ChangeWaves has an interesting article today discussing “

[w]hat will likely be the most important scientific and technological breakthroughs with significant commercial value and impacts on the lives of consumers out to 2025.”

The Register today warns readers to “[b]eware of emails that mention you and your company by name and claim to be official communications from the US Department of Justice. They’re phony and will attempt to install malware on your machine.”

Fittingly, the Register also reports that “[t]he risk of identity theft is a serious concern for users of internet services, with 70 per cent of  [British] adults saying it has changed their online behaviour.  This is one of the findings of a new survey which interviewed 2,000 people across the UK about online security. Almost two thirds of those spoken to said they believed organisations should take more responsibility for protecting their personal details online.  Out of all online service providers, banks are trusted the most (60 per cent), then credit card companies (40 per cent), governments (25 per cent), online retailers (19 per cent) and ISPs (eight per cent).”

According to the Associated Press, [a]ttorneys in a shareholder lawsuit against Apple Inc. over its backdating of stock options said Tuesday they plan to refile some of the claims.  […]  Judge Jeremy Fogel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled Monday that claims alleging fraud in some proxy statements were filed after the federal statute of limitations had expired.  But he gave the plaintiffs an option to amend their complaint to change their arguments.”

O’Reilly xml.com reports that “[f]rom two different sources this week comes the news that ISO and IEC have found there is no substance that they can find to the scare tactics on IPR in the OOXML draft IDIS 29500.  […]  Now it is good to be clear here: if you want OOXML to be a specification that allows complete reverse engineering of MS Office 2007, then you will find a lot of shortcomings with DIS 29500, particularly in that it just ignores things happening outside the XML such as in media files. However, that is explicitly not the purpose of DIS 29500: its purpose is to document a file format which is the native format of Office 2007 and has been designed to expose as XML all the information previously carried in MS’ closed, binary and/or proprietary formats (with some antiquitites and bugs cleaned up, and with some recent parts as befits a living standard.) The worries about IPR often relate to these non-DIS29500 aspects, which belong to some other debate”