Sony Ericsson, in partnership with Fossil watches, have recently announced a new range of personal time pieces that, using embedded bluetooth, display the caller ID on the watch face, as well as giving you an option to forward the call to voicemail. Thus eliminating the need to forceably scramble around in your pocket again.

When an incoming call is received, the watch will vibrate and show you whose calling on a small display in the center of the watch, giving you a serious of options. Whilst bluetooth is renowned for using a fair whack of power, this type of device pairing is likely what Nokia is aiming for with the release of its new Wibree short range, low power data transfer technology.

A new anti-theft system has been designed that aims to significantly reduce the current rise in mobile phone theft.

Remote XT is a system whereby, upon discovering the theft of a phone, the user can ring a call center who will then send out a signal to the robbed phone. This signal destroys all the data on the phone, before emitting a high pitched annoying screetch, rendering the device completely unusable.

“We also then set a small bomb off, if you like, that completely wipes the data…if it has genuinely been stolen then it renders the phone useless to the thief,” says Mark Whiteman, MD of Remote XT.

The noise can be stopped by simply removing the battery, however, upon re-insertion the noise continues. This may provide a temporary measure that can be employed whilst work on reverse engineering the phone takes place. Whilst it hasnt been confirmed, the noise is probably active with any power source, whether battery or mains.

Strangely enough, I’m told that Hyper, from Hackers Voice Radio, came up with this idea a while ago, as mention at the end of the HVTV2 hacker video.

Today saw the Nokia announce its new N Series mobile phone. The N91 Music Edition, now fitted with a huge 8GB hard drive, is aiming to secure Nokia’s position in the mobile media market. The phone is said to sync with Windows Media Player and, thusly, supports the WMA music format. Surprisingly, the new N91 also supports a variety of other formats, including, MP3, AAC, AAC+ and eAAC+. Nokia has said that it will be bundling an updated version of its PC Suite data synchronisation software with Music Manager rip and transfer code.

The lower spec N70 and N73 are said to incorporate 1GB and 2GB of memory respectively, whilst Nokia haven’t announced whether this will be as removable SD media or built in memory, its more than the current versions offer.

The N70 and N73 go on sale this November, with the 8GB N91 shipping by the end of the year. Potential buyers will be looking at a price of £234-£369, dependant on model.

Online retailer, amazon.co.uk, are offering the current standard 4GB N91 from £235

If you thought that was a mouthful, imagine stuffing a terabyte of data into your mouth every second. That’s exactly what Intel announced during this Tuesdays IDF Conference.

With the release of Intel’s Quad Core processors next month, there is much excitement in the hardware industry. But just as you think things have got as good as they can for a few months, Intel have announced the construction of a processor with no little than 80 Cores!

At the, bi-annual, conference this Tuesday, CEO Paul Otellini, offered up a silicon wafer with the prototype chips to amazed onlookers. During his speech, Otellini stated that the 80 Core chips are capable of exchanging data at an astonishing terabyte per second. Each core clocking in at 3.1Ghz. With next months Quad Core processors looking to put Intel ahead of the competition for now, they have announced that the new 80 Core processors are on target for release within the next five years.

More Information : Intel - Intel Core Microarchitecture

On August 29, 2006 a patent request was made by Roger Detzler for an invention that instantaneously destroys the data contained on magnetic data storage media upon the occurrence of certain events.

Unauthorized access to data stored on magnetic media is prevented by destruction of the media with a reactant chemical. This approach may be initiated as a response to tampering or intentionally by using any one of several triggering interfaces rendering the data unrecoverable even to aggressive recovery procedures.

For the full document click here.

UK energy company, Moixa Energy, have just released a new type of rechargeable battery that requires nothing more than a standard USB port to refill.

The NiMH batteries are currently available in AA size and can be purchased via the Moxia website for a mere £12.99 a pair. Details on performance are sketchy, but the new battery certainly looks to be full of potential. The battery itself appears to be a normal AA size. Re-charging is achieved by flippy the postive terminal off to reveal a USB connector, and inserting it into a bog standard USB port.

