The Belgian government accused the Chinese military of attempting to hack into its computer systems.

“The context of this affair and all the clues lead to China,” said justice minister Jo Vandeurzen, although he admitted there was no direct evidence that the attack had been backed by Chinese officials. It is also not known whether the attack was successful.

Public trust in data security is faltering, with the UK privacy watchdog issuing a report detailing almost 100 data breaches by organisations in the four months since HM Revenues and Customs lost 25 million citizens’ personal details.

Over 60 of the breaches were in the public sector while half of the 28 data losses reported by the private sector were in the financial services industry.

The Italian government took the HMRC’s approach to data security a step further, intentionally making the names, addresses, income and tax status of every single Italian citizen available on a public website.

The Italian tax office claimed the move was in the public interest “to allow the free circulation of information in a framework of transparency,” and “in line with privacy guidelines”. Italy's privacy watchdog disagreed and shut the site down 24 hours later.

German applications-maker SAP sent investor confidence plummeting after announcing it was delaying the release of its first software-as-a-service offering by at least a year. The company had hoped that the mid-market service Business ByDesign would attract 10,000 users and revenue of $1 billion by 2010, but CEO Henning Kagermann admitted this was now unlikely.

Chip maker AMD lost $538 million during the first quarter of the financial year and cut staff by 10%, despite growing its revenues by 22% to $1.5 billion. One factor contributing to the loss was a memory-handling flaw in the first batch of quad-core Opteron server chips, a fault which reduced performance by 10% and required investment in a software work-around.

Researchers at computing giant Hewlett-Packard claim to have developed a novel electrical component, long thought to be theoretically possible, that could preserve a computer's memory cache even when the device is switched off.

The property of memory resistance, or ‘memresitance’, was hypothesised in the 1970s but until now has not been created in practice. But a team of HP researchers says that it has built a physical ‘memresistor’ in their laboratory. The team’s research is published in the science journal Nature.