News Wrap: Corus, web perverts sentenced, Intel, memory breakthrough

A telecoms company says it wants to hire many of the workers about to be made redundant by steel manufacturer Corus to fill 4000 new jobs.

EXi Telecoms plans to recruit the workers as part of a huge programme to upgrade infrastructure for the sector.

Unions at Corus are trying to organise retraining programmes which would help prepare Corus workers for jobs at the telco, which currently employs around 1700 staff.

Web paedophiles' sentences slammed by activists

Child protection groups have reacted angrily to news that seven members of the largest internet child porn ring have been given jail terms of just 12 to 30 months, sentences which are less than the maximum allowed of three years.

Two of the group, Ian Baldock and David Hines, have been placed on the sex offenders register for life, while the other five, Gavin Seagers, Ahmed Ali, Andrew Barlow, Antoni Skinner and Fred Stephens, will be kept on the register for seven years.

Since the arrests of the members of the so-called Wonderland Club, legislation is being changed to impose sentences of up to 10 years for the distribution of child pornography.

Intel to close down streaming media network

Intel is to close its dedicated network for streaming media broadcasts, Internet Media Services (IMS), before June.

When IMS was opened in May last year, Intel said it would market the service to companies that wanted to broadcast stockholder meetings, training courses or other events over the web, and promised a $200m investment to create a worldwide streaming backbone.

However, the market for streaming media has fallen short of predictions and IMS failed to gain much of the limited market that did emerge.

University researchers claim memory compression breakthrough

Keele University scientists have applied for patents covering a number of inventions thought to be capable of increasing the capacity of computer memory.

The researchers claim to be able to compress 10.8 terabytes of data into an area the size of a credit card, opening up the scope for more power mobile computing.

Another invention compresses text in binary form by reading only the differences between words, while a third claims to increase the capacity of optical disks by a factor of four.