The European Union has called on the United States to delay the deadline for the introduction of biometric passports for visitors without visas.

The United States has set a deadline of October 2005 that will require visitors entering the country without visas to hold a passport with a biometric identifier held on an electronic chip. But European Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini has written to Congress asking for the deadline to be delayed until August 2006.

Frattini says that interoperability and security issues with the biometric readers are taking longer than expected to address and that only six EU countries–Austria, Belgium, Finland, Germany, Luxembourg and Sweden–are currently in a position to meet the October deadline.

The United Kingdom is also negotiating separately with the United States for an extension to the deadline, as it plans to start introducing biometric passports only from the end of 2005. Each U.K. biometric passport will have a chip with a digital image of the holder, while the EU versions will also carry a fingerprint or iris scan.

If the United States agrees to the demand, it will be the second extension to the biometric passport deadline. If it doesn’t, then millions of travelers to United States will be faced with having to apply for visas to gain entry if they don’t hold one of the new passports.

Source: ZDNet

Need a ride to the airport, need a taxi to take you some where? Just ask Google.

Yesterday Google debut Google Ride Finder, a service that combines Google Maps with Google Local, which lists taxi, limousine or shuttle services in a metro area.

With Google Ride Finder, you can ask where you want to find a ride and it’ll show you the actual location of participating vehicles operators in that area, along with a phone number you can use to contact them.

One of the most popular Weblog-publishing tools, WordPress, is stirring a controversy over search-engine gaming because it included thousands of articles related to popular search terms on its Web site while largely hiding them from site visitors.

Bloggers and search-engine marketers are accusing the open-source WordPress project of spamming the major search engines, while at the same time being one of the advocates in an effort to combat comment spam in blog postings.

The discovery emerged late Wednesday when the blog Waxy.org revealed that thousands of articles about such popular search terms as asbestos, mortgages and debt consolidation appear on sections of the WordPress.org site while being hidden from visitors to the site’s home page.

News of the search-engine gaming technique spread quickly on the Web. As of Wednesday evening, search results to WordPress.org pages with the articles began disappearing from Google’s Web index. Yahoo Inc. followed suit Thursday, removing the WordPress.org pages from its index because of what a spokesman confirmed was “noncompliance to our content guidelines.”

Google officials declined to comment on why WordPress.org pages had dropped from the company’s index, but its Webmaster policies bar techniques that display different content to its crawler than to site visitors.

Source: eWeek

A pair of newly discovered security flaws in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Outlook programs could put millions of users at risk of code execution attacks, a private research outfit warned Thursday.

The vulnerabilities were reported to Microsoft Corp. by private research outfit eEye Digital Security, and basic details on the risks and the affected products have been released on eEye’s upcoming advisories Web page.

A spokeswoman for the software giant confirmed that engineers at the Microsoft Security Research Center were investigating the eEye discoveries.

“At this time, Microsoft is not aware of any malicious attacks attempting to exploit the reported vulnerabilities, and there is no customer impact based on this issue,” she said.

Once the investigation is done, she said Microsoft would “take the appropriate action” to protect affected users.

Under normal circumstances, Microsoft patches are released on a monthly cycle, but in cases of emergency, the company could release an out-of-cycle update.

Google plans to offer a bottomless cup of storage with its Gmail Web-based e-mail service, dramatically raising the bar for rivals in the sharply competitive business for the second time in a year.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based Web giant on Friday plans to double the free storage on Gmail from 1GB to 2GB, said Georges Harik, Gmail product management director. After that, Google will add a yet-to-be-determined amount of extra storage daily, with no plans to stop.

The move highlights the seemingly inexhaustible storage needs of a small group of heavy e-mail users, and the sharply falling costs of online storage. Lifting pre-defined storage caps for Web-based e-mail could have broader ripple effects, Harik said, changing the way people think about quotas from something that is set in advance to something that grows with the user.

“We wanted to make sure we have a plan in place for when people reach their storage limit,” he explained. “We don’t want people to worry that they might run out.”

Source: News.com