Alan Johnson, home secretary, has ruled out making ID cards compulsory for UK citizens, signalling a significant retreat by the government on its flagship ¬£4.8bn national scheme. In his first big policy announcement, Mr Johnson said: Holding an identity card should be a personal choice for British citizens — just as it is now to obtain a passport
The burning hot sun at the equator is a far cry from the weak sunlight that reaches higher latitudes. To make the most of such different conditions you need specially tailored solar cells, according to UK firm Quantasol. So the company has come up with a new solar cell design that can be tuned to the light at a particular latitude, and in the process broken a 21-year-old efficiency record for one type of solar cell
Hoping to protect its top-secret operations by decentralizing its massive computer hubs, the National Security Agency will build a 93,000m² data centre at Utah’s Camp Williams. The years-in-the-making project, which may cost billions over time, got a $181 million start last week when President Obama signed a war spending bill in which Congress agreed to pay for primary construction, power access and security infrastructure. The enormous building, which will have a footprint about three times the size of the Utah State Capitol building, will be constructed on a 200-acre site near the Utah National Guard facility’s runway
Optus today confirmed it will launch its D3 satellite, which will be used to provide more pay-TV channels, in mid-August. The director of Optus Satellite Paul Sheridan said the new satellite will significantly increase its capacity. Foxtel will be the largest customer of the new satellite, which will carry its new suite of HD pay-TV and other channels. Foxtel has previously said it intends launching more than 20 new channels this year
Email logs can provide advance warning of an organisation reaching crisis point. That’s the tantalising suggestion to emerge from the pattern of messages exchanged by Enron employees. After US energy giant Enron collapsed in December 2001, federal investigators obtained records of emails sent by around 150 senior staff during the company’s final 18 months. The logs, which record 517,000 emails sent to around 15,000 employees, provide a rare insight into how communication within an organisation changes during stressful times
An Indian court today decriminalised homosexuality — but only in the country’s capital, Delhi. The Delhi high court ruled that treating consensual gay sex as a crime was a violation of fundamental rights protected by India’s constitution. The ruling is the first of its kind in the deeply conservative country
A single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world, scientists have discovered. Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same inter-related colony, and will refuse to fight one another. The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination
Mozilla fired another shot in the browser wars today with the release of Firefox 3.5. The browser, which was previewed before going to the Release Candidate stage, was driven by quality instead of a timeline, according to the company. The focus for this version of Firefox is speed. Vlad Vukicevic, tech lead for the Firefox project at Mozilla, says that the main significance [of the browser upgrade] is that Firefox 3.5 is really, really fast
. Aside from the speed boost, Firefox 3.5 also boasts HTML 5 capabilities for handling audio and video, and a JavaScript performance and stability boost courtesy of the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine
Amazon cut ties today with its business affiliates in Rhode Island to protest a provision in the draft state budget that would force the company to collect sales tax. Rhode Island is now the second state where affiliates in the program, known as Amazon Associates, have been cut off over the sales tax issue. Earlier this month the Seattle-based online retailer also closed its affiliates’ accounts in North Carolina
The communications regulator has sounded the alarm after receiving a number of complaints from Australians who received SMS messages containing death threats. The threats, which tell the victim I am about to kill you
unless they contact an email address, are part of an SMS scam campaign designed to con targets out of personal details, cash and passwords. The warning from the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) today comes after this website reported yesterday how scores of Australians had received SMS spam messages saying they have won $123,000, but must reply with their email address for instructions on how to claim the prize. The campaign is a ruse, attempting to trick people into paying $1000 for courier fees in order to claim a non-existent prize
A new Trojan horse program being distributed by tens of thousands of recently hacked Web sites hijacks search results so that Google.com users can scarcely tell that their Web searches are being funneled through third-party sites. Earlier this month, security experts at Websense warned that some 40,000 Web sites were hacked and seeded with code that bombards a visitor’s PC with a virtual kitchen sink worth of browser exploits, all in an effort to install a Trojan horse program. Websense named this mass compromise Nine-Ball
, and the Trojan dropped on victimized PCs was thought to install a range of malicious software
One of the largest spam blacklists in the world, developed in Australia, is up for sale and the creator has already received offers of more than $1 million. Proposals have come from all over the world and dubious
