IT makes your skin crawl

An implant that makes credit card payments via radio signals is attracting widespread criticism from technologists, privacy lobbyists and security experts, reports New Scientist.

Advanced Digital Solutions (ADS) in Florida has announced a plan to turn its rice-grain-sized Verichips solution into a method of payment at ID World 2003 in Paris. The company`s previous proposal to implant GPS systems inside people also prompted scepticism. But ADS claims its Veripay system, which is based on radio frequency identification technology, would end the problems of identity theft and make it impossible to lose your credit card.

Gary Williams, Maryland`s basketball coach, makes his players and recruits play home video game versions of matches, to promote their programmes and reach children who might, one day, play for Maryland.

Washington Post reports that Williams and the 12 other coaches who appear in Electronic Arts Sports` new "NCAA March Madness 2004" receive just a few thousand dollars apiece for their roles as motivators and strategists. The game, though, is one way to get onto it. "The kids will see me, and if a kid`s making a decision on which school to attend, I`m not saying he`ll choose us because we`re in the video game," McCaffrey said. "But if you`re not even in it, then you must be one of the bottom teams in division one, in the kid`s mind."

Making predictions in the storage industry would seem to be a no-brainer, opines eWeek. Capacities will go up and cost will come down. But things are getting more complicated. Shifting technologies and trends in the storage industry could mean a challenging year ahead for vendors, IT managers and end-users, the site says.

While hard disk capacities will rise, they may not rise as quickly as in recent memory, and the prices will show the same trend (although in the other direction). Performance will also buck the past trend.

Online survey firm Nielsen/NetRatings has released its holiday e-commerce index, reporting the less-than-surprising fact that some of the most heavily visited sites are those selling toys and games, reports Washington Post.

"Other categories like consumer electronics, and home and garden have shown strong consistent growth throughout this year, and continue to grow traffic strongly as the holiday season is kicking off," said Robert Leathern, director and senior analyst at Nielsen//NetRatings.

A humble plastic material, often used as anti-static coating to keep fluff from computer screens, has been used in a new type of compact, inexpensive electronic memory that may one day store gigabytes of data on cameras, pocket-size music players and cellphones.

The New York Times reports that plastics have received relatively little attention as candidates for use in data storage, despite space in memory storage being crucial to electronic gadgets. In a recent article in the journal Nature, a team of scientists at Princeton University and Hewlett-Packard described an electronic memory based on the plastic, which changes its conductivity permanently when a high current is passed through it.

This year has been rough on business security managers, but next year won`t be any better, reports InformationWeek.

"We`re in for a repeat of this year during 2004," it quotes Vincent Weafer, senior director of Symantec`s security response centre, as saying. "We should expect two to four MSBlast-sized events in 2004 and a major mass-mailed worm or virus every month on the average."