the phone’s no-show at CeBIT was down to the company’s carrier partners, who clearly want a say as to when the handset will be launched. The implication is that the phone is ready to go, but Motorola wants one or two carriers on its customer list before making a formal launch. Apple, equally understandably, wants to whet potential punters’ appetites with a paper launch.

Empliyment company Manpower has claimed that companies are optimistic about employing more staff over the coming three months.

Manpower also suggested that a skills shortage means that it is a candidates market, and that higher wages may be required to hire the best staff, leading to wage inflation.

The labour market is “positive and stable”, with 76% of employers planning to maintain staffing levels.

According to their study of 2,100 firms, Manpower said the construction industry was especially buoyant with jobs, as well as the transport & communications sector. Only the utilities sector expected to see any cut in jobs before June.

While Manpower paints a picture of a strong labour market, it also reported that London was least likely to see increased employment, while Scotland was the region most aggressively planning to take on more staff.

Bernie Ebbers was last night convicted of fraud in the collapse of Worldcom by a jury in the United States.

Formerly a bouncer, a basketball coach and a milkman, he then in 1983 became an early investor in Long Distance Discount Service. Under Bernie Ebbers’ direction, the company turned itself from a regional Mississippi telecoms firm into a global billion-dollar corporate giant named Worldcom.

However, the company was built not simply on aggressive purchasing, but also on exaggerated revenues and false expenses.

In 2002 Worldcom collapsed, wiping out about $180bn (£94bn) in stock holdings and losing 20,000 people their jobs.

The fraud was held to have been squarely managed by the board of directors, and five executives have already pleaded guilty.

Bernie Ebbers is expected to appeal against the decision. If convicted, he could face a sentence of 85 years.

Gordon Brown unveiled his budget today, amidst concerns that the presentation would be more about providing short-term sweeteners ahead of a general election, while putting off longer-term needs.

While Gordon Brown was happy to declare that he had overseen 50 consecutive quarters of economic growth - the longest growth apparently since records began in 1701 - there continue to be concerns about the fragility of the economy.

Many analysts predicting a slowdown in growth, which may affect Gordon Brown’s standing on his “golden rule” of paying back borrowing within the same economic cycle.

Notable concerns are a housing downturn in an over-extended housing market, which has been the main engine for economic growth over the past few years. This is already being seen to be affecting consumer spending, with retail growth also suffering a lagging start to 2005.

Among key areas of concern in business included the merging of 35 watchdog bodies into just 9, in an attempt to cut down on bureaucracy. There were also attempts to simplfying dealings with European regulations.

There are also attempts to simplify the tax system, where according to the BBC:

Mr Brown also said that he would look at ways of simplifying the tax system, accused by many small- and medium-sized businesses of being over-complicated, time consuming and unwieldy.

The Inland Revenue and Customs service will now consult on a single tax account for small business, “where information need only be provided once”.

It will provide a single point of contact for value added tax (VAT) and corporation tax, as well as looking at ways of providing flexible payment terms, Mr Brown said.

For more comprehensive analysis of the budget, the BBC offers a wide range of reports here: Budget 2005.

Netcraft report in Online Banking Industry Very Vulnerable to Cross-Site Scripting Frauds that phishing attacks are becoming sophisticated enough to overcome some banking protection.

Well known banks have created an infestation of application bugs and vulnerabilities across the Internet, allowing fraudsters to insert their data collection forms into bona fide banking sites, creating convincing frauds that are undetectable to most customers.

Additionally, the Register reports in Banks ‘wasting millions’ on two-factor authentication
points to criticisms from respected security commentator, Bruce Schneier.

He decries that current banking authentification systems are based on out-dated technology such as two-factor authentification, and that banks need to look forward to implementing modern cutting-edge solutions to the modern technical problems such as phishing:

Two-factor authentication was invented a couple of decades ago against the threats of the time. Now, the threats have changed - and two-factor authentication doesn’t defend against them. It’s a waste of money.

Although he accepts there is a role to be played by current methods, he doesn’t believe that the challenges of remote authentification over the internet can be properly addressed by two-factor authentification.

On top of all that, ThisIsMoney.co.uk reports in Crooks targeting internet shoppers that Supermarkets are the latest targets in phishing scams:

The National Crime Squad’s National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) has told online retailers such as Sainsbury, Ocado and Tesco that they need a massive upgrade in security to counter the growing threat.