Each battery runs at the standard 1.2v (1300mah) and a dead to 90%+ charge will take you approximately 5 hours.

Next month see’s the European launch of the much anticipated, Netgear SPH101 VoIP wireless phone. The Register reports that the handset is available via pre order to North American customers via Amazon.com with an expected availability date of 15th October 2006. However, Amazon.co.uk is currently listing the device as available and ready for shipping.

At £160, the SPH101 competes well with the current offerings, but given Netgears solid grounding and well known name, it is expected to grab a large proportion of the, rather limited, wireless VoIP handset market.

The SPH101 will connect straight to the Skype network using any 802.11b or 802.11g wireless network. The unit also provides all of the features that the common Skype software does. Whilst open networks are said to be hassle-free, secure wireless hotspots that require web based authentification might cause problems with the Netgear device.

A school, in the South of Wales, has recently began the implementation of a new scheme in which it aims to fingerprint the 1,400 attending pupils in a bid to automate class registrations.

Parents of the children that attend the school, in Porth County, were notified little more than a week before the scheme was put into practice. The headmaster of the school defends the decision, claiming that

“it wasn’t necessary for us to seek parental consent in this. It’s a system that has been approved by the DfES and it’s supported by Capita SIMS…..There are 1,400 students in the school and we had two phone calls…the parents were perfectly happy.”

The system, known as VeriCool, is developed by a sector of General Dynamics, and aims to provide biometric scanning for each classroom. General Dynamics is best known for specialising in producing systems for the military and intelligence services.

The move has met with much controversy, with parents and privacy advocates airing their concerns. David Clouter of leavethemkidsalone argued that taking the register was an important way for teachers to establish contact with each individual pupil at the start of a class and that its role would not substitute manual registers, for instance, in the case of a fire.

Your Response : The Register - Letters

Note: Interestingly, I was recently speaking to a driving instructor. I have been wondering, for some time now, why plastic ID card driving liscences have been introduced when drivers are still required to carry the paper counter-part. The instructor informed me that the common theory is that it is part of the initial phase of the governments biometric national ID card scheme. The idea being that we will put up less of a fight if we are already used to carry an ID card of sorts - a way of slowly introducing us to the idea of a full national ID scheme / database. Coupled with the reported incident of schools implementing fingerprint scanning systems, we clearly ARE slipping further towards that Orwellian society that we resent so much.

1950’s STROWGER UAX13

Over the bank holiday week, I took a trip down to the Forest of Dean, with my family, to see the Thomas The Tank Engine event that was being held by Dean Forest Railway. Now, obviously, this has nothing to do with hack, tech or phreaking. However, before we left I noticed a small museum crammed into the back of the gift shop, I slowly walked around the miniatures and plaquards before coming to what was easily the best part of the day - telephones, lots of telephones. Surrounding the phones was alot of old machinery, not just any old machinery, no, old school GPO telephone exchanges and manual switchboards, dating as far back as the 1930’s. Behind a glass wall was something even more impressive - a fully functional STROWGER Unit Automatic Exchange #13 (UAX13) from the 1950’s.

Click to read more and see photos of old telephone exchanges and the UAX13

PC Pro is currently running an article on new Xerox technologies involving temporary prints via time limited print ink. From the article:

“Xerox has lifted the veil from some of its research and development work in the field of printing. The cutting-edge research highlighted at a press event involved current projects that are expected to see the commercial light of day within 18-months, including a twist on the theme of invisible ink….This offers the prospect of reusable paper in the sense that the content is automatically erased after a period of time, ready for fresh printing. Inspired by the fact that many print outs have a life-span of a few hours (think of the emails you may print out just to read, or the content you proof read on the train journey back home), the specially prepared paper will preserve its content for up to 16 hours.”

Read More : PC Pro - Xerox reveals transient documents