INFORMATION

Windows 8 already eyed by many businesses, says survey

Windows 8 may not launch until later next year, but many businesses are already aiming to jump to the new OS.

A full 52 percent of the 973 IT professionals polled by InformationWeek last month said they plan to upgrade to Windows 8. Among those, 5 percent said they'll deploy Windows 8 to their users as soon as it's available, while 13 percent said they'll switch within the first year, and 19 percent within the first two years.

Only 10 percent of the likely upgraders said they'll switch on an as needed basis, 24 percent said … Read more

Homeland Security moves forward with 'pre-crime' detection

An internal U.S. Department of Homeland Security document indicates that a controversial program designed to predict whether a person will commit a crime is already being tested on some members of the public voluntarily, CNET has learned.

If this sounds a bit like the Tom Cruise movie called "Minority Report," or the CBS drama "Person of Interest," it is. But where "Minority Report" author Philip K. Dick enlisted psychics to predict crimes, DHS is betting on algorithms: it's building a "prototype screening facility" that it hopes will use factors such … Read more

HTC phones major security alert

The next iPhone will be unveiled tomorrow, Facebook partners with Websense to check for malicious links, and a major security vulnerability in HTC Android phones reveals a huge amount of personal data.

Links from Monday's episode of Loaded:

Get informed with MediaInfo

Media files come in numerous different formats these days, and it's not always easy to get a quick look at their characteristics. MediaInfo is a simple utility that can provide users with metadata about their audio and video files, including codecs, and frames per second.

The program's interface is plain and easy to navigate, with menus across the top and buttons down the left side. You can select either an individual file or a whole folder of files to view. There are eight different views to choose from--Basic, Sheet, Tree, Text, HTML, XML, MPEG-7, and PBCore 1.2--each … Read more

Internet Captcha-cha-cha

Captchas are those squiggly, random words or numbers you type in a box to prove to a Web site that you're a human being and not another computer. The word isn't a variation of "capture," it's an acronym: Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Internet Captcha is a free tool that creates colorful animated Captchas you can embed in your Web site to limit traffic to people and exclude other computers. The Captchas it creates use number codes with distortion, animated effects, and background objects that make them impossible for … Read more

Apple invents privacy eyewear for confidential information, gaming

Apple has applied for a patent to cover a great new invention that would allow users to wear specially designed eyewear to view confidential information while using their mobile devices. The patent also covers gamers who are playing multiplayer games.

The gist of how this is works is that a user can set the device, be it an iPhone, iPad, or notebook, to privacy mode, wherein the software would allow the option of obfuscating the information displayed on the screen. The glasses would decipher the display so that any potential onlookers would only see a scrambled mess, whereas the user … Read more

Password rememberer

The more secure a password is, the harder it is to remember. This is a problem since the need for strong passwords grows every day, along with potential threats to your PC. Password managers make it easy to create and use secure passwords for all your log-ons, Web sites, and other password-protected points of access. Capp-Ware's RememberMe is a free tool that can store your passwords in a database secured by 128-bit AES encryption. You only need to remember RememberMe's master password to access or edit all your passwords.

During RememberMe's installation process, we were prompted to … Read more

Mail master

Keeping a list of customer contact information is only part of what it takes to stay in touch; you also need tools to make it easy to produce and mail correspondence. TSC Free Address Book is much more than just a database of addresses. This program also lets users create form letters and labels, saving time when you're ready to contact your clients or any other group of people you need to correspond with en masse.

TSC Free Address Book's interface isn't particularly attractive, but it is easy enough to navigate. Users can create personal profiles for … Read more

NHS laptop loss could put millions of records at risk

A laptop containing unnamed patient information has gone missing from a subsidiary of the National Health Service North Central London health authority,

The Sun reported on Wednesday that the laptop, which was lost along with 19 others three weeks ago, contained the unencrypted health details of over 8.63 million people and records of 18 million hospital visits, operations and procedures. It was taken from a storeroom of London Health Programmes, a medical research organization based within the NHS North Central London health authority.

Both the UK's privacy watchdog, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), and the police are … Read more

Better than a shoebox

If your card collection survived your mother's cleaning campaigns, there's a good chance it could be valuable, now or in the future. Sports Card Collector can help you catalog and organize your treasures. Duck Software's database engine is optimized for collectors, with quick access via name or category, customizable fields, and easy data entry.

Sports Card Collector's interface is plain but businesslike and easy to understand and use. It's divided into two halves. The left half has a window listing entries sorted by player name or card brand with a series of customizable category tabs … Read more