Siobhan Chapman

The 2010 World Cup in South Africa will be remembered for the droning soundtrack provided by the vuvuzela, a long plastic horn that has divided opinion among spectators.

A range of online petitions have emerged to call on World Cup organisers to ban the traditional horn which makes a droning noise comparable to a swarm of bees. Meanwhile, other international fans have bought horns with plans to bring them back to their own country.

The Apple iPad officially went on sale in the UK at 8 a.m. today, however some pre-order units of the touchscreen, tablet-style computer were delivered a day early.

On Twitter, people have been celebrating the early arrival of their iPad. "Bit of breaking news for you. UPS just delivered my colleagues iPad, one day early!" wrote Twitter user, Jamie Bishop (@ J4m1eb).

Julian Assange, the founder of the whistleblower website Wikileaks, has had his passport confiscated by immigration officials when he arrived at Melbourne Airport last week.

According to reports, the passport was returned to him after about 15 minutes, but Assange was told by authorities that his passport was going to be cancelled because it was looking worn.

iPad and iPhone developers beware. Apple reserves the right to kill an app at any time with no reason, and Apple's liability in any circumstance is limited to $50 (£30).

This is one of the highlights of the secretive iPhone developer program license agreement, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation has published in full.

An Apple lawyer has told Silicon Valley gossip site Valleywag that it "crossed the line" after the site started a scavenger hunt for proof of the rumored upcoming Apple tablet device.

Valleywag offered up to $100,000 for photographs or videos of any forthcoming tablet computer.

The power of the Web and communications will help the world to face global challenges like poverty, human rights abuses, and climate change, said U.K. prime minister Gordon Brown.

Brown made a surprise appearance as speaker at the TED Global conference in Oxford last week, where he said technology -- such as blogs, YouTube and Twitter -- meant that the world could no longer be run by "elites."

Worldwide IT spending is expected to decline by a further six percent this year, according to analyst firm Gartner.

The firm said it was expecting to see IT spend total $3.2 trillion in 2009, a 6 percent fall against the $3.4 trillion it saw in 2008.

U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has appointed Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee to improve access to government data, including MP expenses.

Berners-Lee will lead a review on how the Government can best use the internet to open up access to official information. He will oversee work to create a single point of access for government held public data.

The cloud computing business model is a threat to traditional information technology, but for end users, it carries a risk of "lock-in."

While cloud computing is useful for short term, scalable projects or batch processing, it is still not widely adopted by enterprises yet, James Staten, principal analyst at Forrester told delegates at the analyst group's annual European IT Forum, hosted in Berlin.

Artwork: Chip TaylorIT and business technology will take center stage in the post-recession economy, according to George Colony, CEO of Forrester.

In his keynote address at Forrester IT Forum in Berlin, Colony described the current economic turbulence as a "gateway recession" that will connect two different eras.

Now is the time for companies to compel their software suppliers to lower their maintenance charges, according to Forrester Research.

The recessionary times and the rise of software as a service (SaaS) models has put pressure on software vendors to cut support charges or lose business, according to Forrester senior analyst Duncan Jones.

Intel's record $1.44 million fine for breaching competition laws will open the floodgates for civil actions, a competition lawyer has said.

The European Commission issued its biggest ever competition fine to Intel, after ruling that Intel made secret payments and offered kickbacks to retailers in exchange for them exclusively stocking Intel products and not those of rivals.