Credit card companies have designs on your wallet

Japanese credit card companies have formed an association to create a standard for making transactions via a mobile phone. The companies, which includes the Japanese arm of Vodafone, intend to create a new system dubbed QUICPay. Users of most popular credit cards - including MasterCard Japan - would be able to use their phones to pay for goods at any retail outlet that is fitted with a QUICPay scanner. ...more

Coke cans Microsoft

Coca Cola has again edged Microsoft for the title of the world's top brand in Business Week's annual survey. Coca Cola tops the table with a value of $68.95 billion with Microsoft just behind at $65. ...more

Wi-FI Alliance awards first batch of 802.11g certificates

The Wi-Fi Alliance has named the first eight products to be certified as fully compliant with the 802.11g wireless networking standard. The products comprise four access points (sometimes known as base stations) and four PC card client adapters They are the first to gain certification since the 802. ...more

DVD crack number two

We've previously reported on the case of the programmers who managed to hack and copy DVD movies with their DeCSS code, well now it appears that another team of programmers have come up with a similar program. Keith Winstein and Marc Horowitz say that they are using their code to illustrate the point that publishing code that decrypts and plays DVDs is not illegal. These two MIT students claim that they are educating people in the issues surrounding copyright and, therefore, are protected by the First Amendment, which upholds their right to free speech. ...more

Alcohol - laptop fuel of the future

Alcohol could provide the key to greatly extending the battery life for portable computers if research conducted by Sony and NEC lives up to its promise. The two Japanese IT giants are both working on methanol-based fuel cells which promise ten times the fuel to weight ratio of the best lithium-ion batteries found in PC portables. NEC held out the prospect of laptop computers working for weeks in between recharging rather than the several hours, which the best systems offer today. ...more