All UK homes should have access to broadband and faster download speeds by 2012, the government has said.

An interim report on the UK’s digital future also looked at plans for public service broadcasting.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said digital technology was as important today as "roads, bridges and trains were in the 20th Century".

But the Conservatives said the report promised "no new action". The Lib Dems said it was a "complete damp squib".

Culture Secretary Andy Burnham told MPs it would help Britain secure a competitive low carbon economy in the next five to 10 years, adding the country "led the world in content creation".

The report called for everyone in the UK to have access to a broadband speed of up to two megabits per second (Mbps).

This would make internet connections capable of handling much more video and sites that offer greater interactivity.

By the time of the final report, the government will know whether internet service providers (ISPs) can build next generation networks themselves or if government help will be needed.

Full story here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7858498.stm

Cisco Systems announced in a press release on Tuesday the launch of a three-stage plan to help IT businesses reduce their carbon emissions, through the use of their new EnergyWise technology.

Primarily designed for Cisco’s Catalyst switches, EnergyWise reports and reduces the energy consumption of devices such as mobile phones, laptops and wireless access points.

In the press release, Judy Lin, senior vice president of the Ethernet Switching technology group for Cisco said, "With EnergyWise, Cisco is uniquely positioned to help our customers gain a network wide view of energy consumption that encompasses not only device-level power, but in the future entire network efficiency, building operations and business practices across an entire organization."

The first stage of the plan, to be launched in February, will see Cisco Catalyst switches receive a free software upgrade that will make it possible for businesses to monitor and control the energy consumption of any devices connected to the network, by automatically turning off or reducing power to them when they are idle.

The next phase, due in the summer, will see support of EnergyWise expanded across the industry, to include devices such as PCs, laptops and printers.

For the final phase, in conjunction with Schneider Electric, EnergyWise will be extended to include the management of building systems, such as heating, ventilation, air conditioning, elevators and lights, as well as access, fire and security systems. This final stage is expected to begin in early 2010.

Jeff Ton, vice president of IT for Lauth Property Group, believes that the use of EnergyWise could lead to annual energy savings of 15 to 20 percent across their portfolio of commercial office buildings. "This could equate to energy savings of 19 to 33 cents a square foot, which over the course of a year could be thousands of dollars in energy related savings," he said.

News source: Neowin.net

A windows worm named Conficker or Downadup or Kido (as called by various anti-virus vendors) which targets unpatched networks and poor passwords has been reported to have affected 2.4 million machines to over 8.9 million during the last four days by a Finnish anti-virus maker F-Secure.

The worm spreads via a vulnerability due to RPC flaw that Microsoft patched in October 2008. Once on a machine, it sets up an HTTP server and resets a machine’s System Restore point to stop administrators deleting it.

This new worm which belongs to the usual Trojan family, downloads new files from their own malware server and generates hundreds of random domain names to scan for updates.

The numbers given by F-Secure has been criticized by many other vendors and has made F-Secure to explain its method of calculating the size of the malware’s breakup. Servers in China, Brazil and Russia seems to have been affected most.

News source: Neowin.net

Yesterday morning, thousands of previously happy Microsoft Zune 30 owners woke up to a interesting situations. Their Zunes were dead in the water.

As Neowin reported yesterday, "At exactly 2am CDT (12am PDT), the docked Zune made the ‘unplugged from USB port’ bong-noise and went to the boot-up screen with the 100% loading bar…and froze." This situation was similar if not identical for every other Zune 30 owner who had their devices turned on. Those who didn’t received the New Years Eve surprise when their turned on their device to be greeted by the Zune boot screen, and nothing else.

Microsoft acted quickly, undoubtedly after being bombarded with angry phone calls, emails, Tweets and message board posts. Shortly after 2pm PDT, Microsoft posted on their ZuneInsider blog and explained the problem and the solution.

Early this morning we were alerted by our customers that there was a widespread issue affecting our 2006 model Zune 30GB devices (a large number of which are still actively being used). The technical team jumped on the problem immediately and isolated the issue: a bug in the internal clock driver related to the way the device handles a leap year.

The issue should be resolved over the next 24 hours as the time change moves to January 1, 2009. We expect the internal clock on the Zune 30GB devices will automatically reset tomorrow (noon, GMT). By tomorrow you should allow the battery to fully run out of power before the unit can restart successfully then simply ensure that your device is recharged, then turn it back on. If you’re a Zune Pass subscriber, you may need to sync your device with your PC to refresh the rights to the subscription content you have downloaded to your device.

Microsoft says they’ll have an updated firmware for the Zune 30 out before 2012, which is the next leap year and the next time this problem is scheduled to happen.

Rest of the editorial here: http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/01/01/the-day-the-zunes-stood-still