Gary McKinnon: Pentagon hacker’s worst nightmare comes true
The autistic UFO conspiracy theorist has been extradited, charged with the biggest US military hack of all time. 'I sit up all night thinking about jail,' he says For the past seven years, in bedsits in Crouch End and Bounds Green, north London, the Pentagon hacker and UFO buff Gary McKinnon has – according to his family and friends – been suffering one long anxiety attack. He's prone to regular fits of fainting and thoughts of suicide. He's written that he can't look himself in his eyes when he's shaving in case the sight of himself sets the spiral off. He jumps out of his skin if someone touches him by surprise. I've met him sporadically during these years and can vouch that he's a chainsmoking, terrified shell. "I'm walking down the road and I find I can't control my own legs," he has told me. "And I'm sitting up all night thinking about jail. About male rape. An American jail. I'm only a little nerd … My life is like walking through a world you know is probably going to end." And yesterday, at 10am, it did. The high court ruled that extradition to America was "a lawful and proportionate response to Gary McKinnon's offending". It is unlikely that anything will stop it now. How did he become, in the eyes of US prosecutors, the man who committed "the biggest US military hack of all time"? And does he deserve his fate? He was born in Glasgow in 1966, but grew up in London with his mother Janis and stepfather Wilson, a UFO fan
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Gary McKinnon: Pentagon hacker's worst nightmare comes true
The China Digital Entertainment Expo in Shanghai
The 7th China Digital Entertainment Expo took place in Shanghai last week. As ever, the entertainment industry demonstrated its shameless obsession with parading hordes of scantily clad "booth babes" to help promote its wares …
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The China Digital Entertainment Expo in Shanghai
Which (British) computer magazine?
Now Personal Computer World has ceased publication, Tim Heeley wants something else to read Personal Computer World has been my tech bible over the last two decades for learning about computing. Where do I turn now to get my monthly fix? Tim Heeley PC Pro is my favourite read (and, to declare an interest, I've written for it), while the fortnightly Computeractive is friendly and very easy to read. PC Advisor is also worth a look. Computing guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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Which (British) computer magazine?
Ask Jack: 30 July 2009
Paperless payments Claranet (clara.net) says it wants to help the environment by reducing the number of paper invoices and cheques. I am not comfortable with giving it my credit card details but have been told the only way to avoid the £10 charge is to do this. Is this legal? Liz Stevens JS: I am not a lawyer, but BT won a case against Dennis Andrews, a Nottinghamshire pensioner who disputed its similar £4.50 charge. It looks as though Claranet is simply following what a lot of companies are doing. Apparently, there was an item on the BBC's Watchdog programme, but this seems to have had more to do with whether the charges were reasonable, not their existence – and £10 does not sound reasonable to me.
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Ask Jack: 30 July 2009
Technophile: Drobo automatic hard drive backup system reviewed
You need never need lose data again if you shell out for the Drobo automatic hard drive backup If you're like most people, your hard drive space is rapidly running out. When it's full, what are you going to do? You could just replace your internal hard drive if you don't mind cracking open your PC, or start a collection of external drives – which will all need their own power socket and desk or floor space. Wouldn't it be great to have one compact unit that can house several hard drives, and offers terabytes of storage space you can expand at will? Enter Drobo. Now in its second incarnation, Drobo is basically an SATA hard drive enclosure, with some nifty tricks up its sleeve. Many PC owners have used RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) setups to offer some kind of protection against data loss, but these systems usually demand identical hard drives with identical capacities. Drobo will happily use any size SATA drive you want. Drobo has four bays for your SATA drives. If your data needs aren't too intensive you could just fill the bays with, say, 250GB drives. But Drobo is hungry for as much space you can afford. Drobo spreads your data over the drives you've installed, keeping track of every byte of data and space storage space
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Technophile: Drobo automatic hard drive backup system reviewed
Do you need a licence to watch TV on your computer?
