When it comes to data protection, the more the better for most, but are we now being swamped with the number of security tools available to protect our data. Keeping up with security in the enterprise is an endless challenge. The hackers and thieves get more sophisticated while much of the technology inside companies changes over at a much slower pace.

While the major players in online, enterprise and network security continue unveiling new products, services and tools to combat data theft and cybercrime, it may not be enough. Not only is the security industry struggling to contend with growing levels of malware, security breaches and hacking attempts, simply managing the sheer volume of necessary PC security tools means users today feel frustrated.

This is according to Jim Bidzos, chairman of VeriSign, who spoke at the RSA Conference in America last week. He believes the industry needs to start thinking differently when it comes to internet security, internetnews.com reports.

"Consumers are overwhelmed and frustrated by all the security solutions out there," said CEO of VeriSign Jim Bidzos, who organised the first RSA Conference in 1991. "In fact some of the security tools we offer are nearing the point of negative returns."

"It's time we started thinking about security as only part of the solution and ask what users really need from us. Today users are faced with pop-ups and all sorts of security procedures designed to make them feel more secure, but may simply frustrate them and question whether the Internet is safe," he said.

He stated that part of the problem is that while security solutions reduce risk, there are so many pop-ups and procedures users have to go through to make them work that it reduces trust. He compared it to driving through a neighborhood with signs that say it's a high crime area. "You might see a lot of police cars, but you're still going to wonder if it's safe to drive through there," he said, eSecurity Planet reported.

Verisign Trust Seal

On the Internet side, Bidzos noted the introduction last month of the VeriSign Trust Seal. Participating websites will have their sites scanned on a daily basis by Verisign to make sure they are free of malware and the site will be able to display the Trust Seal meant to assure consumers the sites are safe to visit.

VeriSign protects more than one million web servers with digital certificates, protecting the majority of secure websites on the Internet, including 93 percent of the Fortune 500 sites.

The VeriSign Secured Seal is displayed by over 100,000 domains in 145 countries and viewed over 150 million times every day.

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For the first time in 30 years, hard drives are set to undergo their biggest format shift so that by early 2011, all hard drives will use an "advanced format". This will change how they go about saving data that people store on them.

The move to the advanced format will make it easier for hard drive makers to produce bigger drives that use less power and are more reliable.

Through the International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association (Idema) all hard drive makers have committed to adopting the 4K advanced format by the end of January 2011.

Hard drive makers have begun an education and awareness campaign to let people know about the advanced format and to warn about the problems it could inflict on users of older operating systems such as Windows XP.

512 bytes in size

Since the days of the DOS operating system, the space on a hard drive has been formatted into blocks 512 bytes in size. The 512 byte sector became standardised thanks to IBM which used it on floppy disks, the BBC report.

While 512 bytes was useful when hard drives were only a few megabytes in size, it makes less sense when drives can hold a terabyte (1000 gigabytes), or more of data.

"The technology has changed but that fundamental building block of formatting has not," said David Burks, a product marketing manager for storage firm Seagate.

This fine resolution on hard drives is causing a problem, he said, because of the wasted space associated with each tiny block.

Each 512 byte sector has a marker showing where it begins and an area dedicated to storing error correction codes. In addition a tiny gap has to be left between each sector. In large drives this wasted space where data cannot be stored can take up a significant proportion of the drive.

Moving to an advanced format of 4K sectors means around eight times less wasted space, but will allow drives to devote twice as much space per block to error correction.

This shift also allows manufacturers to make more efficient use of the real estate on a hard drive.

"We can put more data on the disk, it's about 7-11 percent more efficient as a format." said Steve Perkins, a technical consultant for Western Digital.

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International Women's Day (IWD) is held annually on 8 March to celebrate women's achievements throughout the world. Largely aimed at inspiring women and celebrating their achievements, its roots are in movements campaigning for better pay and voting rights, and this year mark's the movement's 100th anniversary. But, it seems, despite the hard work, women still don't face equality in many areas, including pay.

Women may be celebrated in the likes of Italy, where men give women yellow mimosas, or in Albania and Russia, where chocolate is another popular gift to celebrate this day, but what women want is to be considered an equal.

The fact remains that in some sectors, women's pay levels remain considerably less. In Britain alone, five million or so women are living in poverty in Britain. Women have 40 percent more chance of being poor than men, with the gender pay gap still at 16.4 percent for full-time work and 35 percent for part-time.

Despite there being an Equal Pay Act in place in the UK since 1970, women still earn on average 17 percent less per hour than men for doing the equivalent role in the workplace, according to figures from The Fawcett Society.

However, although the pay gap persists, there are signs that it is closing in Britain. Women's median weekly earnings for full-time employment rose by 3.4 percent between 2008 and 2009, men's rose by just 1.8 percent.

In Germany, women in Europe's largest economy on average earn 23.2 percent less than men. And while German Chancellor Angela Merkel is one of the most powerful people in Europe, there are few other female heads of state or government in the EU. Others include Finnish President Tarja Halonen, Irish President Mary McAleese and Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite.

