Welcome to another edition of the Prompt newsletter.

It’s all about security this week, with vulnerabilities in Google, and Olympic-themed spam making the headlines. But that’s not all that’s in the newsletter this week - we also have stories about smartphones, invisibility and speculation over the follow up to the Wii.

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Hazel Butters
CEO
Prompt Communications

Cyber criminals aiming for gold at the Olympics

By Ellie Turner

According to the BBC, the amount of spam mail being sent with Olympic messages has increased dramatically since the opening of the games last week.

The email messages are designed to trick people into visiting fake sites and open infected attachments. Most of the threats are targeting Windows PC users. One such email features CNN branding and features news headlines, many of which are about the Olympics. Clicking on the headlines results in users being asked to install a programme to watch a video. If they do, their computers become part of a botnet.

Rik Ferguson from Trend Micro says, ‘We are fully anticipating malicious social engineering techniques to exploit people's interest in this event, luring unsuspecting users into clicking on compromised websites and into handing over sensitive personal information.”

Con Mallon, a spokesperson for Symantec offers this advice: “Members of the public have to remember that they should not open e-mails or click on links from unknown sources, no matter how many gold medals they are offering.”

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Yahoo Fire Eagle takes flight

By Dave Wilby

In last week’s newsletter, I wrote about the future of geolocation gaming on mobile platforms. This week saw a major announcement that will undoubtedly affect geolocation adoption in other spheres of technology, from social networking to business tools. Fire Eagle from Yahoo is a secure development platform for location-aware applications and services that will allow users to store and manage information about their location. This information can then be used by third-party apps and trusted websites on a permissions basis, opening up all sorts of possibilities.

Initially, developers are expected to build a wide variety of web services able to deliver location-relevant content to users, such as information for travellers, or location-rich online communities. In time though, we expect to see more business oriented services proliferating, backed by high-profile advertising initiatives. Reporting from the launch this week, CNET highlighted three established companies already developing Fire Eagle apps – Pownce, Movable Type and Outside-In – as well as a gaggle of smaller social media players announcing interoperability.

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Google’s lack of security is “a feature”

By James Gerber

Google is not secure, according to a well-known security researcher. Announcing his findings at the Defcon security conference, Robert Hansen, CEO of secTheory said, “Google is and will be and always has been vulnerable. They haven't been open with consumers. Ultimately, this all comes down to the fact that they just want to track you guys.”

The flaws in Google security appear most prominently in third-party applications that users add to their personal homepages on iGoogle. The potential attacks include redirecting a user to a page controlled by hackers that appears to be part of Google that phishers can use to prey on users who don’t check URLs.

Google doesn’t quite see the flaws the same way. They incredulously stated that the redirection is a feature, rather than a flaw. While it is true that redirection for legitimate applications is a feature, it is possible to both have that and prevent users’ passwords from being stolen. Google is the largest search engine, and it has a duty to make sure that its users are as secure as possible. All it would take is a few people who get their credit cards stolen because of a security flaw to severely tarnish Google's brand. Consumer confidence is very hard to regain, and compared to the money that would be lost due to losing users, Google would be foolish not to admit that there’s a problem and solve it.

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Get Smart

By Terrie Chilvers

Is that a smartphone in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me? According to technology sales predictions, chances are it’s a smartphone. Sales of the devices are expected to take over laptop sales in the next 12 to 18 months according to a BBC report. The mobile phone is no longer just the means to make a phone call, it’s a multimedia computer, and its rebirth as the multitasking smartphone means the laptop market could well find itself with some stiff competition.

Nokia predicts that it will sell 35 million GPS-enabled phones in the coming year and the rest of the industry seems to be backing the smartphone too. "We see mobile phones evolving into multi-functional devices that now support consumer electronics, multimedia entertainment and mobile professional enterprise applications; all converging," said Luis Pineda, from mobile phone chip firm, Qualcomm, talking to the BBC.

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Bending the light fantastic

By Duncan Heaney

Scientists at the University of Berkeley claim that they have made a breakthrough in invisibility technology. According to National Geographic, the researchers have come up with two new materials that bend light around a 3D object making it invisible. So far, the materials have only been produced on a scale measured in billionths of a metre, but the development team believes this could be scaled up enough to cover people.

The ultimate goal is to make an object appear invisible by bending light waves in such a way that they curve around it and reconnect on the other side. One possible application of this technology is cloaking, but Xiang Zhang, who headed the research, also revealed that the technology could be used for boosting antennas, making more powerful microchips, or creating lenses capable of showing images smaller than the wavelength of light.

It sounds like it’s a long way off, but will we one day find a way to make things invisible? Me, I’ll believe it when I don’t see it.

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Do you need another Wii?

By Dave Wilby

My colleagues love their Nintendo Wii so much, that at lunchtime they just swap their swivel chairs and PC screens for the sofa and a big telly. If all Wii owners are as fanatical about the groundbreaking motion-gaming console as this lot, I’m not surprised that even The Times has started speculating wildly about the next generation Wii already.

So what new tricks will the Wii 2 have up its sleeve? According to the newspaper’s roundup, we could see motion-sensing full-bodysuits, internally projecting HUDs, and even brain activity scanning head claws. With a low purchase price and high fun focus compared to seriously expensive and graphically intense rivals from Microsoft ad Sony, the current Wii is still helping Nintendo profits rocket, with first quarter 2008 results up by 33.7 per cent to 107.3 billion yen, or £507 million. Whether the Wii 2 offers more of the same or an entirely new experience, we’re sure Nintendo fans will be happy either way.