John Lister

IBM's latest work, the Chocolate Genome Project, isn't a wacky codename for a new game: it's a genuine attempt to uncover the DNA of the cocoa bean. The firm is teaming up with confectionary giant Mars and the US Department of Agriculture to track ... the genetic coding which makes up the bean used for chocolate production. The idea is to learn enough to isolate variants of the bean which can survive the growing problems of dry climates, fungi and insect attacks which have driven prices up by half in the past year, threatening many farmers' livelihoods. Around 6.5 million farmers depend on cocoa ... (view more)

A Turkish hacking group has vandalised the websites of those groups that run the Internet's address system. Sites belonging to the Internet Assigned Numbers Agency (IANA) and its parent organisation the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and ... Numbers (ICANN) both fell victim to the hackers. ICANN and IANA manage the routing system which allows web users to type in a domain name (such as www.infopackets.com ) rather than having to know the specific IP address (a string of numbers which identifies a particular computer) where the website is physically located. Their sites briefly redirected ... (view more)

Lawyers may have kicked up a stink over explicit scenes in a previous edition of Grand Theft Auto (GTA), but the game-playing public doesn't seem particularly concerned. This week, lawyers revealed that just 2,676 people filed claims; that may sound ... like a large number, but it's a tiny proportion of the 21.5 million people who'd bought the game at last count -- particularly as the settlement pretty much guaranteed free money for anyone who could be bothered feigning offence. It's all particularly interesting news given the popularity of this most recent release of GTA, Grand Theft Auto 4. ... (view more)

A leading cable firm has abandoned plans to monitor its customers' Internet use and sell the results to advertisers. Charter Communications, which is either the third or fourth biggest US cable company (depending on which stats you follow) announced ... the scheme in May. It planned to use the services of NebuAd, a California advertising firm which installs a physical device on an Internet provider's network. This device takes extremely detailed information about each individual customer's web use and then sends relevant adverts directly to their computer as they use the Internet. It's possible ... (view more)

Google has unveiled a system that will make it easier for online advertisers to find websites that can help reach their target audience. 'Ad Planner' is currently in testing and only available to selected customers, but the plan is to eventually ... make it available to everyone free of charge. Google's new stud should be remarkably simple to use, as advertisers simply type in details of their target demographic and some examples of websites they already know appeal to that audience. The system then returns a list of the best matches, along with details of the overall audience for each site and ... (view more)

A new Google tool to track the comparative popularity of websites has a notable hitch: it doesn't measure Google itself. The service also doesn't cover sites owned by Google, such as YouTube or Blogger. Google Trends for Websites is an extension of ... the existing service which measures the phrases people are looking for most often and how popularity changes over time. The new service tracks websites, making it a competitor to established trackers such as Alexa.com. Any user can get a graph showing traffic over time, while registered users can get further details such as estimated numbers and a ... (view more)

As Bill Gates officially leaves Microsoft to concentrate on his charity work, he's been giving a host of interviews featuring some intriguing stories from the big boss' perspective. Speaking to CNET, Gates revealed that Microsoft once had secret ... talks to discuss a merger with Lotus, a rival in the 1980s which developed both the 1-2-3 spreadsheet (one of the earliest successful PC applications aimed at a mass audience) and Lotus Notes (an email and messaging package designed for use in company networks). He also recalled that IBM actually withdrew an invitation for Microsoft staff to attend ... (view more)

There are major changes in store for the way Internet addresses work; The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), which runs the system used to 'translate' website addresses to the particular computer used to store each site's ... content, held its annual general meeting this week. It has backed plans to completely overhaul the top level domain system, which involves the letters that come after the final period in a site address. At the moment, the only letters which can be used are a two letter code for each country (such as .ca for Canada), or a few generic domains such as ... (view more)

If you love your 80s teen movies, you'll be very familiar with plots in which geeky teenagers (often played by Matthew Broderick) use dial-up modems and green-screen monitors to hack into their school computers and change their grades. Two ... California students have recently been charged over similar incidents where they reportedly used a blend of 21st century hacking and old fashioned brute force. Rather than simply looking in the principal's assistant's drawer for the password, they allegedly broke into the school and installed spyware on staff computers so that they could remotely access the ... (view more)

Many people have been wondering why the new 3G iPhone is much cheaper than expected. It turns out wireless carrier AT ... (view more)