Monthly Roundup: November

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The release of the BlackBerry Storm has dominated the IT headlines as Christmas 2008 looks to be the battleground of a smartphone war, with big players such as Google, Nokia and Apple slugging it out.

With the gap between enterprise and consumer getting smaller by the day, it’s becoming a difficult choice to decide what people will want to be using for the next 18 months or so.

It was also the month where the controversial ID card scheme became a reality for a number of people, with foreign nationals and airport workers the first willing - or unwilling? - participants.

The BBC also decided to make its TV licensing virtually unenforceable by making BBC 1 and BBC 2 available for live streaming.

The threat of malware and viruses was clearly highlighted when a virus managed to bring down three London hospitals, causing them to run on backup power and causing disruption which had the potential

Cybercrime just isn’t going to go away, and the thieves are changing their targets. Email phishing has been around a long while, but it’s the social networks which are big targets, with Facebook the website of choice.

IT PRO also revealed that virtual worlds such as Second Life were also becoming increasingly targeted by malware writers, as they often held details and even virtual items which could have some value in the real world.

At home, a big piece of computing history might have seen saved with news that English Heritage gave the codebreaking institution a £330,000 grant.

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