British users of Google’s email system will soon be able to have an account ending @gmail.com rather than @googlemail.com.

For the past five years the search firm has been prevented from using the shorter name due to a trademark disagreement with a company called Independent International Investment Research. According to a report by the BBC, the firm claimed it had used Gmail first.

Details of the settlement, which follows years of disagreement, have not been released but UK users will soon be able to change their address ending @googlemail.com to the shorter version – something Google expects will save around 60 million keystrokes a day.

In a blog post, Google said: “If you already have a Google email account in the UK, you’ll soon have the option to switch your existing @googlemail.com address to the matching @gmail.com one, but you’re also free to stick with @googlemail.com.”

The transition is due to take place over the coming week.

News home

Germans should soon be able to enter into official correspondence online instead of having to resort to putting it into physical writing, after the country’s postal service announced it would be offering an ‘Internet Letter’ service.

The new medium is designed to be more official than a standard e-mail, yet be simple and secure.

Deutsche Post is also stipulating that such communications must include the sender’s name, but is promising that they will not be able to be edited by third parties.

The service will also be available to people who do not have access to Deutsche Post’s internet portal. In these instances, the postal service will print out the letter and deliver a ‘hard’ copy of it as normal.

PostandParcel reports that July 2010 is the expected introduction date of the new service, which for the first time, will allow the distribution of legal correspondence, contracts and invoices.

One major feature of the ‘Letter im Internet’ service is that senders will not be allowed to remain anonymous. Both senders and recipients should also be confident that, thanks to the use of the latest encryption technology, their correspondence cannot be seen by any third party.

The first customers for the ‘internet letter’ include German automobile association ADAC, LOTTO Hessen, DekaBank, two insurance companies BIG Direktkrankenversicherung and Zurich Versicherung as well as the Kommunale Rechenzentrum Minden-Ravensberg/Lippe (krz) which handles correspondence for numerous local councils in Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine Westphalia.

These organisations jointly have millions of customers, including ADAC with 17 million members alone. Talks are under way with other large companies and organisations, Deutsche Post reported.

The attacks on Google email accounts belonging to human rights activists can be traced back to the Chinese government “or its proxies”, according to a US internet security firm.

Verisign’s iDefense Labs claims the web addresses involved in the cyber-attack “correspond to a single foreign entity consisting either of agents of the Chinese state or proxies thereof”, reports The Guardian.

The newspaper said researchers at the security firm have managed to find a link to the computer servers which controlled software used by the hackers. The company has also spoken to “several sources” which Verisign says have backed up its claims.

Earlier this week Google went public with news of the attacks, and said it is considering pulling out of the country and ceasing its business operations in China. The search giant, which began operating in China in 2006, said it is no longer prepared to censor internet results in order to comply with Chinese law.

In response, China said it intends to stand firm over censorship of certain internet content and that media companies must “live up to their responsibility of maintaining internet security”, which includes censoring content.

The Chinese government has said it will stand firm with regard to censorship of the internet following Google’s threat to withdraw from the country.

A report in the Financial Times this morning quoted Wang Chen, the head of the State Council Information Office and deputy head of the Communist party’s propaganda department, as saying internet media must “live up to their responsibility of maintaining internet security”, which includes censoring content.

Yesterday Google announced it would consider pulling out of the country if the Chinese government refuses to let it operate without censorship. The move follows a series of attacks by hackers on Google email accounts owned by human rights campaigners, which were discovered to have originated from China.

In a statement issued on a government website, Chen said: “The importance different countries attach to internet security is different. We must …, from the angle of national security, information security and cultural security, actively respond to the challenges in internet security and … find a path of internet development with Chinese characteristics.”

At no point did Chen mention Google by name, but his comments have been seen as the first response to the American company’s public threat.

When Google began operating Google.cn in 2006 it had to agree to censorship of some online content in order to stay within the law. The company said it felt “the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open internet, outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results”.

However, since the end of 2008, the government in China has taken a harder line with regard to content it deems to be either pornographic or harmful. Over time this has included thousands of blogs and websites, many of which level criticism at the government. Social networking sites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter have also been banned.

Owners of BlackBerry mobile handsets in the US and South America have been hit by service problems for the second time in less than a week.

Users across a range of mobile networks complained of being unable to access the internet or personal email accounts on Tuesday. Phone and text service are not believed to have been affected.

A similar network issue occurred last Thursday, leading to questions being asked over the stability of the device. BlackBerry manufacturer, Ontario-based Research in Motion (RIM), has apologised for the connection problems, but would not say how many customers had been affected.

RIM said the problem, which may be linked to recent versions of the smartphone’s Messenger programme, has now been addressed.

Sky News reported that some BlackBerry owners were venting their anger on the social messaging website Twitter.

One said: “RIM needs to hurry up and fix the problem. If these BlackBerry outages start happening too frequently, I’m going to get an iPhone.”

“All BlackBerry services were down all day over North America. No tweets, no email, no bbm. I felt so ancient,” another posted.

In the UK, mobile network operator O2 was forced to apologise earlier this week after some customers were unable to make calls or connect to the internet for up to 36 hours.

Thousands of accounts on web-based e-mail system Hotmail have been compromised in a phishing attack, software giant Microsoft confirmed. BBC News says it has seen a list of more than 10,000 e-mail accounts, predominantly originating from Europe, and passwords which were posted online. Microsoft said it had launched an investigation.

Phishing involves setting up fake websites to lure people into revealing details such as bank accounts or login names.

“We are aware that some Windows Live Hotmail customers’ credentials were acquired illegally and exposed on a website,” said a Microsoft spokesperson. “Upon learning of the issue, we immediately requested that the credentials be removed and launched an investigation to determine the impact to customers.”

Graham Cluley, consultant at security firm Sophos, told BBC News the published list may just be a subset of a longer list of compromised accounts. “We still don’t know the scale of the problem,” he said.

Technology blog neowin.net was the first to publish details of the attack. It said the accounts were posted on 1 October to pastebin.com, a website commonly used by developers to share code. Although the details have since been removed, BBC News and Neowin said they had seen a list of 10,028 names beginning with the letters A and B.

BBC News later confirmed that the accounts were genuine and predominantly originate in Europe. The list included details of Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail accounts with email addresses ending hotmail.com, msn.com and live.com.

Mr Cluley advised Hotmail users to change their password as soon as possible. “I’d also recommend that people change the password on any other site where they use it,” he said. Around 40% of people use the same password for every website they use, he added. Hotmail is currently the largest web-based e-mail service.