Since the outbreak of swine flu in Mexico in April, the amount of newly registered domains related to the disease has increased significantly, making hypochondriacs a potential target for villains. Playing on peoples' fear in this way is a classic example of how to perform fraud. In fact, the false propaganda on swine flu domains is comparable with the technique that fake-scanners use.  The sites are created solely to bring feelings of emergency, fear and panic to visitors, and the overall ambition is to make people pay for a product.

As a response to the EU Action Agenda to strengthen consumer protection for software products, two EU Commissioners, Viviane Reding and Meglena Kuneva, have proposed consumer protection rules for software products which are in line with the current consumer protection rules for physical products.

The period between the mid-1940's and the early 1990's came to be called the Cold War, a time characterized by conflict between the Soviet Union and the Western world. That period was paved with an arms race, and military muscles were flexed to their rupture limit. The superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, threw themselves into a "tech-race" that took the rocketeers and humanoids to where no man had gone before - to space. The Cold War period also encompassed concepts such as the "proxy-wars" which account for the fact that the main combatants never came to face each other in direct battles. So what has changed since then?

As reported previously, Google Street View was launched in Sweden on April 21. Yesterday, BBC News reported that Greece has put "Hellenic-power-assisted brakes" on the Google camera fitted "surveillance" units while the privacy issues of the Google Street View service are debated.

Various reports state that huge numbers of PCs throughout the world have been “zombified” during the last year. Still, the true number of hijacked computers is likely much higher than what's stated, making botnets a massive global security problem.