Reports on pay difference

A 2009 report by the International Labor Organization found an average 20 percent difference in pay for men and women employed full time in the Group of 20 largest developed and developing economies.

In a report, the World Economic Forum, surveyed 600 heads of human resources offices at the largest employers in 20 countries representing 16 different industries. They found companies in the US, Spain, Canada and Finland lead the world in employing the largest numbers of women from entry level to senior management, according to the by the World Economic Forum. Yet the report also found that, despite increasing awareness of gender disparities in the workplace, women at many of the world's top companies continued to lag behind their male peers in many areas, including pay and opportunities for professional advancement.

Companies in India had the lowest percentage of female employees, 23 percent, just below Japan, with 24 percent. Turkey, Austria and Italy rounded out the bottom five, with women representing just 26 percent, 29 percent and 30 percent of their staffs, respectively, The New York Times reported.

Celebrations around the world

In each country around the world, celebrations of the day differ. The theme chosen this year is progress: the progress women have made in the past century, and the long journey that many have ahead of them. The latest statistics on the lot of women in Britain and around the world suggest that some undoubted gains over those 100 years have now stalled, or been reversed, more recently, the British paper The Independent reports.

To try and combat the differences in pay, the executive European Commission has set out its plans to address the pay gap between men and women. They stated that women are on average earning only 82 percent of male rates in the EU.

Equality is to be at the heart of the Europe 2020 strategy, a 10-year plan to boost economic growth and create jobs.

There are clearly still many obstacles to overcome and some countries have more work to do than others. The EU's gender pay gap has changed little over the last 15 years and data released in 2008 by the Eurostat statistics office also showed pay gaps also still vary widely across the EU.

 

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Any business person knows that technology such as the mobile phone is paramount when away from the office, so that they can still be contactable. Unfortunately for some, this means the bane of hearing people talking loudly on their phone, but there could be a solution for this.

Researchers from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have shown off technology at the Cebit electronics fair in Germany, which could stop people talking loudly into their mobile phones, allowing people to conduct silent conversations.

The technology measures the tiny electrical signals produced by muscles used when someone speaks. The device can record these pulses even when a person does not audibly utter any words and use them to generate synthesised speech in another handset.

"I was taking the train and the person sitting next to me was constantly chatting and I thought 'I need to change this'," Professor Tanja Shultz of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology told BBC News. "We call it silent communication."

Electromyography

The device relies on a technique called electromyography. This technique detects the electrical signals from muscles. It is commonly used to diagnose certain diseases, including those that involve nerve damage.

The prototype currently on display in Germany uses nine electrodes that are stuck to a user's face. Professor Shultz explained, "These capture the electrical potentials that result from you moving your articulatory muscles. Those are the muscles that you need in order to produce speech."

The electrical pulses are then passed to a device which records and amplifies them before transmitting the signal via bluetooth to a laptop. Then software translates the signals into text, which can then be spoken by a synthesiser.

The future

Professor Shultz, said that in the future, the technology could be packed in a mobile phone. "We know this is not appealing for mass market use at the moment."

However, she added, it could be initially used to help people who have lost their voice due to illness or accident. It could also form the basis of an instant translation system, she said. "You could speak in your mother tongue and the text could be translated into another language," she added.

"The person that you are communicating with would then hear the synthesised voice in the other language."

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Following Apple bringing a lawsuit against HTC for patent infringement, Google has offered its support to the Taiwanese mobile maker - its smartphone manufacturer.

Google offering its support HTC is set to bring a new battle between Google and Apple, who were formerly close partners.

Apple's suit was filed with both the US International Trade Commission and the US District Court in Delaware. It seeks to prohibit HTC from selling, marketing or distributing infringing products in the US.

"We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours," said Steve Jobs, Apple chief executive.HTC denied the allegations. "HTC is not only an innovator in mobile technology but also an owner of many patents. We take American and international patent rights protection seriously," the firm said in a statement.

Apple has accused HTC of infringing 20 hardware and software patents related to the "user interface, underlying architecture and hardware" of the iPhone and cites the Nexus One, the Google-branded phone launched by the internet search company in January.

The Nexus One and several other new touchscreen phones made by HTC and other companies use the free Android operating system developed by Google.

Android represents the biggest commercial threat to the dominance of the iPhone. The Nexus One, made by HTC to Google's specifications, has been hailed as the first phone to rival the iPhone's intuitive touchscreen controls and features. Apple has sold more than 40 million iPhones since its introduction in 2007.

Google is selling the Nexus One directly to consumers from a website, becoming a direct rival to Apple as a smartphone vendor for the first time, the British paper The Times reports.

A Google spokeswoman said: "We are not a party to this lawsuit. However, we stand behind our Android operating system and the partners who have helped us to develop it."

