Apple''s iPhone goes on sale in the UK and Germany on Friday with thousands expected to snap up the device. The first European handsets were sold at the T-Mobile store in Cologne just after midnight. By contrast Apple fans queuing in poor weather in London will have to wait until Friday evening to get their hands on an iPhone. Full Article

A project that harnesses the spare processing power of Sony''s PlayStation 3 (PS3) to help understand the cause of diseases has entered the record books. Guinness World Records has recognised folding@home (FAH) as the world''s most powerful distributed computing network. FAH has signed up nearly 700,000 PS3s to examine how the shape of proteins affect diseases such as Alzheimer''s.Full Article

Mobile phone provider 3 has launched a new handset that will allow users to make free calls over the internet via telephony service Skype. Users will also be able to use Skype''''''''s instant messaging service, 3 said. But while people using Skype on their computers are able to make cheap global calls to any phone number, this will not be possible via the new 3 handset.Skype has about 246 million registered users worldwide and is one of the firms reshaping the global phone industry. Full Article

Leopard, the latest update of the Apple Mac operating system OS X, goes on sale on Friday. The release ends months of waiting for Mac fans, after Apple pushed back the launch to finish development on its much-hyped iPhone. Early reviews for Leopard have been positive with veteran technology writer Walt Mossberg calling it "evolutionary, not revolutionary". Full Article

The level of state-led censorship of the net is growing around the world, a study of so-called internet filtering by the Open Net Initiative suggests. The study of thousands of websites across 120 Internet Service Providers found 25 of 41 countries surveyed showed evidence of content filtering. Websites and services such as Skype and Google Maps were blocked, it said. Full Article

Thousands of gamers were unable to play the multiplayer test version of Halo 3 on Wednesday due to technical problems. Players were unable to download the beta program and hundreds of people left messages on the maker''s official website complaining about the issue. Bungie has now fixed the problem and extended the three-week beta period by four days. Full Article

Gamers are being forced to wait to get their hands on Spore - the next creation by gaming legend Will Wright. Publisher Electronic Arts has announced that the title will now be delayed until 2008. The ambitious title lets players create and control creatures from their cellular beginnings through to when they conquer space. Although no official release for Spore has been given by EA, it was expected to be available for Christmas 2007. Full Article

A new web-based television service, or IPTV, for British Sign Language (BSL) users has recently launched in the UK. VeeSee TV airs news and other programmes in BSL and is available 24 hours a day. The channel can be viewed on a computer or via a set-top box and is the brainchild of BSL interpreter Susie Grant. She said she launched VeeSee TV in frustration at mainstream TV's inability to cater for deaf viewers. VeeSee is the first dedicated channel for BSL users which also includes an interactive forum and user-generated content. Full Article

Scientists have expressed concern about the use of autonomous decision-making robots, particularly for military use. As they become more common, these machines could also have negative impacts on areas such as surveillance and elderly care, the roboticists warn. The researchers were speaking ahead of a public debate at the Dana Centre, part of London's Science Museum. Full Article

British engineers are designing a Moon landing mission that would also test key technologies to take to Mars. The MoonTwins concept would put two probes on the lunar surface - one at each pole - to do science experiments. The work is being undertaken by the aerospace company Astrium at the request of the European Space Agency. Esa plans eventually to go to the Red Planet to retrieve rocks for analysis on Earth, and the Moon is seen as a good place to develop the know-how. "A Mars sample return mission would be very challenging and MoonTwins would help us understand some of the technology elements that would be needed, Full Article

Halo 3, one of the most anticipated videogames for the Xbox 360, will be released to the public in test, or beta, from 16 May. The online multiplayer element of the game will be made available to the public with feedback going to developers Bungie. More than 14.7m copies of Halo titles have been sold and more than 800m hours of online Halo games have been played. The beta will last for three weeks and ends on 7 June. Three multiplayer maps will be available - Snowbound, High Ground and Valhalla. Halo 3 is expected to be released in the last quarter of 2007 and is a key weapon for Microsoft in its rivalry with Sony and Nintendo. Full Article

The EU has launched a probe into what Apple's online music store iTunes charges users across Europe, accusing it of restricting customer choice. Brussels believes agreements between Apple and record companies violate EU laws by preventing users in one country buying music from a site elsewhere. The move follows a complaint by UK body Which? that British users have to pay more to download songs than others. Apple said it wanted to offer a single European service but faced obstacles. The Commission's move is unrelated to an agreement, announced on Monday, between iTunes and EMI to make the latter's music available online without piracy protection. Full Article

