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Air France begins trial of biometric boarding cards
Air France begins trials with biometric cards as a replacement for boarding passes; the RFID-equipped cards store the passenger’s fingerprints and may be re-used up to 500 times
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Critic: U.K. fraud strategy "more worthy of Uzbekistan"
Business fraud costs Britain £14 billion a year; the U.K. government today launched its National Fraud Strategy, but a Cambridge professor harshly criticizes the initiative
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Leading browsers easily felled at hacker contest
Students at a hacker convention easily breach the protections built into Safari, IE 8, and Firefox; contestants do so in front of appreciative spectators and in a matter of hours
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CSC to help combat cyber warfare
Cyberattacks pose a major threat to the welfare and security of developing countries; developing protection against that threat offers business opportunities
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IDO Security shoes-on inspection device adopted by several airports
Taking your shoes off for airport security checks is a hassle; a shoes-on inspection devise is gaining popularity
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U.K. government flags ID cost increase
The U.K. government says that passports will account for a smaller proportion of the cost of the national identity scheme’s overall cost than previously stated; introducing and producing passports containing fingerprints will cost about 70 percent of the £4.785 million budget for the National Identity Scheme for U.K. nationals
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European Commission calls for single EU patent
EC says that the absence of a single Europe-wide patent law is hindering the growth of technology companies in the European Union
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Yoran: Better metrics needed for security
Amit Yoran says that the security industry is awash in bad data, and that companies that attempt to use the metrics could take the wrong actions
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Iris recognition on-the-move tested at Schiphol Airport
Sarnoff Corporation promises to make it faster and easier to verify users through iris scanning technology; Schiphol Airport want to know more about it
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Handling nuclear materials for less
During this century, nuclear plant decommissioning in the United Kingdom will likely produce thousands of waste packages that will be retrieved, conditioned, and stored for no less than £40 billion; BNS develops new way to reduce storage and handling costs of radioactive material
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U.S. searching for a nuclear waste graveyard
Congress has killed the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository project, so the United States has no central location for storing nuclear waste; 50,000 metric tons of toxic nuclear waste that has already been produced by the U.S. nuclear plants; 30,000 metric tons more of nuclear waste is expected to be generated in the coming decades
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Questions raised about private inspections of food companies
What the mortgage meltdown did to the financial services sector, the recent salmonella outbreak has done to to food industry: critics charge that both cases exposed the inherent weaknesses of industries regulating and inspecting themselves
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Project allowing Mexican long-haul trucks into U.S. ends
Two years ago the Department of Transportation launched a pilot project allowing Mexican long-haul trucks to carry their cargo from the Mexican origin all the way to the U.S. destination, without transferring the cargo to an American carrier; Congress removed funding for the project from the omnibus spending bill
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U.K. looking for a single search and rescue helicopter fleet
The U.K. Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Transportation are planning to acquire one helicopter for both military and domestic search and rescue missions; the single SAR fleet of aircraft will succeed the existing service in 2012
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Roche takes over Genentech for $47 billion
Swiss drug giant pays $95 per share for 44 percent of Genetech (Roche already owns 56 percent); the combined company would be the seventh-largest U.S. pharmaceutical company in terms of market share and would generate about $17 billion in annual revenues with a payroll of around 17,500 employees in the U.S. pharmaceuticals business alone
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The long view
Not Just Beijing’s Doing: Market Factors Are Also Hitting Rare Earths Prices
Have depressed rare earths prices been engineered by the Chinese state to snuff out non-Chinese rivals before they get going? Or do they simply reflect a weak market, with demand rising more slowly than was expected by the promotors of a slew of new projects?
Emerging Threats to the U.S. Financial System
In early 2021, a freewheeling, freethinking group of investors on Reddit plowed their money into GameStop, a video game retailer that several big hedge funds had bet against. The stock price shot up, some people made millions—and, to the delight of those on Reddit, the hedge funds had some very bad days. Researchers saw the GameStop story as a cautionary tale. If investors on Reddit could work together to move the markets like that, what could an adversary like China do?