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Posts Tagged ‘Bank Accounts’

The ABCs of securing your Windows netbook

Netbooks are likely to be a popular gift this holiday season—they’re cheap, highly portable, and the kind of thing that you can give as a gift to a relatively novice computer user who needs a laptop but doesn’t need the power or responsibility that comes with a more expensive portable. Netbooks are also looking increasingly good to business travelers, due to their portability and low hardware replacement cost in case of loss, damage, or theft. But even though a netbook itself can be cheap to replace, losing an inexpensive netbook PC can still be very costly. Sure, a stolen or lost netbook will set you back a few hundred dollars for the device, but you have to consider how much the data stored on it is worth. That lost netbook can open you up to identity theft, empty out your bank accounts, or even cost you your job. That’s something to think about before you walk out the door with that $300 wonder.

However, with a little bit of planning, a little bit of effort, and perhaps some additional software, you can ensure that if you lose your netbook, whoever finds it has nothing more than a useless, two-pound hunk of plastic and silicon. Not only can you protect and encrypt your data from prying eyes, you can also set your netbook to self-destruct all the data onboard if you lose it.

In this article, we’ll give you a basic introduction to securing your Windows netbook in case it’s stolen. Advanced Windows users will already know most of what we’ll cover, so this article is aimed more at the user who has a new netbook and no idea how to secure it.

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Nokia readies mobile payment service Nokia Money

Nokia said today that it’s going to be entering the mobile payments market next year with a product called Nokia Money, powered by mobile payments startup Obopay. With it, users will be able to send money to other people using their mobile phone numbers, as well as pay merchants and bills.

The mobile device manufacturer isn’t revealing too many details yet about how the service will take on competitors like PayPal Mobile. It sounds like it won’t just be for the owners of Nokia phones, though, since the company says it will work on “virtually any mobile phone.” (Though whether someone who owns a non-Nokia phone would want to do that is another question.) Nokia plans to demonstrate the service at the Nokia World conference on Sept. 2 and 3, and then to start rolling it out in early 2010.

The news isn’t a big surprise — after Nokia’s investment in Obopay earlier this year, it was clear the company planned to get involved in mobile payments; it was just a question of what form that involvement would take. Simple mobile payments could have the biggest impact in emerging economies in Africa and Asia, where phones are many people’s primary or only connection to the we. In the announcement, Nokia notes that that there are far more mobile phones in the world than bank accounts (4 billon compared to 1.6 billion).

[photo:flickr/whiteafrican]

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Tony Hawk Ride Limited Edition skateboard outed as UK version gets priced and dated

[Via Joystiq]

Read – Tony Hawk Ride dated and priced
Read – Limited Edition listing

Filed under: Gaming

Tony Hawk Ride Limited Edition skateboard outed as UK version gets priced and dated originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 Aug 2009 21:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Energy software startups set to fight off Google, Microsoft

Consumer-level energy management has suddenly become a hot topic. The Department of Energy has made it a major part of its stimulus spending, hardware makers from GE to Cisco have announced initiatives, and both Google and Microsoft have announced Web-based energy management software. The fact that these companies can enter the market just as it appears poised to take off is the result of years of work by various companies and consortiums, which have been pushing to have open standards adopted by everything from appliance makers to utility data centers. Those standards are what allow the latecomers like Google and Microsoft to enter the market with bigger bank accounts and higher brand recognition among consumers.

To get a sense of how companies in the energy management field are adapting to rapidly growing markets and the entry of large competitors, we talked to two companies with a history in energy management software:  Fat Spaniel, which focuses on photovoltaic systems, and Tendril, which makes smart grid software for everyone from individual consumers to entire utilities. The general impression they gave is that open standards are too important for their business to avoid simply because of the threat of competition, and that they both see ways of staying out of the way of their larger competitors.

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ATM scam at DEFCON clearly the work of ironic criminals

The hooligans in this case have a dry sense of humor or are extremely unlucky: Either way, we can’t help but get a chuckle out of the fact that someone placed their smart card skimmin’ faux ATM at the Riviera Hotel Casino in Las Vegas — during DEFCON, the world’s largest hacker convention. No one can say exactly how long the kiosk was there — at least the kids were smart enough to place it right outside the security office, one of the few places in the conference center not under surveillance. It was picking up on this last fact that aroused the suspicion of Brian Markus, CEO of Aries Security. When shining a light through the glass panel that should house a camera, he instead found the PC that was set up to skim people’s data. He then notified security, who removed the device and once again made the world safe for hackers and their bank accounts.

ATM scam at DEFCON clearly the work of ironic criminals originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 Aug 2009 10:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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