More than 8 million American adults were victims of identity theft in 2005, the Federal Trade Commission said Nov. 27.

Of the victims, 3.2 million experienced unauthorized use of their existing credit card accounts, according to an FTC survey. Another 3.3 million reported misuse of non-credit card accounts and 1.8 million victims said that new accounts were opened or other frauds were committed using their personally identifying information.

The cost of being an ID theft victim varies widely, according to the survey. The FTC examined the value of the goods or services stolen, and in at least half of the cases, ID thieves stole $500 or less in goods and services. However, in 10 percent of the incidents, thieves made away with at least $6,000.

The team behind the Jasypt Java encryption tool is rolling out Jasypt 1.4.

Jasypt is a Java library that enables developers to add basic encryption capabilities to their projects with minimum effort and without having to know much about cryptography, developers involved with the project said.

Jasypt, also known as Java Simplified Encryption, is an open-source project hosted on Sourceforge.net. New features in version 1.4, which was announced Nov. 23, include encryptable properties files and Spring Framework integration, encryptable Hibernate data source configuration, new command line tools, Apache wicket integration for URL encryption and upgraded documentation.

According to the Jasypt documentation, the technology can be used for encryption tasks associated with applications, such as encrypting passwords, sensitive information and data communications, and creating sums for integrity checking of data.

Google Maps has added a new view layer to its repertoire today. It’s called terrain view, and as the name suggests, it lets you get a detailed look at geographical features both natural, and human-built like buildings and landmarks. Unlike Google Earth, you can’t zoom around and change eye level to see how high something is, but Google has gone to some degree of rendering the surface of the earth to give it a three dimensional look and feel.

While it lacks the flash and instant usefulness of Street View (Google’s latest maps addition), terrain view is a great way to look at topographical features with a little more understanding than one can garner from the plain map view alone. My one quibble after giving the service a spin around most of the West Coast is that you can’t zoom in as close as you might be used to. While satellite and map view can get you down to 20 feet, with terrain view you’re limited to 1000 feet.