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Ever since people starting nicking passwords, credit card details and other information from other people’s hard drives, the subject of identity theft has been a rather sensitive one in modern society. A recent survey conducted to kick off awareness of NIFPW, or National Identity Fraud Prevention Week, shows that a massive 97% of British consumers are concerned that companies don’t take good enough care of their personal data. We’ve all fallen foul of giving out an email address or mobile phone number only to be bombarded by spam and ’special offers’ in the past but concerns run a bit deeper than day to day annoyances. With 92% of respondents worried that their own employer may not be able to keep customers’ sensitive data safe it seems clear that the safety measures in place at the moment aren’t really sufficient. Adrian Chiles is the figurehead for the new campaign, and says that “Britain’s businesses have come a long way in protecting employees and customers from identity fraud, yet, while many have introduced stringent identity fraud prevention policies, more than a fifth of businesses in the UK still don’t have comprehensive strategies in place.” Sort it out then Blighty! You can find more information about NIFPW from the link below, including how it occurs and how to prevent it. - Paul Lester [StopIDFraud] fraud theft hacker

Original post by nafiz

Popular Mechanics has a quiz, a list and videos of 100 skills everyone should know, the article says “men” but as I went through the list I know more women who can do more of the skills than men, so I’m going to suggest they call it “100 skills everyone should know”… check it out, see how you do.

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Original post by Phillip Torrone

The little Mobile Internet Device (MID), the PocketSurfer2 from DataWind, has just been revamped with the PocketSurfer2R, boasting free UK Internet access for the lifetime of the device for a £60 one-off payment. If you don’t want to fork out the £60, then you still get a year’s free Net access in the UK, up to 20 hours per month. Datawind are also promising much reduced roaming rates for outside the UK, at 5p per minute, down from 25p per minute. PocketSurfer2R retains many of the key features of the predecessor, with its quirky thumb-friendly QWERTY keypad and the 640 pixel full-colour wide screen display, for viewing Web pages as they were intended. The 2R is a quad-band device - no 3G though - and comes with in-built GPS receiver. There’s also a new trackpad like those on laptops in place of the direction keys on the 2, to allow for easier Web navigation. These are the key specs:Touchpad Mouse Navigation • Backlit QWERTY keyboard • Sub 7 Second Page Load • Web Browsing in Original Layout • Embedded GPS satellite receiver • 174 grams. 152 x 75 x 15 mm • Lithium Polymer Battery • 4 Hours Battery Life • In-built High Performance Antenna • Transreflective Backlit Display • 640 x 240 VGA Colour • Mini USB Charger The downside to this is that the PocketSurfer2R is just that - for surfing and emails only. There’s no support for “audio, video or fast moving gaming applications”. On sale now, it costs £199 at John Lewis Partners, PC World, Maplin, Amazon and Ideal World, among others.-Martin Lynch mobile internet

Original post by nafiz

There’s been plenty of talk of big names from the music industry taking advantage of the internet in promoting or releasing new songs and albums. Oasis is the latest band willing to risk an impact on their album sales and though it hasn’t gone so far as to just throw the thing at PirateBay, it has put the whole album up for playback on its MySpace page. Of course savvy users will be able to ream off a list of software as long as your arm that can record audio direct from a sound card, so we can see naughty people ripping this thing to MP3 quicker than you can say ‘digital download’. According to Oasis’ official website it’ll be available from mid-day on the 1st of October, in other words round about now. Though apparently it’s having some problems with the MySpace music player so you might have to keep checking back until the issue is resolved. The new album “Dig Up Your Soul” is officially released on the 6th of October and the first single, “The Shock Of Lightning” is available to buy on iTunes now. All hail the modern age of digital music! - Paul Lester [Oasis] [Oasis Myspace] Oasis Myspace digital music

