Internet turns 40

Though it might try to hide its greying hairs, it was 40 years ago yesterday that computer scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, established a network connection between two computers, creating the first node of what we now know as the Internet, says ABC News.

At the time, Leonard Kleinrock and his colleagues were charged with developing the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (or Arpanet), a government-funded research project in global computer communications that eventually grew into the Internet.

On 2 September 1969, Kleinrock and his team succeeded in getting two computers to exchange data over a network for the first time.

According to a new survey, women are more password-savvy than men, says The Register.

A survey on security awareness by PC Tools found 47% of men use the same password for every Web site they visit, compared to just a quarter (26%) of women who use the same insecure practice.

Nearly two-thirds of men polled said they would open a link or attachment from a friend without first checking its provenance, compared to a more cautious 48% of women.

All police forces in England and Wales will computerise the issuing of tickets for traffic and minor offences by 2011, reports Computing.co.uk.

Currently, Fixed Penalty Notices, issued for driving offences such as speeding, and Penalty Notices for Disorder, issued for offences such as petty shoplifting, are recorded on paper tickets and taken back to the station for processing by two different IT systems.

But a new scheme instigated by the National Policing Improvement Agency will see police recording such offences on handheld mobile devices currently being rolled out to frontline officers.

Two bloggers from Azerbaijan are facing up to five years in jail after posting a video of a donkey giving a news conference on YouTube, reports the BBC.

Shortly after the video was released, Andnan Hajizade and Emin Milli were held on hooliganism charges following a scuffle in a restaurant.

Their lawyer says the arrests were politically motivated.