A replacement for the black and white stripes of the traditional barcode has been outlined by US researchers. Bokodes, as they are known, can hold thousands of times more information than their striped cousins and can be read by a standard mobile phone camera. The 3mm-diameter (0.1 inches), powered tags could be used to encode [...]
Voice-to-text firm Spinvox has reacted to BBC allegations over its technology, finances and privacy standards. In a blog post on its company website, it described the allegations as "both incorrect and inaccurate". The BBC has been told that most voice mail calls handled by Spinvox are transcribed by call centre staff, rather than converted [...]
Web users suspected of file-sharing are being cut off without warning by internet service provider (ISP) Karoo, based in Hull. Karoo, the only ISP in the area, makes customers sign a document promising not to repeat the offence in order to get their service restored. Some customers have had their accounts suspended for more [...]
The latest update of Apple’s iTunes has included a fix to block devices such as the Palm Pre that use the program for synchronising music and content. The Palm Pre smartphone is seen by many as a direct rival to Apple’s iPhone because of its innovative interface and web based software. Marketing for the new [...]
The microblogging service Twitter is taking legal advice after hundreds of documents were hacked into and published by a number of blogs. TechCrunch has made public some of the 310 bits of material it was sent. It posted information about Twitter’s financial projections and products. "We are in touch with our legal counsel about [...]
Microsoft has fired its latest salvo at Google, announcing a free web-based version of its Office software. Office 2010 will include lightweight versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote when it ships next year. The new web offering will compete with Google’s free online Docs suite launched three years ago. Last week Google took [...]
Governments and companies should limit the snooping they do on web users. So said Sir Time Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, who said that growing oversight of browsing could have a pernicious effect. A greater part of the value of the web lay in the lack of constraints on what people could do [...]
Google has announced which hardware firms have pledged to build machines that will run its Chrome OS. The search giant said it was working with many firms on Chrome OS hardware including Acer, Asus, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, and Toshiba. The software is designed to work with the web and Google said it was most [...]
Efforts by those trying to sell tickets they won to the Michael Jackson memorial service are being thwarted. Hours after lottery winners collected their passes, postings went up on Craigslist and eBay offering tickets to the highest bidder. Some were offered for as much as $25,000 (£15,450) before being pulled or flagged by users. "eBay [...]
A majority of public sector employees do not know about environmentally friendly IT targets set out in government’s Greening ICT Strategy. The strategy calls for government IT to be carbon neutral by 2012, with office carbon emissions down 11.5% by 2011. One of the commissioners of the report says there are scattered trends toward [...]
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