Tony Neate, the unit’s industry liaison officer, said: ‘We have warned all the big retailers that we consider them to be the next targets and are helping them to secure their sites against the attacks we think are coming. We are working with the online retailers, but are also working to educate their customers and make them aware of the problems.’

While consumer confidence has surmounted original concerns about internet security with advanced encryption protection, and internet sales growth continues to increase, the increase in phishing attacks and vendors responses to the developing threats could have a definitive impact on the consumer web.

Amazon have filed a report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, stating that the company has now settled a class-action lawsuit that alleged false statements about the company’s finances.

Although Amazon disputes class-action allegations that the company was in violation of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, it has apparently paid out a $27.5 million settlement to close the matter, the costs of which will apparently be passed on to insurers.

Additional suits are still pending against the company, including another class action claim, this time stipulating violation of the Securities Act of 1933. Others include proceedings involving companies such as Pinpoint, BTG International, IPXL Holdings, Toysrus.com, Soverain Software and Cendant Publishing.

The HoneyNet Project has reported that massive networks of zombie computers are being used for identity theft, installation of spyware - and for attacking each other.

The findings are published in the paper KYE: Tracking Botnets, which summarises the findings of German research into 100 different bot nets, which found that some networks comrpised of more than 50,000 individual machines.

The key motivation in establishing zombie networks is financial, with the spread of malware - spyware, adware, and trojan keylogging software - all specific aims.

However, astonishingly, the researchers also found bot nets involved in cyber wars - which can involve different bot nets attacking one another via Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS) - as different criminal gangs attempt to disrupt competitors.

Interestly, it was also revealed that bot nets could be involved in Google AdSense fraud, with such networks being used to provide a wide range of IPs from which to provide automated clicks on their own AdSense programs, delivering increased revenues.

In the more concise article at CNET, Zombie PCs being sent to steal IDs, some of the more bizarre methods, and future developments, of bot nets were revealed:

In one case, bot software detected whether the game “Diablo II” was installed on the host PC. If the game was present, the program would steal items from the player’s characters and drop them at preplanned places in the online game world. The bot net’s controller would then collect the items and sell them on auction site eBay, Holz said.

Future bot nets will likely move to peer-to-peer communications, which are harder to intercept and shut down. Moreover, there is a trend toward smaller numbers of bots in each network–a measure that makes the collection of compromised computers that much harder to detect, he said. While a network of 3,000 to 8,000 computers is harder to detect than one of 20,000, it can be as damaging.

According to IDC, the market for storage software was up over 16% last year, with revenues in data storage software applications reaching over $7.9 billion in 2004

In the report Worldwide Storage Software Market Posts Record Revenue of More Than $2 Billion in the Fourth Quarter of 2004, IDC Says, the company outlines key areas of growth and development include storage resource management, and backup and archive software.

Compliance issues, especially in data protection and management, were seen as major growth factors, with Q4 revenues in 2004 alone accounting for $2.2 billion in revenue.

In the CNET report Storage software market on the upswing it places the market leaders as:

1. EMC - market share: 30.9%
2. Veritas - market share: 21.9%
3. Computer Associates - market share: 8.4%
4. IBM - market share: 7.8%
5. Hewlett Packard - market share: 6.7%

EMC enjoyed the largest market gorwoth over the year at over 36%, but IBM enjoyed the second highest growth in Q4.

Google, which has so far staunchly defended its implementation of its Autolink toolbar feature, faces a major challenge as a new Firefox extension has been released which adds similar links to Google’s own pages.

The news was widely reported at Threadwatch in Google gets a taste of it’s own Autolink Medicine. The website has led a campaign against the autolink feature, and even released code to prevent autolink running on webpages via server side and browser scripting such as JavaScript, PHP, Perl, ASP, and ASP.net.

As covered in Google releases new toolbar, faces consumer concern, and approached in more detail by Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineWatch in Google Toolbar’s AutoLink & The Need For Opt-Out, the Google Autolink feature allows the new Google Toolbar to add links in webmaster pages to third party sites, including to Google’s commercial partners.

Google’s Product Manager, Marissa Mayer, has continued to advocate the usefulness of the feature for toolbar users.

However, concerns and objections in the webmaster world are extensive, with publishers fearing this is a doorway for Google to monetise their content without their permission.

