Pre-order your Xbox now

If you've heard enough about the PlayStation 2 pre-order scheme, steel yourself for another assault - but this time it's the Xbox that gets the pre-order treatment. Yes, you heard correctly - Microsoft's console-busting machine, the Xbox, is being put on pre-order schemes in America, over a year before it is launched. One web site, Gamestop. ...more

Broadband rollout continues apace

BT has announced when another batch of exchanges are to be upgraded to ADSL broadband. ...more

Black holes help encrypt data

Scientists have discovered how to use black holes to encrypt data. Using the radio waves emitted from quasars, believed to be driven by black holes, Japanese scientists at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Tokyo say it is possible to encrypt and decrypt streamed data securely According to the New Scientist, the radio signals are so random in nature, that messages encrypted in this way would be impossible to hack open. As long as the sender and recipient have access to the same radio signal at the same time, randomness could be overlayed to the encryption of the data stream and successfully decrypted simultaneously. ...more

IBM preps fuel cells for ThinkPad notebooks

IBM has unveiled initial plans for using methanol fuel cells in its ThinkPad notebook range. The direct methanol fuel cells (DMFCs) will be developed by Sanyo and are expected to provide up to eight hours of power per cartridge. They have been designed to work not only with future ThinkPad ranges, but also with existing models. ...more

Apple open-sources Intel version of Mac OS X

Apple has confounded sceptics who suggested its open-source days were over by releasing the source code for the Intel version of Mac OS X. Ernest Prabhakar, the open-source product manager at Apple, notified developers that buildable kernel sources are available, adding that Apple regrets the delay in readying the new kernel for release. In February open-source developers suggested that Apple had failed to release the Intel source for fears that it would make it easier for hackers to get OS X running on non-Mac hardware. ...more