Patent infringement

One alleged patent infringement relates to a technology that enables the phone's touchscreen to detect more than one finger touch at a time, allowing a user to zoom in or out by spreading their fingers apart or pinching them together. Google released this software feature on the Nexus One last month.

The iPhone had around 14 percent of the global smartphone market share in 2009, according to Gartner, the research group. Phones running Android comprised only 3.9 percent of the market, but were growing fast. Apple lost some share to Android phones in the fourth quarter and is coming under pressure to compete.

This latest lawsuit is likely to see the battle between Google and Apple heat up even more in Silicon Valley as just 10 miles separates these two conglomerates.

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Many people like buying all the latest gadgets so that they can say they have the latest 'it' item, but how many of them actually know how to use them?

According to a new survey, many consumers are flummoxed by new technologies such as DAB radios and HD-ready televisions.

According to the research conducted on behalf of Sky HD, the average Briton only uses half of the functions available on their gadgets.

Almost half of the 3000 people questioned by One Poll did not know that their HD-ready television needed to be connected to a high-definition device, such as a Blu-ray DVD player or HD service, in order to enjoy high-definition pictures, the British paper The Telegraph reports.

Only a quarter of men will ask for help with their gadgets, compared to 47 percent of women. Almost two thirds of women will read the product manual when problems occur, compared to 54 percent of men. Ten percent of IT experts admitted to resorting to the age-old solution of hitting a gadget in order to try and make it work properly.

The least tech-savvy city was Glasgow, where they used just 42 percent of the functions available on their gadgets. In contrast, Wolverhampton's residents got the most value for their money, using almost 80 percent of their gadgets' abilities.

£3000 worth of electrical goods

The survey found that the average British consumer owns more than GBP£3000 worth of electrical goods, but it calculated that the UK 'gadget gap' - the difference between the amount people spend on their gadgets compared to the value of functions they actually use - is more than GBP£52 billion.

The 'gadget gap' was calculated by dividing the average value of a person's gadget collection by the average number of features people don't know how to use. This total was then multiplied by the number of households in the UK to arrive at a figure of GBP£52 billion.

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After the speculation over the future of areas of the BBC, director general of the corporation, Mark Thompson has finally spoken out saying that BBC 6 Music and Asian Network are facing closure. While speaking to staff, Mr. Thompson also announced that half of the websites on BBC online will close by 2013.

Among the closures will be teen services Switch and Blast, with Mr. Thompson admitting Channel 4 should lead the way with these audiences.

During the briefing, Mr. Thompson said the earliest 6 Music and Asian Network would close would be by the end of 2011.

The review said 6 Music delivered "relatively few unique listeners to BBC radio.

"Given the strength of its popular music radio offering from Radio 1 and 2 and the opportunity to increase the distinctiveness of Radio 2, the BBC has concluded that the most effective and efficient way to deliver popular music on radio is to focus investment on these core networks," it said.

The BBC would review how some of 6 Music's "most distinctive programmes can be successfully transferred to other BBC radio stations, and how its support for new and specialist music can be sustained across the BBC."

Also facing changes is comedy and drama station BBC Radio 7 which will be now known as "Radio 4 Extra", under proposals published today.

The strategy review has now been submitted to the BBC Trust and a public consultation period will take place, the BBC news site reports.

Pledge

In the future, Mr. Thompson has pledged that 90p of every licence fee GBP£1 will be spent on programming and the corporation would spend 25 percent less on BBC online.

The review said more money will be ploughed into international news and the BBC must put a higher proportion of the licence fee into quality programmes to make "fewer things better."

As a result of the changes Mr. Thompson said he expected the plans would see an extra GBP£600 million diverted into programme-making.

BBC Worldwide is expected to go through a period of change, with the possible loss of magazines such as Top Gear, Radio Times and Gardeners' World.

It will also move to a more international focus, deriving at least two-thirds of its revenue from outside the UK by 2015.

The report said BBC local radio had to improve "its quality and originality", with more to be invested in local journalism, the British paper The Guardian reports.

Local websites will be refocused to carry only news, sport, weather, travel and "local knowledge content". A new "contract for local" will define a series of BBC commitments and limits, "including a commitment never to becoming any more local in England - that is, never to increase the BBC's number of local services on television, radio and online or to make any existing services more local".

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Following Microsoft striking a deal with the European Commission, the company is to ask millions of users across Europe if they want to use a different web browser in an agreement to resolve a long-running case in which the software giant was accused of abusing its market position.

A pop-up window will prompt people to choose and install one of 12 different browsers or let them stay with Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE).

From today, people will have the choice as part of the Windows Update system Microsoft usually uses to distribute security patches.

Although the update has been prepared for Windows XP, Vista and 7, not all users will see it. It will not pop up in front of those who already run a different default browser, such as Firefox, Safari or Chrome, the BBC report.

Users guaranteed to see it are those that have IE set as their default browser and have taken the option to let Windows automatically download and install updates.