Now webmasters are striking back, with developer Mark Pilgrim releasing an extension for Firefox which allows links to third-party sites to appear exclusively in Google’s own pages.

Simply named Butler, the new Firefox extension is claimed to be able to do the following:

• removes ads on most Google pages
• fixes fonts on most Google pages
• Google web search:

• adds links to other search sites (”Try your search on…”)
• in news results, adds links to other news sites
• in movie results, adds links to other movie sites
• in weather results, adds links to other weather sites
• in product results, adds links to other product sites

• adds links to other image/photo/art sites

• adds links to other news sites

• Removes image copying restrictions

• adds links to other Firefox-friendly toolbars

Additionally, Mark Pilgrim uses Google own arguments to justify the product:

No, Butler is not spyware. It does not track the pages you visit, display ads, hijack Amazon affiliate links, log keystrokes, steal passwords, set cookies, “phone home,” or install any bundled software on your computer. It is simply a Firefox script that modifies a few Google services in ways that I find useful. If you don’t like it, you can easily uninstall it.

Microsoft had attempted to release a similar system called Smart-Tags for Internet Explorer a few years ago, but later withdrew it in view of webmaster outrage.

It is difficult to imagine Google continuing with the Autolink feature despite the rising publisher objections to its use. However, until the company is seen to act to webmaster concerns, the reputation of Google continues to suffer damage.

Over 100 Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) developers have signed a petition calling for the company to continue support for Visual Basic.

Microsoft have already announced that after this month, it will no longer offer free incident support and critical updates for Visual Basic 6. Fee-based support will run for another 3 years before VB6 is finally abandoned by the company.

Microsoft has already spend years moving from its BASIC platform to developing its .NET programming platform, and refers to Visual Basic.net as VB7.

However, critics say that the similarity is only in name, and that the languages are fundamentally incompatible, with program code written in the language of VB6 and earlier versions unable to run on the .NET platform.

Rich Levin of PC Talk Radio has been particularly vociferous in support of the MVA petition, and he explain his position in Microsoft MVPs revolt:

Learning Microsoft BASIC (Atari BASIC, BASICA, GW-BASIC, and later, QuickBasic, Professional Basic, and Visual Basic) made it possible for me to earn a living as a professional programmer and, ultimately, as a technology writer. With a little tweaking, programs written in earlier versions of BASIC seamlessly migrated to newer versions. Nobody did BASIC better than Microsoft.

Now millions of VB developers are language refugees, looking for a new language to call home. This will be to the benefit of language vendors other than Microsoft, which squandered a golden lock on the hearts, minds, and souls of BASIC programmers worldwide–all in the name of something new and allegedly better (read: we need an answer to Java).

It’s not too late or technically difficult for Microsoft to admit its mistake, and resurrect support and advancement of classic Visual Basic. There’s no reason, technical or otherwise, why Visual Basic 6 can’t coexist with Visual Basic .NET, just as Microsoft Visual FoxPro coexists with Access, just as Microsoft Visual C++ coexists with Visual C#, and just as Microsoft’s Macintosh division coexists with the company’s overarching Windows focus.

David Berlind at ZDnet also expresses his disappointment in First VB gets the axe. What’s next COBOL?, by pointing out that COBOL suffers similar criticisms as Microsoft have levelled at VB6, but points out that VB7, with its better web functionality, is the superior platform to focus on:

Perhaps the moral of this story is that you can’t teach a dog new tricks. Particularly these old dogs, who, like my old dog, bite back if you don’t handle them just right.

A summary is also provided in the CNET article Developers slam Microsoft’s Visual Basic plan

One of the main issues keeping VB6 and earlier developers from making the migration to VB.Net is the steepness of the learning curve,” said Albion Butters, Evans Data’s international analyst, in a statement. “The difficulty in moving existing VB6 apps to VB.Net is, in some cases, insurmountable.”

The original petition can be found here: A Petition for the development of unmanaged visual basic and visual basic for applications

Michael Eisner will leave Disney a year earlier than expected, in the face of continued shareholder hostility.

Robert Iger, the existing company president, will replace him.

Walt Disney’s nephew, Roy Disney, led a shreholder revolt in 2004 to oust him and received over 45% of the vote, leading to Michael Eisner to offer to leave in October 2006.

However, he has brought the plans forward and announced his intention to leave the company later this year.

The price of manufactured goods rose faster than expected in February, but companies are still holding off from passing continued manufacturing costs on to the public.

