Wireless wonder goes one better One of the IT world’s stranger creations, the originally Eastern European Cybiko, has now been succeeded by the Cybiko X-treme 2. The updated PDA, geared toward teens, is being previewed at the E3 entertainment and games show in the US this week. Sleeker, slimmer and more powerful than its predecessor, the CyX2 aims to become the handheld of choice for young gadget-heads. It is due to US hit stores in September priced at $150 (about £105)....

CIA turns nose up at EU snoop troupe European parliamentarians visiting Washington last week were snubbed by the Bush administration and cut short their trip intended to pursue suspicions that the US uses a global eavesdropping device codenamed ‘Echelon’ to spy on European companies, according to an EU source. The Bush administration refused to meet the delegation. The NSA (National Security Agency) and the CIA also refused a meeting, said Carlos Coelho, chairman of the European Parliament temporary committee on the Echelon interception system, on his return from the US....

Motorola slashes workforce Motorola yesterday announced it would cut 7,000 staff from its mobile handset division. This second cutback brings the mobile phone manufacturer’s total job losses to 12,000 since December. Although Motorola refused to comment on where the redundancies would fall, it is likely some cuts will be made at the Swindon branch and in Scotland. “Where the cuts will be made has not yet been confirmed,” said a spokesperson at Motorola....

Another nail in Napster’s coffin Music file-sharing service Napster implemented a filtering system on Sunday night, meant to block users from downloading banned song titles, but by Monday afternoon users found they were able to bypass the system in some cases. Unfortunately for the firm, as it had warned, one of the flaws of the system is that it can filter out only exact file names – songs with file names that have been misspelled or made up by users won’t be blocked....

Forum – NEC laptop for Registered Users To celebrate the runaway success of the Tech Advisor discussion forums we’re giving away another prize. The best contributor between now and 16 March 2001 will win the stylish Versa Aptitude C600 notebook from NEC, primed with all the usual multimedia trimmings. Last month regular contributor China walked away with an award-winning Evesham desktop PC after consistently providing outstanding postings in all four of our forums....