Motorists are to be told officially for the first time which traffic cameras are the country's biggest money spinners under a new "transparency" move to be launched on Monday

Mike Penning, the Road Safety Minister, will order police and local authorities to stop treating drivers like "cash cows" and open up a whole range of previously hidden statistics to the public, The Sunday Telegraph has learned.The evidence will give a broad picture - for the first time - of whether cameras have been effective in saving lives and preventing injury - or whether they are simply useful revenue raisers.Up until now authorities have been reluctant to publish admit which cameras were the biggest income generators, with details having...

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French search engine seeks multi-million euro damages from Google

French search engine seeks multi-million euro damages from Google 1plusV pleads with Mountain View to end 'suffocation' of marketBy Kelly Fiveash • Get more from this authorPosted in Music and Media, 28th June 2011 10:34 GMTFree whitepaper - Email storage affecting productivity? SaaS email archiving can helpA French search engine is demanding damages of €295m from Google, in a legal spat over Mountain View's dominance of the market.1plusV, a local rival to Google in France, alleged that Mountain View's command of the search engine biz had...

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Hacking suspect Ryan Cleary 'has Asperger's syndrome

19-year-old charged with hacking the website of the UK Serious Organised Crime Agency has been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a court has heard.Ryan Cleary, from Wickford, Essex, was arrested as part of a Scotland Yard and FBI probe into online hacking group LulzSec.His counsel told City of Westminster Magistrates' Court he had the form of autism, along with agoraphobia.He was granted bail, but remains in custody after prosecutors objected.Ben Cooper, defending Mr Cleary, said he was concerned the alleged hacker would have to remain in custody...

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Motion Picture Association petitions BT to block access to Newzbin

The Motion Picture Association has applied for a high court injunction that would force internet provider BT to block public access to a file-sharing hub.The outcome of this trial, which is a UK legal first, could set an alarming precedent. If the high court rules in favour of the MPA it could allow the entertainment industry to strong-arm BT and other broadband providers into censoring the internet.The website in question is the British site Newzbin,...

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People who post ratings on websites tend to exaggerate, research suggests

Five-star product ratings on Amazon and restaurant review websites have long reassured online shoppers and diners that they will not be wasting their money.Now, however, new research suggests that perhaps we should treat some of them with caution.The findings, to be published in the Economic Journal, show that, in a world where everyone is competing to get their message across, there is a strong incentive for people to express extreme opinions.According to Dr Kohei Kawamura, an economics lecturer at Edinburgh University, this incentive means that...

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British authorities charge teenager with launching DDoS attack, and anti-LulzSec group says it's tracing identities of the hacking group's members.

hacking group known as LulzSec shows no signs of slowing down. Early on Wednesday, the group announced that it had taken offline Brazil's official government website, as well as the Brazilian president's website. As of Wednesday afternoon, both sites still appeared to be unreachable.LulzSec's activities and taunts come despite the arrest of a 19-year-old hacking suspect on Tuesday, outside London, who was reportedly involved in the group. "Seems the glorious leader of LulzSec got arrested, it's all over now... wait... we're all still here! Which...

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New web domain suffixes approved by ICANN

THE cyber sphere was warned to prepare for a bumpy regulatory ride after the peak naming authority yesterday passed a resolution to allow organisations to run their own generic domain suffixes alongside the likes of .net, .org and .com.The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers board yesterday ratified the protocols for companies and organisations to apply for the generic top-level domains (gTLDs) at its 41st international convention in Singapore.In a landslide 18-to-one (and two abstentions), the board passed a resolution to accept...

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Oracle Corp is seeking damages "in the billions of dollars" from Google Inc

Oracle Corp is seeking damages "in the billions of dollars" from Google Inc in a patent lawsuit over the smartphone market, according to a court filing.The disclosure on Thursday was the first time either side publicly mentioned the cumulative scale of Oracle's damages claims.Oracle sued Google last year, claiming the Web search company's Android mobile operating technology infringes Oracle's Java patents. Oracle bought the Java programing language through its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in January 2010.Some see the lawsuit as a sign of a growing...

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Sega Pass website hacked

Sega has warned that the Sega Pass network of sites, which includes its gaming forums and press resources websites, has been hacked.The gaming company revealed the hack on Friday by sending an email to registered members. It reassured users that no payment information had been compromised as it uses third-party payment providers to handle transactions."Over the last 24 hours we have identified that unauthorised entry was gained to our Sega Pass database," the email said. "We immediately took the appropriate action to protect our consumers' data...

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Student who ran file sharing site TVShack could face extradition to US

The mother of a British student who is facing extradition to the United States over alleged copyright offences online has spoken of her anguish that he could face a possible jail sentence.In a case carrying echoes of that of Gary McKinnon, the computer hacker who has spent years fighting US extradition, 23-year-old undergraduate Richard O'Dwyer was arrested late last month at the request of the US immigration and customs enforcement department.Until last year, when police and US officials first visited him at his student accommodation in Sheffield,...

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The International Monetary Fund has become the latest, and potentially the most serious, victim of an attack by computer hackers.

The organisation, which has been orchestrating the sensitive bailouts of European governments and dealing with the fallout from an attempted rape charge against its former boss, had been under assault for several months, it discovered last week.The fund told staff that its computer system had been compromised, but did not make a public announcement. It is still trying to discover the extent of the attack, its source and its motives. Yesterday, it would say only that the fund remains "fully functional".In an internal memo, IMF chief information...

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Hot on the heels of Spain's recent arrest of three members of the hacking group known as "Anonymous," Turkish police are now claiming to have rounded up an additional 32 members of the group.

