FTC urged to restrict Amazon's handling of customer data

Amazon.com is once again under fire for its handling of customers. Following on from charges of a discriminatory pricing policy, two US privacy groups are now campaigning to prevent the company making any disclosures of customer data unless shoppers themselves give permission. ...more

Different XHTML horses for different courses

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - the body that looks after Web standards - has released "Modularization of XHTML as a W3C Recommendation". Basically, it's a means of specifying agreed subsets of XHTML such that content developers can more easily target platforms such as mobile phones or interactive televisions. It's a way, for example, to help manage the display of equivalent content across different devices: a menu on a cell phone will be managed differently from making a selection on a TV-based Web browser. ...more

Intel brings in desktop support for NX security protection

Intel has introduced desktop support for an important security feature in XP SP2 - a hardware defence against buffer-overrun attacks. When Microsoft issued Windows XP Service Pack 2 back in August it included a security feature to tackle such vulnerabilities, which are frequently exploited by virus writers. Essentially data is crafted to include sequences of code that will be erroneously executed and compromise the integrity of systems. ...more

eBay proves indispensable to UK shop owners

Had Napoleon been marching his armies around Europe now rather than 200 years ago he might have described of the British as 'a nation of online shopkeepers'. New figures from eBay show that there are now 68,000 cottage industries in the UK that depend on the website for at least a quarter of their income. Across Europe there are 170,000 businesses dependent on the site, many of which started out as a hobby before going full-time. ...more

US military drafts Napster

Napster has announced an agreement with the Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES) that gives all branches of the United States military - Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard - access to the Napster 2.0 music service. AAFES is making Napster's catalogue available to over 11. ...more