Those that have this option turned off will be prompted to download, install and run the software. Those that have automatic updates turned off can go to the Windows Update site and run a "Check For Updates" to get it.

"An important choice"

Users will be presented with a window which says in bold text "An important choice to make: your browser". Users will see a screen which lists the 12 browsers available.

The Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and IE browsers are randomly ordered on the first section of this screen. Another seven browsers - Sleipnir, Green Browser, Maxthon, Avant, Flock, K-meleon, and Slim, will be randomly ordered on the rest of the screen.

Below each listing will be a button giving more information. Another button lets users install one of the browsers.

If a user is unsure of their choice at that particular moment, they can make a choice later. A shortcut icon will appear on the Windows desktop that gives access to the browser choice window at any time.

Those who stay with IE will be prompted to upgrade to the latest version.

It is unclear what effect the browser choice will have on IE's market share.

Although exact estimates are hard to come by, web stats firm Net Applications said IE is used by 62 percent market share. Its closest rival is Firefox at 24 percent.

It is feared by some, that the browser choice system will confuse people. Already some who have been confronted with the choice screen have been worried that their machine has been taken over or fallen victim to a virus.

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John Mack, the chairman of US bank Morgan Stanley has controversially stated that bankers are still paying themselves too much - it comes at a time when the banking industry is trying to justify its big bonuses.

All through the current bank earnings season, banks have sought to defend bonuses by saying the ratio of compensation to overall revenues has been cut back, The Financial Times states.

"I still don't think the industry gets it," Mack said during an appearance in Charlotte, North Carolina. "The issue is not structure, it is amount." He spoke at a question-and-answer session moderated by former Bank of America Corp. Chief Executive Officer Hugh McColl Jr. at Queens University, a private institution whose graduate business school is named after McColl.

Banks are reforming pay by focusing too much on structure - such as deferring bonuses to later - rather than the huge amounts being paid out, he said.

Earlier in the week, the New York state Comptroller said that Wall Street banks may have paid more than US$55 billion in bonuses last year.

"If we don't do something, the government will do something," Mack told the BBC.

Political issue

On both sides of the Atlantic, the issue of bonuses has become a huge political issue, as many of the banks that are paying bonuses to staff made losses during 2009 and were bailed out by taxpayers.

On Thursday, Royal Bank of Scotland - which is 84 percent-owned by the UK government - said that it made a loss of GBP£3.6 billion in 2009, but will still pay GBP£1.3 billion in bonuses to staff - sparking anger.

Mack used the example of a trader that recently left Morgan Stanley - the 28-year-old trader's unit had earned as much as US$400 million for the bank. Morgan Stanley had offered to pay him US$11 million, but the trader left to join a hedge fund that paid him US$25 million, Mr. Mack said, according to Bloomberg News.

Morgan Stanley reported record losses in 2008 and survived the financial crisis because of government aid.

Mack, who has not taken a bonus for the last three years, recently stepped down as chief executive but remained chairman.

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Google has revealed in a blog posting that the European Commission has now notified the search engine goliath that it's looking into complaints about the companies behaviour.

The European Commission has revealed that the complaints were made by UK price comparison site Foundem, French legal search engine ejustice.fr, and Microsoft's Ciao.

Google's senior competition lawyer Julia Holtz said the internet giant was "confident" it operated within European competition law. Foundem have claimed that its site is demoted in Google's search results.

"Foundem [...] argues that our algorithms demote their site in our results because they are a vertical search engine and so a direct competitor to Google," Google said. "ejustice.fr's complaint seems to echo these concerns."

Terms and conditions

The complaint regarding Ciao, which Microsoft bought in 2008, concerns Google's standard terms and conditions. Microsoft initially took its case to the German competition authority, but Google said it had now been transferred to Brussels.

"Although we haven't been notified yet by the commission, we do believe it's natural for competition officials to look at online advertising given how important it is to the development of theinternet and the dominance of one player," a Microsoft spokesman said to the BBC.

"In the meantime, we continue to cooperate with the German government's investigation into complaints brought by Ciao."

Google's AdSense program, which has worked with Ciao, helps websites sell space to advertisers. Google received complaints about its business practices from Ciao after it was acquired by Microsoft, Google said. Microsoft bought Munich-based Ciao's parent, Greenfield Online Inc.

Google response

"At this stage this is a fact-finding exercise and we're happy to answer the commission's questions," Mountain View, California-based Google said in an emailed statement. "We are happy to explain our products and technology, and are very confident that our business operates in the interests of users and partners, as well as within European competition law."

"Though each case raises slightly different issues, the question they ultimately pose is whether Google is doing anything to choke off competition or hurt our users and partners. This is not the case," Holtz, said on the blog. "We always try to listen carefully if someone has a real concern and we work hard to put our users' interests first and to compete fair and square in the market."

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As soon as the cold weather comes, you want to hide away - whether that's on your lunch-break at work, or your precious free time at the weekend - no one wants to brave the cold unless they have to. Normally the snow spells bad news for businesses, but for the BBC, the snow came as a blessing.