According the Office for National Statistics (ONS) own report, Factory gate inflation rises to 2.8%:

In February, output price annual inflation for all manufactured products rose to 2.8 per cent from 2.6 per cent in January, while input price annual inflation rose from 9.7 per cent in January to 10.7 per cent in February.

The figures suggest that factory inflation is rising higher than expected, and adds additional pressure on the Bank of England to consider raising interest rates at their next meeting.

However, the figures also show that while price of goods is steadily rising, actual costs of production have been increasing faster, suggesting that some manufacturers are trying to maintain lower competitive pricing at the expense of profit margins.

According to the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (Cara), Britain is wasting valuable skills, by not developing the right skills training for refugees.

The charity has now published a handbook, backed by the government and trade unions, urging refugees to seek funding for training.

CARA claims that there are up to 4,000 refugees living in Britain that have strong technical and academic backgrounds in healthcare, computing, and engineering, but that these skills are being wasted in lower-paid unskilled work due to lack of training.

According to the BBC report Britain ‘wasting’ refugee skills:

The charity says it could cost as little as £1,000 to prepare a refugee doctor to practise in the UK, compared with £250,000 to train someone from scratch.

Other professionals, including engineers and scientists, could have their skills updated for much less.

But, at a time of shortages of skilled workers in these fields, the charity says many refugee specialists are either unemployed or working in unskilled jobs.

The First Division Association (FDA) has voted to go on strike, over proposed changes in pensions that would see their retirement age increased from 60 to 65.

The FDA comprises of permanent secretaries, crown prosecutors, diplomats and other senior figures running government departments and agencies, and if action goes ahead, it will be the first time the FDA has gone on strike since 1981.

It is the latest in a string of unions to protest pension reform, and the FDA joins Unison, the TGWU, Amicus, PCS and Ucatt, in planning strike action on March 23rd.

The Disability Rights Commission (DRC) today launched a report, to try and quell fears that workers who develop disabilities have no place in former employment.

Citing a study Mori, which found that nearly a third of workers in the UK fear they would lose their job if they became disabled.

However, the DRC counters that the implementation of the final phase of the Disability Discrimination Act for small businesses, means that employers are much more likely to retain key skills in their workforce.

According to the BBC article Redundancy fears over disability:

One in four of the working population in Wales is disabled and the poll’s findings contrast between workers and bosses’ attitudes.

A DRC survey of 1,000 small employers found 85% said they would be flexible about hours or minor parts of the job if the employee had the right skills and enthusiasm.

Sir Digby Jones, director general of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), is backing the DRC initiative.

“Many good employers recognise the benefits of meeting the needs of disabled employees and retaining individuals in their business,” he said.

“And what’s good for all staff is - in the long run - good for customers and business.”

The SCO group is pushing OpenServer 6 into beta testing, amid a backdrop of steep declining revenues.

The company gained notoriety in 2003, when it launched a $5 billion lawsuit against IBM, claiming that proprietary Unix code had been built into Linux by the company.

The move originally sent shockwaves through the computing industry, and has led to the development of worms that can use an infected computer to attack SCO’s website.

In business terms, the company has lost standing within the development community upon which it had otherwise depended, and has suffered financially for it. As reported by CNET in SCO reports deeper loss, shrinking revenue:

The company reported a loss of $6.5 million, or 37 cents per share, for the quarter ended Oct. 31, compared with a year-earlier loss of $1.6 million or 12 cents per share. The Lindon, Utah, company’s revenue dropped from $24.3 million to $10.1 million over the same period.

SCO has also suffered from poor relations with a parent investor, the Canopy Group, as well as accounting problems. Even worse, in its far-reaching court case against IBM it has so far failed to materialise evidence of any actual legal infraction.

OpenServer 6 provides a last push for the company for profitability, but with so much of its user-base already alienated, it may require more than just a new software release to help the company pitch to original markets.

HP Labs work on crossbar switch nanotechnology - which could potentially replace transistors in circuits - is to be published in a special nanotechnology issue of
Applied Physics A.

Hewlett Packard’s specialist research arm has also launched a general public release on its molecular development technology for the exlectronics industry.

