This week’s WSJ.com/AWSJ column (subscription only, I’m afraid) is about biometric fingerprint readers. Microsoft’s new offering seems to have reinjected some vigour into an otherwise obscure corner of the market. As I say in the column, I’m not convinced that fingerprint scanners are the way to go, not least because of tested methods of fooling… Read More »
I had an interesting conversation the other day with Trek 2000’s chief financial officer, Gurcharan Singh. Trek, a Singapore company, claim to be the originators of the USB drive, or thumb drive as they call it, and are currently sueing a company called M-Systems in a test case over who owns the patent for putting flash… Read More »
The Brits have succeeded in squeezing a terabyte onto a DVD disk, 10 times what the BluRay disks can currently hold and 50 times the capacity of a double-sided, double-layed DVD. Nature reports that the disk is called MODS, for Multiplexed Optical Data Storage, and could potentially contain 472 hours of video footage – equivalent… Read More »
A bit late (my apologies) but it’s interesting to look at the recent Distributed Denial of Service attack on Akamai, an Internet infrastructure provider. The attack blocked nearly all access to Apple Computer, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo’s Web sites for two hours on Tuesday by bringing down Akamai’s domain name system, or DNS, servers. These… Read More »
Here’s a great example of why you can never really entrust your information to anyone but yourself. The Register’s John Leyden reports that Pointsec Mobile Technologies, a data security company, has obtained via eBay a hard disk apparently owned by ”one of Europe’s largest financial services groups”. On the hard disk were, in the words of… Read More »