Technology

I couldn’t understand why I was near tears. It was only a computer server I was shutting down, not pulling the plug on a life or saying goodbye to faithful pet. Nonetheless, my eyes were moist.

This Babbage has run his own server hardware since 1994, first hosting other companies’ sites as an early web developer, and later my own operations. The first servers lived in my basement, connected by a dedicated 56 Kbps line to a much smaller internet. The current set of five are rack mounted in a co-location data centre, where I pay a monthly fee for space, electricity and bandwidth. They’ve hummed away there for years, chunking through millions of database queries each day, occasionally seeing one of their number replaced with a faster model. One of them is pictured there to the right. — via dungbeetlemania.newsvine.com

The police are seeking powers to shut down websites deemed to be engaged in criminal activity.

The Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) has tabled a plan for Nominet, which oversees .uk web addresses, to be given the domain closing power — via dungbeetlemania.newsvine.com

Support and FAQ application add-ins for web sites — via Smashing Apps

Facebook user? There’s a good chance you’ve been exposed to malware at least once in your recent travels through the popular social-networking site. According to the security firm BitDefender, which analyzed the profiles of 14,000 users, approximately 20 percent of all news feeds on Facebook contain some sort of malware — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The clerk of Orleans Parish Civil District Court said Tuesday that her office continues to make progress in resolving the computer problems that have been holding up real estate transactions in New Orleans for the past month, but there still was no indication of how soon the crisis might end — via redwolf.newsvine.com

browserling provides cross-browser testing from the comfort of your browser.

A new entrant into the mobile phone market is hoping to lure customers from the big three operators with the launch of no-frills plans — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networking sites represent “one of several threats” to the future of the world wide web, its founder, Sir Tim Berners-Lee has warned — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Novell has long since lost its position as a dominant vendor in the operating system market, but the vendor’s long, slow decline didn’t change the fact that Novell still has some valuable technologies.

The value still inherent in Novell was, to some extent, reaffirmed Monday by a definitive merger agreement in which Attachmate is expected to purchase Novell for $2.2 billion — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The role of the PBX is changing in importance, but it’s still too early to issue a death certificate, according to Infonetics.

PBXs took a big hit when the economy faltered two years ago — sales dropped 25% in 2009 — and they have been struggling to rebound, says Matthias Machowinski, an analyst with Infonetics, but they are far from out, as Microsoft suggested last week with its announcement of its latest unified communications platform Lync 2010, a renaming of its Office Communications Server line — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The United States has launched a vast reconnaissance satellite reputed to be the largest eavesdropping device ever sent into space — via redwolf.newsvine.com

PBL Media is expected to bolster its digital media credentials ahead of a $5-billion-plus float next year.

This, by securing a joint venture with popular US video streaming group Hulu and the return of former Microsoft executive Daniel Petre to the board — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Desktop administrators rejoice! In the very near future you may be able to stop deploying Adobe Reader to users with basic PDF needs, and quite possibly, Adobe Flash as well.

Stepping to fill the gap is Chrome’s built-in PDF viewing feature, which is available presently in Chrome’s developer and beta channels as well as the integrated Flash player which has been out for a number of months now — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Rovio Mobile, developers of the addictive Angry Birds game, has run into the oft-denied Android platform fragmentation issue. The company said in a blog post that it is now working on a separate, lighter version of its Android game version, after users reported performance problems with several older Android devices — via redwolf.newsvine.com