The UK's Ministry of Defense has awarded more than $377 million worth of contracts to General Dynamics for two communications system programs. The contracts include upgrading the UK Armed Forces' Bowman digital radio communication system, and improving interoperability with other UK and Allied systems reports Silicon.com.

IDG News Service reports that security researchers Charlie Miller and Colin Mulliner have discovered a vulnerability in the way Apple's iPhone handles text messages received via SMS. Miller will unveil more about this at next months Black Hat USA conference in Las Vegas. Miller has alerted Apple of the flaw and IDG says Apple may be working on a patch ahead of Miller's presentation.

Last Friday (6/26) a contract security guard working for United Protection Services at the Carrell Clinic in Dallas was arrested and accused of hacking into the hospital's computers. Specifically, the authorities believe Jesse William McGraw, 25, who goes by the hacker alias "GhostExodus", installed malware on the systems and planned to use the botnet to launch a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on July 4th.

The recent high profile deaths of a number of celebrities, particularly Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, have brought an onslaught of spam and phishing emails trying to sell you something, steal your personal information or infect your PC. The U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team (US-CERT) has even issued an advisory warning about these Internet scams.

From US-CERT:

"US-CERT is aware of public reports of an increased number of spam campaigns, phishing attacks, and malicious code targeting the recent deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett. These email messages may attempt to gain user information through phishing attacks or by recording email addresses if the user replies to the message. Additionally, email messages may contain malicious code or may contain a link to a seemingly legitimate website containing malicious code."

Anonymous sent us news that "CBS 2's Kris Habermehl reports, no one was able to check in for outbound United flights at [Chicago's] O'Hare as of 6:45 a.m. The problem had already been going on for an hour or more by then."

It seems that an as-of-yet unidentified "computer glitch" is the cause of the problem.

The UK's Home Secretary on Tuesday announced that the new national identification card will not be mandatory for British nationals. The cards will now be issued only to people who want one, however, there is speculation that the end of the compulsory nature of the card might mean the entire program is going to be cancelled.

The U.S. government launched a new online tool Tuesday that provides Americans with a way to track how and where tax dollars are spent on government and military IT projects.

The IT Dashboard is accessible at USASpending.gov. It has been launched as a beta, and not all the features are live yet. However, the site is already full of charts, news, analysis tools and data feeds that you can customize.