Digital music download sales stall

Apple may be in the process of selling over 10 million iPods each month but a development that is bound to be worrying record company executives is that sales of digital music downloads have stalled. Since May the number of tracks sold, most of which are downloaded from Apple's iTunes Music Store, has remained almost static at around 6.5 million per week, according to Nielsen SoundScan. ...more

LexisNexis security breach endangers 310,000 customers

LexisNexis, an online legal division of the Anglo-Dutch company Reed Elsevier, has admitted that a security flaw in its legal brokering unit meant that the personal details of up to 310,000 customers in the US were at risk. The breach occurred through a LexisNexis subsidiary known as Seisnet, a data brokering company that compiles information from federal records and probably holds information most US citizens. The personal details held include information such as Social Security numbers (SSN) and driver's licence information. ...more

Heathrow tests biometric security

A trial of a new biometric scanning system at Heathrow Airport's Terminal Three started today. Dubbed MiSense, the pilot scheme, set to run until the end of January, will track passengers as they make their way through the airport and onto their plane. Passengers travelling on Cathay Pacific and Emirates flights will scan their fingerprints and passport at the check-in. ...more

Berners-Lee blasts US Copyright Office

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has taken issue with the US Copyright Office over its insistence that certain online forms can only be submitted using Microsoft's Internet Explorer. In an open letter from the W3C which seeks to establish standards for web usage, Lee says that restricting submissions to a single browser is not only against the whole spirit in which the world wide web is established, it is also against the spirit of Federal Information policy. At issue is a new 'pre-registration' system for establishing copyrights. ...more

BT informs Ofcom of large price cuts for an ADSL wholesale product

BT Wholesale has notified industry regulator Ofcom that it intends to make large cuts in the prices of its Central Plus ADSL wholesale products. The catch is that Central Plus has just two customers - BT Retail and BT Yahoo! - so the cuts will inevitably be seen as a unfair hand-up. Independent ISPs will be hoping that Ofcom ensures this is not the case. ...more