Technology makes women happier

According to research conducted by BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, access to IT has a statistically significant positive impact on the lives of women and those on a lower income, reveals Computing.co.uk.

Called 'The Information Dividend: Can IT make you happier?', the report is based on an analysis of the World Values Survey, with responses from more than 35 000 people across the world.

“Put simply, people with IT access are more satisfied with life, even when taking account of income,” said the study's author, social scientist Michael Willmott.

A report has revealed that a single criminal operation was responsible for two-thirds of all phishing attacks in the second half of 2009 and is responsible for a two-fold increase in the crime, writes The Register.

The Avalanche gang is believed to have risen out of the ashes of the Rock Phish outfit, which by some estimates was responsible for half the world's phishing attacks before fizzling out in late 2008.

Driving the success of both groups is their use of state-of-the-art technology for mass-producing imposter Web sites and distributing huge amounts of crime ware for automating identity theft.

Lasers have already had a profound impact on our daily lives, but the potential of the technology has only just been tapped, scientists believe, says the BBC.

Sunday marks the 50th anniversary of the first demonstration of a ruby laser at the Hughes Research Labs in the US.

The light beams have since found myriad uses, from scanning shop prices, to trying to sense the ripples in space-time made by colliding black holes.

In less than 18 months, there will be no more big blocks of Internet addresses to give out, estimates suggest.

According to the BBC, predictions name 9 September 2011 as the date on which the last of those tranches is released for Internet firms and others to use.

The Internet is built around version four of the Internet Protocol addressing scheme which has space for about four billion addresses. The growth of the Web has meant that only about 7% of these addresses, roughly 300 million, are left to allocate.