PC World takes data recovery to the high street

PC World is to offer high street data recovery services through it chain of nationwide stores. In a partnership with forensic experts Ibas, all 152 PC World stores will have their Advice and Service clinics stocked with Ibas' data recovery equipment and run by trained staff. Each Data Recovery Lab offers a five-day turnaround and no-fix, no-fee service able to cater for everything from floppy disks, USB sticks and iPods to hard disks hundreds of Gigabytes in capacity. ...more

Games companies face multi-billion dollar lawsuit

Linda Sanders, wife of teacher and Columbine massacre victim Dave Sanders, has filed a multi-billion dollar class-action lawsuit against a total of 25 media companies, many of which are related directly to the manufacture and distribution of video computer games. The lawsuit, which has been instigated by Mrs Sanders and her two stepdaughters, comes just hours after many relatives of the Columbine massacre victims had settled legal claims against the parents of the two teenage killers involved, Harris and Klebold. Essentially, the suit claims that the school massacre would never have happened if it hadn't been for the violent and "influential" imagery seen by both Klebold and Harris. ...more

Pentagon throws out trackable Internet

A Pentagon research agency has rejected an idea to rebuild the Internet so that data would be tagged with identifying information, making anonymous surfing impossible. Exactly why the eDNA plan was withdrawn is unclear, but the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a division of which was funding the project, will no longer continue to do so, it was revealed. Part of the proposal for the system read: 'All network and client resources will maintain traces of the user eDNA so that the user can be uniquely identified as having visited a Web site, having started a process or having sent a packet. ...more

Chemist takes Amazon route to research

A UK scientist has applied technology developed by the likes of Amazon to the analysis of chemistry research papers. Henry Rzepa, a reader in organic chemistry at London's Imperial College, has developed the SemanticEye application that searches papers's content to create links between common topics. The software works in a similar way to the tools that Amazon and Apple's iTunes use to generate purchase recommendations based on what you have previously bought. ...more

Games producers embrace Xbox

Microsoft announce the names of the 155 games developers that are to support its new console and reveal a snazzy new logo. At a press conference in San Francisco, Xbox supreme J Allard did most of the talking about the project, which should see the light of day late 2001. Microsoft is the late-comer to the world of consoles but still have managed to sign up most of the important names from the world of computer gaming. ...more