Banks more trustworthy than govt

UK consumers have more confidence in the IT security of banks and building societies than they do in central government, according to a YouGov survey, says Computing.co.uk.

More than half of respondents said they trusted their bank or building societies with their data security, but only 25% had the same confidence in central government and only 21% in local councils.

While 20% thought mortgage brokers, stockbrokers and financial advisers could keep their details safe from fraudsters, only 18% trusted utility firms with the same task.

HD-DVD has been dead less than four weeks, yet it appears prices have already started to rise on DVD players supporting the surviving high-definition format Blu-ray, reports Information Week.

The average price in January of the top 10 Blu-ray players on PriceGrabber.com, a comparison-shopping site, was $467. In February, the month Toshiba said it would no longer lead the charge for HD-DVD, the average price jumped to $604.

Some of the increase was due to the introduction of expensive players with features that went above the norm, said Darren Davis, VP of product marketing for PriceGrabber.com. Taking away that factor, however, still left an increase between $20 and $50 on most players in February.

Barclays hopes to cut energy consumption and carbon emissions in its new Gloucester data centre by 13% by using HP's Dynamic Smart Cooling technology, says Computing.co.uk.

The data centre, expected to be operational by February 2009, will use HP's environmental sensor system to cool hundreds of HP BladeSystem servers. It will be the first in Europe to use HP's cooling technology, said Elaine Heyworth, head of environmental management for Barclay's retail and commercial bank.

"Our engineering team went out to HP California to see what they were doing, and were able to assess exactly how much each server will need to cool it down. Some 13.4% energy savings is the figure they came back with that we could commit to, but we expect it to be much higher," she said.

It didn't take much to hack into a heart monitoring device and get it to administer a 137-volt shock: an oscilloscope, a PC, a wireless radio with a couple of antennas and some free software, reports IT World.

With those tools, a group of university researchers were able to gain access to what is known as an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD), read sensitive patient information, disrupt its operation and even programme it to repeatedly administer strong electric shocks.

These tiny life-saving ICD devices are surgically implanted in the chests of heart patients, wired to the heart so they can shock it out of ventrical fibrillation. This is a heart-attack condition in which the heart muscle twitches randomly instead of pumping blood in a coordinated fashion.