Stories by: Peter Sayer

Private information stored in Apple's iPhone and protected by a lock code can be accessed by anyone with just a few button presses.

Oracle has bought Global Knowledge Software, a developer of enterprise software training automation tools, the companies said Thursday.

IBM has agreed to buy French software company Ilog for around US$340 million. IBM plans to combine Ilog's business rules management systems with its own business process management and business optimization tools, it said Monday.

SAP plans to close its TomorrowNow software maintenance subsidiary by Oct. 31, having failed to find a buyer for the company. It will help TomorrowNow's 225 customers to find new support providers before the company closes its doors, it announced Monday.

Google may conceal YouTube users' identities when it hands a database of their viewing habits to Viacom International in response to a court order, the companies agreed Monday.

For Google, ready Privacy: That could be the subliminal message Google wants to send by replacing its name on its famously spartan home page with a link to its privacy policy.

Microsoft is pinning its hopes on European researchers to help it shake up the search and advertising marketplace. It plans to open a search technology center somewhere in Europe by the middle of next year.

European researchers and politicians are counting on the development of a few key high-performance computing (HPC) centers to boost science and industry across the European Union. However, their bid to build a supercomputer capable of a million billion calculations per second is already falling behind the competition, with Japan and the US well on their way to that goal.

Venezuela has joined the list of countries that have lodged appeals against the adoption of an international standard based on Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) file format.

French bank Societe Generale expects to have remedies in place by year end for the technical and procedural flaws that allowed rogue trader Jerome Kerviel to build a fraudulent trading position that cost the bank Euro 4.9 billion (AUD$8 billion).

Deutsche Telekom has asked the public prosecutor in Bonn to investigate allegations that its security staff misused call data records on a number of occasions in order to track contacts between board members and journalists, according to company sources.