Database disrupts drugs trade

The UK Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) is trialling a database that will hold information on Class-A drug seizures and help track drug supply chains, says Computing.co.uk.

Chemical analysis from drug wrappings held by police forces and forensic science labs around the country will be fed into the Home Office-funded database to help map distribution routes.

Soca hopes the £400 000 system ‑ the first of its kind in the UK ‑ will help trace supply lines back to trafficking gangs.

Service has been restored to the Web site that handles Ohio's voter registration and elections information after hackers breached its defences. The intrusion is one of several assaults confronting the Secretary of State's office as tensions mount over next month's presidential election, reports The Register.

IT workers took the site down on Monday to "detect and prosecute any illegal breach of our voting infrastructure to maintain voter confidence," secretary of state Jennifer Brunner said in a statement.

On Tuesday, the site returned, although parts of it remained in "static" mode, meaning a campaign finance search database and other features were unavailable.

Two British inventors have unveiled a device that claims to alleviate the problem of cold calling, says The BBC.

The TrueCall device acts as a buffer between the phone and the outside world, and learns to distinguish between welcome and unwelcome callers.

It is estimated that the British public receive 1.5 billion silent calls and 1.5 million malicious calls each year.

Amazon's third-quarter revenue was in line with analyst expectations, but e-commerce doesn't appear to be immune to the economic slump pounding offline and online retailers alike, says CNet.

For the quarter ended 30 September, Amazon reported $4.26 billion in revenue, up 31% compared with $3.26 billion in third quarter of 2007. The numbers came in on the low side of Amazon's forecasts from last summer.

The company said revenue would be between $4.2 billion and $4.4 billion. Analysts, on average, expected revenue to be $4.28 billion.