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National Lottery goes online

The National Lottery is going online with games similar to its scratch cards. There are five luck-based games on offer, ranging from a simple animated scratch card to an online 'Flirtathon' where players try out chat-up lines with members of the opposite sex.

Users must register with the site using a debit card and there are additional registration details for 16-19 year olds.

"We'll only take money that is already available in users' debit card accounts," said a Camelot spokesperson. This is just the first stage. Draw-based games like Lotto will be online hopefully by the end of the year, on Sky Active by spring 2004 and on mobiles by summer 2004."

The company hopes that the move will boost revenues, which have been falling recently as fewer people play the lottery.

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Consumers are the key to recycling

Consumers will be key to making sure inkjet cartridge manufacturers stick to the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directive, according to the Environment Agency.

The government agency will monitor how companies fulfil their commitment to recycling and end-of-life disposal for larger electrical products. Geoff Cooper, a spokesman for the Environment Agency, said that it had yet to be decided how consumers should report breaches of the directive.

"Recycling is a sound principle," he said. "Currently around 70 per cent of cartridges are sent to landfill that could be sent to remanufacturers. There are a lot of organisations that will take these, including charities. Some companies also pay people to send in cartridges."

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Grokster boss slams music industry

The music industry has launched a war of contempt against its own customers, according to Grokster president Wayne Rosso.

He said record companies were trying to protect profits when they should look to exploit the internet to give consumers a better deal by cutting out manufacturing and packaging costs.

"They view their customers with contempt... and just want to shove product down their throats." But he claimed that consumers would continue to download file sharing services because they were convenient and easy to use.

"We are not pirates," said Mr Rosso. "We are legitimate businessmen who are in the software distribtion and marketing industry." He compared his business with that of CD burner manufacturers.

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No more help for 95 and NT 3.5 users

Microsoft has ended support for the Windows 95 and Windows NT 3.5x operating systems as of 31 December 2002.

The software giant ceased offline help for the operating systems over a year ago, but had continued to offer a limited online service.

Now that this has ended no more patches specifically aimed at flaws in these operating systems will be developed, and users will be unable to get advice or help from Microsoft.

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New robot face smiles and sneers

A new robot that, according to its creators, can express a full repertoire of human facial expressions was unveiled on Sunday.

K-bot has a feminine face and is capable of 28 facial movements, including smiling, sneering, furrowing her brow and arching her eyebrows. She also has cameras in her eyes to recognise and respond to humans.

David Hanson, of the University of Texas, Dallas, sculpted K-Bot's face using an electroactive polymer with 24 artificial muscles to provide facial movement. Her predecessor - Andy the android - had just four facial movements.

"This is the face for human robotics," Hanson told the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting in Denver. Previously, Hanson has designed robots for Disney theme parks.

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Error messages unlock internet payments protocol

A fundamental flaw in the technology used to secure online credit card transactions and other communications has been discovered.

Serge Vaudenay and his team, at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, found they could unlock an encrypted message by exploiting the error message scheme of the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol.

The SSL protocol secures the link between a web browser or an email program and a web server. It is used by thousands of web sites to allow online credit card payments.

When an SSL message is sent to a server, the server's SSL program decrypts the message to check that it is the correct length and has been encrypted properly. If there is a problem, an error message will be sent back.

Vaudenay's team found that, by intercepting messages and modifying them in a particular way, they could cause the server to generate an error message that revealed part of the plain text message.

They demonstrated the attack in the lab by intercepting and modifying encrypted passwords sent to an email server. By generating 160 altered messages and analysing the error messages they prompted, they successfully worked out a password eight characters in length.

"It's a first time we have found a problem in SSL itself, rather than just the way it's used," Vaudenay told New Scientist. But he concedes that the attack devised by his team would be difficult to pull off in practice.

This is because an attacker would need to be able to intercept the encrypted messages, which would require access to secure parts of a network. Further more, the latest version of SSL, which patches this problem, was released on Wednesday.

Security consultant Eric Rescorla agrees that the flaw does not pose a major problem. He notes that tracing this type of attack would probably be easy. "An active attack involves generating errors, so it would definitely leave footprints," he told New Scientist.

The use of the SSL protocol is identified in browsers by the presence of "https" rather than "http" at the start of a web page's URL, and by a small padlock in the corner of the browser window.

From New Scientist Online News  17:40 20 February 03

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U.S. companies fined $185,000 for violating children's online privacy

 
American snack companies Hershey Foods and Mrs Fields Cookies have been fined $85,000 and $100,000 respectively for violating children's privacy on their websites.

The hefty fines were issued by the Federal Trade Commission after it decided both companies had broken the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by collecting personal information from children without first obtaining parental consent.

The penalties are the largest since the Act became law in April 2000 and show that the US government is serious about protecting kids' privacy on the Internet. Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, Howard Beales warned: "If your website collects personal information from children, comply with the law or face the consequences."

The law itself is tough and applies to operators of commercial websites and online services that are either aimed at children under 13 or knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. That information includes not only includes things like full name, home address, email address and telephone number but also hobbies, interests and any information collected through cookies or other tracking mechanisms if this information is in any way tied to an individual.

Mrs. Fields' sites mrsfields.com, pretzeltime.com, and pretzelmaker.com provided birthday greetings and free cookie coupons to kids and recorded the full name, address, email address and birth date from over 84,000 children as part of the service. However, while it did not disclose the information to any third parties, it didn't obtain parental consent before picking up the information.
 
Posted: 28/02/2003 at 17:32 GMT

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