Personal information on 72 worker’s compensation claimants was stolen from Sentry Insurance and later sold over the Internet, the company said.

The data sold included names and Social Security numbers but not medical records, Sentry said. Data on an additional 112,198 claimants was also stolen but there is no evidence it was sold, the company said.

Sentry said it notified everyone affected and was providing credit monitoring services to help prevent fraud.

Source: AP

Growing numbers of fans are protesting online when labels delay the digital release of hit radio singles. But these consumer complaints are doing little to stop record companies from deferring the availability of downloads.

Source: Reuters

Mozilla Corp. on Thursday gave users a first look at the next version of its Thunderbird e-mail client by releasing an alpha of v. 2.0.

Thunderbird 2.0 Alpha 1, which can be downloaded in Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X editions, is suitable for developers only, Mozilla said on its Web site, although there are no actual barriers that block others from trying the software.

Among the new features being tested in the client are message tagging, enhanced mail notification alerts, updates to the program’s extension model, and a “Conversations” view mode (similar to the grouping used in Google’s Gmail).

Source: Yahoo

Microsoft plans next week to charge a nominal fee for Office 2007 Beta 2 downloads, in a move that runs counter to the practice held by most software companies.

Consumers who download the 2007 Microsoft Office system Beta 2 will be charged $1.50 per download, beginning next Wednesday at 6 p.m. PDT, a Microsoft spokeswoman said.

“Since the end of May, Beta 2 has been downloaded more than 3 million times…That’s 500 percent more than what was expected,” the spokeswoman said. “The fee helps offset the cost of downloading from the servers.”

Source: News.com

Lockheed Martin to Design Nano Air Vehicle to Monitor the Urban Battlefield

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) a $1.7-million, 10-month contract to design a revolutionary remote-controlled nano air vehicle (NAV) that will collect military intelligence indoors and outdoors on the urban battlefield.

Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories (ATL) leads a team that will design a remote-controlled NAV, similar in size and shape to a maple tree seed. A chemical rocket enclosed in its one-bladed wing will power a sensor payload module more than 1,100 yards. Delivered from a hover and weighing up to 0.07 ounces, the module will be interchangeable based on mission requirements. Besides controlling lift and pitch, the wing will also house telemetry, communications, navigation, imaging sensors, and battery power.

The NAV will be about 1.5 inches long and have a maximum takeoff weight of about 0.35 ounces. In typical operation, a warfighter will launch the NAV and fly it toward the target by viewing its flight path through a camera embedded in the wing. Like a maple tree seed, the one-bladed device will rotate in flight, but its camera will provide a stable forward view and transmit images back to a small, hand-held display.

As the system matures, a simple autopilot aboard the NAV will provide limited autonomous operations. Once the NAV delivers its payload, it will return to the warfighter for collection and refurbishment.

According to James Marsh, ATL director, designing and building such a small device will require revolutionary manufacturing technologies to integrate near-microscopic components into the airframe. But even the airframe will require a challenging combination of new and emerging technologies.

A new research project aims to harness search engine Google to find security flaws in open source code. Bugle identifies common vulns using a (thus far) limited set of Google queries. So far the search queries look for cross-site scripting, SQL injection and buffer overflow flaws, for example.

Source: The Register

Opera Software is making plans to steal market share from Microsoft.

Though a launch date for Opera 10 hasn’t yet been set, Opera is hoping the updated application will lure users away from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 by building on Opera 9’s use of small Web applications called widgets.

Source: News.com

Microsoft Corp. on Thursday failed to quash fears that a new version of its Windows software system would be further delayed, stirring concerns that a new technology cycle tied to the upgrade could be put on hold.

This uncertainty over when Microsoft and the rest of hi-tech would benefit from the surge in revenue growth that typically accompanies a major Windows upgrade led Microsoft’s shares to close down 2 percent at $23.87 on the Nasdaq on Thursday.

Source: Reuters

The rivalry between Digg and AOL’s Netscape got dirty on Wednesday. Apparent Digg fans used a flaw in Netscape.com to send an expletive flying over the AOL social media site.

Other messages that popped up in text boxes on the Netscape Web site included pro-Digg messages and, in some cases, users were redirected to the Digg Web site.

Source: News.com

In its latest effort to further the open-source programming movement, Google opened a site Thursday where programmers can host their software projects.

As expected, Google engineering manager Greg Stein announced the project hosting site during a talk at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Ore.

“One of our goals is to encourage healthy, productive open-source communities. Developers can always benefit from more choices in project hosting,” Google said on a frequently-asked-questions site.

Source: News.com

Nokia, the world’s largest cellphone maker, has started its first tests of a technology that allows users to roam seamlessly between phone networks and local wireless hotspots such as Wi-Fi.

Fifty families in Oulu near the polar circle in northern Finland will test the technology over the next two months, Nokia said on Thursday.

Source: Reuters

New ballistics-imaging technology, developed by Intelligent Automation, a Rockville, Maryland, engineering firm with funding from the Justice Department, lets forensic scientists capture a fired bullet’s distinctive markings in 3-D for the first time.

The technology, which was featured at the 2006 National Institute of Justice conference here Tuesday, works by projecting white light through a special microscope onto a bullet or its casing. The depth of the marks determines the intensity of the reflected light, which is recorded by a camera.

A computer then generates a 3-D image of, say, a Remington 9-mm slug or a Winchester .44-caliber Magnum round for researchers to pore over. Previously, forensic examiners were limited to flat photos of bullets and casings taken from different angles. But the wrong orientation of the photos can throw off the analysis: An examiner may end up comparing striations from different sides of the bullets. Not with the new technology.

Source: Wired