Cisco Systems will buy cable TV equipment maker Scientific-Atlanta for $6.9 billion, the companies announced Friday. This acquisition marks a major strategy shift for Cisco, which has increasingly expanded its business into the home. The Scientific-Atlanta acquisition also firmly plants Cisco in the video market. With this gear, it will provide cable operators and the phone companies that also are entering the paid TV market an end-to-end solution for delivering video service.

Verizon Wireless and Research In Motion introduced the BlackBerry 7130e, the first BlackBerry handset that takes advantage of Verizon Wireless’ BroadbandAccess service on the company’s Evolution-Data Optimized (EV-DO) network. Coupled with Verizon Wireless’ new BroadbandAccess Connect pricing, the BlackBerry 7130e delivers all the popular email and data capabilities available with the BlackBerry wireless platform and can also serve as a modem for customers who want to use the device to connect their laptop with Verizon Wireless’ BroadbandAccess service.

Snowtide Informatics Systems announced an upgrade to PDFTextStream, its PDF content extraction library for Java applications and Web services. Version 1.4 expands PDFTextStream’s Pure Java API to include support for extracting PDF form data, enhances performance, and introduces an expanded PDF document model.

The United States claimed victory this week in the contest to keep control of the computers crucial for directing Internet traffic. But approval Friday of a plan to leave Washington squarely in charge hasn’t fully ended the debate: the European Union and a host of other countries are suggesting that a new multinational forum, which delegates to a U.N. technology summit also agreed to set up, simply delays the battle for another day. The forum, they say, still could ultimately leave several countries–and not the United States alone–with key decisions about domain names and the computers that direct the Internet’s flow of information, commerce and dissent.

TLCC (The Learning Continuum Company) has released another Notes Domino 7 course, Notes Domino 7 Application Development 1. This course is for developers who are new to Notes and Domino application development. Using Domino Designer 7, new developers learn how to create a Domino database, create forms, add fields to a form, create views, use the formula language, and create agents. They then enhance their application using framesets, outlines, pages, tables, single category views, hotspots, buttons, and actions. The student then completes the application by adding help documents and applying Domino security. This course is packed with demonstrations and activities to quickly get a new developer creating Notes and Domino applications. As they progress through the course the student builds a customer tracking application.

For years–decades to be precise–the OS/400 platform has been a popular choice for local and county governments, for much the same reason as it has been in other tight verticals: availability of applications. But we may soon be seeing even more local and county governments coming on board with the iSeries in the near future. In a recent interview, Chip McClellan, IBM’s senior marketing manager for market segments, he identified several "hot" markets that are being targeted by IBM for iSeries growth in 2006. Among those is government. McClellan says that this growth, which is occurring in all three geographies (Americas, Europe, and Asia/Pacific), is being driven, in part, by government spending on security, disaster relief, infrastructure projects (especially in Asia), and "broad-based investment in the public sector."

A Florida man known as the "timeshare spammer" was sentenced to a year in prison on Thursday for clogging in-boxes with millions of unsolicited email messages, in one of the first criminal prosecutions under federal anti-spam laws. Peter Moshou plead guilty in June to violating the U.S. Can-Spam Act after EarthLink sued him in January. In its suit, EarthLink alleged that Moshou sent millions of junk email messages in 2004 and 2005 offering brokerage services for people interested in selling their timeshares. The suit charged Moshou with numerous Can-Spam violations, including falsifying the "from" field in email addresses, using deceptive subject lines, failing to identify the sender, and failing to provide an electronic unsubscribe option.

A man described as Britain’s most prolific spammer has been sentenced to six years of prison. Peter Francis-Macrae’s sentencing on Wednesday in the Peterborough Crown Court followed his six-week trial and his conviction on charges of fraudulent trading, concealing criminal property, threatening to destroy or damage property, making death threats, and blackmail. Francis-Macrae of Cambridgeshire was accused of defrauding thousands of people by tricking them into sending him money to register an .eu domain name on their behalf. He was also charged with sending fraudulent emails to companies and claiming they had to pay a renewal fee to avoid losing their domain names.

Security sleuths at FaceTime Communications say they have linked a group of hackers operating in the Middle East to a worm that began spreading last month via America Online’s Instant Messenger service. Experts at FaceTime’s security unit reported Thursday that the hacker group has seized control of at least 17,000 computers across the globe. The hackers have the capability to pilfer personal information from a computer’s hard drive or remotely commandeer a PC to help launch attacks against companies or networks.

BeamYourScreen, provider of secure real time collaboration software-as-a-service solutions for small and mid-size enterprises, announced the launch of Version 2.0. BeamYourScreen allows businesses and professionals to share intuitive communication and collaboration across any distance by beaming their computer screen onto invited audience member’s desktops live over the Internet. With BeamYourScreen, clients can share their computer screen with invited participants within a safe, Web-based interface, either through secure site log-in at BeamYourScreen.com or directly from their Web site domain.