In fact, statistics show that as the snow came in and people went out less, the BBC saw records broken for TV and radio requests on BBCiPlayer in January. In total, there were 120 million requests across all platforms - both online platforms and devices, and BBC iPlayer on Virgin Media TV combined.

In particular, the week of 4 to 10 January saw a new record set for total requests (23.8 million) and radio requests (8 million), as people looked to catch up on TV they had missed over Christmas, such as the Doctor Who and Gavin and Stacey Christmas specials.

January saw BBC iPlayer attract an average of 3.2 million requests for programmes each day - the highest figure to date. To break the data down, it was a daily average of 2.2 million for TV programmes and an average of one million for radio programmes.

The top five BBC iPlayer shows in January 2010 were:

1. Top Gear Series 14, Episode 7 - 1,135,000 requests
2. Doctor Who: The End of Time Part 2 - 831,000 requests
3. Gavin and Stacey Series 3 Episode 6 - 700,000 requests
4. Mock the Week Series 8 Episode 1 - 658,000 requests
5. Tracy Beaker Returns Episode 1 - 565,000 requests

The figures show TV on the iPlayer was most popular between 8pm and 10pm in January - similar hours to TV peak time - while noon is the time most people listen to radio on theiPlayer, the British paper The Guardian states.

 

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It's only a week since Google launched Buzz, but it's already causing controversy over privacy laws as a leading privacy group urges US regulators to investigate Google's new social networking service.

The Electronic Privacy Information Centre (EPIC) has made its complaint to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), saying that Buzz - which is part of Google's Gmail service and was automatically rolled out to its 176 million users - is "deceptive" and breaks consumer protection law.

Google Buzz allows users to share personal messages, photos and videos. Hundreds of millions of users of the company's email system, Gmail, were invited to click and join the new social network when it was launched last week. However, the system noted whom a user emailed and chatted to most often from their Gmail account, and made those frequent contacts their "followers" on Buzz.

The search giant has twice made changes to the service over concern from users over privacy.

Epic isn't the only one making a complaint either, with Canadian officials also looking into whether Buzz violates privacy laws.

"Google still hasn't gone far enough," Epic's consumer privacy counsel Kim Nguyen told BBC News.

"Twitter is a social networking site and people know what they are signing up for. With Gmail, users signed up for an email service not a social networking service," said Ms. Nguyen. "Despite all the changes, they still do not give users a meaningful way to opt into it."

The FTC has been asked to "require Google to provide Gmail users with opt-in consent to the Google Buzz service".

The complaint has also asked the FTC to "require Google to provide notice to and request consent from Gmail users before making material changes to their privacy policy in future, and seek appropriate injunctive and compensatory relief."

Criticism

Since launching Google Buzz as part of Gmail last week, the search giant has faced a torrent of criticism regarding privacy.

The feature that attracted the biggest outcry was one which automatically gave users a ready-made circle of friends to follow based on the people they emailed the most.

Privacy advocates said that meant the list of contacts was open for all to see and could have had serious implications for journalists, businesses or even those conducting illicit affairs.

Engineers have now replaced the auto-follow feature with one that suggests who to follow but EPIC said that still leaves the "user with the burden to block those unwanted followers."

The organisation also wants the company barred from using Gmail address book contacts to make up social networking lists.

Google has apologised and said it acted quickly to address concerns including introducing a new option to disable the service.

"If it becomes clear that people don't think we've done enough, we'll make more changes," Todd Jackson, product manager for Google Buzz told BBC News.

The move by EPIC to ask the FTC to investigate Buzz mirrors one it made in December against the world's biggest social networking platform Facebook, when they weren't happy about changes the company made to its privacy settings.

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How conscientious are you when it comes to security on your phone? New evidence suggests that, as mobile phones becomes more and more advanced, and consumers begin to carry more and more valuable data around with them on their phones, the devices are becoming a security like never before.

These days, having a phone stolen or mislaying one i means you can forfeit everything from sentimental items such as family photos to identifying information such as email passwords and credit card details.

Because of this, in the UK, the government has called on the mobile phone industry to do more to protect handset owners against theft as around two percent of British mobile phone users report that they have suffered a theft in the last year.

Alan Campbell, Minister for Crime Prevention, said firms "have a social and a corporate responsibility to tackle crime."

According to the BBC, Mr. Campbell likened the problem to that of car theft. He said that following government intervention, innovations in the car industry - such as immobilisers - had helped cut theft by 60 percent in 10 years.
Figures suggest that 228 mobile phones are reported stolen in the UK every hour.

How can you protect yourself?

Until measures are introduced to help cut down on mobile phone theft, there are some tips consumers can utilise to protect themselves.

• On most phones you can dial *#06# on your mobile to see your handset's unique identifying number and write down your phone's 15-digit ID.

• Create passwords to prevent unwanted access to your phone and memory card.

