The grid that will process data from the Large Hadron Collider has undergone stress testing, with Cern and other organisations trying to gauge its limits.

The tests, called Scale Testing for the Experiment Programme '09, threw huge amounts of data around the distributed computing project, which uses dedicated optical-fibre networks to distribute data from Cern (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) to 11 main computer centres in Europe, Asia and North America.

The hot weather the UK has been experiencing in the past week or so doesn't seem to have caused too many headaches in IT departments across the country.

The latest silicon.com CIO Jury poll asked tech chiefs whether they'd taken any extra steps to protect their technology infrastructure during this week's heat wave, with nine of the 12 revealing they haven't.

CIOs spend countless hours listening to suppliers pitch their technology, so silicon.com decided to make the process a lot more entertaining by putting the vendors on the spot. Welcome to the 60-Second Pitch.

Suppliers have just one minute to pitch their product or service to a panel of current and former heads of IT, who then have the opportunity to quiz the vendor before giving the technology a green or red light - just for fun, of course.

Glastonbury - home to ley lines, juggling hippies, gurning students covered head-to-toe in mud and publicity-hungry minor celebrities showing off in their wellies.

And, this year, they were joined by 407 BBC staff. Yep, 407.

Airlines should scrap in-flight entertainment systems because they cannot compete with the thousands of songs and scores of movies that can be stored on modern media players, according to an aviation expert.

The pace at which airlines can update the selection of film, music, games and technology offered to passengers is being outstripped by constant advances in storage and functionality on media players, according to professor John Hansman, director of the International Technology Center for Air Transport at MIT.

The Ministry of Defence has awarded two comms contracts worth a total of £231m to General Dynamics UK.

The deals cover upgrading the UK Armed Forces' Bowman digital radios comms system and improving interoperability with other UK and Allied systems.

In the future, your mobile phone could become your holiday concierge, reminding you to check-in the minute you arrive at the airport or automatically ordering a taxi for you when your plane lands.

It's a vision that airline passengers could see become reality within the next 12 to 18 months, according to Jim Peters, CTO at airline IT supplier Sita.

June saw plenty of activity on the hardware and software fronts - including a peek at prototypes of a new kind of mobile gadget that's a cross between a smartphone and a netbook, from Freescale. The chipmaker was showing off so-called 'smartbook' prototypes at the Computex show in Taiwan. The design pictured above is intended for vertical displays.

Click here to see more smartbook prototypes.

Considering hitting the shops at the weekend? Looking for inspiration? Check out the latest in our series of gadget mini-reviews, courtesy of silicon.com's sister site CNET.co.uk, the home of technology reviews. For the full review and details, click on the link below.

What is it: 10.1-inch netbook with long battery life

Orange Business Services (OBS) has launched the pilot of a managed videoconferencing service that connects companies regardless of the vendor of their equipment or the type of network they are using.

Open Videopresence, which will be available on a monthly subscription, was unveiled at an event in Paris on Wednesday. The service can be used within and between companies, with meetings set up using an online portal or Microsoft Outlook. Orange can supply compatible equipment, although interoperability with other and older devices is part of the service.

It is likely Microsoft will offer a "Family Pack" version of Windows 7, according to language in a leaked test version of the operating system.

This week enthusiasts started buzzing over wording in the licence agreement in the test build that suggests Microsoft will have an option to buy a licence for Windows 7 that covers up to three PCs in the same household.

Apple expects to have a fix later this month for a vulnerability in the iPhone that could allow an attacker to gain control of the device remotely via SMS, a security researcher said on Thursday.

An attacker could exploit a weakness in the way iPhones handle SMS messages to do things like use GPS to track the phone's location, turn on the microphone for eavesdropping, or take control of the device and add it to a botnet, Charlie Miller, co-author of The Mac Hacker's Handbook and principal security analyst at Independent Security Evaluators, said in a presentation at the SyScan conference in Singapore. The presentation was covered by IDG News Service.

Oracle has unveiled the next generation of its middleware suite, Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g.

Fusion Middleware is Oracle's name for a variety of products - many acquired through company buyouts - that fall outside of its main database management and application product lines.

BT reckons a government plan to put a 50p tax on copper lines in order to fund fibre broadband to the country's hard to get to places can only go so far - and will probably never reach the last fifth of the UK.

The plan, unveiled last month in the government's Digital Britain report, is aimed at ensuring superfast broadband is rolled out to areas likely to be ignored by the market.

Revamped privacy settings are coming soon to Facebook.

The social network's privacy controls had reached the point where they were distributed across six separate pages and 40 different settings, according to a conference call the company held on Wednesday.

June was a month full of Apple-related news with the launch of the latest version of the iPhone, the iPhone 3G S, coming at the Mac maker's annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC).

O2 wasted no time in sharing details of the iPhone's UK pricing - revealing the new version would be offered at a higher price than its predecessor was when it launched a year ago.

The computer security industry historically borrows military defence concepts to combat digital threats, literally creating war rooms where experts follow attacks in progress on huge screens with phones ringing off the hook.

Not so at Google's Postini email security service provider unit. Instead, computerised systems monitor three billion messages per day that flow in and out of customer systems and pass through Postini's thousands of machines in datacentres around the US and in Europe before hitting the internet. The Postini system is highly automated, distributed and scalable, characteristic of all of Google's operations.

IT staff at British Airways (BA) have saved the company more than £2m by working for free or taking unpaid leave amid forecasts of a slump in airline IT spend this year.

Techies were credited by BA CEO Willie Walsh for being among the 7,000 of BA's 40,000 staff who cut back on hours or pay to help the company through the credit crunch.

