Quantum cryptography – commonly lauded as an absolutely secure avenue of data transfer – has been broken.

The advanced technology was thought to be unbreakable due to laws of quantum mechanics that state that quantum mechanical objects cannot be observed or manipulated without being disturbed.

In quantum cryptography, regular information is encrypted and decrypted with a quantum key. Any attempts to copy a quantum cryptographic key in transit will be noticeable as extra noise, and cause the communication to be aborted.

But a research team at Linköping University in Sweden claim that it is possible for an eavesdropper to extract the quantum cryptographic key without being discovered.

In a research paper, published in the International engineering journal IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Larsson has proposed a change in the quantum cryptography process that he expects will restore the security of the technology.

Hackers attacked the website of Zimbabwe’s state-owned Herald newspaper and shut it down for three days, the newspaper said on Monday.

The Herald is widely seen as the official mouthpiece of President Robert Mugabe’s ruling ZANU-PF party and has been critical of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) which won the country’s disputed March 29 elections.

The website www.herald.co.za has been unavailable since Saturday after it was hacked by someone calling himself “r4b00f”. Visitors were redirected to the website of a state-owned Sunday newspaper.

Users who thought the Windows XP operating system would be more reliable than its younger sibling Vista are being buffeted by reports that the latest update for XP, Service Pack 3, has its own problems.

A variety of complaints about SP3 are being posted on the Web, with users complaining about system crashes, spontaneous reboots, and other issues. On the Windows XP forum at Microsoft.com, for instance, a poster named Doug W. said that, after installing SP3, he had to use system restore “after three attempts, with different configurations each time.” He mentioned that his system has an Athlon chip from Advanced Micro Devices, and other users have reported similar problems with SP3 on AMD machines.

Nokia plans to add navigation to half of the phones it sells within a few years to find new revenue streams amid decreasing handset prices, a senior official at the world’s top cellphone maker said.

Michael Halbherr, the head of Nokia’s location-based activities, told Reuters he remains comfortable with Nokia’s year-old goal for seeing up to 50 percent of its phones equipped with global positioning system (GPS) chips in 2010 to 2012.

“We are planning to ship 35 million GPS units this year,” Halbherr said, adding “and many more location-enabled phones that use cell-towers to orient themselves on the map”.

“You will see few ‘E’ or ‘N’ Series phones without GPS,” he said.

Fedora is the community-maintained Linux distribution that’s the foundation for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the leading commercial version of the open source OS. No surprise, then, that it has a tremendous following.

You can think of Fedora as a testing-ground for RHEL; it’s where you can find the latest cutting-edge features before they make their way out to the officially-supported distribution. That means it’s really best suited for hobbyists, but it’s also a good way to get the jump on the best that Linux has to offer.

The biggest change for this release is the inclusion of KDE 4, the most recent edition of the desktop software that powers Fedora. KDE 4 brings new icons and changes under the hood that should make Fedora run faster and use less memory than earlier versions.

Google has begun testing face-blurring technology for its Street View service, responding to privacy concerns from the search giant’s all-seeing digital camera eye.

The technology uses a computer algorithm to scour Google’s image database for faces, then blurs them, said John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Google Maps

Apple Inc. has scooped up Time Warner Inc.’s HBO to feed television shows to its online iTunes store, reeling in one of the last holdouts among major channels and agreeing to a rare pricing concession to land hit shows like “The Sopranos,” “Sex and the City” and “The Wire.”

The Cupertino, California-based company said HBO programming began appearing on iTunes Tuesday and the shows cost either $1.99 or $2.99 per episode, making HBO the only channel allowed to charge above the standard $1.99 for their episodes on iTunes.

Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of iTunes, said the higher prices for some of HBO’s shows - in particular “Deadwood,” “Rome” and “The Sopranos” - are still cheaper than buying the DVD sets of the full seasons of those shows, which translates into prices two or three times higher per episode.

A notorious “Spam King” and his partner now owe MySpace about $230 million in damages after a federal judge awarded the popular online hangout what is believed to be the largest anti-spam judgment ever.

The judgment is a big victory for MySpace, although service providers often have a tough time collecting such awards. But even if the News Corp.-owned site never collects, it hopes the judgment deters other spammers.