• Only enable Bluetooth while you exchange data. Otherwise set it to "hidden" or "invisible".

• Consider engraving your name on your mobile to make it less tempting to thieves.

• Consider buying software to protect your data.

Missing in action

• If your phone is lost or stolen, contact your mobile phone carrier and provide the handset's ID number.

• If the phone subsequently turns up, you can have the handset unblocked.

Michael O'Hara from the industry body GSMA said the mobile industry "supports and welcomes innovations that help to safeguard against mobile phone crime in any guise."

He said the GSMA "leads a growing number of initiatives" aimed at tackling mobile crime including "a database of handset serial numbers" that allow a phone to be blocked when they are reported as lost or stolen.

The government's call comes as the Home Office unveiled the winning designs in a crime prevention contest, aimed at making mobile phones less attractive to thieves.

Designs included an alarm that sounds when a phone is too far from its owner and locks the handset, or a system to encrypt users data on the phone.

The winning designs will be shown off at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona from the 15-18 February.

 

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Are you doing enough to protect your business by having secure passwords? And do you have different passwords that can't easily be traced?

Many people use the same password for everything - from their private work accounts, containing a plethora of confidential details, through to their own personal Facebook or social networking account.

Analysis of the 32 million passwords exposed last month in the breach of social media application developer RockYou - who's applications can be used on Facebook and Myspace - provides further proof that consumers routinely use easy-to-guess login credentials.

Sensitive login credentials - stored in plain text - were left exposed because of a SQL injection bug in RockYou's website. RockYou admitted the breach, which applied to user password and email addresses for the widgits it developed, and pledged to improve security in order to safeguard against future problems, The Register states.

Click image to enlarge

"Easy to crack"

After the security breach, database security firm Imperva analysed the passwords used, publishing a report entitled Consumer Password Worst Practices.

The data found that the most common passwords were:

1. 123456
2. 12345
3. 123456789
4. Password
5. iloveyou
6. princess
7. rockyou
8. 1234567
9. 12345678
10. abc123

The analysis revealed a large amount of users had chosen "easy-to-crack" passwords, the most common being "123456", which was chosen by 290,731 users, or almost one percent.

'Nicole' was the 11th most commonly chosen code, followed by 'Daniel' in 12th. Other names appearing in the top 20 passwords include 'Jessica' and 'Michael'.

 

According to Imperva, the data found that 50 percent of password records exposed used names, slang words, dictionary words or trivial passwords (consecutive digits, adjacent keyboard keys). Analysts believe that if login names and password are easy to guess then it's more likely that hackers will be able to break into accounts using brute force dictionary attacks and readily available password cracking tools. If users (as they often do) use the same login credentials for social networking sites and more sensitive accounts (email, online banking etc) then the problem gets even more critical.

"Everyone needs to understand what the combination of poor passwords means in today's world of automated cyber attacks: with only minimal effort, a hacker can gain access to one new account every second - or 1000 accounts every 17 minutes," said Imperva's chief technology officer (CTO) Amichai Shulman, in a statement, ITPRO states.

Password safety

The key point of the report is to make sure passwords avoid being short and simple, to make them as strong as possible, to protect your data.

Passwords should have a combination of numbers and lowercase and uppercase letters to be secure. He added that users should consider using longer 'pass phrases' - to protect their identity online.

The risks for businesses are strong if users don't up their security game by protecting their data with strong passwords, they put other people at risk.

 

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If Google has its way, it's set to transform communication within years as it develops software for the first phone capable of translating foreign languages almost instantly.

By building on existing technologies in voice recognition and automatic translation, Google hopes to have a basic system ready within a few years. If it works, it could eventually transform communication among speakers of the world's 6000-plus languages and revolutionise business.

The company has already created an automatic system for translating text on computers, which is being honed by scanning millions of multi-lingual websites and documents. So far it covers 52 languages, adding Haitian Creole last week, the British paper The Times reports.

Google has also developed a voice recognition system that enables phone users to conduct web searches by speaking commands into their phones rather than typing them in.

Its aim now is to combine the two technologies to produce software capable of understanding a caller's voice and translating it into a synthetic equivalent in a foreign language. Like a professional human interpreter, the phone would analyse "packages" of speech, listening to the speaker until it understands the full meaning of words and phrases, before attempting translation.

Translation services

"We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years' time," said Franz Och, Google's head of translation services.

"Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that's what we're working on."

Although automatic text translators are now reasonably effective, voice recognition has proved more challenging. "Everyone has a different voice, accent and pitch," said Och. "But recognition should be effective with mobile phones because by nature they are personal to you. The phone should get a feel for your voice from past voice search queries, for example."

The translation software is likely to become more accurate the more it is used. And while some translation systems use crude rules based on the grammar of languages, Google is using its vast database of websites and translated documents to improve the accuracy of the system.

