Tetris comes to chip and pin terminals

Researchers at Cambridge University have managed to hack tamper-resistant chip and pin terminals so they can play a game of Tetris. Stephen Murdoch and Saar Drimer, researchers at the Security Group at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory managed to open up the terminal and replace most of the inner workings that control the screen, card reader and keypad. 'Steven suggested that in order to show that it is completely under our control, we should make it play Tetris (similarly to the guys who made a voting machine play chess),' said Drimer on their blog. ...more

iTunes' European debut sparks rivalry

iTunes-rivals Napster and OD2 have both emphasised consumer choice as reasons for Windows users to choose their services over the iTunes Music Store. Adam Howorth, communications director for Napster UK, said that while 'iTunes is a straight download store - pay your money take your tracks' you are only allowed to play them on one portable player, the iPod. 'Napster too offers a store,' he said, 'because we believe in letting music fans choose how they consume their music. ...more

Evo, the second wave

Compaq has launched a second wave of Evo products, its computing line aimed at the business end of the market. As well as Evo Desktop PCs (the D300 and D500), there are new notebooks in the Evo range (the N200 and N600c). All the models come bundled with network management tools, such as Altiris eXpress for configuring software releases. ...more

HP unveils mid-market disk backup

Aimed at small businesses, HP has launched a disk-based backup and recovery system, which it claims will make protection and disaster recovery more reliable and affordable. The HP StorageWorks D2D Backup System is, according to the company, at least 50 per cent cheaper than competing systems and can be integrated into existing network-based IT environments. The company said that restoring lost or corrupted files would be easier on the new systems as backup data is stored online, where is can be retrieved in minutes instead of hours. ...more

Mozilla updates the Thunderbird email client

The Mozilla Organisation has released an update for its fully-features email client, Thunderbird. In addition to a lengthy list of bug fixes, the update provides several new features, including: the ability to have several email addresses going into the same account; Secure Password Authentication using a new cross-platform NTLM authentication mechanism for POP3 and SMTP; a new Palm Sync address book conduit; and an improved Spell Checker. All the changes are listed in the release notes. ...more