Officially, yes – depending on what you watch. The law states that anyone watching or recording TV programmes as they are broadcast must have a licence. It really doesn't matter if you use a TV, a computer or a mobile phone – if it's live, you have to pay. Catch-up services such as the BBC iPlayer or 4oD fall under different rules and don't require a licence. But how does TV Licensing , which collects and enforces licence fees on behalf of the BBC, know when a PC is receiving a live broadcast? Have the mysterious detector vans been fitted with some new kit? TV Licensing is very secretive about its detection methods, fearing that disclosing too much could help potential evaders. In a Freedom of Information request last year the BBC refused to reveal the technical equipment used by its vans, stating it "relies on the public perception that the vans could be used at any time to catch evaders". This lack of information has only encouraged speculation. A common theory is the vans can pick up a signal transmitted by components from within the TV. To receive a broadcast, the TV must be tuned to the correct frequency, which is generated by a local oscillator. TV Licensing could potentially use this signal to find licence-dodgers. Whatever the method, it can't be used to detect unlicensed computer use, as TV broadcast over the internet doesn't generate a TV signal. TV Licensing admits it has no separate strategies for catching those who watch online, and while it has caught people watching TV illegally on something other than TV sets, it won't provide records of the equipment used. Is there a danger that people will ditch the set and go online in order to avoid paying
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Do you need a licence to watch TV on your computer?
Newsbytes: 30 July 2009
Travel in pictures Google's Street View has a new feature which lets you navigate between similar user-contributed photos.
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Newsbytes: 30 July 2009
Will smartbooks replace netbooks?
Could netbooks be replaced by smartbooks? Yes. But will they? Maybe. The smartbook name has been adopted by companies working with ARM (Advanced Risc Machines), which developed the core processor used by most smartphones. The general idea is to run smartphone software such as Google's Linux-based Android and Microsoft's Windows CE (AKA Windows Mobile) on portable computers with 7in-10in screens. These could be netbooks or touch-operated tablets. Apple, which sells ARM-based devices such as the iPhone and iPod Touch, has been widely tipped to produce the latter. Smartbooks are designed to work with online applications rather than traditional desktop software – one of the ideas behind netbooks. As we know, things turned out differently. Suppliers such as Acer, Asus and MSI were keen to sell netbooks running Linux-based systems with consumer-friendly front ends but these models failed in the marketplace. When users were given the option to buy much the same hardware at a higher price running Microsoft Windows XP instead, the Linux versions went from 100% of the market to around 5%. Buyers also drove the netbook market towards larger screens.
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Will smartbooks replace netbooks?
When the chips are down: the economics of computing power
Moore's law has seen computing power grow exponentially for 40 years – but soon economics, not physics, may stop it. Jack Schofield reports on the search for a solution For the past 40 years, the whole of modern electronics – not just computers, but games consoles, mobile phones, MP3 players, digital cameras, personal video recorders and so on – has been driven by Moore's law: the observation in 1965 by Intel's co-founder Gordon Moore that manufacturers can put roughly twice as many transistors on a chip every two years. This has produced a stream of smaller, faster and cheaper chips, advancing at an exponential rate. But Moore's law could soon come to an end. And not because, as frequently predicted, we've run into insurmountable technical problems – but because chip factories cost too much to build. We have not got to that stage yet. Intel is spending $7bn (£4.2bn) upgrading its seven US chip fabrication plants (AKA fabs), and last Friday, Global Foundries started building a new $4.2bn fab in Saratoga County, New York. It will not be in operation until 2012, but the semiconductor industry has to invest during recessions to be ready to supply boom markets. Not cheap as chips Global Foundries is one answer to the affordability problem. It's a spinoff from the chip giant AMD, which so far is its only customer. But it's also a collaborative investment that will serve as the focus for collaborative research and development. New York state put up a $1.2bn incentive package to encourage Global Foundries to bring 1,400 high-paying high-tech jobs to the region. The government of Abu Dhabi is also investing up to $6bn over the next five years, both in the new Fab 2 and AMD's current fab in Dresden. Global Foundries also has alliances with IBM – which has a $2.5bn chip plant nearby in East Fishkill, NY – and several other companies. "We don't believe any more in a home-grown R&D model," says a spokesman, Jon Carvill. Rather than just serving AMD, the new strategy is to target the 20 largest companies who need leading-edge chip technologies in high volumes. "There's very little competition in that part of the market," says Carvill. "For those customers today, there isn't any choice: there's only TSMC [Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company] that can meet their needs
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When the chips are down: the economics of computing power
Video: The inner workings of the Antikythera mechanism
An animation shows how the world's oldest computer helped the Ancient Greeks simulate planetary motions and predict lunar eclipses Click on the first symbol on the bottom right of the player to enlarge the video
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Video: The inner workings of the Antikythera mechanism