Hot on the heels of Spain's recent arrest of three members of the hacking group known as "Anonymous," Turkish police are now claiming to have rounded up an additional 32 members of the group.According to Security Week:"The Anatolia news agency said today that the suspects were taken into custody after conducting raids in a dozen cities for suspected ties to Anonymous.The group recently targeted Web sites of the country's telecommunications watchdog, the prime minister's office and parliament as a protest to Turkey's plans to introduce Internet...

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County council fined £120,000 for emailing intimate details to cab firm

Intimate details of 241 vulnerable individuals were wrongly emailed to a cab firms mini-bus companies by Surrey County Council, it can be revealed.A catalogue of privacy blunders at the council has been uncovered by the Information Commissioner’s Office, which has fined Surrey £120,000 for breaches of the Data Protection Act.In May last year, a member of staff working for an Adult Social Care Team emailed the unencrypted file that contained 241 individuals’ physical and mental health details to the wrong group email address. Although the Council...

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The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says it has been targeted by a sophisticated cyber attack.

Officials at the fund gave few details but said the attack earlier this year had been "a very major breach" of its systems, the New York Times reports.Cyber security officials said the hack was designed to install software to create a "digital insider presence".The IMF, which holds sensitive economic data about many countries, said its operations were fully functional.The cyber attack took place over several months, and happened before former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested over sexual assault charges."I can confirm that we are investigating...

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Another day, another hack, this time, it was UK's largest games publisher, Codemasters, who admitted that it was hacked and that the criminals managed to steal the names, date of birth, passwords and email addresses of thousands of customers.

Another day, another hack, this time, it was UK's largest games publisher, Codemasters, who admitted that it was hacked and that the criminals managed to steal the names, date of birth, passwords and email addresses of thousands of customers.In an extraordinary turn, Codemasters have been forced to pull down their websites and have currently redirected both their US and UK websites to their Facebook page, highlighting not only the importance of the social networking website but also Codemasters inability to provide with a proper plan B. A spokesperson...

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One of the UK's biggest computer games developers has confirmed the personal details of many of its customers have been stolen, after its systems were hacked.

 Codemasters - which makes games for consoles including the Microsoft Xbox and Nintendo Wii - has said customer names and addresses, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers and encrypted passwords have been taken.It follows a number of similar computer hacks, including two against Sony which saw the data of almost 100 million users taken.Codemasters has now taken its website off line, following the breach last Friday.The company said it had emailed every customer ever registered on the site in the wake of the data theft but insisted no payment...

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Computer hackers have penetrated NHS systems, triggering fears that the security of highly sensitive patient records is at risk.

The hackers are part of the same online gang that recently hacked into electronics giant Sony, accessing the images of a million users.  The self-styled 'pirate ninjas', known as Lulz Security, sent a warning to the NHS that its computer networks were vulnerable to cyber attack.The self-styled 'pirate ninjas', known as Lulz Security, sent a warning to the NHS that its computer networks were vulnerable to cyber attack. In an email to health staff, hackers gave evidence of some of the passwords, saying: 'While you aren't considered an enemy...

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Stuxnet virus attack represented a new kind of threat to critical infrastructure.

computer in Iran started repeatedly rebooting itself, seemingly without reason. Suspecting some kind of malicious software (malware), analysts at VirusBlokAda, an antivirus-software company in Minsk, examined the misbehaving machine over the Internet, and soon found that they were right. Disturbingly so: the code they extracted from the Iranian machine proved to be a previously unknown computer virus of unprecedented size and complexity.On 17 June 2010, VirusBlokAda issued a worldwide alert that set off an international race to track down what...

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MAN from York has been arrested as part of an FBI investigation into an online attack on the Facebook website

MAN from York has been arrested as part of an FBI investigation into an online attack on the Facebook website, writes Jennifer Bell.A tip-off from the US law enforcement and investigation agency led to officers from Scotland Yard’s e-crime unit swooping on the 26-year-old’s home, after the social networking site’s staff became suspicious.He is believed to be the first person to be detained in England over a large-scale hacking attack on Facebook, which has more than 600 million users.The alarm was raised when attempts to breach its systems were...

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U.K. Facebook Hacker Arrested

26-year-old man in the U.K. was recently arrested for trying to hack into Facebook."Details of the alleged crime, which is still under investigation, are sketchy, but Facebook said Friday that no user information had been stolen," writes Computerworld's Robert McMillan."Facebook said it was working with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and London's Metropolitan Police Service," McMillan writes. "'While no user data was [compromised], we have been working with Scotland Yard and the FBI, as we take any attempt to hack our internal systems...

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One in four U.S. hackers is an FBI informant, according to an investigation by Britain's Guardian newspaper.

The world of computer hacking has been "so thoroughly infiltrated in the U.S. by the FBI and secret service that it is now riddled with paranoia and mistrust," the paper claims in a report published Monday.The best-known example of the turncoat "phenomenon," the paper says, is Adrian Lamo, a convicted hacker who turned informant on Bradley Manning, a United States Army soldier who was arrested in May 2010 in Iraq on suspicion of of passing secret documents to the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks.Writes the Guardian:Manning had entered into a prolonged...

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Sony hack: private details of million people posted online

The names, birth dates, addresses, emails, phone numbers and passwords of people who had entered contests promoted by Sony were all published on the internet.LulzSec, a hacker group, said it had infiltrated the firm's systems to prove how vulnerable they were to "simple attacks".The data was apparently stolen from Sony Pictures, the company's entertainment distribution arm.The group has previously launched hacking attacks on the US broadcasters PBS television and Fox.com.In a message on Twitter, the group said: "1,000,000+ unencrypted users, unencrypted...

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