Week in review: Need the speed?

Technology is expanding the options for traveling from one place to another--the one determining factor between the two seems to be whether you want to complete the trip in months or minutes.

A team of documentary filmmakers completed its quest to pilot the Segway Human Transporter across the United States on Tuesday, when rider Josh Caldwell successfully navigated his trusty scooter across an invisible finish line in plain view of the Atlantic Ocean.

Looking tired and cold, but enthused by his achievement, Caldwell posed for pictures in front of a small gathering of interested onlookers, reporters and Segway enthusiasts.

The trip, dubbed "America at 10 mph," started Aug. 9 in Seattle and took the five-person team across 14 states. It was undertaken in the name of capturing on film "a true sense of what this country is about."

Caldwell said the scooter held up "incredibly well" during the ride and underwent no major mechanical breakdowns. At last count, the machine had required 409 battery charges. The trip averaged 60 miles per day.

That same day, NASA launched an experimental rocket-powered airplane that smashed the previous airspeed record, reaching close to 7,000 miles per hour.

The test of the X-43A "scramjet" was the third and most ambitious in a series of tests. The second test reached 5,000 miles per hour, while the first was aborted after problems with a rocket booster. Tuesday's flight reached Mach 10, or about 10 times the speed of sound.

NASA researchers declared the test, which was aimed at examining both the capacity of the supersonic engine and the performance of the vehicle at the extremely high speeds, a success.

The Mach 10 speed reached by the plane would be fast enough to travel from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles in about half an hour.

Phishing hooks
Phishing is one of the fastest-growing forms of personal fraud in the world. While consumers are the most obvious victims, the damage spreads far wider--hurting companies' finances and reputations and potentially undermining consumer confidence in the safety of e-commerce.

Phishing scammers typically send out an e-mail that appears to come from a trusted company, such as a bank or an e-commerce Web site. The phishing messages attempt to lure people to a bogus Web site, where they're asked to divulge sensitive personal information. The attackers can then use those details to steal money from the victims' accounts.

Companies are paying a hefty amount to fix phishing damage. In many cases, they make good on their customers' losses. Companies are also spending money to educate customers about fraud prevention, and the cost of polishing up a tarnished brand is hard to estimate.

As part of that effort, banks are looking to bring down the number of phishing attacks by adopting two-factor authentication, which would require people to produce two forms of identification, according to Microsoft. The company's chief security strategist, Scott Charney, said that companies had failed to adopt the technology as fast as he would have liked.

"We haven't had as much adoption as you would hope for," Charney said at the Microsoft IT Forum in Copenhagen. "A lot of solutions for two-factor authentication are for enterprise spaces. If you get two-factor authentication to the consumer level, you reduce the phishing threat."

Microsoft has been focusing a lot on security, as well as coming under a lot of security scrutiny. This week, three more vulnerabilities were found in version 6 of Internet Explorer. That brings the total number of