Microsoft beefs up Hotmail security

Microsoft has rolled out new features for its popular Hotmail Web mail service designed to make it easier for users to report suspected hacked accounts and encourage better password etiquette, writes V3.co.uk.

The first feature is an additional tab on the drop down menu which allows users to choose “phishing scam” or “My friend's been hacked” if they suspect an account has been hacked and used to send them spam.

Hotmail group program manager Dick Craddock explained in a blog post that Microsoft's “compromise detection system” is always running in the background to detect unusual behaviour.

Twitter marked the fifth anniversary of its public unveiling on Friday with a slew of statistics demonstrating the explosive growth of the real-time blogging service, says AFP.

“There were 224 Tweets sent on 15 July 2006. Today, users send that many Tweets in less than a tenth of a second,” Twitter said in a message on its @TwitterGlobalPR account.

Twitter Engineering says it delivers 350 billion tweets a day. The San Francisco-based Twitter said last month that Twitter users are sending 200 million messages a day, most of which have to be delivered to multiple accounts.

The fallout from the News of the World hacking continued this weekend with the arrest of the paper's former editor and the resignation of London police chief Sir Paul Stephenson, states PC Magazine.

Rebekah Brooks was arrested in London on suspicion of corruption and conspiring to hack into the cellphones of celebrities and crime victims, ABC News reported.

The arrest comes two days after Brooks resigned as CEO of News International, which published the News of the World until it folded amid the hacking scandal.

Computers and the Internet are changing the nature of our memory, research in the journal Science suggests, reports BBC News.

Psychology experiments showed that people presented with difficult questions began to think of computers. When participants knew that facts would be available on a computer later, they had poor recall of answers but enhanced recall of where they were stored.

The researchers say the Internet acts as a "transactive memory" that we depend upon to remember for us.