Bogus call sends SWAT team to home of unsuspecting family A 19-year-old Washington state man is due in court on Monday to face accusations he hacked into emergency 911 systems and faked a call that a sent SWAT team to the home of a sleeping family 750 miles away. Continued

Review Could it be a contender? Rock has a reputation for punching out high-performance laptops, and it’s latest line, the flagship 17in desktop-replacment X770 series, has a spec that suggests it’s no slouch either. Continued

ALK Technologies will finally launch the latest release of its CoPilot Live satellite navigation software across Europe this month. Version 7.0 will arrive - coincidentally - seven months after it was originally promised. Continued

French law bites Mac maker, again Orange will indeed offer Apple’s iPhone on France, but the most interesting aspect of the two firms’ partnership will be the availability, for the first time, of officially unlocked handsets. Continued

To subscribe to Channel Register’s weekly newsletter - seven days of channel news in a single hit - click here. As usual, we’ll start with the good news. Carly Fiorina is back in the public eye after far too long an absence following her departure from HP two years ago. Continued

Feeling left out by robust network T-Mobile joined the ranks of proper mobile operators with its own inadequately-explained network outage - losing data connectivity across its network for around four hours yesterday morning. Continued

Headed for HD showdown with BBC Britain’s communications watchdog has warned broadcasters they have no God-given right to reoccupy the analogue TV spectrum that they began vacating this week. Continued

Net profit slips Sony Ericsson has started to feel the margins pinch from its shift to lower-priced handsets, although it is still managing to keep a more successful balance than most of its rivals. Strong demand for its phones were the highlight of mixed third quarter results at Samsung, which remains hobbled by weakness in the semiconductor division. Continued

The UK’s ISP oligopoly Rapid consolidation in the UK broadband market means it’s now dominated by just six operators, who divvy up 94 per cent of home internet users between them. Continued

Cisco licking its chops? The persistent rumors that Cisco is close to making a WiMAX infrastructure acquisition resurfaced at WiMAX World last month, with most of the independent WiMAX vendors in the frame. Continued

Motorola has launched the Pebl-inspired U9 music phone that was forecast way back in July. The compact curvacious sliderphone sports a bright 1.5in OLED external display to give it that MP3 player feel. Continued

At last Motorola has taken a 50 per cent stake in UIQ, the phone user interface company spun out of Symbian last year. Continued

Which is it? It becomes increasingly hard to work out where the control point in handset design is. Once we all thought it was the hardware, then it was the operating system, and just as we start to think that it s the service layers above the operating system, then it s all in the network, an finally Apple comes along and tells us it s the hardware all over again. Continued

To subscribe to The Register’s weekly newsletter - seven days of IT in a single hit - click here Fries with that? Continued