It's almost security conference season in Las Vegas and with one month to go, a presentation has been pulled from Black Hat and Defcon.

Juniper Networks says it pulled a talk about a flaw in ATM software that one of its researchers was scheduled to give at the security conferences, after the ATM vendor complained.

There's a reason the first thing in Windows 7 that Microsoft chose to show publicly was its support for touch input.

That built-in ability to use two fingers to rotate, scroll and zoom offers tangible proof that the operating system is different from its predecessor, not to mention being something not found on a Mac.

Mobile applications are numerous but often lacking in quality. Quocirca's Rob Bamforth looks at what's needed to improve them.

"Mobile application stores - should they be controlled by handset manufacturers?"

Microsoft is trying to get a leg up in the real-time search wars by adding Twitter messages to search results.

The software company's recently launched Bing will now surface results for certain celebrities when users search their names and "twitter", the company announced Wednesday afternoon.

Microsoft on Wednesday launched a new datacentre in Dublin, describing it as the largest it has built outside the US.

The site is what Microsoft calls a "mega datacentre", a class the company has constructed previously only in the US. The company plans to open another mega datacentre in Chicago on 20 July, it said in a blog post on Monday.

The government has been slammed over its decision to press ahead with the national ID card scheme following Home Secretary Alan Johnson's announcement that carrying an ID card will never be compulsory for British citizens.

Plans to make ID cards compulsory for airside workers and pilots have also been dropped this week by the Home Office with trials planned for Manchester and London City airports both scrapped.

British Airways CEO Willie Walsh has said the airline will not extend in-flight mobile comms to any of its aircraft already in service.

BA is currently planning to launch a mobile email, web browsing and texting service from OnAir on two new Airbus A318 aircrafts in September of this year.

The government is turning co-ordination of its IT security training over to the information assurance arm of British intelligence agency GCHQ.

In the past, all government IT security training has been the charge of the Cabinet Office, through the office of the Central Sponsor for Information Assurance (CSIA). However, GCHQ said on Tuesday that its National Technical Authority for Information Assurance arm, known as CESG, will take on the role of co-ordinating the training effort.

Firefox 3.5, the embodiment of Mozilla's attempt to "upgrade the web", is now available for Windows and Mac.

Firefox 3.5 has a range of new features, including a new JavaScript engine for faster web applications such as Google Docs; the ability to show video built into web pages without plug-ins; a private browsing mode; fancy downloadable fonts; and geolocation technology that can let websites know where you are.

The shift to digital and on-demand content has not been kind to traditional media business models. So how can media companies ensure their survival in this ever so demanding digital world?

Business intelligence could well be the order of the day.

Transform your iPhone into an office with our pick of handy apps.

Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite

A parliamentary select committee is to check whether the recommendations proposed in the Digital Britain report are realistic, particularly those regarding broadband speed.

The Business and Enterprise Committee inquiry was announced on Monday. Many of the government's recommendations in Lord Carter's Digital Britain report, published earlier this month, require new legislation if they are to be put into practice.

You want your website to be noticed - but not without sacrificing quality. Stewart Baines weighs up the pros and cons of search engine optimisation.

In my previous column on search, I explained the basics of how search engine optimisation (SEO) - the art of raising your reputation among the billions of pages that search engines scan and index every month - works.

The government has announced it will drop plans to make ID cards compulsory for airside workers.

Pilots and other airside workers will not be forced to apply for or carry the cards, the Home Office said in a statement on Tuesday. As a result, a pilot scheme to issue workers with compulsory cards, which was planned for two airports, Manchester and London City, will not take place.

Global spending on IT could drop by 10 per cent this year, according to analysts.

The figure, from Forrester, is a drastic increase to the researcher's earlier prediction that worldwide IT spending in 2009 would fall by around three per cent year-on-year.

TalkTalk has hired a CIO for the first time.

The company announced today that it has appointed David Cooper to the newly created post in April, after previously splitting responsibility for IT across a number of individuals within the company.

The government has announced a venture capital fund for tech start-ups that it hopes one day will top £1bn.

The UK Innovation Investment Fund will gain funding from the Department of Energy and Climate Change and the Department of Health who will each match private sector contributions of up to £150m.

Let silicon.com keep you up to date with all the latest CIO job moves and changes with our regular CIO Job Report.

CIO moves

Dell has rolled out a SaaS package to enable European businesses to outsource functions such as email, software-licence management, disaster recovery and laptop encryption.

The Dell Modular Services package marks the company's first cloud-based services for European customers, Dell said in its announcement on Monday. The suite is already available in the US.

Telecoms companies may tell us it's good to talk but they seem to be struck dumb when it comes to communicating with their own customers, according to a new poll.

In a survey asking 5,000 Brits to vote for UK businesses with the worst customer service half of the top 10 are telecoms companies.

While every man and his dog seems to be bringing out a smartphone at the moment, several devices stand out from the crowd. Here silicon.com rounds up the current crop of smartphone heavy-hitters - starting with Apple's iPhone 3G S, still the device all other manufacturers look to beat.

Apple's latest is known as the 3G S, with the S standing for speed, in the shape of a faster processor. It also has a better camera (3MP), a video recorder, a digital compass and even an anti-fingerprint coating on the screen for maximum shine.

Levels of fraud have fallen at online payment provider PayPal thanks to cybercrime detection and prevention technologies.

Fraudulent transactions accounted for 0.28 per cent of the value of all payments using PayPal in 2008, down from 0.3 per cent in 2007, according to Garreth Griffith, head of risk management for PayPal UK.