The long-awaited revamp of the Xbox 360 console, capable of displaying high definition video, has been launched. The black Xbox 360 Elite has a 120GB hard drive and will go on sale in the US in April for $479.99 (£255). No details of a UK release were announced. Updating the white 360 is the latest move by Microsoft in the battle to take control of the digital living room. It comes just days after rival Sony completed its launch of the high definition capable PlayStation 3 (PS3). Full Article

Vehicles may soon be swapping information about road conditions to warn drivers about jams and dangers. A German research project on show at hi-tech trade fair Cebit envisions a peer-to-peer network for vehicles on a road passing data back and forth. Cars or bikes experiencing problems would pass data that would ripple down the chain of vehicles behind them. Information would be conveyed to drivers via a dashboard screen or through a mobile phone headset. Full Article

Privacy bodies have welcomed Google's decision to anonymise personal data it receives from users' web searches. The firm previously held information about searches for an indefinite period but will now anonymise it after 18 to 24 months. "This is an extremely positive development," said Ari Schwartz, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a US-based watchdog. "It's the type of thing we have been advocating for a number of years." However, governments could still force Google to hold onto data or hand it over to authorities. "By anonymising our server logs after 18 to 24 months, we think we're striking the right balance between two goals: Full Article

The mobile world's movers and shakers are gathering at 3GSM in Barcelona and the key talking point is how to persuade people to do more with their handsets. User-generated content, mobile TV and location-based services are all likely to cause a buzz among the 60,000 visitors. With one billion handsets sold last year, it is certainly in a healthy state but the majority of customers are still stuck in a talk and text world. For Ben Wood, director at research firm CCS Insight, this year's conference will be the start of the journey to really bring the web to the mobile phone. To succeed where earlier attempts have failed, Full Article

Steve Jobs, the boss of Apple, has urged the world's largest record companies to begin selling songs online without security software. He said the abolition of copy protection software known as digital rights management (DRM) would be good for consumers and music suppliers. Copyright protection had failed to tackle piracy, he argued. The firm behind the iPod has been under pressure to make its iTunes music store compatible with other music players. Consumer rights groups in several European countries have lodged complaints with the firm over the incompatibility of iTunes with other music players. Full Article

The World Cup will be a testing ground for TV on mobile phones, says a report. The football tournament will give phone owners a taste of what the technology promises and let operators work out how their networks will handle demand. The report by analysts Informa predicts that more than 210 million people will be watching TV on their mobile by 2011. By that date, the technology behind mobile TV should have settled down and handsets that can handle the shows will be widely available. Mobile phone operators across the world are planning to use the World Cup as a way to get customers more interested in watching TV on their mobile phones, says the report from Informa Telecoms and Media. Full Article

The Discovery orbiter has been moved onto its launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, as part of preparations for a July lift-off. The slow procession from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the pad took almost eight hours. The space shuttle is scheduled to fly some time between 1 and 19 July. It will be only the second shuttle flight since the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry three years ago, killing all seven astronauts. Pointing skywards, the shuttle, already attached to its orange rocket fuel tank and two solid rocket boosters, inched along its four-mile (6.5km) journey atop a giant transport vehicle. Full Article

The new PlayStation 3 (PS3) will hit Japanese stores on 11 November, with the US and Europe following less than a week later, Sony has announced. The console will be available in two versions starting at $499 (394 euros). Sony revealed the launch details in Los Angeles ahead of this week's games expo E3. The PS3 is the successor to the best-selling PlayStation 2 and will compete with Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii. The machines make up the next wave of video gaming. The Xbox 360 is already available, while the Wii is due out later this year. Full Article

A real world cash card that allows gamers to spend money earned in a virtual universe has been launched. Gamers can use the card at cash machines around the world to convert virtual dollars into real currency. The card is offered by the developers of Project Entropia, an online role-playing game that has a real world cash economy. Last year, a virtual space resort being built in the game was snapped up by a gamer for $100,000 (£56,200). The buyer, Jon Jacobs who plays in the game as a character called Nerverdie, is developing the space station into a virtual night club through which the entertainment industry can sell music and videos to gamers. Full Article

Gene therapy used to treat children with no immune system could be far riskier than previously thought, a US study has suggested. The treatment is used for children with X-SCID - commonly known as "bubble boy" syndrome. The latest animal study in Nature found the treatment itself can cause cancer. But experts from Great Ormond Street, where nine children were successfully treated, said the study had used unnaturally high doses of the gene. They said other studies showed the cancer risk was not present when lower doses were given. Full Article

