LaCie gives thumbs up to biometric hard drives

LaCie has introduced a pair of hard drives that include fingerprint recognition technology to prevent unauthorised access to their data. The LaCie SAFE Mobile Hard Drive in 40GB and 80GB incarnations comprises 5,400rpm drive with 8MB cache with a Hi-Speed USB 2.0 connection. ...more

Lines linked for 8Mbit broadband

Nildram is the latest ISP to announce that it will be offering a bonded ADSL service that can provide a maximum speed of 8Mbit/sec. Bonding works by tying together up to four ADSL lines to create a single connection: 8Mbit, for example, would be achieved by bonding four 2Mbit lines. It is a process that will be familiar to ISDN users, which uses two lines to provide its throughput. ...more

FBI's snoopings to be reviewed

The US Department of Justice has selected the Illinois Institute of Technology to carry out a technical review of the FBI's 'Carnivore' Internet tapping technology. The review was authorised to shed more light on the nature of the software that captures electronic documents deemed relevant to criminal investigations. It should be completed by December. ...more

Final call for old numbers

Well, if you've so far managed to ignore the Big Number campaign and carried on life using the old mobile numbers that have been kept on, it's time to wake up and smell the digits, because, as of Saturday, they'll all be switched off. Old numbers for mobiles and pagers have been kept on, running alongside the new numbers since the campaign began in September 1999. However, users trying to dial outdated numbers after Saturday will not be connected and receive a recorded message. ...more

Windows is more secure than Linux, claim researchers

Researchers have unveiled a study at the RSA security conference that concludes Windows is more secure than Linux. Richard Ford, a computer-science professor at the Florida Institute of Technology and Herbert Thompson, director of security research and training at Security Innovation, claim that Red Hat's Linux is vulnerable for more than twice as long as Windows. Servers running Windows Server 2003 and Red Hat Enterprise Server 3 were tested for security with databases, scripting engines and Web servers. ...more