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Lenovo has bought back the mobile phone arm that it sold to a private equity firm at the start of 2008, the company said on Friday.

The manufacturer sold Lenovo Mobile to the Hony Group for $100m just under two years ago, and has now bought it back for $200m in cash and stock.

According to the company, Lenovo Mobile is the number three handset maker in China.

"As Lenovo's global PC business continues to make steady progress, we view mobile Internet as a key growth opportunity moving forward globally," group CEO Yang Yuanqing said in a statement.

"Lenovo has prepared itself in this area. We have developed first class products with excellent hardware and operating systems integration. We will launch these innovative new products in China soon."

Explaining why it was reversing its plan of focusing on its core PC business, Lenovo said in its statement that the "acquisition reflects the changed market conditions of the past 18 months".

Businesses running open Wi-Fi networks should brace themselves for a slew of copyright warnings from rights holders, internet law expert Lilian Edwards has told ZDNet UK.

Edwards also warned that, apart from the civil cases that can already be launched against such businesses, future laws could lead to disconnection before appeal unless the government is lobbied by the business community.

On Friday, ZDNet UK reported how, according to the managing director of hotspot firm The Cloud, a pub was fined £8,000 this summer for copyright infringement, due to downloads made over the pub's open Wi-Fi hotspot.

ZDNet UK asked Edwards, who is professor of internet law at Sheffield Law School, to give advice to companies who run such hotspots for customers or visitors.

"You're probably OK for now in terms of data retention," Edwards said, "but watch out for the pile of copyright infringement warnings coming your way."

Edwards then warned that the upcoming Digital Economy Bill, which could make it possible to have internet subscribers disconnected for repeated copyright infringements, could make matters worse for businesses with open Wi-Fi hotspots.

Referring to the fact that it is currently not yet clear as to whether those facing disconnection would get their chance to appeal before or after being cut off, she said businesses should "lobby for the upcoming Code of Practice to allow an early appeal against [warnings] before rather than after you get disconnected".

Risks to successful online banking identification and authentication using smartcards involve a mixture of human and technological factors, according to the European Network and Information Security Agency (Enisa).

The agency launched a paper on Thursday detailing the risks of using electronic identification smartcards for online banking services. A number of European countries have proposed the use of ID smartcards for online transactions. The Enisa paper points out which risks need to be mitigated for those transactions to be acceptably safe.

Enisa spokesman Ulf Bergstrom told ZDNet UK on Thursday that human and technology aspects are "intrinsically linked". However, in terms of processes, Enisa said that governments and banks need to cooperate more closely for smartcard authentication to work.

"The biggest room for technical improvement which we underline is that banks and governments must cooperate better to be able to use national eID cards for banking purposes," said Bergstrom.

Risks include flaws in smartcard design and cryptography, vulnerabilities in the user's PC, weaknesses in authentication architecture, weaknesses in infrastructure, and lack of user awareness.

Gary McKinnon's extradition to the US to face hacking charges is set to move forward, after home secretary Alan Johnson said he will not intervene.

McKinnon's supporters had asked the minister to halt the extradition on the grounds that it would be a breach of McKinnon's human rights. They argued that the move would be inhuman treatment under the European Convention, as the Londoner has been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome.

According to a report in the Daily Telegraph on Thursday, Johnson said he had carefully considered the fresh medical evidence presented to him, but had found that it was not "materially different" from that already considered by the high court and did not demonstrate a potential breach of McKinnon's human rights.

"As the courts have affirmed, I have no general discretion. If Mr McKinnon's human rights would be breached, I must stop the extradition. If they would not be breached, the extradition must go ahead," Johnson is quoted as saying.

The home secretary added that the US authorities had given him assurances that McKinnon's health and psychiatric needs would be met. He also said it was not likely that the hacker would be sent to a supermax prison.

McKinnon faces charges of hacking into US military computers, which could bring a sentence of up to 60 years.

McKinnon's mother, Janis Sharp, said in a Twitter post that her son's legal team will seek a judicial review of Johnson's decision within a week. She also expressed concern that the government might expedite the review to enable McKinnon to be sent to the US before Christmas.

The BBC has a nice story for anyone who hopes that IT can bring economic benefits to disparate communities. Which it should, given that you can do anything online from anywhere on the planet - forcing people to huddle together is a relic of the industrial revolution.

The story, that Dumfries and Galloway council has given permission for "one of the biggest data centres in the world" to be built in south-west Scotland, is on the face of it all good news. There's not very much there at the moment - it's one of the UK's least populated areas - and if you're going to gobble electricity then you might as well do so in Scotland where the potential for non-carbon generation from hydroelectric, wind and wave power is top notich. And with sympathetic design and careful production, a data centre can be made to fit in wonderfully with landscape and environment.

But there are things you can't escape - extra infrastructure such as roads, car parks, shops and all the bits to keep humans mobile, warm, fed and happy. These need to be lit at night - and there's a lot of night in Scotland.

And that has implications. For Galloway has just become home to a Dark Sky Park, one of the very few in the world - places where light pollution is so low, the sky at night is displayed in its unblemished splendour. (I must admit to a personal bias here - I spent a few nights earlier this year at the Galloway Astronomy Centre, home of the biggest publicly accessible telescope in Scotland, and saw things you people would not believe. Seriously. How about a constellation of spy satellites, wider than the full moon, moving in perfect formation from horizon to horizon in a couple of minutes? Or a globular cluster of thousands of stars, filling the field of view like so much spilled salt?)

