Police can hack into your PC

Police and security services have been granted new powers to hack into personal computers without a warrant, following European Union proposals aimed at extending the use of intrusive surveillance.

They allow the use of keyloggers, which can be installed in a variety of ways, to monitor keyboard use including emails, web surfing and instant messaging conversations.

Authority must still be obtained from a chief constable, but the new measures have angered opposition MP's, and civil liberty and privacy organizations are threatening a legal challenge.

"The exercise of such intrusive powers raises serious privacy issue," said Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve. "The government must explain how it would work in practice and what safeguards will be in place."

Shami Chakrabati, director of human rights group Liberty, added: "These are very intrusive power. The public will want this to be controlled by new legislation and judical authorization.

"Without those safeguards it is a devastating blow to any notion of personal privacy. This is no different from breaking down someone's door, rifling through their paperwork and seizing their computer hard drive."

The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) defended the move, pointing out that it would still be governed by the Regulation of investigatory Powers Act.

According to the police, 194 police hacking operations were carried out in England, Wales and Northem Ireland over the past two years: 133 in private homes, 37 in offices and 24 i hotels.

High-def 3D TV 'not far off'

Panasionic is pushing for a standard for 1080p high-definition 3D TV to enable services to get off the ground, its chief executive Yoshi Yamada told a CES press conference. He said the company would propose a standard in Japan in the coming months for the system it debuted last year at the Cebit show in Germany.

"Panasionic does not think that 3D high definition for the home is far away at all," Mr Yamada said. "We are at the start of another phase-change that will have an impact on Panasionic's business."

The standard is needed for both consumer and broadcast devices to encode and decode images. Panasionic has been working with studios and standards groups to develop a format.

"3D in the home will never flower unless we have a national standard," Said Bob Ferry, executive vice-president of Panasionic onsumer electronics. "But we are very excited because we believe that 3D changes the world from watching TV to an immersive experience."

Elsewhere in the show Mitsubishi demonstrated a system that translates 2D games and movies into 3D and does not require the use of special glasses to view the effect. It is based on a package from Nvidia called 3D-Vision

Philips sells software called Wowvx that does the same thing and it demonstrated an entirely different 3D system at the IFA show in Berlin last year. Intead of storing different stereoscopic data for each eye, it adds depth information to 2D pixels.

Several different 3D rendering technologies are also available, so a global standard will be hard to establish.

Lenovo pulls a dual screen laptop

We've long liked the idea of a notebook with two screens that opens out like a book, though we have yet to see one gaining success in the mainstream.

Lenovo's new W700ds Thinkpad notebook has a rather different take on the two-screen idea. It has a 17in main display and a 10.6in one pulls out from the casing when required. Lenovo hopes it will appeal to people in graphics-intensive fields such as digital media creation, geophysical exploration and computer-aided design. Pricing starts at £3,459.

End of the line for adapters?

A new industry initiative could cut down our need to lug around multiple power adapters - surely the single biggest irritation in computing.

PCW has been pointing out for years that the technology exist for smart power supplies with whatever a device wants. But the idea has never gained momentum, perhaps because vendors are making too much money from existing adapters.

The new initiative, launched in Hong Kong last month, would do away with the plugs altogether and deliver power wirelessly. This is alredy done by any adapter that transfered by wireles induction between the primary and secondary windings.

In the system proposed by the new Wireless Power Consortium (WPC), the primary and secondary would be separated respectively into the source and the device drawing power. There are eight companies in the WPC: National Semiconductor, Philips, Logitech, Convenient Power, Fulton Innovation and Shenzhen Sang Fei Consumer Communications.

Proprietary wireless charging devices are already available. The WPC aims to create a standard to allow any compliant device to be charged by any compliant source.

"This is a crucial moment in the development of wireless power," said Menno Treffer, senior director of standardisation at Philips and chairman of the WPC.

The standard relates only to power transmission across a short distance and is not about to do away with adapters. It will deliver only 5W, so is suitable for only low-drain devices. However, the WPC intends to move on to a higher power spec.

Pack Your life on to a 2-terabyte SD card

Memory firms plan to make a barely imaginable 2TB of storage available on SD card or Memory Stick. The move would enable the use of compact HD video cameran, as well as 'life recorders' that capture everything you say and do.

The SD Association announced a new SDXC (for Extended Capacity) specification at CES that will be published in the next few weeks. No timescale was given for reaching 2TB capacity but first implementation are likely to hold less.

Read/right speed are expected to hit 104Mbits/sec this year but the SDXC roadmap goes to three times as fast.

Sandisk and Sony announced a joint effort to create a Memory Stick Pro capable of storing up to 2TB, in a device measuring just 31x2x1.66mm, with a maximum transfer rate of 320Mbits/sec.

Windows 7 lifts CES gloom

Microsoft chose the massive Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas to launch the first public trial of Vista successor Windows 7. Chairman Steve Ballmer announced during has keynote that a beta version would be posted at www.microsoft.com/windows-7.

Microsoft is capping the number of downloads, so you may already be too late to get a copy. The new code has been generally well received.

It certainly look good in demos. The most obvious difference is in the revamped Taskbar, which uses the icons much better than Vista, and menus without forcing you to maximise. The icon are larger too, to facilitate finger control on touchscreens; Windows 7 also support multi-touch gestures, briingin iPhone-style control to suitable platforms.

Windows 7 is said to run on box than can run Vista - including Atom-powered netboooks. Ballmer also announced the availability of a new version of Windows Live, Microsoft's significant for beta tester as Windows 7 loses the current form of Vista's Calendar, Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, and Contact.

Istead you are invited you to download versions which can be used standalone or act as client for Live versions that can be used from any browser. Microsoft gives you 25GB of online storage too.

some manufacturers may opt to pre-load the clients - Dell says it will. This Opt-in is persumably to avoid reviving accustions of monopoly abuse, using Window to lock people into Microsoft services.

The usual caveats about using beta code apply: don't install over a missing-critical system and back everything up. Windows 7 uses the Vista kernel and so should present few compatibility problems. But is reasonably stable.

Lucky number 7 for Windows

After all the dismal retail and business news over the past few weeks, it's been good to see at least the semblance of song cheer coming out of the annual Consumer Eletronics Shows (CES) in Las Vegas. This show run at the begining of january and while visitor numbers were being predicted to be down on last year, there was still plenty of glitz and hype to be found on products ranging from web-enabled TV's to 3D desktop scanners.

One of the first big stories was Microsoft's announcement of an initial public beta for Windows 7. By the time you read this, the beta download will problably have been stoppped, as we understand that Microsoft intends to limit the number of downloads.

It now looks as though Microsoft intends to launch Windows 7 before the end of 2009, perhaps in an increasingly precarious state. I'm not even going to attempt to make any predictions that far ahead - with intel issuing profit warnings and several top tech companies laying off staff. It's certainly going to be a rough this year.

Hacker Linux Uncovered

Concentrating on Linux installation, tuning, and administration, this guide to protecting systems from security attacks demonstrates how to install Linux so that it is tuned for the highest security and best performance, how to scan the network and encrypt the traffic for securing all private traffics in a public network, and how to monitor and log the system to detect potential security problems. Backup and recovery policies that provide a structure for secure operations are also considered, and information related to configuring an Apache server, e-mail service, and the Internet gateway using a proxy server, an FTP server, DSN server for mapping DNS names to IP addresses, and firewall for system protection is provided

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