Doubt over Google

Despite Google's optimism, some experts believe the hurdles to live translation remain high. David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at Bangor University, said: "The problem with speech recognition is the variability in accents. No system at the moment can handle that properly.

"Maybe Google will be able to get there faster than everyone else, but I think it's unlikely we'll have a speech device in the next few years that could handle high-speed Glaswegian slang."

 

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Apple may have thought they had a clear lead with the iPad, but it seems there's competition they hadn't considered.

It's not as you'd think an established company which are giving Apple a run for their money, it's a new British start-up - X2, who are releasing their version of the iPad, and Itablet.

It appears the only similarity between the iPad and the Itablet is the name, from there they start to go in opposite directions.

X2 offer a range of hardware configurations, as well as offering support for both Windows and Linux. It comes with either a 10.2 and 12.1-inch screens both sporting a retro 1024x768 resolution and optional multi-touch.

The 1.18kg unit will have up to three USB ports and an optional HDMI output, and will be powered by Intel processors with the fastest available being a 1.6GHz unit along side 2GB of memory, The Inquirer reports.

Robin Daunter, technical director of X2 Computing said, "The Itablet is extremely powerful with a vast array of features and data storage capacity and, what is more, it uses the well-received Microsoft Windows 7 operating system making it a more compelling proposition for users wishing to share data with their existing Windows-based systems and networks."

X2 have yet to release pricing for the Itablet, but they did mention it would be on sale in April 2010, the same time that Apple's iPad is set to hit the streets.

 

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The opposition to Internet Explorer 6 is continuing to grow as an online petition against the government use of the browser achieves more than 5000 signatures in the space of a few days.

IE6 contains well known security flaws but is still being used extensively in Whitehall, including at the Department for Work and Pensions, the Department of Health and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

The German and French governments have urged their citizens to stop using the browser, but sp far, the UK hasn't followed suit.

It's believed that once the UK urge people to upgrade away from the browser, the rest of Europe will fall in line, with pressure then falling on the US to upgrade too.

The security problems of using the outdated browser were highlighted when it was revealed that Chinese hackers recently exploited a flaw in IE6 in an attempt to infiltrate the corporate systems of Google, Adobe and several other firms.

Government use of IE6 is also a problem because companies building websites have to include support for the browser so that the departments can view their sites, V3 states.

"IE6 'end of life' was extended to 2014 by governments and business not ready or willing to upgrade," says the petition posted by DanFrydman from Inigo Media, a company that builds websites.

Abandoning IE6

It was only last week that Google said it was going to stop supporting IE6.

The UK's Department of Health also recommend to the NHS that it replaces IE6 on PCs running Windows 2000 or Windows XP with the newer IE7.

 

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Questions are being raised over the authenticity of the iPad after a Chinese company has claimed that Apple's new device is nothing more than a copy of an existing product.

The Chinese company - Shenzhen Great Loong Brother - claims that Apple have copied their P88 which has been on the market in China for six months.

The president of the company, Xiaolong Wu, gave an interview to Spanish national newspaper El Mundo, saying that if the iPad comes to China, "We won't have any choice but to report them because it will certainly affect our sales."

He added that he has already applied for a patent for the product last May - a process that can take up to a year in China. "We'll have to follow the law," says Wu, admitting that it will be difficult to take on Apple in the US. However, the El Mundo reports the crime as "plagiarism," although it's assumed it means IP or copyright infringement, Wired states.

Wu says that Apple has not only copied the concept of a multi-touch tablet, but also the design of the case and screen bezel. But, while Wu may claim the products are "completely identical", the stats tell a different story.

The 10.2-inch screen on the P88 isn't multi-touch (it uses resistive touch), it uses a hard-drive (250 GB), has an Ethernet port, a 1.3-MP webcam and Intel 945GSE chipset (likely to be paired with an Atom CPU, not listed) with a gig of RAM, and it runs Windows.

In terms of usability, while Apple boasts that the iPad can run for 10 hours, the P88 only runs for a fraction of that without being plugged in: a disappointing 1.5 hours.

There are plus points to the Chinese device, though. For one, the P88 boasts three USB ports, which means users don't have to worry about docks and other hardware items. Also, it addresses the biggest complaint against theiPad - it has full support for multi-tasking. The P88 is also credited with having a faster processor and runs on the Intel Atom N270 1.6Ghz CPU. Unlike the iPad , its RAM is not a big secret and amounts to 1GB (which, incredibly, is expandable to 2GB). Boosting its connectivity, it has a three-in-one SD, MS andMMC card reader. It also offers ports for mic jack, headphone jack, network cable and external display interface. And finally it boasts a much larger disk drive, with a capacity of 160GB, thinkdigit reports.

But should Apple be worried? Well, for the time bring at least, it doesn't look like it - given that the iPad is already whipping up a storm in the States.

However, Wu isn't the only competitor to make claims against Steve Jobs' latest gadget. Fujitsu Ltd have also stepped forward thios week, saying that their US subsidiary launched a similar, sleek handheld multimedia device with a 3.5-inch screen, used by retail store clerks to keep inventory data, scanbarcodes and manage business operations as far back as 2002.