Sun Microsystems says co-founder and CEO Scott McNealy, who has been a critic of Microsoft, is to step down. The 51-year-old will quit the post with immediate effect, but will stay on at the company in the role of chairman. Sun's current president and chief financial officer Jonathan Schwartz will take over at the helm of the firm. The news came as the US firm revealed third quarter losses had widened to $217m (£121.4m) from $28m at the same time a year ago. Sun blamed a number of mainly merger-related charges for the fall - excluding the one-off costs losses fell to just 1 cent per share. Full Article

Computer users are being urged to update the Firefox web browser to close serious security holes in it. Some of the security lapses in Mozilla software, which Firefox is based on, could allow malicious hackers to hijack computers. There have been a total of 21 security flaws in various versions of Firefox, according to security firm Secunia. Users are urged to download the latest versions of all Mozilla programs to protect their computers from attack. The US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (Cert) warn that other Mozilla products including e-mail client, Thunderbird, and the internet application, Seamonkey, may also be affected. Full Article

Microsoft has snapped up one of the UK's leading figures from the world of video games, Peter Molyneux. The veteran game maker is best known for inventing the god game genre, where players control all that happens. The purchase of Mr Molyneux's Lionhead Studios is part of Microsoft's efforts to secure exclusive titles for its new console, the Xbox 360. "What we love about Peter is the innovation he brings," said Microsoft gaming division head Peter Moore. Full Article

Police are using the latest technology to clamp down on motorists who take to the streets without insurance. In some areas, as many as a third of drivers are said to be uninsured - although the nationwide figure is one in 20. Legal car users do not have to be hit by an uninsured driver to be affected. It already costs the honest motorist an extra £40 a year to cover the missing revenue. Full Article

The Burnout team swap cars for Kalashnikovs in a first-person blast that is big, dumb and full of guns and probably the last great shooter for the PlayStation 2 generation. There is a reason the developers describe Black as "gun porn". In this four-course feast for the explosion-starved, players fill the hobnails of Jack Kellar, part of the world's most brutal strike force, as he hunts down an ex-CIA operative in the Eastern Bloc. Full Article

Apple Computer Inc. has resorted to a poetic broadside in the inevitable cat-and-mouse game between hackers and high-tech companies. The maker of Macintosh computers had anticipated that hackers would try to crack its new OS X operating system built to work on Intel Corp.'s chips and run pirated versions on non-Apple computers. So, Apple developers embedded a warning deep in the software -- in the form of a poem. Indeed, a hacker encountered the poem recently, and a copy of it has been circulating on Mac-user Web sites this week. Full Article

Beat-em-ups, they always remind me of the "olden days". Groups of people huddled around arcade machines - winner stays on - and a decent queue forming to take on the recumbent champion, 10 pence pieces at the ready. This sort of thing doesn't happen much any more and it doesn't really have to. Our living room consoles have become far more adept at providing our entertainment for us. Full Article

After a white-knuckle takeoff, millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett soared out over the Atlantic in a bony-looking experimental airplane Wednesday on a quest to break the 25,000-mile record for the world's longest aircraft flight. Fossett squeezed into the tiny cockpit, kissed his wife goodbye and set out on the planned, 3 1/2-day nonstop journey, taking off from the Kennedy Space Center on a nearly three-mile runway. Full Article

"There are a lot of people who are going to be very unhappy on the third of February," said Professor Merrick Furst from the Georgia Tech College of Computing. That's when the Kama Sutra computer worm will begin destroying critical files on infected computers. And hundreds of thousands of machines may have the worm lurking within their Windows operating system, ready to be unleashed on February 3 and the third of every month thereafter. Full Article

Microsoft founder and Chairman Bill Gates believes cell phones are a better way than laptops to bring computing to the masses in developing nations, according to a published report. The New York Times reports that Craig Mundie, the No. 1 software provider's vice president and chief technology officer, told the paper that both he and Gates believe that turning a specially configured cell phone into a computer by connecting it to a TV and a keyboard is the best way to spread the power of computing. Full Article

The 20th anniversary of the first PC virus falls this month. It was during the opening weeks of 1986 that the first PC virus, called Brain, was discovered in the wild. Though it achieved fame because it was the first of its type, the virus was not widespread as it could only travel by hitching a ride on floppy disks swapped between users. Full Article