Titled Beyond Silicon: HP Outlines Comprehensive Strategy for Molecular-scale Electronics, the paper quotes Stan Williams, HP Senior Fellow and director, Quantum Science Research (QSR), HP Labs as saying:

“Computers of tomorrow could be quite different from what they are today,” said Williams. “When you can make a computing appliance so tiny that it could fit across the width of a hair, you could enable many, many different things to become ‘smart.’ Computing could become as ubiquitous as electricity – it’s just there, making things work. The possibilities are limited only by human imagination.”

According to the CNET report HP unfurls more details of its nano plans:

Crossbars, theoretically, can outperform transistors but will cost less to produce…mass production remains a major hurdle for crossbars and other transistor alternatives, which will likely mean that silicon has a long future.

SPECIAL REPORT: ABAP programming language coming of age with SAP

ABAP originally started out in the 1980’s as a programming language, developed by SAP for its SAP/2 reporting application.

With a syntax resembling COBOL, ABAP was originally called Allgemeiner BerichtsAufbereitungsProzessor, German for “generic report preparation processor”.

However, over the past two decades ABAP has grown into a larger entity. In the 1990s, SAP started to convert all the key functional code in SAP R/3 to ABAP, so that by the year 2001, the SAP project relied on ABAP for all but the most basic of functions.

Now named Advanced Business Application Programming, ABAP has begun to hit the wider programming radar.

According to the TIOBE Programming Community Index - which is based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors, and intended for making a strategic decisions about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software systems - ABAD is currently one of only 15 programming languages to be currently awarded “A” status.

The high Niobe scoring means that over the following year you can expect to start seeing ABAP become increasingly developed for industrial and mission-critical software systems. Even though it is not yet regarded as a major programming language, ADAP is finally hitting the mainstream radar.

Even though ABAD still has a relatively small development community, as reported in Biggest Jump in the Ranks of the Most Popular Programming Languages, it is the fastest growing programming language of the past year.

And with a focus on production of high-level reports in materials management and financial and management accounting, ABAD has a real niche it can develop in.

Additionally, its development has recently focussed on object orientation to the degree that it is now developing in parallel with the development of Sun Microsystem’s Java, which it now uses as one of its production pillars.

For the time being, ABAD is may seem like just another quirky acronym. However, in the dynamic pistons of IT development, ABAD may yet become a more familiar name over the coming years.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mobile Google: Google goes mobile & local

Google have been quietly developing their search engine services aimed squarely at mobile device use, such as PDAs and mobile phones.

Google Mobile is a service that mimicks its more popular web search engine very closely, offering websearch and image search, as well as local search.

As explained on their more in-depth Google Mobile Search, it also other features, such as an advanced number checker that prevents users have to tap number keys so much to form letters.

For example, to spell P-I-Z-Z-A on a cell phone would normally require the user to input the number keys “7444999999992″ - but with the advanced number checker, Google will read the shorter number string “74992″ as also spelling the word.

This continues Google’s expansion into services for mobile devices, and follows on Google SMS text services and Google WAP search, and also Google Palm search.

However, as suggested in the O’Reilly commentary 2005 is Year of Local Mobile Search, and quoting from Local mobile search? Hold the phone, Google’s George Harik, director of Google’s entrepreneurial division, Googlettes, said:

The issue is, people haven’t figured out how to make mobile information delivery work. If you fix those issues, it makes the delivery of advertising possible. Monetization always follows use, and the stage we’re in is perfecting usage.

Interestingly enough, if you then combine that concept with Google Maps, their purchase of Keyhole, as well as their online services - not least Google’s additional mobile Froogle search functionality - then you can see that Google may well be developing a platform to become the world’s global local shopping and advertising medium.

That could mean that, wherever you are, whatever you want, Google can show you where to spend.

A project of that scale could make websearch, AdSense, and even single point Amazon shopping seem archaic and small by comparison.

Microsoft has announced that it is withdrawing ISP and MSN software services for Mac OS X users.

As covered in Microsoft to kill MSN for the Mac, as of May 31st, Microsoft will no longer support MSN for Mac OS X Internet Software client.

Although only a small number of people will apparently be affected, it represents a movement away from ISP services to internet software development.

Microsoft will still allow Apple user to purchase Hotmail accounts and other Microsoft internet software services, but it will not offer any local software and customers will have to log on using the Mac’s built-in Internet Connect dialer.

However, Microsoft denies that it is moving away from the Apple Mac OS X operating system, and has plans to release a version of its popular Microsoft Office software for Apple later this year.