X-Flex is a new kind of wallpaper: one that’s quite possibly stronger than the wall it’s on. Invented by Berry Plastics in partnership with the US Army Corps of Engineers, this lifesaving adhesive is designed for use anyplace that’s prone to blasts and other lethal forces, like in war or natural-disaster zones, chemical plants or airports. To keep a shelter’s walls from collapsing in an explosion and to contain all the flying debris, you simply peel off the wallpaper’s sticky backing, apply the rollable sheets to the inside of brick or cinder-block walls, and reinforce it with fasteners at the edges. Covering an entire room can take less than an hour

Staff at mobile phone company T-Mobile passed on millions of records from thousands of customers to third party brokers. Details emerged after the firm alerted the information commissioner, who said his office was preparing a prosecution

Officers from the Metropolitan Police’s Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) have made Europe’s first arrests in the battle against the ZeuS or Zbot Trojan which threatened to compromise thousands of computers. Officers from the PCeU, assisted by Greater Manchester Police, arrested a man and woman, both aged 20 years, in Manchester for offences under the 1990 Computer Misuse Act and the 2006 Fraud Act

The city wifi system that was shut down by the MPAA two weeks ago is back up. The Coshocton County courthouse based Wi-Fi system is up and running again after it was taken offline due to a single copyright infringement notice

US military boffinry chiefs have stated that they will shortly issue a brace of contracts for refrigerator sized laser blaster cannons. One of the deals will see a full-power ground prototype built which will be the final stage prior to America’s first raygun-equipped jet fighter

Mozilla will add a new lockdown feature to Firefox 3.6 that will prevent developers from sneaking add-ons into the program. The new feature, which Mozilla dubbed component directory lockdown, will bar access to Firefox’s components directory, where most of the browser’s own code is stored. The company has billed the move as a way to boost the stability of its browser

Today marks the end of an era, as The Pirate Bay team announces that the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker is shutting down for good. Although the site will remain operational for now, millions of BitTorrent users will lose the use of its tracker and will instead have to rely on DHT and alternative trackers to continue downloading

The communications watchdog has welcomed a bipartisan effort by Optus and Telstra to crack down on premium SMS providers operating on their networks. The decision of the two carriers follows industry statistics revealing skyrocketing complaints about premium SMS services and the Federal Court’s decision to impose $15.8 million worth of fines on a Queensland mobile messaging company and its directors for breaching spam laws. Telstra and Optus have agreed to engage mobile advertising and messaging compliance specialist WMC Global to monitor premium SMS services to ensure they comply with industry codes

URL shorteners are problematical, as everybody knows, but with the rise of Twitter and its ilk they seem to be a necessary part of the landscape. Some of the biggest questions around services such as bit.ly, TinyURL, and is.gd is what happens when they go out of business (as tr.im did last August). Now a group of such companies, organised under the auspices of the Internet Archive, has formed a non-profit entity to hold URL-shortening databases in escrow, with the intent of continuing to resolve a member company’s links should it get out of the business. At announcement, the 301Works organization has 21 URL-shortener members, including the largest, bit.ly. Many others are not (yet) on board. The members have agreed to cede control of their domain names to 301Works.org should they exit the field, and to back up their URL mappings regularly to the organisation — via Slashdot

When a block of IP addresses or a collection of domain names becomes associated with bad action — spamming, jabbering, denial-of-servicing — various ad-hoc Internet groups will add it to a blacklist of rogue IPs or badware domains that are blocked at a very low level in the network. The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be any way to readily diffuse an all clear signal to everyone who follows along with this block, which means that gradually, the net is acquiring slums — blocks of useful space that can’t be occupied by legitimate users because someone bad once lived there and now no one will accept their traffic — via Boing Boing

A new spam campaign is targeting a financial transfer system that handles trillions of dollars in transactions annually and has proved to be a fertile target of late for online fraudsters. The spam messages pretend to come from the National Automated Clearing House Association (NACHA), a US nonprofit association that oversees the Automated Clearing House system (ACH). ACH is a widely used but aging system used by financial institutions for exchanging details of direct deposits, checks and cash transfers made by businesses and individuals. In 2002, ACH was used for nearly 9 billion [b] transactions worth more than US$24.4 trillion

Internet security experts say that misconfigured DSL and cable modems are worsening a well-known problem with the Internet’s DNS (domain name system), making it easier for hackers to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against their victims. According to research set to be released in the next few days, part of the problem is blamed on the growing number of consumer devices on the Internet that are configured to accept DNS queries from anywhere, what networking experts call an open recursive or open resolver system