Sportingbet.com beats odds on dot com failure

The success of UK-based site sportingbet.com has shown that gambling is second only to porn in being able to extract money from the Net. The site has announced a turnover of ?103. ...more

Japan abandons 'iPod tax'

Japan has abandoned plans to introduce a levy on portable music players - a so-called 'iPod tax'. The Cultural Agency's decision follows a year of deliberations about the country's levy system which currently adds 3 per cent to the price of recording devices. Record companies asked for the levy to be extended to digital players in order to compensate them for the claimed loss in sales as a result to file sharing. ...more

Flickr lights up APIs for rivals

Photo sharing website Flickr has had a change of heart over its previous refusal to share the APIs for the Yahoo!-owned service. As things stood, Flickr users could only upload pictures with no interface for exporting them, despite assurances in the site's terms and conditions that they retain ownership of their images. But in a discussion on the website, Flickr developer Stewart Butterfield signalled a change of policy. ...more

GeForce3: first tests

We get our hands on nVIDIA's next-generation card, the GeForce3. Over the past few years nVIDIA has been a key player in the graphics card market, and with the success of its GeForce chipsets, it's taken the market by the throat. So with the release of its next-generation card, the GeForce3, there’s a huge burden on nVIDIA to produce something special. ...more

Security researchers demo RFID chips cloning

Security researchers at German firm DN-Systems chose the final day of the Black Hat hacking conference in Las Vegas to demonstrated how RFID chips can be cloned. Founder Lukas Grunwald showed attendees how a relatively simple process can clone chips produced to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) standard. According to Wired. ...more