Internet

Hi-tech thieves who specialise in card fraud have a credit line in excess of $5bn (£3.35bn), research suggests.

Credit card numbers and bank details are big sellers among hi-tech thieves

Security firm Symantec calculated the figure to quantify the scale of fraud it found during a year-long look at the net’s underground economy.

Credit card numbers were the most popular item on sale and made up 31% of all the goods on offer.

Coming in second were bank details which made up 20% of the items being offered on criminal chat channels.

The $5.3bn figure was reached by multiplying the average amount of fraud perpetrated on a stolen card, $350 (£234), by the many millions Symantec observed being offered for sale.

Similarly, the report said, if hi-tech thieves plundered all the bank accounts offered for sale they could net up to $1.7bn.

Closed accounts
Symantec said it was likely that many of the cards offered for sale were invalid or cancelled and bank accounts closed but it added: “These figures are indicative of the value of the underground economy and the potential worth of the market.”

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Chips based on ARM designs power the majority of smart phones

Mobile phone chip designer Arm has announced an alliance with the makers of the Ubuntu open source software.

The deal will produce a version of the operating system for small net-browsing computers known as netbooks.

It marks a departure for Arm, which before now has been best known for designing the chips inside smartphones and feature phones.

The new operating system for Arm-powered machines looks set to be available in April 2009.

Battery power

Rob Coombs, director of mobile marketing at Arm, said he expected to see the first devices running the version of Ubuntu by the time of the Computex show in June.

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Cisco System

Cisco Systems warned that a sharp drop in sales could push revenue down by as much as 10 percent. The computer networking giant, the first major technology company to report financial results that include October, when the credit crisis spread beyond financial companies, said Wednesday that its sales fell by 9 percent in the month, compared to a year earlier.

Cisco expects sales for its current quarter to drop 5 to 10 percent from the $9.8 billion reported in the same period last year.

“The environment has changed dramatically in the last two months,” John T. Chambers, Cisco’s chief executive, said in a conference with Wall Street analysts.

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Microsoft has unveiled a cloud computing service

Microsoft has unveiled a cloud computing service, in which data and applications will not be stored on individuals’ computers.

The new platform, dubbed Windows Azure, was announced at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.

The platform was described by Microsoft’s chief software architect Ray Ozzie as “Windows for the cloud”.

The framework will be offered alongside the next Windows release, Windows 7.

The move sees Microsoft taking on established players like Google and Amazon in the rapidly growing business of online software.

The aim is to allow developers to build new applications which will live on the internet, rather than on their own computers.

Microsoft believes consumers will also want to store far more of their data - from letters to photos to videos - on the servers in its “cloud” of giant data centres around the world, so that it can be accessed anywhere, from any device.

The move, which Microsoft sees as a major shift in its corporate strategy, was unveiled in front of 6,000 software developers from around the world.

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Comcast broadens reach of DOCSIS 3.0

Broadband junkies in the northeastern US got some good news Wednesday in the form of an announcement from Comcast that it is extending its DOCSIS 3.0 rollout to that part of the country. The company’s 50Mbps “Extreme” (can we please retire the Extreme branding already?) speed tier will be launched in the Boston area (including southern New Hampshire), as well as parts of Philadelphia and New Jersey over the next few weeks.

Back in April, Comcast flipped the switch on its first DOCSIS 3.0 deployment in the Twin Cities, pricing the 50Mbps tier at $149.95 per month. Comcast’s newly-renamed Extreme 50 service is now a bit cheaper at $139.95 (upstream speed is 10Mbps). The cable giant’s other new service tier is Ultra, which offers speeds of up 22Mbps down and 5Mbps up for $62.95. Most current Comcast customers will also get a speed boost: Performance broadband customers will see their speeds doubled to 12Mbps/2Mbps up, while Performance Plus subscribers get a boost to 16Mbps down.

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disturbing children

Three out of four children have seen images on the internet that disturbed them, an NSPCC poll suggests.

The charity is renewing its call for computer manufacturers and retailers to install security to stop children finding violent or sexual content.

The NSPCC, which polled visitors to its children’s website There4me.com, said it was “alarmed” by the accessibility of potentially disturbing material.

Some 377 of 497 votes cast claimed to have been disturbed by internet images.

One child posted a comment on a There4me message board saying: “I’ve seen violent images I didn’t search for. I was freaked out.”

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Brussels is considering making broadband access available for all.

The fast growth of broadband has led the European Commission to bring forward a review of the basic telecoms services Europeans can expect.

Current statistics suggest about 36% of households in EU member nations have high-speed net access.

When a majority of EU citizens are using a telecoms service, EC rules dictate that it becomes one every European should be able to enjoy.

Basic access

“High-speed internet is the passport to the Information Society and an essential condition for economic growth,” said Viviane Reding, EU Telecoms Commissioner in a statement announcing the review.

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The government is to unveil findings from a long-awaited review of the UK’s broadband services.

They will help decide if firms should get subsidies to lay higher-speed cables for homes and businesses.

Industry estimates have put a minimum £5.1bn price tag on fitting the UK for next-generation broadband.

That service would boost the speed of connections linking homes and businesses to the net to 100 Megabits per second (Mbps) and beyond.

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Your Web browser is probably the most important program on your computer, and it’s now getting the competition it deserves.
Mozilla Firefox, the most successful challenger to Microsoft’s incumbent Internet Explorer, is an outstanding piece of work and more than deserving of the raves it has won since its debut four years ago. (I made it my default browser in Windows even before its 1.0 version arrived.) But its developers don’t have a monopoly on all the bright ideas in browsing; people looking for better ways to the Web have two new options.

One comes from Microsoft, which two weeks ago shipped an impressive, but unfinished, release of IE’s next version. The other comes from Google, which last week offered a preview of its own browser.

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 ( http://microsoft.com/ie) and Google Chrome ( http://google.com/chrome) each show thoughtful attention to the ways busy people who don’t read manuals try to read the Web.

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So far we’re pretty smitten with Google’s Chrome. It’s certainly not without its faults, but for version 1.0 of a browser it’s pretty sharp. We’ve compiled a list of 10 things we’d really like to see added or tweaked. Some come from other browsers, and some are just improvements on some of the existing features. Google, we hope you’re listening.

1. Profile roaming between multiple browsers. This may be a pipe dream, but if Foxmarks for Firefox has proved anything, syncing up your bookmarks between multiple machines is awesome. Doing the same with passwords, settings, and history would be even better. Considering Google already has a way for your browser to send data back to the mothership, and a hosted Web history service of its own, a little sync using my Google account doesn’t seem that hard does it?

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Communities bypassed by broadband should be the first to get even faster services, says an Ofcom advisory group.

The regulator’s Consumer Panel said excluded areas of the UK should “leapfrog” to next generation access.

Consumer Panel chair Anna Bradley admitted that the areas concerned were likely to be the least cost-effective places for such services.

But, she said, the step was vital to prevent Britain’s digital divide deepening.

Public services

“If we are imaginative and use a mix of private and public business models, we could provide a way for consumers who are excluded from first generation broadband to leapfrog straight to the next generation,” she said.

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Google is launching an open source web browser to compete with Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The browser is designed to be lightweight and fast, and to cope with the next generation of web applications that rely on graphics and multimedia.

Called Chrome, it will launch as a beta for Windows machines in 100 countries, with Mac and Linux versions to come.

“We realised… we needed to completely rethink the browser,” said Google’s Sundar Pichai in a blog post.

The new browser will help Google take advantage of developments it is pushing online in rich web applications that are challenging traditional desktop programs.

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