Technology

The current generation of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is vulnerable to eavesdropping, cloning and forging.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority late yesterday gave the thumbs-up to a limited evaluation of GSM mobile phones and GPRS devices, but only for one commercial aircraft. According to a Qantas spokesperson, the three-month trial will involve a Boeing 767 plying between domestic capital cities.

Qantas has decided to limit the pilot to e-mail and text, and disable voice services. The spokesperson said once the e-mail and SMS evaluation ends, Qantas will decide if voice calls should be tested. "We're just starting this so we'll see how it goes."

In an emergency, is an e-mail message enough to notify people of what's happening so they can take shelter, evacuate or take other evasive action?

That's one of the questions being asked in the wake of Monday's shooting on the campus of Virginia Tech, where 32 students and faculty members were killed in two separate shooting incidents more than two hours apart. The gunman apparently killed himself, bringing the death toll to 33.

The Blu-ray Disc Association has announced that following breaches of the security of the high-definition format's AACS security technology, it has brought forward the planned release date of the BD-Plus (BD+), a more advanced anti-copying system.

BD+ is an entirely different encryption system to AACS. Instead of each movie having the same encryption key, BD+ allows each disc to install a small piece of encryption software on a player, so that each disc has its own key.

I'm driving through eastern France, the blip-blip of the lane markers zinging backward through my peripheral vision at about 90 mph. I check the mirrors: nothing there.

Pretending to doze off, I let the car drift gently to the left. Just as it begins to veer over the dotted line, the left side of my seat vibrates, activated by an infrared sensor looking at the road paint. Meander right, and it's my right thigh that gets the warning.

It's a simple equation: As data storage needs grow, so do storage costs. In fact, even as prices continue to come down, storage equipment now accounts for 19 percent of the IT hardware budget, according to a report from Forrester Research. And that figure doesn't include costs such as energy and management.

"Disk might be cheap, but storing the increasingly high volumes of data that companies generate isn't. It's actually quite expensive," says Forrester analyst Andrew Reichman.

If you Google the word Darfur, you will find about 13 million references to the atrocities in the western Darfur region of Sudan -- what the United States has said is this century's first genocide.

As of today, when the 200 million users of Google Earth log onto the site, they will be able to view the horrific details of what's happening in Darfur for themselves.

In an effort to bring more attention to the ongoing crisis in Darfur, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has teamed up with Google's mapping service literally to map out the carnage in the Darfur region.

Russia plans to launch a direct competitor to the US GPS satellite navigation system next year using military technology developed in the Cold War era.

Drivers, trampers, sailors and army commanders around the world navigate using satellite technology developed by the US military but soon they will be able to switch to a Soviet-designed rival - GLONASS.

"We are planning to deliver all sorts of devices already available on GPS," said Alexander Gurko, the chairman of M2M Telematics which manufacturers satellite navigation equipment.

The Z750 is Sony Ericsson's first Tri-band HSDPA and Quad-band EDGE enabled phone. It offers full broadband speed for web access, email handling and picture blogging on the move, all within a stand-out design.

PEOPLE who tell lies in their emails and text messages may soon be exposed by new "lie detector" software.

Employers, spouses and people using online dating will be able to install the computer program to check if they are being lied to.

Developed in the US and expected to be available in Australia next year, the program scans the contents of an email or mobile phone text message for specific word patterns.