It's not as bad as it might be - the Dark Sky Park is quite far from the site of the new data centre, and a plan to build 750 houses was junked. But light pollution is visible over a very wide area: it's not just that the park is dark, it's that the areas around are dark, too.

So, one hopes very much that the approval for the new centre includes provision for proper assessment of the light pollution and, if necessary, a requirement to minimise it. For it is perfectly possible to design low-impact public lighting without imposing Blitz-level blackouts: it's just that, until recently, nobody ever thought they should. Lighting can be effective and economic and not spill half its photons into the sky where they do no good and lots of harm.

Opera has updated the Chinese version of its mobile browser to stop users accessing restricted content.

Opera Mini was updated on Friday from an international to a Chinese version, the BBC reported on Tuesday. This version no longer allows users to access Facebook, the BBC said.

Previously Opera Mini had run on Opera servers located outside the country, bypassing the Great Firewall of China, the BBC added.

Opera joins other search companies in censoring Chinese content. Microsoft's Bing censors Chinese search results even outside of China, according to Ars Technica, while Google set up Google.cn in 2006 partly to censor itself on behalf of the Chinese government, the BBC reported.

Security company Symantec has said that one of its websites was successfully breached.

Romanian security researcher 'Unu' posted details of the breach in a blog post on Monday.

Unu claimed to have cracked the Symantec server using a blind SQL injection attack, and to have accessed customer information and passwords.

Symantec on Tuesday confirmed the crack.

"A SQL injection vulnerability was identified at pcd.symantec.com," said the company in a statement. "Symantec has remediated the website vulnerability, resulting in little to no customer impact. The website facilitates customer support for users of Symantec's Norton-branded products in Japan and South Korea only. This incident did not affect Symantec customers anywhere else in the world. The incident pertained only to customer support in Japan and South Korea and did not affect the safety and usage of Symantec's Norton-branded consumer products at all. Symantec is still investigating the incident has no further details to share at this time."

The National Health Service's flagship IT project has been criticised by a tax campaign group for running billions of pounds over budget.

The NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT) has overspent by £10.4bn, the Taxpayers' Alliance said in a statement on Friday.

"These [government] projects are so poorly planned at the outset," Taxpayers' Alliance policy analyst John O'Connell told ZDNet UK on Friday. "NPfIT costs have spiralled out of control."

O'Connell said that the original government costing for NPfIT had been £2.3bn, but that this figure subsequently ballooned to over £12.5bn in a 2008.

A spokesperson for Connecting for Health, which administrates NPfIT, told ZDNet UK on Friday that the £2.3bn figure had originally been put forward in 2002 as projected costs over three years.

The spokesperson added that the Taypayer's Alliance had been "incorrect to pull that figure of £2.3bn out and say that was the projected cost of the entire programme."

However, when NPfIT was first started in 2002, ZDNet UK has found there were no public projected cost figures for the programme.

The Connecting for Health spokesperson told ZDNet UK on Friday that £2.3bn over three years was first put forward in the Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) for 2002. This is not correct. CSR 2002 makes no mention of this figure.

When challenged by ZDNet UK to give documentary evidence that the £2.3bn figure was for three years, the spokesperson pointed to a document from February 2004. Aside from being two years after NPfIT started, this document, New NHS IT, states that the £2.3bn was over the first three years, but makes no reference to any government documents from 2002, apart from the 2002 Wanless report, which recommended a doubling of NHS IT funding at the time.

E-Health Insider reported in January 2003 that the £2.3bn was for the first three years of the project, calling the news "long-awaited official confirmation" of the figure.

The world's biggest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, is in operation again after more than a year of repairs.

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research, Cern, said in a statement on Friday that particle beams are once again circulating in the LHC, and that a clockwise circulating beam was established at 10 PM local time.

According to the Cern Twitter feed, an anticlockwise beam was also successfully injected, and both beams have completed many thousands of turns of the LHC.

"The LHC is up and running regularly. Operators are adjusting and testing obedient beams," according to the Cern Twitter feed.


The particle accelerator, which is in an underground location spanning the French-Swiss border, was started up for the first time in September 2008. However, it was decommissioned after only nine days in operation because a fault in a copper splice caused an explosion. Since then, Cern has been working to investigate, repair and eliminate the fault, and to get the LHC cooled to operational temperatures.

"The LHC is a far better understood machine than it was a year ago," said Cern’s director for accelerators, Steve Myers, in the statement. "We've learned from our experience, and engineered the technology that allows us to move on."

The aim of the LHC, which has taken 15 years and €10bn to build, is to conduct particle collision experiments that could shed light on fundamental questions about the origins and nature of the universe.

One of the UK's leading climate change research centres has had a security breach.

The Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA) suffered a compromise of information, a UEA spokesperson said on Friday.

"We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites," said the spokesperson in a statement. "Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all of this material is genuine."

"This information has been obtained and published without our permission and we took immediate action to remove the server in question from operation," the spokesperson continued.

"We are undertaking a thorough internal investigation and we have involved the police in this enquiry."

At the time of writing, the UAE spokesperson declined to comment further. It was unclear whether the breach was internal or external.

Professor Phil Jones, who is involved with climate research at the facility, was not available for comment at the time of writing.

Sophos senior technology consultant Graham Cluley blogged on Friday that details of over 1000 emails and 3800 documents were leaked onto a Russian FTP server:

"A 61MB zip file containing information stolen from one of the world's leading climate research centres, was posted onto an anonymous FTP server in Russia, accompanied by a note saying:

'We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps'," wrote Cluley.