organisations have been especially keen on the acquisition. The list, popularly known as SORBS or spam and open relay blocking system, was created in 2002 by programmer Michelle Sullivan (then known as Matthew Sullivan), who used to work at the University of Queensland. SORBS is a free service that sets up virtual spam traps
to identify and block senders of unsolicited bulk email
id software’s John Carmack has begun delivering on his love of the iPhone with a brand new game made just for the platform called Doom Resurrection, available right now on the App Store. There’s nothing small about this game at all — it offers up 76 mb of original id shooter, including eight levels total
According to gaming company Global Gaming Factory X, it is in the the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay for $7.8m (SEK 60 million). The acquisition is scheduled to be completed by August and will see the site launch new business models to compensate content providers and copyright owners
Two senators plan to introduce a bill that would bar foreign companies that sell technology to Iran from receiving federal contracts. Senators Charles Schumer, D-NY, and Lindsey Graham, R-SC, said they wrote up the legislation after the Wall Street Journal reported on June 22 that a joint venture of Nokia of Finland and Siemens AG of Germany had sold a sophisticated Internet-monitoring system to Iran in 2008. Schumer and Graham’s bill would require the Obama administration to identify foreign companies that export sensitive technology to Iran and ban them from bidding on federal contracts, or renew expiring ones, unless they first stop exports to Iran
Trading virtual currency for real goods has been banned in China, putting hundreds of millions of dollars in economic activity at risk. In addition to its ongoing crackdown on Internet porn, the Chinese government has declared that virtual currency cannot be traded for real goods or services. Virtual currency, as defined by Chinese authorities, includes prepaid cards of cyber-games, according to a joint release issued by China’s Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Commerce on Friday
Britain is hiring former computer hackers to join a new security unit aimed at protecting cyberspace from foreign spies, thieves and terrorists, the country’s terrorism minister said. Alan West said the technology-savvy staff would join efforts to trace the source of — and prevent — cyber attacks on Britain’s government, businesses and individuals. The country also will develop its capability to wage cyber warfare against the country’s foes, he said
The gas tank of the future may be full of chicken feathers. Engineers have discovered a way to store large amounts of hydrogen fuel using carbonised downy fluff, which could help pave the way to clean, green cars. A practical hydrogen car has been elusive for decades. Before the announcement this week by University of Delaware engineers, a nonstop trip from Portland to Eugene in a hydrogen car would need a tank bigger than 100 gallons to store liquid or gaseous fuel, even under high pressure. Treated chicken feathers work like a sponge. They soak up large amounts of hydrogen and hold it in a small space so the tank can be a conventional size and the fuel won’t need to held under dangerously high pressures. Hydrogen creates only water vapor when it burns, unlike gasoline that emits carbon dioxide, a culprit in climate change
Commonwealth Bank’s web banking service NetBank failed today, in what could be a hacker attack, leaving thousands of customers unable to access their accounts via the internet. A recorded message on the bank’s phone access line acknowledged the problem with NetBank, saying it was working to resolve this as a matter of emergency
. The bank blamed intermittent network issues
and gave no set time for the entire system to be restored
For seven months, The New York Times managed to keep out of the news the fact that one of its reporters, David Rohde, had been kidnapped by the Taliban. But that was pretty straightforward compared with keeping it off Wikipedia. Times executives believed that publicity would raise Mr Rohde’s value to his captors as a bargaining chip and reduce his chance of survival. Persuading another publication or a broadcaster not to report the kidnapping usually meant just a phone call from one editor to another, said Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times. But Wikipedia, which operates under the philosophy that anyone can be an editor, and that all information should be public, is a vastly different world. A dozen times, user-editors posted word of the kidnapping on Wikipedia’s page on Mr Rohde, only to have it erased. Several times the page was frozen, preventing further editing — a convoluted game of cat-and-mouse that clearly angered the people who were trying to spread the information of the kidnapping. Even so, details of his capture cropped up time and again, however briefly, showing how difficult it is to keep anything off the Internet — even a sentence or two about a person who is not especially famous. The sanitising was a team effort, led by Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, along with Wikipedia administrators and people at The Times. In an interview, Mr Wales said that Wikipedia’s cooperation was not a given. We were really helped by the fact that it hadn’t appeared in a place we would regard as a reliable source,
he said. I would have had a really hard time with it if it had
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