UK Crime Squad receives international cybercrime award

The UK team dedicated to investigating online abuse of children is to receive an international award in recognition of its achievements. The National Crime Squad's Paedophile Online Investigation Team will be presented with the International Law Enforcement Cybercrime Award 2005, which recognises innovation and best practice in the prevention and deterrence of online crime. The award is granted by the Society for the Policing of Cyberspace and acknowledges the UK team's leadership of the Virtual Global Taskforce. ...more

Orange at top of the tree

Orange claims it is now the UK's 'largest operator in terms of active customers'. According to its latest figures, its UK customer base has increased by 2.6 million to 12. ...more

Pioneer announces eight-speed DVD writer

Pioneer has announced a new internal DVD/CD writer, the first to provide a maximum 8x DVD burning for both -R and +R media. Eight-speed recording will be possible with both the new high-speed DVD-R discs, the standard for which is in the process of being ratified by the DVD Forum, and the recently ratified DVD+R media. In addition, the DVR-A07 drive support both +RW and -RW media. ...more

Lycos anti-spam screensaver proves too effective for target websites

The anti-spam action pioneered by Lycos and its 'make love not spam' campaign has been all-too successful and could make the company vulnerable to legal attack. The screensaver, which has been downloaded 90,000 times, enables disgruntled users to contribute to denial of service attacks on identified spammers, the idea being to clog up their server's bandwidth and limit, but not fully disable, the problem at source. The Internet monitoring firm Netcraft reports, however, that two of the targets (bokwhdok. ...more

Microsoft Live Writer beta released

Another piece of the Microsoft Live mosaic is slotted into place with the release of a beta of the Live Writer tool. This is an editor principally aimed at bloggers for Windows Live Spaces, although the company says it can also be used with other blogging services including Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad and WordPress It offers WYSIWYG authoring and Microsoft says that the software can adapt to the styles of a blog, including headings, fonts, colours, background images, paragraph spacing, margins and block quotes. It also supports embedding of photos and other images and can modify size, text wrapping, borders, and apply graphic effects. ...more