John Lister

Talk about 'An Inconvenient Spoof'; the website for Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth has been breached by hackers. The blog page of climatecrisis.net has been altered to include links to more than eighty pages, each named after a ... different product from an online pharmacy. The products include Viagra, Vicadin and Prozac. (Source: theregister.co.uk ) The links only appear in the page's source code (which tells the computer what to display). They aren't ordinarily visible on-screen to site visitors, so it seems likely the hackers are not intending to lure people directly to their site ... (view more)

The New Jersey Assembly has taken another step closer to passing a law to govern Internet dating. The Internet Dating Safety Act has passed its committee stage (where proposed laws are debated in detail) and will now go to the full assembly for a ... final vote. The law would affect all dating sites with customers in New Jersey. The key requirement of the bill is for sites to inform customers whether or not they run background checks, and whether or not people who fail such checks are still allowed to sign up. This information would appear on every email sent to or from a customer in the state on ... (view more)

A security expert has produced proof that Internet phone calls could be hacked. Peter Cox has produced a program named SIPtap, which is designed to monitor VOIP (voice over Internet protocol) streams that carry phone calls through services such as ... Skype. The program can record conversations as audio files and even index the calls by date or caller. The software only needs to be installed on one machine (through a virus) to record all the calls made on the network. A skilled hacker could even install it across an entire Internet service provider's system. Mr. Cox has only used SIPtap to prove ... (view more)

Music and movie retailers in the United Kingdom claim digital copy protection is hurting, rather than protecting sales. The Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) says album sales are down 11% this year. Its director-general Kim Bayley said copy ... protection is "stifling growth and working against the consumer interest." The drop in CD sales is not matched by a rise in downloads. According to the ERA, only 150 million tracks have been legally downloaded in the UK in the past three years, fewer than one track per person each year. The ERA says consumer confusion over incompatible formats used ... (view more)

Facebook users and privacy groups have criticised a new advertising scheme from the social networking site. Designed to net Facebook more ad dollars, the program plays Big Brother with the site's loyal (and growing) membership. The 'Beacon' system ... is a partnership between Facebook and 44 other sites. Whenever a user visits one of these sites while logged in to Facebook, their activities are monitored. Certain events are then automatically posted on their Facebook news feed which can be seen by all of their online friends. The events which are reported include online purchases, movie rentals, ... (view more)

The British government has admitted losing a compact disc containing the personal details of 25 million people. The scandal has led to concerns that criminals could use the information for identity fraud or to access online bank accounts. The disc, ... which contains details of every family receiving child benefit (a form of social security paid for all children), was produced by a junior official at Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC), the British tax department. The official put two passwords on the disc, but did not encrypt the information. They then sent the disc to another government ... (view more)

The group behind the regulation of website addresses is planning the first step to a multi-lingual Internet. The International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is working to allow top level domains to be registered in languages ... which do not use the Latin alphabet. This is the set of 26 letters, also known as the Roman alphabet, used in languages such as English, French of German. The top level domain is the part of the website address which identifies the type of site (such as .COM or .NET) or the country of origin (such as .CA for Canada). ICANN have launched the project by ... (view more)

Sony's PlayStation 3 has become the first game console with Internet security software. The software was included in the system upgrade received by owners last week, but has only just been announced. It's the work of Trend Micro, a security company ... working in partnership with Sony. The service is currently free of charge, but will be a subscription service from next April. Sony and Trend Micro have yet to reveal the prices which will then apply. Aside from anti-virus features the software also includes web filters. This blocks sites in two different ways; it checks history and ownership to ... (view more)

Microsoft has announced a Word plug-in to make it easier for visually impaired users to use its program. The plug-in will read Word 2003 and 2007 files out loud, and will also convert files from Open XML (the standard format used to save Word 2007 ... files) into DAISY, a format which is easier to use for producing digital audio files. DAISY (Digital Accessible Information Service) is a not-for-profit group based in Zurich, Switzerland. Formed by "talking books libraries," DAISY promotes open standards to make it easier to produce digital files. (Source: Guardian.co.uk ) Reed Shaffner, ... (view more)

An Indian computer has been ranked the fourth-fastest in the world. It's the first time India has even cracked the top 100 in speed rankings. Computers from Sweden and Germany are among five new entries in the top ten, which was previously dominated ... by US-built machines. The list was announced at the SuperComputing 07 conference in Reno, Nevada. It's the 30th edition of the list, which comes out every six months and is compiled by experts from universities in Tennessee and Germany and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center in California. (Source: Top500.org ) The Indian ... (view more)