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The latest furore surrounding the loss of a memory stick with the data of all the prisoners in the UK is surprising in a number of ways.

However, the media have chosen to focus on the loss of the key itself, but I don’t think that is the surprising thing; I mean, we all lose things from time to time, especially something barely bigger than an AA battery.

The really surprising thing to me is why I can ensure that we can have all our company disks and portable media encrypted in less than a few hours for the sake of a £150 outlay, but a government contractor with contracts worth north of £50 million over the past few years hasn’t put a similar system in place.

What have they spent all that money on I wonder?

If you deal with any commercially or personally sensitive information, and if you’re in business, then that means you, then do yourselves a favour and invest a small sum in getting things secured.

www.pgp.com

Spell-checkers can be pretty handy. When you are staring at the same document for sometimes hours on end as it is being compiled, sometimes you can miss the simplest of typos, so it is useful to run it through a spell-checker or at least past another pair of eyes before you send it to the client.

However, we didn’t realise that spell-checkers can also pass comment on the policy of our friends and neighbours in the US.

After recently checking the spelling in a document we are putting together for a client, the US-centric spell-checker flagged up “healthcare”.

It said “word not found”…

The search giant Yahoo, amongst others, is experimenting with a new version of the internet called the “Semantic Web”. In other words, the aim is to try and get the internet to behave more like person, rather than just a collection of dumb terminals.

At the moment, when you do a web search for, say, “office equipment”, the search engines use the specific words in that search request, and try and match pages that they have previously indexed. This can sometimes throw up all sorts of anomalies and weird pages. Basically this is because people are still much better than computers at associating between words and phrases, and as people’s associations differ wildly between age groups, countries, races and so on, it is very difficult for a search engine to get it right every time, for everyone.

The solution, say the techies, is to have the web think for itself, and instead of just dumbly returning a list of pages, it should actively search for relevant content by understanding its meaning. Of course “understanding” is a relative term - we think it is doubtful whether a computer will ever pass the Turing test in our lifetime, as the meaning we as humans attach to information is vastly complex and, ultimately, any computer will have to be programmed by us, and we do not fully understand this relationship ourselves.

We all saw what happened in Terminator 2 when SkyNet started to think for itself (it fought back, apparently, when someone tried to unplug it), so maybe going as far as a fully self-aware internet wouldn’t be such a good idea. However, anything that makes our daily trawl through the internet a little easier and quicker is a good idea in our book.

Check out:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7296056.stm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

Handheld gadgets storing thousands of hours of film footage could soon be a reality thanks to IBM scientists.

Researchers for the computer giant are working on a technology known as racetrack memory which uses tiny magnetic boundaries to store data.

In a paper in the journal Science, the team at IBM’s Almaden lab in California outline ways to make the building blocks of the novel storage medium.

The capacity of MP3 players could increase 100 times from present levels.

But the IBM team say racetrack memory is still seven to eight years away from commercial use.

Click here to read the full article on BBC News Online

According to Symantec, the online security company, the number of viruses, worms and trojans in circulation has reached the one million mark.

Our experience has shown that for the sake of £50 or so, it is well worth investing in a comprehensive virus-scanning and backup solution, as the inconvenience of losing your data is simply incalculable - never mind the cost to your business.

Read the story on BBC News Online