In fact, according to Fujitsu spokesman Masao Sakamoto in Tokyo, in 2003 Fujitsu's US arm made a trademark application for the 'iPad' name with the US Patent and Trademark Office, something that the AFP says is still pending and not yet registered.

So, anymore claims?

 

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In a move which could effect some businesses, Google has begun to phase out support for Internet Explorer 6 - the browser identified as the weak link in a cyber attack on the search engine.

The firm have said that from 1 March some of its services, such as Google Docs, would not work "properly" with the browser. As such, Google is recommending that firms and individuals upgrade "as soon as possible."

Google threatened to withdraw from the Chinese market following the "sophisticated and targeted" attacks, which it said originated in China.

Hackers used a flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) browser to target the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

Switching browsers

Following Google revealing the flaw was linked to IE6, the French and German governments advised their citizens to switch to a different browser until the hole has been closed.

To resolve the situation, Microsoft quickly updated the browser, nearly three weeks ahead of its regular security update. The new patch is available via the Microsoft Update site and will also be fed out to those who have their machines set to update automatically.

Microsoft recommended that customers of all Internet Explorers install the update as soon as possible or update to the latest version of the web browser for "improved security," the BBC state.

Despite Microsoft working to fix the problem, Google have said that it plans to phase out support for the browser "starting with Google Docs and Google Sites."

Google Docs is the firm's answer to products such as Microsoft Office, whilst Google Sites allows people to create web pages.

The online campaign ie6nomore, supported by more than 70 web firms, says that because the browser does not support modern web standards it restricts what developers can do and is "holding the web back."

Market share

Around 20 percent of web users still use the browser, which has been around for nine years. Microsoft has admitted that it has known about the vulnerability "since early September" 2009 and had planned to patch it in February.

The bad publicity has allowed rivals such as Firefox to gain market share.

According to web analytics company StatCounter, Firefox is now a close second to Internet Explorer (IE) in Europe, with 40 percent of the market compared to Microsoft's 45 percent share.

In some markets, including Germany and Austria, Firefox has overtaken IE.

 

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After months of speculation, Apple have finally unveiled their new tablet device, known as the iPad at an event in San Francisco.

Apple's chief executive Steve Jobs unveiled the touchscreen device, which will cost between US$499 and US$829 in the US, as a "third category" between smartphones and laptops.

"We want to kick off 2010 by introducing a magical and revolutionary product," he said. "All of us use laptops and smartphones [...] the question has arisen, is there room for something in the middle? We've wondered for years as well.

The iPad resembles that of a large iPhone and can be used to watch films, play games and browse the internet. The firm has also secured a deal with publishers including Penguin, Macmillan and Harper Collins to allow e-books to be downloaded directly to the device through a new iBook Store.

In addition, the New York Times has developed an application specifically tailored for the iPad, which allows readers to view videos embedded within articles, and which recreates the look and feel of a print edition copy of the leading newspaper.

The next level

The device boasts a 9.7-inch multi-touch display, which allows people to type directly on to the screen, as well as manipulate pictures and control the action in games with their fingers. Users can also plug-in a keyboard, if they wish.

Weighing 680 grams and measuring half-an-inch thick, Apple claim it has a battery life of 10 hours.

It will have a wi-fi connection to the internet, while higher spec versions can link to the web via a mobile phone network. This will allow users to download video, music, books and newspapers on the go rather than being tied down to wi-fi internet hot spots in the home or town centres.

It comes preloaded with 12 applications - essentially multi-touch versions of existing Mac software such as iPhoto.

Owners can also download third party apps - both specially designed for the iPad and those already available for the iPhone, and those consumers with both devices will be able to synchronise their apps between the two.

iBooks

However, the key component for Apple is introduction of the new iBooks application. This includes a visual bookshelf, as well a huge variety of the eBook on offer - a move that Apple believes signifies the app's major advantage over the Amazon Kindle. Prices are good too, with PC Pro saying that best-selling novel The Lovely Bones is now on sale in the all-new Apple iBook Store for just US$4.99 -significantly cheaper than Kindle options.

What's more, Apple says that all books will be sold in the industry-standard ePub format, which allows users to buy a book and share it with five other eBook readers. Also, through iBooks, users are able to change the font of the text they are reading - a unique feature that hasn't been seen elsewhere.

However, such technology doesn't come cheap: the least expensive iPad, which will come with 16GB of flash memory and wi-fi, will cost US$499; the dearest, with 64GB of storage and the ability to connect via a mobile 3G signal, will set consumers back US$829. Meanwhile, Mr. Jobs said that the firm hoped to have international prices in place by June or July.

So will people be rushing out to buy the device? A new toy for some, it certainly looks set to be popular - but with cynics already jeering that the device is nothing more than a glorified iPhone, time will tell how successful the iPad really will be.

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