Hacking and Anonymous surfing

One of the criminal masterminds behind the infamous DarkMaket site built to allow cyber criminals to collaborate on online scams, has been sentenced to nearly five years in jail, according to widespread reports.

Renukanth Subramaniam, 33, was sentenced at Blackfriars Crown Court to serve 46 months for conspiracy to defraud and 10 months for five counts of mortgage fraud.

John McHugh, 66, of Doncaster, South Yorkshire, was jailed for two years for conspiracy to defraud after being caught using the site under the alias of ‘devilman’. According to an AP report, Judge John Hillen said: “Criminals should learn from this case that, even in cyberspace, there is no hiding place.”

As 10-year-old Lim Ding Wei blasts alien space ships on a computer screen in his living room, his father Lim Thye Chean looks over his shoulder proudly.

“This is way beyond me already, because I do not know how to do 3D programming. I can’t teach him any more,” he said proudly as his son zips around in outer space fully rendered in 3D.

From being the teacher, Thye Chean, 40, a chief technology officer at a local firm, has now become the student of his son, whom local media reports fete as Singapore’s youngest programmer of mobile applications. The game is the latest in Ding Wei’s repertoire of mobile applications, which include the hit Invader Wars 1 as well as art scrawler Doodle Kids that has registered more than half a million downloads since it was posted on the iPhone App Store last year.

Researchers from two National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers at Princeton University and the University of California, Santa Barbara made a significant breakthrough in the worldwide pursuit of quantum computing. They engineered a method to control the spin of a single electron within a magnetic field without disturbing other nearby electrons.

The method developed by a team of researchers led by Jason Petta, assistant professor of physics at Princeton University with partial support from his NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award, traps one or two electrons in microscopic corrals created by applying voltages to minuscule electrodes giving them an ability to control spin orientation.

The accomplishment overcomes a major challenge to creating scalable semiconductor-based quantum computers that use the intrinsic spin of individual electrons to store and manipulate information. Previous methods, namely electron spin resonance or ESR, unselectively sprayed microwave radiation on a sample, causing all the electrons in the sample to adopt the same spin orientation. This defeated the goal of having distinct electrons work together to represent data.

The depressed economy did not dampen demand for information technology professionals last year, according to a survey by recruitment firm Kelly Services. The finding is at odds with observations from recruiters – who have said vacancies dropped by as much as 75 per cent during the recession, but the picture for 2010 looks brighter.

The Kelly Services survey of senior IT staff and hiring managers in New Zealand found 71 per cent reported an increase or no change in demand for skilled IT professionals in 2009. Fifty-four per cent of respondents who reported a decrease in demand believed that would reverse within six months.

Beyond Recruitment director Ben Pearson said the company saw a significant drop in demand for permanent IT staff last year. Demand for contractors also slipped, but not as severely. This had changed in the past three to four months, with permanent vacancy numbers doubling and contractor vacancies also recovering slightly.

The Android Market may still lag behind the iPhone App Store in terms of variety and quality, but there is something to be said for the Android operating system’s extremely tight integration with existing Google products, and the wide choice of devices and carriers.

There’s no question that the iPhone has many wonderful apps, but Android’s smart syncing with existing tools, interesting Android-only experiments coming every day from Googleemployees, and its open marketplace model have yielded some tools that may give the average iPhone user pause.

If you’re looking for a change, or you’re in the smartphone market and still weighing the pros and cons, consider these Android-only apps and how they might fit into your work, play, and mobile lifestyle.

The Australian Services Union (ASU) claimed yesterday that IT giant IBM was looking to offshore around 800 jobs, many more than the 150 positions the union had originally believed affected.

Workers had been told that the services for each of IBM’s customers, except for the Federal Government, could be potentially offshored to low cost centres in India and China, ASU branch secretary Sally McManus said in a statement.

“We understand that there are potentially 800 jobs that will be lost,” she said. Last week, the union had flagged that IBM was looking at offshoring, but had estimated the number of affected jobs to be only around 150. There were also suggestions that some of the work could be sent to Ballarat, according to McManus.

Australian researchers believe about 8 per cent of people who play computer games may be suffering symptoms of addiction.

A team led by associate professor Vladan Starcevic at the Psychological Medicine Department of Nepean Hospital in Sydney surveyed almost 2000 computer-game players aged 14 and above and found 156 responded differently to the questions they posed, and appeared to have a problem.

Other studies have shown higher levels of problem game-playing, ranging from 8.5 per cent to 11.9 per cent. Good indicators of a problem are if gamers admitted playing longer than they had planned, or were playing games “despite knowing one should not do it”, according to their research, published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry.

This followed a media report suggesting its executive agency, the Identity and Passport Service, had scrapped plans to store biographical information on the Department for Work and Pension’s database.

A spokesperson for the Home Office told GC News: “The Identity and Passport Service is currently working with DWP as we develop the National Identity Service. No decision has been made on the solution for the biographical store for the National Identity Register.”

A Home Office spokesperson had earlier told GC News that the IPS had no intention of using the the DWP’s CIS system. “A lot of people seem to think we were going to piggyback on the system, but that was never the case,” said the spokesperson.

At least eleven 15-year-old children were discovered to be working last year in three factories which supply Apple. The company did not name the offending factories, or say where they were based, but the majority of its goods are assembled in China.

Apple also has factories working for it in Taiwan, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, the Czech Republic and the United States.

Apple said the child workers are now no longer being used, or are no longer underage. “In each of the three facilities, we required a review of all employment records for the year as well as a complete analysis of the hiring process to clarify how underage people had been able to gain employment,” Apple said, in an annual report on its suppliers.

“On the Internet,” one dog tells another in a classic New Yorker cartoon, “nobody knows you’re a dog.”

The internet is notorious for its digital dens of deception. But on Facebook, what you see tends to be what you get — at least in one study of tailless, two-legged young adults.

College-age users of Facebook in the United States and a similar social networking site in Germany typically present accurate versions of their personalities in online profiles, says psychologist Mitja Back of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. People use online social networking sites to express who they really are rather than idealized versions of themselves, Back and his colleagues conclude in an upcoming Psychological Science.