Fiber fracas

Mega American telco Verizon Communications is just three days from a possible union strike that would see the company lose 65,000 employees - about a third of its workforce.…

Your financial future looks cloudy

Rackspace appears to have a knack for ill-timed IPOs.…

An anonymous reader writes "Flying drones from halfway-across the world used to be considered a cushy military job. But the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have become so dependent on the robo-planes that the Air Force has called in chaplains and psychiatrists to help these remote-control warriors cope. 'In a fighter jet, "when you come in at 500-600 miles per hour, drop a 500-pound bomb and then fly away, you don't see what happens," said Colonel Albert K. Aimar, who is commander of the 163d Reconnaissance Wing here and has a bachelor's degree in psychology. But when a Predator fires a missile, "you watch it all the way to impact, and I mean it's very vivid, it's right there and personal. So it does stay in people's minds for a long time."'"

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Two Google engineers have created an iPhone-specific version of the company's language translation site.

bluefoxlucid writes "According to The Register, several banks are forcing users to opt-in to the Verified by Visa optional service by locking their cards if and when they encounter a Verified by Visa participating site and fail to opt-in. Register reader Steve says, 'This seems like a strange way to implement a voluntary system. On most of the retailers' websites there is no clue that you are about to be challenged by Verified by Visa until you attempt to complete the transaction. This means that you trigger the "fraud protection" unintentionally. And when you have located a retailer who doesn't require Verified by Visa to complete a purchase, you can't because your account is on hold.' Further, '[I]n some cases resetting the password is all too easy. Fraudsters know this and go after these credentials which, once obtained, make it harder for consumers to deny responsibility for a fraudulent transaction. Phishing scams posing as Verified by Visa sites have sprung up targeting these login credentials.'"

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Mike sends in the story of a new fingerprint technology with interesting potential for both crime detection and rights violations; there are also intriguing possibilities in fighting cancer. "Using a variation of mass spectrometry called 'desorption electrospray ionization' or 'Desi,' a fingerprint can identify what the person has been touching — drugs, explosives, or poisons, for example. Writing in the Friday issue of the journal Science, R. Graham Cooks, a professor of chemistry at Purdue University, and his colleagues describe how the technique could find a wider application in crime investigations. As it becomes cheaper and more widely available, the Desi technology has potential ethical implications, Cooks said. Instead of drug tests, a company could surreptitiously check for illegal drug use of its employees by analyzing computer keyboards after the employees have gone home, for instance."

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Infoworld reports (via MacsimumNews) that Samsung has been working with developers to boost solid state drive (SSD) performance in operating systems. Samsung announced Wednesday that it has been in talks with Microsoft to boost performance in Window...

An iPhone framework points to an application blacklist on Apple's servers, but questions remain about the mechanism's purpose.

Moneydance 2008r2, an update to the personal finance management software, is now available.

drfuchs writes "If you signed an employment agreement in California, any non-compete clause in it is null & (void*), says the state Supreme Court of California (ruling PDF). Better still, the San Francisco Chronicle opines that the US Federal courts are likely to fall in line with the decision in the way they interpret California law. (Most other states still have non-compete laws on the books and it's not clear this ruling will affect them.) Turns out it wasn't a high-tech case at all, but a CPA who had worked for the accounting firm Arthur Anderson (now disgraced due to their complicity in the Enron case)."

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New invention has familiar ring

Apple will fill in some long-awaited missing features from its iPod and iPhone mobile players, a patent application published this week suggests. There's just one problem: Much of Apple's "invention" was dreamed up by Reg readers several years ago - and one embodiment is already on the market.…

FsG writes "In the first 24 hours that it was available, eight people bought a completely useless iPhone app for $1,000 a pop. This app does nothing except alert onlookers that you have a lot of money. The developer priced it at $999.99, which is the most you can charge on Apple's store. Apple has since yanked the app (without explanation as usual), while the inventive programmer walked away with $5,600."

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Interactive nano-Spandex iPants for all

Japanese boffins have developed a material which they believe could be used to make stretchy, highly flexible electronic circuitry. It goes almost without saying that their elasto-conductor miracle sheet is based on fashionable carbon nanotubes.…

Hey, Chertoff, seize this

A US senator has accused the head of the Department of Homeland security of “blatant mischaracterization” over the searching of laptops at US borders.…

DaringFireball.net clarifies that the published blacklist url likely only blocks malicious apps from accessing the iPhone's Core Location functions. Core Location allows applications to detect the user's location through GPS and Wi-Fi triangulation....

MacPractice, the medical practice management software, now supports e-prescriptions through the eRX NOW service.

Linux escapes mail fail

Budget hosting provider 1&1 Internet has hit problems while updating its Microsoft email platform. Customers have been unable to access web mailboxes for more than 24 hours.…

Diomidis Spinellis writes "An article in this week's Economist outlines Microsoft's marketing response to Vista's travails and Apple's hip Get a Mac campaign. Describing the recent Mojave Experiment as 'Microsoft at its worst,' the article's writer wonders whether hiring a new hot ad agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, to put together a $300m campaign can make Microsoft look cool. Can money buy you love?"

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Nothing to do with failures or cloning, definitely not...

Transport for London and London's mayor Boris Johnson have ended their contract with Transys, the group of companies which provide Oyster cards - the card ticketing system for the capital's buses, trams, some trains and tubes.…

Canon has introduced three new HD camcorders to its line, including one that records to internal memory and SDHC cards.