IT PRO – Businesses shy away from prosecuting cyber criminals
Businesses often shy away from sharing information about cyber crime with the police because they do not want to end up dealing with a public court case, according to an expert. John Harrison, an independent consultant with three decades experience working for BT, said that companies often don’t want to prosecute when they become a victim of cyber crime.

ITVT – YouTube Trumpets “Sophisticated” Usage of its Interactive Video Annotations Service
In a posting on its corporate blog, Monday, YouTube noted that its Interactive Video Annotations service–a set of tools that allow users to add text and hyperlinks directly onto their videos–is now one year old. According to the company, the service has since its summer, 2008 launch been “put to use with increasing sophistication” in order to, among other things: Provide dynamic commentary, Add interactive links and menus, Create branching storylines, Create interactive games and entertainments.

Computing – Berners-Lee briefs Brown on opening up government data
Sir Tim Berners-Lee has visited 10 Downing Street to update Gordon Brown and the Cabinet on the progress of his task to make government data more open and accessible. The inventor of the web and his colleague Professor Nigel Shadbolt, from the University of Southampton, were asked in June to help open up public data. According to Number 10, Berners-Lee told the Cabinet about the goal of delivering a single online access point to government information, similar to the one introduced by President Obama’s administration in the US.

Computer World UK – Security execs are insecure about Twitter
According to this report from Computer World security event in San Diego, security execs hate Twitter

FT.com – Apple TV rivals offer far more features
While Apple figures out what to do with its languishing Apple TV – it quietly dropped its 40Gb model on Monday leaving only the 160Gb version – there are plenty of other contenders scrapping to bring networked content to the big living-room screen. Among them – FreeAgent Theater+, announced by Seagate today as an improved version of the unit it launched only six months ago.

The Telegraph – Guardian staff told to expect redundancies
In a letter to staff, Guardian News & Media managing director Tim Brooks warned that planned steps to stem losses meant redundancies were “likely”. He wrote: “We are looking at everything – literally everything – that we do, to see how we can economise, and we will do whatever we can to keep the impact on staff to a minimum. However, because the biggest portion of our costs is people’s salaries, we have to review staffing levels.”

BBC News – Facebook grows and makes money
Facebook has begun making money, ahead of schedule. The world’s largest social networking site is now ‘cash flow positive’, something it hadn’t expected to achieve until 2010. Founder Mark Zuckerberg said: “This is important to us because it sets Facebook up to be a strong independent service for the long term. We are succeeding at building Facebook in a sustainable way. We are just getting started on our goal of connecting everyone.” Facebook also announced it now has 300m active users worldwide, up from 250m in July, and is currently gaining users at a rate of 5m a week.

BBC News – French ‘pass’ piracy legislation
The French National Assembly has passed a draft law that would allow illegal downloaders to be thrown off the net. The French hard-line policy on piracy has drawn worldwide attention as nations around the globe grapple with the issue of piracy.

BBC News – New Africa broadband ‘ready’
A new high-speed undersea cable connecting East Africa with the rest of the world is poised to go live, Kenya’s top internet official has told the BBC.

Paid Content – Lovefilm Looks To BBC Canvas; C4, UK Film Council In Talks
Project Canvas director Richard Halton told the Westminster Media Forum that he expects the BBC, ITV, Five and BT-backed IPTV venture to ultimately offer a mix of free and paid-for content. He said: “Canvas offers scope for lots of different models, but Canvas doesn’t have some puritanical view that if you don’t offer some free content you’re not allowed in. It’s an open platform.”

Computer Weekly – Businesses find new uses for mainframes
Businesses are finding more ways to use their IBM System z mainframe platforms, a study from IDC has found. Far from being killed off, the mainframe is still considered a significant platform for running applications, according to the analyst firm.

Computer Weekly – Crowdsourcing reveals 600 search engine flaws
A competition for software testers to reveal bugs in major search engines has unearthed over 600 in Google, Google Caffeine, Bing and Yahoo.

The Register – Rights commission slams police DNA database advice
The Equality and Human Rights Commission has criticised the Association of Chief Police Officers’ advice to chief constables to continue adding profiles of innocent people to the DNA database. The advice recommends continuing to apply existing retention policy until the Home Office issues new guidance in 2010. According to the commission, this does not meet a European Court of Human Rights requirement for there to be clear reasons for holding DNA data on someone who has not been convicted of a crime.

Silicon.com – Intuit snaps up start-up Mint.com in $170m deal
Financial software maker Intuit is to acquire Mint.com for $170m. Intuit said the acquisition of Mint.com, a start-up launched two years ago that tracks personal finance data, will help it gain more clout in the software-as-a-service sphere.