President Elect Obama does not want to give up his cherished Blackberry phone. Despite the security (personal and data) that surround the device.

He is fighting with the laws that prevent the president from having such a device and the ones that exist to preserve all presidential communications for posterity.

The Blackberry (and indeed almost all Cellular devices have means to be tracked remotely. This (to me at least) would seem to be reason enough to do away with the device as it puts the President at risk to long range remote attacks. But not for Obama, I guess he is hoping that big red "s" he is going to have tattooed on his chest will protect him.

As they say, all good things must come to an end and in this case it's Intel's much beloved Q6600 processor which brought fun and frills to many enthusiasts and overclockers for nearly two years running.

Come the first quarter of next year, the beginnings of a phase-out will take place as Intel shifts it toward an end-of-lifecycle during the second quarter where we'll see the wonder chip dissapear off the market for good.

Though AMD's upcoming Phenom II (Deneb) series of 45nm processors aren't set to be launched until the opening day of CES next year (January 9), a few e-tailers seem assured of the launch pricing on the two models that will hit the market initially and they haven't kept it under wraps either!

What we know is that the first two models will comprise a Phenom II 920 at 2.8GHz and a 940 Black Edition which comes out of the box at 3.0GHz. An aussie website has revealed that the 940 Black will hit the market at just AU$532 (€264 / US$342) whilst an italian e-tailer listed prices on both models, with the 920 coming in at 251 Euro and the 940 at 299 Euro.

With streaming rental services becoming more popular than ever these days, Blockbuster has decided to team with 2Wire for the purpose of offering an On-Demand streaming MediaPoint player which allows for powerful streamlined access to a massive range of movies from the rental giant.

The MediaPoint digital player features Blockbuster's new "BLOCKBUSTER ONDEMAND" service and both DVD and HD video content is supported. The box carries a full range of connectivity options including component, HDMI, composite as well as Toslink, 802.11b/g WiFi and of course Ethernet. The unit is also quite compact with dimensions of just 8-inches x 8-inches x 1-inch (around the same size as Apple TV) and it comes with a user friendly remote.

We first heard last week that Cooler Master has planned a special treat for the holiday season; a limited Black edition of its popular COSMOS chassis which will see just 500 units make their way to very happy chappys.

Aside from the sleek black appearance inside and out, details on what other trinkets this limited run will bundle with remain scarce for the time being. However, PCGamesHardware has acquired two images of the case which allow us a better look at it than what Cooler Master's been willing to show thus far.

YouTube gave itself a nice little upgrade a short time ago, which no doubt some of you have spotted already. With the 4:3 aspect ratio mostly being a thing of the past, they decided they should get with the times and allow for widescreen (16:9) content to be uploaded and watched in full aspect.

As a result of this, the site's layout also gets expanded to 960 pixels so as not to cripple the video in any way. Furthermore, existing 4:3 content will not be stretched (rather, you'll just see two black bars on each side) so as to retain the original aspect.

***New information***

In Part III of our XenServer 5.0 soap opera, I have been contacted by Citrix directly who are stating that XenServer 5.0 does indeed have Windows 2008 Server support.

They explain that they lack of Widows 2008 server in their supported OS page was an "our bad" mistake. They have also provided me links to their "what's New" page that references Windows 2008 server. The What's new page goes on to state "Tuned for Windows - XenServer adds support for Windows Server® 2008, has been optimized to run Windows-based workloads (up to 30% faster) and has been certified on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Server through Micrsoft's Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP).". XenServer 5.0's installation Guide also lists Windows Server 2008.

A new security exploit has been uncovered in Google's Gmail that could be a problem for many domain owners.

In an article over at Geekcondition.com they explain that a filter can be forced on unsuspecting Gmail users that can forward certain emails to a remote user. This flaw in Gmail was reputedly fixed by Google but appears to still be active and open.

According to the Geekcondition article this flaw has been used to take over domains setup on GoDaddy.com

Things are heating up in both the Blue and Green camps, at least in the PR departments. As new CPUs are launched both sides are diving into the PR fray with abandon.

With AMD's recent announcement of hitting 6.GHz with the new Phenom II and SubZero Cooling they have moved away from their usual Xenophobic PR workings. This has taken away some of Intel's i7 thunder and caused Intel to start up its own PR monster.

From the Intel camp we hear rumblings that AMD has finally caught up with Yorkfield and Penryn with the new Phenom II but still cannot match i7 at stock speeds.

More iPhone legal woes are popping up. This time it is the browser that is being subjected to litigation.

EMG Technologies is seeking damages as well as future royalties from the fruity company. All this over the way Safari Browses around the internet.

As the title of the EMG Technologies' patent suggests "Apparatus and Method of Manipulating a Region on a Wireless Device Screen for Viewing, Zooming and Scrolling Internet Content" it seems they have a lot of ground covered.