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Will Gmail users be forced to change their e-mail accounts?

Those Gmail barons at IIR Group Plc are at it again. According to WebProNews, IIR has filed a claim with the US Patent and Trademark Office to wrest control of the Gmail trademark away from Google in its home market. If successful, prepare yourself for the drastic: IIR would demand Google change the name – and pay damages. In other words, gone goes the @gmail.com handle from millions of e-mail accounts.

Pay for BitTorrent? That's the plan

BitTorrent, the P2P pioneer once demonised by Hollywood, is going legit. To the profound disappointment of teenage download fiends everywhere, the Silicon Valley-based firm will launch on its site at some point today the "BitTorrent Entertainment Network", a download store for movies, music videos and PC games. As of this morning, the site was still carrying a "Stay Tuned" banner.

SkypePro offers free calls – at a price

Skype has launched a new service that lets people call landlines from PCs without paying a per-minute charge, but users will have to buy a monthly subscription and pay a connection fee for each call they make.

Subscriptions to SkypePro will cost €10 (£6.70) for a five-month introductory period, and then will continue at €2 (£1.35) per month. The connection fee varies according to the currency in which it is paid, but in UK pounds is 3.3p per call and in euros is 4.5 cents per call.

Skype users have always been able to call other users without paying anything, but until now had to pay 1.7 euro cents per minute when using SkypeOut to call a landline. SkypePro subscribers in 15 European countries will be let off the per-minute charges, but all users will have to pay the connection fee for SkypeOut calls.

The complexity of this price structure may be no accident. Skype, owned by eBay, is keen to introduce more paid-for add-ons to its free web calls base, but the fledgling market in internet-based phone calls is extremely price sensitive. Any opportunity to muddy the waters as far as price comparisons go will be seized with both hands.

French politics enters the virtual world

Nicolas Sarkozy has joined the growing number of real people and companies setting up shop in the virtual world.

The French presidential candidate has opened a campaign office in the online game Second Life, with some help from the French blogger Loic Le Meur.

Jobs: the future of education? Fire bad teachers

Forget about wiring up classrooms and handing out cheap laptops. Improving the educational system must start with a low-tech solution: firing lazy teachers, says Steve Jobs in his latest save-the-planet public address. Call it Jobs' "Thoughts on Education", which also includes the controversial measure to cut off the crooked cabal of textbook publishers who drive up the cost of education.

Webcam diplomacy

Israel has started to broadcast live footage of an archaeological dig at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem in an attempt to demonstrate that the foundations of the site are not under threat.

Fighting between Palestinians and Israeli police broke out last Friday after Muslim groups claimed that the mosque would be damaged. Work to replace a broken wooden ramp was suspended, but excavations continued.

VoIP won't mean cheap mobile calls: T-Mobile

The age of cheap IP-based phone calls on your mobile handset may be a more difficult proposition than first thought. That's the disappointing news coming out of the annual 3GSM conference in Barcelona this week.

 

New York proposes ban on killer iPods

According to at least one New York state lawmaker, iPods kill. That's why this state senator – remember the name Carl Kruger, particularly if he gets laughed out of office some day soon – wants to slap a $100 fine on anyone who ventures across a busy city street fidgeting with the 5-ounce killers. The same goes for Blackberrys, mobile phones, handheld video games like the PSP, and on and on.

Huge web attack: what’s your alibi?

Someone tried to bring down the internet last night, and it might have been you.

Hackers targeted 13 of the servers that control the internet with a denial of service attack, using infected PCs to bombard it with traffic in an attempt to close it down. They take over unprotected computers using trojans, malicious programs that allow individual PCs to be controlled remotely without the owner’s knowledge.

Jobs "wholeheartedly" shifts DRM blame

Have the Norwegians brainwashed Steve Jobs? Are they the ones who have forced him – possibly at gunpoint – to denounce the evils of digital rights management and pledge to open up iTunes to everyone? Not so fast.