A disc that can store 500 gigabytes (GB) of data, equivalent to 100 DVDs, has been unveiled by General Electric.
The micro-holographic disc, which is the same size as existing DVD discs, is aimed at the archive industry.
But the company believes it can eventually be used in the consumer market place and home players.
Blu-ray discs, which are used to store high definition movies and games, can currently hold between 25GB and 50GB.
Micro-holographic discs can store more data than DVDs or Blu-ray because they store information on the disc in three dimensions, …

By Dominic Casciani
BBC News home affairs reporter
Communications firms are being asked to record all internet contacts between people as part of a modernisation in UK police surveillance tactics.
The home secretary scrapped plans for a database but wants details to be held and organised for security services.
The new system would track all e-mails, phone calls and internet use, including visits to social network sites.
The Tories said the Home Office had “buckled under Conservative pressure” in deciding against a giant database.
Announcing a consultation on a new strategy for communications …

Nikolay Grebennikov
In February 2005, Joe Lopez, a businessman from Florida, filed a suit against Bank of America after unknown hackers stole $90,000 from his Bank of America account. The money had been transferred to Latvia.
An investigation showed that Mr. Lopez’s computer was infected with a malicious program, Backdoor.Coreflood, which records every keystroke and sends this information to malicious users via the Internet. This is how the hackers got hold of Joe Lopez’s user name and password, since Mr. Lopez often used the Internet to manage his Bank of America account.
However …

A behind-the-scenes conflict appears to be under way—but not the sort you might think
Illustration by Claudio Munoz
IT IS the new frontier for military and intelligence activity: cyberspace. For years military experts and computer scientists have speculated about the possibility of a nation’s infrastructure being attacked using computers, rather than bombs. There have been dark warnings of the danger of a “digital Pearl Harbour”—an unexpected strike in which digital attackers shut down America’s electrical grid or air-traffic control systems, or hack into nuclear-power stations and cause them to overheat. In recent …

By Maggie Shiels
Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley
The computer company that has in the past taken on the grandmasters of chess is now turning its attention to the famed US trivia quiz show Jeopardy.
In a head-to-head challenge of man versus machine, IBM will pit a supercomputer named Watson against human contestants.
Watson is a new question-answering system based on natural language.
“The aim is to get Watson to think and interact in human terms,” IBM’s Dr David Ferrucci told BBC News.
“It will try to understand a user’s question and …