Original post by nafiz

Despite over 30,000 cases being settled out of court for a few thousand dollars a pop, the RIAA has never been successful at trial in upholding its five-year copyright infringement litigation campaign. The first and only federal jury verdict against a P2P file sharer has recently been made in a trial where defendant Jammie Thomas was expected to be handed a fine of around £150,000 for infringing copyright by distributing 24 music tracks she made available on the Kazaa network. However, despite U.S. District Judge Michael Davis ruling last year that the recording industry did not have to prove anybody downloaded the songs, a last-minute u-turn saw Davis decide that he may have committed a ‘manifest error of the law’ and ordered a retrial. The RIAA isn’t happy, and says that requiring proof of actual transfers would cripple efforts to enforce copyright owners’ rights online. Digital rights groups point to the fact that the damages awarded in these cases are completely disproportionate to the damages suffered. According to the Copyright Act, fines of up to $150,000 can be made per music track, and Thomas’ $222,000 fine in this case was around 500 times the cost of buying 24 separate CDs and over 4,000 times the cost of three CDs. It also points out that the jury is still out on whether RIAA investigators break the law when gathering evidence, since they’re not licensed to do so. Is the RIAA taking the p*ss with these exorbitant figures? Or are they legitimately trying to protect the interests of the owners of the copyright? - Paul Lester [Wired] RIAA copyright P2P

Original post by nafiz

You have to laugh. No really. What else can you do when here in the UK you struggle to get half of your 2Mb or 4Mb per second ‘advertised broadband speed’ and in Japan, some lucky east coast surfers are about to get 1Gbps broadband. KDDI Corp has announced a fibre optic communications service with upload and download speeds of up to 1Gb per second on Oct 1. Aimed at people living in “single-family homes and low-rise apartment buildings”, the 1Gbps service will be a drastic leap up from the not exactly slow, 100Mbps broadband already available. It will cost around £35 per month - including telephone - as long as people are willing to sign up for two years. Can you imagine the customer complaints? “Hi, I have a complaint. I signed up for your 1Gbps broadband but according to my speed tester, I’m only getting downloads of around 550Mbps.” Where the hell is my passport?-Martin Lynch [Japan Today]

Original post by nafiz

The much-hyped revamp of the Xbox 360 Dashboard and online LIVE service, labelled the ‘New Xbox Experience’ is picking up pace with the launch of a new site showing the major changes. One of the biggest changes will be players getting to create their own avatars, which we covered here and you can see the video of the simple and cool-looking process after the jump. There are also simulation videos on the new site demonstrating other changes like Parties, an improved social networking side so you can jabber with friends using a ‘deeper level of interaction’, and extra community content. There’s also something called an ‘Inside Xbox’ channel but there’s no detail yet. Overall, the new look and features look slick and polished. Those expecting this to arrive after today’s big maintenance outage will be disappointed. Major Nelson says that it will NOT be coming today but somewhere vaguely after the Fall.-Martin Lynch [New Xbox Experience via Kotaku] Video: Avatars in the new Xbox experience xbox console wii

Original post by nafiz

The online operating manual for your government is now more complete… Not the type of “code” we’re usually posing here!

From a paper-choked sublet office in Sebastopol, Carl Malamud is operating a kind of nonprofit Napster, with offerings a little less sexy than the music of Metallica, Dr. Dre and Green Day.

Example: 404.1. All plumbing fixtures, other than water closets and urinals, shall be equipped with approved strainers having an approved waterway area.

That’s a snippet of the 2007 California Plumbing Code, a print version of which might cost $125. But Malamud purchased the code and placed it on his Web site - and now anybody can download all 526 riveting pages free.

Or the building codes, fire codes, or mechanical codes from California, San Francisco or Los Angeles. Or millions of pages of other codes, all legally obtained by Malamud, who then uploaded them to public.resource.org for anybody to take, even though many of them are copyrighted.

“Not everybody is going to read the building code, but everybody who wants to should be able to without putting 100 bucks in the slot,” Malamud said. “Primary legal materials are America’s operating system.”

His actions perturb government agencies, technical organizations and publishers who create, maintain and sell books of codes. While some say they do not plan to oppose Malamud’s efforts, others question the legality of his site and the wisdom of his actions.

Thanks Derek!

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Original post by Phillip Torrone

The versatile free service that is Google Maps recently added another feather to its cap when it announced that it is bringing traffic updates to the UK. Well, we should be clear here and say that major roads in England get traffic predictions but if you live in Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales you’re out of luck, at least for the time being. Not only will it tell you what the traffic is like in any particular area at the current time, it also stores this information so it can build traffic predictions based on past history to give you an idea of how likely you are to get held up on a journey. It’s certainly a nice addition and hopefully means that we won’t have to shell out for additional hardware and annual fees to retrieve traffic information on GPS-based devices for too much longer. - Paul Lester [Google Maps] Google traffic google maps

Original post by nafiz

This is pretty handy, you can now search old newspapers on Google… Official Google Blog: Bringing history online, one newspaper at a time…

For more than 200 years, matters of local and national significance have been conveyed in newsprint — from revolutions and politics to fashion to local weather or high school football scores. Around the globe, we estimate that there are billions of news pages containing every story ever written. And it’s our goal to help readers find all of them, from the smallest local weekly paper up to the largest national daily.

