Security of personal information sacrificed for sake of theatre tickets

Nine in ten people gave researchers for this month's InfoSec conference the personal information often needed to access bank accounts - for the chance to win a theatre ticket. Posing as researchers interested in the theatre-going habits of the public, the InfoSec crew reeled off innocuous questions, interspersed with clever ruses to reveal a combination of their pet's name and mother's maiden name and the name of their first school. One bank employee recognised that the researchers would have enough information to open a bank account, although that didn't prevent her from subsequently handing out that information. ...more

16-Dec-2000 Essential news of the week

Catch up on the essential news of this week and find out what the movers and shakers of the IT industry have been up to by clicking on the stories below. Ofcom does away with Oftel Our chips will be even faster than your chips FileMaker in the Palm of your hand IBM raises curtain on 10GHz chip Turn your Palm into a robot Free to breathe, but not to surf Don't forget, we welcome your comments. Just click on a story and go for the 'Comments' link on the right-hand side of the screen. ...more

UK employers say IT workforce needs more training

The latest research from e-skills UK, says that 57 per cent of employers believe their IT staff require additional skills, a jump of 11 per cent over the same survey last year. The survey also found that employers in London and the South East expected to lose up to 24,000 jobs over the next year. In contrast, many regions including Scotland, Northern Ireland, the North East, the North West, Yorkshire and Humberside and the east of England can all expect to boost their IT workforces by between 0. ...more

Price check: 512Kbps broadband services

Broadband prices are continuing to fall, due to competition between providers and different types of connections, reduced costs of BT Wholesale products and increased differentiation of services, such as those that have monthly traffic limits or the so-called 'midband' products at 256Kbit/sec or even 128Kbps. Nonetheless, unrestricted 512Kbps services remain the core broadband product, and it is these we will look at first. Hopefully we will avoid some of the errors made by other websites' ADSL price comparisons, such as not including VAT and ignoring traffic caps or bans on P2P activity. ...more

Pirate CDs to FADE

Piracy is the bane of the software industry and new ways of combating this crime are always being developed. A new system from Codemasters aims to fool pirates into thinking they've got away with it before striking. The new FADE anti-piracy system is being used on military simulator Operation Flashpoint, which is released on 22 June, and is embedded with code that can tell the difference between a real and counterfeit copy of the game. ...more