Charity Age UK has unveiled a basic Sim-free mobile phone that lets users dial contacts directly with the touch of an oversized button.
The credit card-sized UK My Phone, jointly developed with specialist network operator CyCell, comes with a maximum of eight customised homescreen buttons, simplifying the art of speed-dial — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Lifehacker readers and writers are a tech-savvy bunch, and many of us can’t imagine living without our keyboard shortcuts that save us so much time every day. They’re so useful that it’s often hard to watch a less-knowledgeable friend or family member point and click their way to everything. If you want to get them on board with keyboard shortcuts, print out this handy cheat sheet so they always have it around for quick reference.
Most of the shortcuts on this page are pretty simple, but they’re the basics a novice ought to know. Remember, the cheat sheet is just a starting point. Don’t forget to teach your friend or family member how to find new ones themselves. Once they get the hang of the basics, hopefully they’ll be hooked — via Lifehacker
Nine people have each been told to pay £624 to a woman raped by footballer Ched Evans after they admitted naming her on Twitter and Facebook.
The former Sheffield United and Wales striker was jailed for five years in April for raping the 19-year-old.
Seven men and three women, aged between 18 and 27 from north Wales and Sheffield, have been accused of revealing the victim’s identity.
The law grants victims and alleged victims of rape lifelong anonymit — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Skype illegally distributed a user’s personal information to a private company during a police investigation into Anonymous-sanctioned cyberattacks on PayPal.
It and several other payment companies were attacked out of retribution for blocking donations to Wikileaks in 2011.
Skype handed over the personal information of a 16-year-old to an IT firm, which later informed Dutch authorities.
The police file for Operation Talang
, which has been seen by NU.nl, focussed on two persons. They are alleged to have played a role in attacks on websites belonging to Mastercard, VISA and Paypal by hacker collective Anonymous. They dubbed the attacks Operation Payback
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
After getting caught tracking customer web browsing in June this year, Telstra has brought back the controversial cybersafety program Smart Controls, only this time customers must opt in to the project.
In June, Telstra was caught out tracking its Next G customers’ web browsing, and sending that data to US-based filtering company Netsweeper to build a database of sites for a new cybersafety tool called Smart Controls. Smart Controls is designed to block certain categories of sites from appearing on Telstra mobiles whose owners have signed up for the service.
The company ceased the tracking when it was caught, but claimed that it had been removing customer information from the URL before sending that data to the United States.
Today, the company announced that it has redesigned Smart Controls as an opt-in
product for internet browsing to be tracked for the service — via redwolf.newsvine.com
An international training institute to teach online tactics for human rights campaigners is being set up in the Italian city of Florence.
The first students, starting in the new year, will be drawn from human rights activists around the world — with the aim of arming them with the latest tools for digital dissent.
As the Arab spring showed, protests are as likely to be about individuals using social networking as much as public demonstrations. Street protests have become Tweet protests.
And repressive regimes are as likely to be hunting through Facebook as they are raiding underground meetings.
There is a dangerous, high-stakes, hi-tech game of cat and mouse being played — with protesters needing to balance their secrecy and safety with their need to achieve the maximum public impact.
This training centre, being set up by the European wing of the US-based Robert Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, wants to combine academic study with practical skills and training — via redwolf.newsvine.com
While serial self-publicist Kim Dotcom was re-igniting the submarine cable debate in New Zealand, the Electronic Frontiers Foundation’s (EFF’s) case trying to recover files on behalf of a former Megaupload user Kyle Goodwin took a new twist.
The EFF has been in court trying to gain access to the servers seized by the Feds last year, when the Megaupload saga began. Access to the servers, they have argued, is necessary to help establish Goodwin’s case that his files should be returned.
In a filing that the EFF says should terrify
users of any cloud service, the government is arguing that Goodwin’s property rights aren’t sufficient to demand access to the servers.
The government arguments are that Goodwin cannot demonstrate any ownership
over the servers, since he merely paid for a service. Moreover, while conceding that Goodwin might have the right to assert his copyright, that is not sufficient to establish that he has an ownership interest in the property that is the subject of his motion — the copies of his data, if any, which remain on Carpathia’s servers
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
A World War II German Enigma cipher machine is on the block at Bonhams, the London auction house, this month.
The 1941 oak model, described as an extremely rare example
, is expected to go under the hammer on 14 November for an estimated £40,000-£60,000.
In 2010, a 1939 Enigma fetched £67,250 at auction — that model was furnished with a modern power supply and had some restoration. The Bonhams machine is in working order, completely untouched and unrestored, Bonham’s Laurence Fisher, says — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The Russian government has opened a blacklist of websites that will be blocked from domestic internet users to avoid them harming themselves with too much information.
