Communications from the world of, er, communications. And other stuff.
David Meyer is a freelance technology journalist. He fell into journalism when he realised his musical career wouldn't pay the bills. David's main focus is on communications, as well as internet technologies, regulation and mobile devices.
A UK city will get £24m in government funding to become a 'city of tomorrow', through a competition that has just opened.On Monday, the Technology Strategy Board launched its Future Cities Demonstrator programme.
LG has begun selling its Optimus 4X HD Android smartphone in Germany, the first country where the device is available.LG's Optimus 4X HD has gone on sale, but not yet in the UK.
New procedures for unmasking online trolls will make life simpler for those operating the websites where the trolling is taking place, justice secretary Ken Clarke has said.Ahead of the new Defamation Bill's second reading on Tuesday, Clarke said the current libel regime — built for the pre-internet era — created so much uncertainty for website operators that they tended to take down potentially risky material too quickly.
Lenovo has become a mobile broadband operator with the introduction of Mobile Access, a global cellular data service for 3G-enabled ThinkPads.Unveiled on Monday, Lenovo Mobile Access allows both pay-as-you-go and monthly usage, and is immediately available in the UK, eight other European countries and the US.
Smart meters could be used to build extensive profiles of the households using them, Europe's privacy regulator has warned.The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) said in a statement on Monday that, while smart meters were potentially useful for controlling energy use, they will also "enable massive collection of personal data which can track what members of a household do within the privacy of their own homes".
Governments should not be able to stop operators from charging content providers for carrying their services, a lobby group representing Europe's operators has proposed.A bar on net neutrality legislation was one of several suggestions made last week by the European Telecommunications Network Operators' Association (ETNO), in a submission to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).
Research In Motion has stopped making the cheapest version of its PlayBook tablet, a less successful rival to the iPad and to Android tablets.RIM has said it will no longer produce the 16GB version of its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.
The emerging Do Not Track standard should give web surfers privacy by default, Microsoft has insisted after the idea was turned down by the standard's working group.The working group at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) represents a wide spectrum of players including advertising and analytics companies, social networks, browser-makers and others.
The first patent-related court showdown between Apple and Motorola in the US since Google bought Motorola has been scrapped, after a Chicago judge decided neither company could back up the levels of damages they were calling for.Apple sued Motorola in 2010 over Apple patents allegedly used without a licence in Motorola's Android phones and tablets.
In a blow to Microsoft's idea of having browsers block tracking cookies by default, the working group dealing with the issue at the World Wide Web Consortium has come up with a proposal that bars any automatic Do Not Track setting.The proposal is a "grand compromise", as Stanford University's Jonathan Mayer put it in an email on Wednesday, with the privacy advocates in the working group losing out on two of the scheme's three biggest elements.