Zombie computers on the rise

McAfee says 12 million computers have been hijacked by cyber criminals and detected by security vendor McAfee since January, reports the BBC.

There has been a 50% increase in the number of detected so-called "zombie" computers since 2008, McAfee says.

The true number of newly hijacked PCs is likely to be higher than those detected by McAfee alone.

British home secretary Jacqui Smith has defied critics to press ahead with ID card proposals, confirming that residents of Greater Manchester will be the first British citizens able to apply for them later this year, reports Computing.co.uk.

A small number of volunteers in Manchester will be offered the chance to enrol before the end of the year. The Identity and Passport Service says the city was chosen because of its high ratio of young people, a group identified as gaining significant advantages from the cards.

Young people in the city will be offered ID cards from 2010, after which they will become generally available in the city, and from 2011-12 they will be rolled out to the wider population on a voluntary basis, Smith said yesterday.

The Australian government yesterday broke new records for Web censorship by requiring the takedown not just of a page containing harmful content, nor even a page linking to harmful content, but a page linking to a link to allegedly harmful content, says The Register.

The content the Australian Communications and Media Authority originally deemed to be inappropriate was to be found on a US site: Abortion TV.

The site is political in nature, clearly coming down on the anti-abortion side of that debate - and the page in question features pictures of aborted foetuses.

The Hubble Space Telescope, one of the greatest scientific instruments of all time, is about to get an extreme makeover, says USA Today.

At 19 years old, the famous telescope is showing its age. Three of its scientific instruments are broken. Half of its six gyroscopes, which keep the Hubble pointed in the right direction, aren't working. And its batteries are slowly dying.

The seven-member crew of space shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to blast off on Monday in an attempt to fix it.