Week in Review: Facebook banned

Week in Review

It was a good week for Google as it started with news that the EU was backing its controversial plan to publish online the millions of books it has scanned as part of its Google books project. Sony also announced that it would be putting Google's Chrome browser on some of its VAIO PCs, marking the first time that Google's browser has been officially distributed.

Is social networking a time waster at work? Portsmouth City council seems to think so, and has banned its employees from accessing Facebook at work. And from the "completely obvious when you think about it department", Symantec has revealed that uploading too much personal information online could be bad for your career prospects.

In the war of the browsers, the long time battler Opera released the final version of Opera 10, in what seems like a brave but ultimately fruitless bid to take on Microsoft, Google, and Apple all giants compared to the pioneering, but small Norway based company.

eBay finally confirmed its sale of Skype for an actually quite reasonable $2.75 billion, which isn't bad considering nobody really understood why eBay had bought the company in the first place.

It wasn't a great week for web servers with both the open source Apache, and Microsoft's IIS server coming under fire from attackers.

On the mobile side, Windows Mobile 6.5 devices such as Sony's Xperia 2 and HTC's Touch 2, started to peek their heads above the parapet, while Nokia unveiled the N97 Mini and its Booklet 3G at the Nokia World show in Stuttgart.

Meanwhile, is the recession over? Intel seems to think it might be, with a very upbeat look at its performance so far this year.

Finally, our intrepid news and features Editor Nicole has spent the week enjoying the sight and sounds at VMWorld. Click here for a full run down of all the news out of this virtualisation-fuelled event.

Benny Har-Even

Benny Har-Even is a twenty-year stalwart of technology journalism who is passionate about all areas of the industry, but telecoms and mobile and home entertainment are among his chief interests. He has written for many of the leading tech publications in the UK, such as PC Pro and Wired, and previously held the position of technology editor at ITPro before regularly contributing as a freelancer.

Known affectionately as a ‘geek’ to his friends, his passion has seen him land opportunities to speak about technology on BBC television broadcasts, as well as a number of speaking engagements at industry events.