The new rules mean that ISPs will automatically block websites that the courts have deemed inappropriate. The law was introduced with the usual caveats about it being to protect children from online predators and to stop drug distribution, but political websites that criticise Tsar President Putin have already been blocked by the courts.
The decision on what sites are to be banned will be enacted by the sinister-sounding Roskomnadzor (AKA the Agency for the Supervision of Information Technology, Communications and Mass Media) and enforced with deep-packet inspection of all internet traffic across the country — which must be reassuring for those using Russian cloud providers — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Despite self-interested claims from companies and governments, identity theft is extremely rare and the costs of cybercrime are significantly lower than claimed, new polling by Essential Research shows.
Crikey has previously examined overhyped reports from computer security companies aimed at generating additional sales for their products, hyping the Australian government has happily joined in. According to Attorney-General Nicola Roxon, identity fraud is one of Australia’s fastest growing crimes and one in four Australians had been a victim or had known someone who had been a victim of identity theft
.
The key to overhyping cybercrime is to conflate a variety of different crimes under one broad description. But now Essential has disentangled commonly-conflated crimes and asked people to estimate how much they actually cost. And the evidence comprehensively debunks the claims made about cybercrime.
According to Essential, just 1% of Australians report ever being the victim of identity theft. If identity theft is Australia’s fastest growing crime
as Nicola Roxon, the AFP and many media reports insists, then it must have been coming off a positively microscopic base.
Moreover, 43% of identity theft victims said they suffered no financial loss from the incident. Just over a third? — ?36% — ?said their loss was between $100 and $500; another 14% said it was between $500-1000. In fact, identity theft was the least expensive crime, averaging a cost of $230, well below the overall average cost of $330.
So, identity theft that actually costs people money has happened to 0.57% of Australians — via redwolf.newsvine.com
It looks like mission control: in a Swiss market town, an array of screens in Nestle’s headquarters tracks online sentiment. Executives watch intently as California wakes up, smells the coffee — and says whether it likes it.
This is the nerve centre of the company’s Digital Acceleration Team. By monitoring conversation about its products on social media — right down to realtime recipe tweets
across the United States — they aim to win over a sometimes hostile world.
Other companies, such as PepsiCo, Danone and Unilever, have exploited the opportunities to promote themselves online. But Nestle is also concentrating on using social media for damage limitation — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A rare look behind the server aisle. Here hundreds of fans funnel hot air from the server racks into a cooling unit to be recirculated. The green lights are the server status LEDs reflecting from the front of our servers — via Google
Tiger Airways has been found guilty of spamming its customers by Australia’s communications watchdog.
The Singapore Airlines-backed carrier has been fined $110,000 by the Australian Communications and Media Authority for failing to unsubscribe customers from marketing emails.
The news comes in the same month that restrictions imposed on the airline were lifted more than a year after its entire fleet was grounded over safety concerns — via redwolf.newsvine.com
It’s bad enough that when you buy
an e-book, you’re really only renting it, but now we hear that at least one e-book seller will, it has been alleged, wipe your device if it sees fit.
Norwegian writer Martin Bekkelund tells the story of a chum, called Linn, who claims to have had her Kindle remotely wiped by Amazon UK.
Linn not unreasonably asked Amazon what was up and was told via email by one Michael Murphy, Executive Customer Relations at Amazon.co.uk, that we have found your account is directly related to another which has been previously closed for abuse of our policies. As such, your Amazon.co.uk account has been closed and any open orders have been cancelled
.
As for the remote wipe, Amazons T&Cs say, according to Mr Murphy, that Amazon.co.uk and its affiliates reserve the right to refuse service, terminate accounts, remove or edit content, or cancel orders at their sole discretion
. [our italics]
Bekkelund’s pal maintains she had no Amazon.co.uk account. Instead she says she used Amazon.com. But the British offshoot refused to accept this point — or provide her with any further details that might provide her with a way back to the content she claims she acquired legitimately — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A trick of the light evolved by silvery fish to avoid predators could help improve optical devices like LEDs, according to a study in Nature Photonics.
While polarisation has many applications in photonics, non-polarising devices are also important. The research – abstract here — took a look at how fish such as sardines and herring reflect light without polarising it.
PhD student Tom Jordan from the Bristol Centre for Complexity Sciences, and his supervisors Professor Julian Partridge and Dr Nicholas Roberts in Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences, found that these fish avoid reflecting polarised light by having two types of reflective crystals in their skins.