The problem is that most of these newspapers are not available online. We want to change that.

Today, we’re launching an initiative to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives. Let’s say you want to learn more about the landing on the Moon. Try a search for [Americans walk on moon], and you’ll be able to find and read an original article from a 1969 edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

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Original post by Phillip Torrone

The City Of London Police has decided not to investigate BT’s trial of the controversial ‘Phorm’ advertising monitoring system on unsuspecting users last summer. BT secretly trialled Phorm without telling thousands of users that their Web browsing habits were being monitored, resulting in angry users taking action and filing a dossier of evidence with the police in July. Alex Hanff, the anti-Phorm campaigner who compiled the dossier, received an email from City of London Police saying: “The matter will not be investigated by the City of London Police as it has been decided that no Criminal Offence has been committed. One of the main reasons for this decision is the lack of Criminal Intent on behalf of BT and Phorm Inc in relation to the tests. It is also believed that there would have been a level of implied consent from BT’s customers in relation to the tests, as the aim was to enhance their products.”Nicholas Bohm, lead counsel at legal think tank, the Foundation for Information Policy Research countered: “City of London Police’s response expresses massive disinterest in what occurred. Saying that BT customers gave implied consent is absurd. There was never any behaviour by BT customers that could be interpreted as implied consent because they were deliberately kept in the dark.” BT had no official comment. It seems somewhat coincidental that the police have decided not to investigate BT’s Phorm antics just weeks after the government gave Phorm the thumbs-up for a UK roll-out.-Martin Lynch [Register] broadband advertising BT

Original post by nafiz

Tomorrow, the next big thing in mini robots arrives. It’s WowWee’s Rovio, taking home surveillance and communications with a Webcam robot to the next level of brilliance/dodgy Peeping Tom territory. Rovio has been knocking around the Web for some time but it launches officially tomorrow [in the US first] for around £165 and there are 2 new videos showing off just what the little fella can do. That said, the bit that shows your business colleagues sitting talking to this robot in a video-conference without laughing their assess off every 30 seconds is just a marketing pitch too far. Rovio is a very manoeuvrable Wi-Fi and GPS-enabled bot and the controls on your PC will allow you to drive this baby all over the house via the Internet, scaring the pets and snooping on your kids. Oh, and checking for burglars. The interface looks very user-friendly and the image quality - check out Video 2 below - looks great. It comes with a charging base which it can find it’s way back to automatically when power is low - very handy indeed. I can just imagine how little work will get done once people start snapping these up tomorrow and as Christmas presents.-Martin Lynch [More videos of Rovio at Robotsrule] robot robots technology

Original post by nafiz

jcgam69 writes “SpaceX’s Falcon 1 is on the pad in the South Pacific Kwajalein Atoll ready for its fourth launch attempt, according to a blog post over the weekend from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. The countdown is scheduled for Tuesday, Sept. 23, between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. PDT, though the launch window will extend through Thursday if need be.”

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Original post by CmdrTaco

Kristina from Science News writes “Combining computer simulations with data about the way starlight shines through Saturn’s rings suggests the individual grains are big and thus could have been around a good 4 billion years, not the mere 10 million to 100 million previously suspected. What may have thrown earlier observations off is the chance that the grains aren’t evenly distributed, but clump here and spread out there.”

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Original post by CmdrTaco

Adam Korbitz writes with an excerpt from his blog on an exciting discovery in space: “A team of researchers led by Spanish scientists has published their discovery of the complex molecule naphthalene in an interstellar star-forming cloud, indicating many prebiotic organic molecules necessary for life as we know it could have been present when our own solar system formed. According to the new research — published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters — the naphthalene molecules were discovered 700 light-years from Earth in a star-forming region of the constellation Perseus, in the direction of the star Cernis 52.”

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Original post by timothy