Carrera Technology ceases trading

As reported last week, Carrera Technology has gone into administration. Since then many readers have reported that their attempts to buy the Carrera Octan M800, a machine that performed well in the current issue's Labs, has met with little success. An e-mail from Carrera's sales team notes that, "as we are no longer trading, our web-site has also been frozen. ...more

Pentagon defends war on YouTube and MySpace

The Pentagon has defended its decision to block popular websites including YouTube and MySpace on US military computers, saying it needed to keep its network clear for operations. Military officials said they had restricted access to more than a dozen recreational sites because they had registered high levels of use on Department of Defense computers. Rear Adm. ...more

ID card scheme stumbles towards rollout date

Delays to the UK's ID card scheme have prompted calls for it to be scrapped in its entirety, as costs and problems mount up. Tenders for contracts to supply the Home Office with systems for the multi-billion pound project have been set back until at least the end of the year, while the mounting complexities have forced the department to compromise on a scaled back version in order to meet the published 2008 rollout. As such the first versions to make it out of passport offices may carry just a digital image or fingerprint data from only a couple of digits, although the Government still wants all ten fingerprints, digital images, iris scans and other biometric and personal data stored on its central servers. ...more

ASA provides new definition of 'unlimited' broadband

The Advertising Standards Authority appears to have established a new definition of 'unlimited', after it approved Vodafone's use of the word to describe an Internet access package with a fair usage capacity of just 1GB. The mobile phone network operator had claimed in a brochure advertising its Vodafone Data Unlimited service that the amount of data that could be downloaded each month was 'unlimited', before qualifying it by stating: 'fair usage of 1GB applies'. The service provides Internet access over its mobile network. ...more

Visa and AmEx drop hacked payment processing company

Visa and American Express have dropped the payment processing company that left some 40 million credit and debit card accounts vulnerable to hackers. In one the biggest ever threats to consumer data security, CardSystems Solutions' security was breached in May this year, with some 200,000, mainly Visa and MasterCard records stolen, although the company did not inform the FBI until June. Visa spokeswoman Rosetta Jones explained that CardSystems 'has not corrected, and cannot at this point correct, the failure to provide proper data security for Visa accounts'. ...more