The crystals are guanine, which as Discovery points out is also a component of guano. A single guanine crystal layer in the scales would polarise the light reflected, which would also dim
the reflected light — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Greater Manchester Police has been fined £120,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) for failing to take appropriate measures against the loss of personal data.
An investigation into the force’s data protection practices was launched after a memory stick containing personal details about thousands of people linked to police operations was stolen from an officer’s home in July 2011. Despite the sensitive nature of the data, the device had no password protection.
The ICO discovered that a number of officers across Greater Manchester Police force regularly used unencrypted memory sticks. The USB devices may also have been used to copy data from police computers for officers to access away from the department.
This is despite a similar security breach in September 2010. As a result, the ICO concluded Manchester Police had failed to put restrictions on downloading information and that staff were not sufficiently trained in proper data protection — via redwolf.newsvine.com
US auction site eBay has paid only £1.2m in tax in the UK, according to an investigation by the Sunday Times.
The newspaper said that its tax bill in 2010 comes despite eBay’s UK subsidiaries generating sales of £800m.
The auction site — which also owns PayPal — responded that it complies fully with all applicable tax laws
.
The report comes after coffee giant Starbucks was also accused of paying just £8.6m in corporation tax in the UK over 14 years.
According to the Sunday Times, eBay had sales of £789m during 2010 in the UK at its four British subsidiaries. Using its worldwide profit margin of 23%, it would have made a profit in the UK of £181m, leading to corporation tax owed of £51m.
Instead, it paid £1.2m, the report said — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Cyber-scammers have started using the 1.usa.gov links in their spam campaigns in a bid to fool gullible users into thinking that the links they see on a website or have received in their mail or newsletter are legitimate US Government website.
Spammers have achieved these shortened URLs through a loophole in the URL shortening service provided by bit.ly. USA.gov and Bit.ly have collaborated thus enabling anyone to shorten a .gov or .mil URL into a trustworthy 1.USA.gov URL. Further, according to an explanation provided by HowTo.gov, USA.gov short URLs do not require any log in.
As pointed out by Symantec, beyond the legitimate users, cyber scammers and spammers have found this method of shortening URLs very lucrative. Symantec notes, By using an open-redirect vulnerability, spammers were able to set up a 1.usa.gov URL that leads to a spam website
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
New research suggests that companies behind some of America’s best known consumer brands may be far more effective at fighting cybercrime than any efforts to enact more stringent computer security and anti-piracy laws.
Recent legislative proposals in the United States — such as the Stop Online Piracy Act — have sought to combat online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods by granting Internet service providers and authorities broader powers to prosecute offenders, and by imposing stronger criminal penalties for such activity. But recent data collected by academic researchers suggests that brand holders already have the tools to quash much of this activity.
Over the past two years, a team of academic researchers made hundreds of “test buys” at Web sites from 40 different shady businesses peddling knock-off prescription drugs, counterfeit software and fake anti-virus products. The researchers, from George Mason University, the International Computer Science Institute, and the University of California, San Diego, posed as buyers for these products, which tend to be promoted primarily via hacked Web sites, junk email and computer viruses.
The test buys were intended to reveal relationships between the shadowy merchants and the banks that process credit and debit card transactions for these businesses. Following the money trail showed that a majority of the purchases were processed by just 12 banks in a handful of countries, including Azerbaijan, China, Georgia, Latvia, and Mauritius.
The researchers said they submitted the test buy results to a database run by the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition, (IACC), a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit organization devoted to combating product counterfeiting and piracy. Several pharmacy and software vendors and IACC members whose trademarks were infringed in those transactions (the researchers said non-disclosure agreements prohibit them from naming the brands) used the data to lodge complaints with Visa (only Visa-branded debit cards were used to make the test buys) — via redwolf.newsvine.com
One of the greatest benefits of 3D printing technology — the ability to make replacements or parts for household objects like toys, utensils and gadgets — may be denied to US citizens thanks to the granting of a sweeping patent that prevents the printing of unauthorised 3D designs. It has all the makings of the much-maligned digital rights management (DRM) system that prevented copying of Apple iTunes tracks — until it was abandoned as a no-hoper in 2009.
US patent 8286236, granted on 9 October to Intellectual Ventures of Bellevue, Washington, lends a 3D printer the ability to assess whether a computer design file it’s reading has an authorisation code appended that grants access for printing. If it does not, the machine simply refuses to print — whether it’s a solid object, a textile or even food that’s being printed — via redwolf.newsvine.com
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