A plan to provide police officers on the beat with mobile fingerprinting devices is to be further rolled out after an 18-month trial showed average time savings of 30 minutes per case, reports Computing.co.uk.
One hundred devices have been provided to 10 forces this month as part of the project, known as Lantern - adding to the 10 constabularies involved in the pilot.
Officers use the technology to establish people's identity by linking in real-time to Ident1 - the National Automated Fingerprint System - avoiding the need to take possible miscreants back to the station to confirm who they are.
Wolf warns of foreign attacks
Republican Frank Wolf called yesterday for better measures to protect government computers and cellphones from cyber-attacks. He revealed that computers in his office and several others on Capitol Hill had been targeted in recent years by hackers believed to be based in China, says Washington Post.
Wolf, a champion of human rights in China and elsewhere, said at a news conference that authorities investigated the attacks on four of his computers in August 2006 and traced them to a computer in China.
The hackers, he said, gained access to sensitive information about the identities and locations of many Chinese dissidents and refugees he has worked with during his years in Congress. Wolf said he suspects he was targeted because of his human rights work.
MS goes Facebook on employees
Microsoft's Office Labs team, a testbed for ideas from company employees, is treating attendees of the Enterprise 2.0 conference to a sneak preview of a Facebook-like social network the company is working on to help employees keep tabs on each other, reports eWeek.
The network is called TownSquare, and while the project will exist at Microsoft internally, the company will use it as the basis for future feature functionality in the next version of the SharePoint collaboration software, Bram Paperman, program manager for Office Labs in the US, told eWeek.
The benefit is obvious for a company of Microsoft's size, even if the in-house project is a little curious. Microsoft, the software power at this show, said it inked several deals with social software providers to provide hooks and whole-hog integrations into SharePoint.
MS Office 14 in 2009?
A leak on a Microsoft Web site, referring to a product in the Office suite, hints at a 2009 release for the next version of the productivity suite, currently code-named Office 14, says ITWorld.
On Monday, Microsoft revealed a podcasting kit for Office SharePoint Server, the portal product in the Office family, with an accompanying question-and-answer article on its Codeplex site for developers that includes information about the product.
The site made reference to Office SharePoint 2009, which hints that the next version of Office will be named Office 2009 and released that year. Microsoft has not officially revealed a timeline for Office 14.
Share