New York Senator Charles Schumer has called on America’s largest sites to make the HTTPS protocol the default for their sites in an effort to prevent ID theft when users hop on public Wi-Fi at places like Starbucks and McDonalds.
The Senator says the growth of public Wi-Fi spots is making it easier for hackers to steal info like credit card numbers and passwords for banking institutions.
Says Schumer (via Reuters):
The number of people who use WiFi to access the Internet in coffee shops, bookstores and beyond is growing by leaps and bounds.
The quickest and easiest way to shut down this one-stop shop for identity theft is for major Web sites to switch to secure HTTPS web addresses instead of the less secure HTTP protocol.
HTTP, says the Senator, is a “welcome mat for would-be hackers.” Most major site operators, outside of the banking institutions, use HTTP as the default, even if they do have HTTPS versions.
Result for: bookstores
Amazon has announced this week that it has launched AmazonCrossing, a book imprint that will publish foreign-language books that have been translated into English.
The first book available will be “The King of Kahel,” a 2008 French novel which received the prix Renaudot French literary prize.
The book will be out, translated, on November 2nd, and in e-book form the same day.
AmazonCrossing will work exactly like AmazonEncore, which is the e-tailer’s first imprint. Encore uses “customer feedback and other data from Amazon sites around the world to identify exceptional books deserving a wider, global audience.”
Amazon says it also hopes to sell its book in bookstores around the U.S., in addition to on its website.
Adds Chad Post, publisher of Open Letter Books, a nonprofit press that publishes only works in translation, via PW: “There are many thousands of books out there worthy of being translated and published in English, but that are currently unavailable to us monolingual readers. The more international books that are available in English, the better. It’s exciting to see a company like Amazon investing in such a worthy cause like AmazonCrossing, and in a way that will definitely help expand the audience for literature in translation.”
Result for: bookstores
Italy, France, Germany and Scandinavia have begun offering DVD movies on a new format called DVD-D which is unique because it is self-erasing.
By self erasing I mean that the content on the discs are erased exactly 8 hours after the movie is first played in any DVD player or PC drive. The timer is slightly longer for DVD-Ds that have software on them, 48 hours to be exact. The new format is available at kiosks, bookstores and gas stations for about 1/3 the price of standard retail DVDs and seem to be growing in popularity.
After the time is up, inserting the disc into a player will give you a “No Disc” error message. More interestingly, there are recordable DVD-D discs available which can be recorded at up to 8x speed and DVD-5 capacity. After ordering the blanks, the client can then “specify how long the data is to remain, having the option of one-time viewing only, or a time period of 8 hours, 48 hours or otherwise.”
It is important to note that it is unknown right now what copy protection is used on the DVD-D discs, if any or what copy protection potential clients can use to stop experienced users from copying the data to their computers. Even more importantly, the discs and packages are fully recyclable.
