Servers go to trailer parks in Iceland

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Easter ID theft

While we in the UK were taking a break on Good Friday, thieves in Chicago walked into the headquarters of Chicage Public Schools and stole two laptops which contained names and social security numbers of 40,000 teachers. Ouch. Authorities have apologised and are trying to get the information back.

Sun Fujitsu boxes ready to ship

We've got an exclusive story on next week's announcement of new boxes from Sun and Fujitsu. The Olympus systems are based on Fujitsu Sparc processors and are aimed at the mid to high range customer.

Salesforce does content

Salesforce.com has done a good job of changing the market for sales and customer management software - by making it available to people who didn't even know they wanted it - and now it wants to do the same thing for content management. It's bought a company called Koral, which is the toast of the blogosphere for being so easy to use.

Summer's here, let's go to Iceland

Summer brings its own problems for data centres which increasingly struggle to keep temperatures and power demands down. So maybe there's a grain of truth in suggestions that Cisco and Microsoft are looking at relocating to chillier climes.

Local reports suggest that both companies are considering opening server farms in Iceland - the country has oodles of green power thanks to geothermal power stations.

Redneck server farms

Another view of the future of data centres came from a Microsoft researcher backing an idea first mooted by Sun and Rackable Systems - put your server room in a shipping container. Power and cooling needs are reduced and the whole kit and caboodle can be moved to wherever cheap power is available - like Iceland we guess.

Que passe Pipex?

You may have missed reports over Easter that the takeover of ISP Pipex has all gone a bit dodgy. Bankers UBS were trying to get Carphone Warehouse, BT, Virgin and Sky taking part in a bidding war, but interest is waning. None has gone public yet, but it seems only Carphone Warehouse is still keen.

Six years old and 100 million sold

Apple's iPod is six years old and the company has sold 100 million of the little white boxes. It launched in November in 2001 in a Mac only version.

Never feed a troll

This week saw the tail-end of a heated debate on blog manners. This started when marketing wonk Kathy Sierra received a flame email and cancelled an appearance at a conference because she took the death threat seriously.

This led Wiki creator Jimbo Wales and Tim O'Reilly to suggest some etiquette for the blogosphere. It hasn't received much praise yet, but see what you think.

HP inks speed record

Ink behemoth HP is claiming records for its new colour printer which can knock out 50 colour prints a minute. It uses a series of printer heads across the width of the page. New technology makes sure the prints are dry to the touch almost instantly.

NHS IT promises summer launch

The NHS IT programme is promising a summer arrival for its super site of patient information. It promises to be one of the more visible aspects of the programme and will be piloted in libraries from April.

Oops, I did it again

Content management can be tricky, but Ebuyer has been caught pinching content from rival websites again. This time it was using product descriptions from MoreComputers.com. And, once again, it left the images on MoreComputers.com's servers so it bore the cost of serving up information to Ebuyer customers.

Security round-up

Tuesday was Microsoft's monthly patch extravanganza with six bulletins released, five of them considered critical. Some of the information was released early because of widespread efforts to exploit the hole.

Interesting research from Forrester this week on how much security breaches actually cost. An inexact science, as it freely admits, especially as public concern sees increasing attention paid to such problems. The boffins reckon each record lost could cost your company between $90 and $305. US data laws mean more and more breaches are reported rather than covered up.

This week's biggest blunder was in the US, where 2.9 million Medicaid recipients in Georgia discovered their names, addresses, social security numbers and other information had been lost.

That's all folks. Have a lovely weekend. ®