Crumbs

The scares over the use of Wi-Fi technology keep rumbling on, and it's starting to get concerning.

Events kicked off in March when controversial medical professional George Carlo was welcomed into Parliament by Ian Gibson MP to call for wireless networks - GSM, 3G and Wi-Fi - to be restricted as much as possible. Carlo claimed there were significant health risks which would be incurred by coming within reach of such radio waves.

Round two kicked off when the BBC relayed the results of tests in its Panorama programme last Monday which showed that the strength of Wi-Fi signals are much stronger than those of mobile phone basestations.

But unfortunately round two is continuing. Take this article, which quotes council leaders as saying they may be unable to roll out wireless LANs because of the concerns of users.

Now I'm all up for listening to how users want to use technology, but that can really only happen when arguments are based on solid facts.

Panorama's facts were rather ropey. The gist of the argument was that if you monitor the strength of a radio wave next to a Wi-Fi-enabled notebook, it is stronger than the strength of the radio wave being transmitted from a distant mobile basestation.

Gee, those are laws of physics.

Children put mobile phones to their skulls. Children do not, by and large, put Wi-Fi enabled notebooks to their skulls, and so really should have nothing to worry about.

However, the debate has started and it looks set to mushroom. As the council leaders said, a report from a respected organisation - perhaps the Department of Health - is required to settle a few nerves.

Unfortunately, we're not likely to get that for a while, if at all.

There is nothing more dangerous than the public reacting to something which scares them and is unproven.

Apart from needlessly turning your back on proven technology which can drive productivity through your business.

Three journalists working for news.com, a website owned by ZDNet UK's parent company CNET Networks, are preparing to file a lawsuit against HP for invasion of their privacy.

The private phone records of Dawn Kawamoto, Stephen Shankland and Tom Krazit were scrutinised by investigators working for HP.

The dispute stems from an investigation of HP's directors initiated under its former chairman, Patricia Dunn. To try to uncover leaks from Board members, private investigators examined the phone records of a total of nine journalists who covered the company, as well as the records of some of their relatives.

HP has admitted acquiring the records through subterfuge, a practice called pretexting.

Now the three news.com journalists are intending to sue HP, as was reported in an article from the New York Times, which was published on Monday by news.com.

None of the three reporters are now allowed to cover HP in their day-to-day work.

The other reporters investigated by HP worked for The Wall Street Journal, Business Week and The New York Times.

My US-based colleague Tom Krazit has picked up on an interesting blog from Sun Microsystems concerning OpenOffice.

Sun is to help with the port of OpenOffice to Aqua, the Mac user interface. All that means Mac OS X users might see a native version of OpenOffice much earlier than originally thought.

This is Tom's version of events.

HP is to help fund IT training for graduates and unemployed people under the age of 25 across the Europe, Middle East and Africa region.

Its funding contributes towards a wider programme called GET-IT, or Graduate Entrepreneurship Training through IT. GET-IT aims to give younger people a much better chance to enter the IT profession and to start up their own businesses.

Needless to say, HP's contribution will be in the form of equipment, while the actual training will be provided by 35 not-for-profit organisations in 18 countries.

The PC vendor didn't say how much money it was ploughing into the work, but the overall project is worth $1.4million.

Seemingly there's not a skills shortage any more, but any effort to increase IT skills in Europe has got to be a good thing - as long as they are the IT skills that are really needed by businesses.

Bob Fuller, the chief executive officer of 3 UK, is to retire in June when he reaches his 60th birthday, the mobile operator said today.

Fuller will be replaced by Kevin Russell, who has been the company's deputy CEO since January. Fuller joined parent company Hutchison in 1982, and headed the operations of Orange for two years in the late nineties.

The chairman of 3, the wonderfully named Canning Fok, stays on. Once again, we're deprived of that headline we're still dying to write: "Fok off".