Prime Minister Gordon Brown tried to reassure Britons their personal details were safe Wednesday after the one of the biggest security breaches in the country’s history left millions of people exposed to identity theft and bank fraud.

Two computer disks that went missing while being sent from one government department to another contained names, addresses, birth dates, national insurance numbers and – in some cases – banking details for 25 million people, nearly half the country’s population.

The disks were password protected but the information on them was not encrypted, officials said.

"I profoundly regret and apologize for the inconvenience and worries that have been caused to millions of families that receive child benefits," Brown told the House of Commons. "We have a duty to do everything that we can to protect the public."

Brown said he had asked security experts to work with government departments to check their procedures. He said the information commissioner also would be given the power to carry out spot checks on government departments.

Full story: http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_7524525

YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, speaking at the NewTeeVee Live conference today, confirmed that high-quality YouTube video streams are coming soon. Although YouTube’s goal, he said, is to make the site’s vast library of content available to everyone, and that requires a fairly low-bitrate stream, the service is testing a player that detects the speed of the viewer’s Net connection and serves up higher-quality video if viewers want it.

Why wouldn’t they? Because the need to buffer the video before it starts playing will change the experience. Hence the experiment, rather than just a rapid rollout of this technology. On stage, he said the current resolution of YouTube videos has been "good enough" for the site untill now.

Full story and news Source: Webware.com

A Dutch teenager has been arrested for allegedly stealing virtual furniture from "rooms" in Habbo Hotel, a 3D social networking website.

The 17-year-old is accused of stealing 4,000 euros (£2,840) worth of virtual furniture, bought with real money.

Five 15-year-olds have also been questioned by police, who were contacted by the website’s owners.

The six teenagers are suspected of moving the stolen furniture into their own Habbo rooms.

A spokesman for Sulake, the company that operates Habbo Hotel, said: "The accused lured victims into handing over their Habbo passwords by creating fake Habbo websites.

"In Habbo, as in many other virtual worlds, scamming for other people’s personal information such as user names has been problematic for quite a while.

"We have had much of this scamming going on in many countries but this is the first case where the police have taken legal action."

Story continues here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7094764.stm

A quarter of the 11 million Britons who use social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook may be leaving themselves open to identity fraud.

Get Safe Online, a government-backed campaign group, is warning against posting personal details online.

Its research also showed eight million people leave home wireless networks unprotected against intruders.

And more than half of the over-65s polled use a single password for every website they visit, the group said.

The group is advising older internet users to change their passwords more often.

‘Rich pickings’

Tony Neate, managing director of GetSafeOnline.org, said a date of birth and address details were enough for someone to set up a credit card in another name.

"Although some of these details may seem harmless, they actually provide rich pickings for criminals," he said.

Cabinet Office minister Gillian Merron said the risks can be easily fixed and did not mean people should stop using social networking sites and wireless networks.

News source: BBC Technology News

YouTube is a website for people to communicate more efficiently with video by sharing, commenting on, and viewing videos. The site was originally started as a personal video sharing service, and has rapidly grown into the leading video entertainment destination on the Internet, helping to pave the way for social networking to evolve into the many catacombs that is has indeed become, and the newest YouTube feature is setting a higher standard in video sharing.

YouTube’s Multi-Video Uploader allows members to upload videos that are up to 1 gigabyte in size, compared to the previous limit of 100 megabytes. But note, a video must still be no longer than 10 minutes. And of course the main purpose behind this feature: the ability to upload many videos at once. So why is YouTube doing this? It is speculated that Youtube is trying to compete with another social networking video site (Vimeo), which announced it will now support high definition videos.

News source: Neowin.net

Software isn’t just about functionality anymore, users want brains and beauty. And beauty, as we know, is in the eye of the beholder, which is why the team behind Firefox 3 plans to ditch the unified cross-platform look of the browser in favor of a sexier look tailored to specific operating systems. Rather than a single look across all platforms, which is the way Firefox currently ships, Firefox 3 will feature different skins for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OS X and various Linux distributions. Alex Faaborg, Mozilla’s interface designer, posted a note on his blog yesterday about the divergent themes coming for Firefox 3. Echoing the sentiments of many a Mac Firefox user, Faaborg writes, “personally I think a unified cross platform UI results in applications that at best feel foreign everywhere, and at worst don’t even feel like real applications.”

With both Windows Vista and the upcoming OS X Leopard, there is an increasing focus on sexy visual appeal, and fitting in with the unique visual design each platform has clearly become an integral part of building software. Some might argue that this comes at the expense of new features, but the trend shows no signs of abating. Applications that don’t fit the design of an OS stand out like a sore thumb and users shy away from them.“The Web browser is an incredibly central piece of the user’s operating system, and we don’t want the user’s initial reaction to be that they have modified their computer to add some type of strange, foreign application,” Faaborg writes. “Mozilla’s user experience team literally wants to do a better job of visually integrating with Windows than IE, and a better job of visually integrating with OS X than Safari. I don’t know if we will be able to pull that off, but that’s the goal.”

Screenshot: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/images/ff3.jpg
Full story: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/10/beauty-and-the-.html