Orange prices rise 40 per cent

Orange is to push up the prices of its pre-pay handsets by 40 per cent, with the cheapest up from ?49.99 to ?69.99. ...more

An alien's view of Earth

If there are aliens monitoring us from out in space, what they might be listening to is the noise of the earth's atmosphere: the hiss and buzz of escaping radio waves. Now you can share a similar experience via the Web. The New York Times reports that NASA has installed a very low frequency (VLF) radio receiver on a tower at its Marshall Space Flight Centre in Huntsville, Alabama, and this is connected to a computer that converts the signals to sound waves. ...more

Sony to launch world's first solid-state laptop

Sony will introduce the first laptop to use solid-state flash memory instead of a traditional hard drive next month, according to the Korea Times. The compact notebook will use the 32GB solid-state drive (SSD) that weighs half as much as an HDD, but reads data three times faster and writes 1.5 times faster. ...more

Sony drives the DVD+RW

Sony has announced a new internal DVD+RW drive with a 2.4x write speed for DVD. That's about 1Gb of data every five minutes. ...more

UK company pioneers self-destructing text messages

A UK company has developed a technology for sending text messages that self-destruct. Not only will StealthText messages be automatically deleted once they have been read they can only be read by the recipient in possession of the necessary 'secret code'. It will be possible to reply to messages, but not to forward them. ...more