Mousetrap Technology - Times Online - WBLG

Psst. IT workers are snooping on you

Listen up, worker drone. Someone is snooping through your e-mails, wage details and HR records. The boss? No, a far more powerful force in the corporate world: the IT staff. In an alarming new survey of 200 IT professionals, financed by digital archiving specialists Cyber-Ark, one in three admitted to snooping on colleagues, regularly picking through their private files and confidential employee details via their privileged online access. And it gets worse: one third also admitted to continuing their spying ways after leaving the company.

World's slimmest laptop: think Razr-thin

At 18mm (0.7 inches) thick and a fraction over 1kg (2.25lb), chip giant Intel has designed the world's thinnest laptop, reports BusinessWeek, which recently got a sneak peek of the machine and describe it as "gloriously smooth and streamlined." The images more than bear this out. The razor-thin, or erm, Razr-thin laptop, is featured with a leather cover and strap that makes the computer seem more like a fashion accessory. Designers were ordered to make the computer ultra-fast, connect wirelessly to every available network and put in a case as thin as Motorola's iconic Razr phone. It's close. The Razr is a quarter-inch thicker, BW says. But who's counting?

Facebook to open its doors?

Much speculation today about what Facebook is up to after the Wall Street Journal reported that the site was on the verge of allowing other companies to use its network.

Our cheap laptop's better than yours

The war of words between Nicholas Negroponte, head of the 'One Laptop Per Child' (OLPC) project, and Intel, the chip maker, continues.

Two days ago Mr Negroponte accused Intel of "shamelessly" attempting to derail the OLPC project by offering its competitively priced laptop, Classmate, to governments at below cost. Last night Intel's chairman, Craig Barrett, hit back at the claims, telling CBS: "We're not trying to drive him out of business. We're trying to bring capability to young people."

Recycled PlayStation Chair

When is a black plastic chair not just a black plastic chair?

When it’s made out of recycled Sony PlayStations.

Protect yourself with metal underpants

Tin-foil hats have long been favoured by those who fear that the Government and/or space aliens are engaged in a systematic mind-reading program. Now, paranoiacs the world over will be beating a path to ISA bodywear, a Swiss company that’s marketing metallic underpants.

The idea is that they will protect your sensitive parts from mobile phone radiation, which some studies have linked to an increased risk of infertility.

Le Matin Online, a Swiss publication, reported the creator’s intriguing method for demonstrating the pants’ performance.

"Slide a mobile phone between the underpants and your skin, then dial your number from another handset," he told the paper. "You will notice that the fabric used reduces reception to the point that the phone will not ring."

He did not say why it was necessary to be wearing the pants during this exercise.

Is Intel crippling the $100 laptop?

Nicholas Negroponte's "One Laptop Per Child" programme is well behind schedule, the MIT professor admits in a lengthy interview with CBS. And the culprit, he says, is Intel. Negroponte accuses the chip giant of "shameless" dumping, offering their competitively priced laptop, Classmate, to governments at below cost to derail Negroponte's AMD chip-based machines. "Intel and AMD fight viciously," Negroponte says. "And we’re just sort of caught in the middle."

Germans rule in Second Life

Think the virtual world Second Life consists primarily of Americans? Think again. According to the latest comScore tally, Europeans out-number North Americans by a whopping 3-to-1 ratio. Of the 1.3 million people to run the Second Life software in March, 777,000 were Europeans. Digging deeper into the numbers, the Germans, French and then the Brits make up the largest concentration of European Second Lifers. But the Germans are the kings of Second Life, comScore says.

World's largest companies unmasked as mega-spammers

Are major corporations, perhaps unknowingly, burying us in spam? Spam fighters at The Spamhaus Project have been naming and shaming telecoms companies for years who are believed to be hosting known spammers or who are just too lazy to block spam-spewing sources on their networks.

It's not just the telcos that are responsible for the daily spam torrent. According to network security specialists at Support Intelligence, some of the biggest companies in the world are acting as mega-spam relays too, sending out bulk mailings for Russian brides, penny stock tips and little blue potency pills.