News about what is happening in technology today!

Online information brokers pried thousands of private cell-phone records from Verizon Wireless by posing as speech-impaired customers and company employees, court documents show.

The charges, which appear in a civil suit filed by Verizon in Florida late last year, shed a rare light on the shadowy world of online phone-record vendors — a cottage industry among private investigators that has operated below the radar for years but is now in the spotlight amid a flurry of private suits and calls for laws restricting phone-record sales.

According to the suit, online cell-phone record vendors placed hundreds of thousands of calls to Verizon customer service requesting customer account information while posing as Verizon employees from the company’s “special needs group,” a nonexistent department. The caller would claim to be making the request on behalf of a voice-impaired customer who was unable to request the records himself. If the service representative asked to speak with the customer directly, the caller would impersonate a voice-impaired customer, using a mechanical device to distort his voice and make it impossible for the service representative to understand him — a variant of a widely used social-engineering technique known as the “mumble attack.”

Rob Douglas, a private investigator turned privacy activist, says federal authorities have known about the sale of private phone records since at least 1998 but have done little to address the problem. In the absence of federal action, phone companies have been resorting to civil lawsuits to prevent sellers from obtaining and selling records.

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NEW YORK — Federal lawsuits were filed Tuesday seeking to halt President Bush’s domestic eavesdropping program, calling it an “illegal and unconstitutional program” of electronic eavesdropping on American citizens.

The lawsuits accusing Bush of exceeding his constitutional powers were filed in federal court in New York by the Center for Constitutional Rights and in Detroit by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The New York suit, filed on behalf of the center and individuals, names Bush, the head of the National Security Agency and the heads of the other major security agencies, challenging the NSA’s surveillance of persons within the United States without judicial approval or statutory authorization.

It asked a judge to stop Bush and government agencies from conducting warrantless surveillance of communications in the United States.

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Microsoft said Tuesday it plans to offer a variety of analytical and data transfer tools, aimed at luring customers of IBM’s rival Lotus Notes e-mail software to its own system that allows business to collaborate on projects using the web.

Both Microsoft and IBM are vying for supremacy in the $2.8 billion corporate messaging market which includes collaboration tools such as e-mail, web publishing, electronic calendars and project management systems.

Each company wants to play a leading role in defining how web services will work together in the future.

Analysts agree that Microsoft has captured the momentum in the more than decade-old battle between Exchanges and Lotus Notes to win the lion’s share of the corporate e-mail market.

But IBM is seeking to redefine the competition by investing in a new set of web-based collaboration tools known as IBM Workplace that is attempting to recapture momentum among corporate users switching to Microsoft.

To encourage customers to switch from their existing Lotus applications to Microsoft’s platform, Microsoft said it would offer a tool to allow potential customers to identify and organize its most-used shared software.

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Perl.com has a new article entitled What is Perl 6?. It analyzes the changes to the language in light of the good and bad points of Perl 5 and provides new information about the current state of the project: Perl 6 exists, you can write code in it today, and it’s more consistent and easier to use than Perl 5.

Nature.com is reporting on a study by Canadian researcher Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University that visitors to a webpage can make up their minds about the quality of the page within just 50 milliseconds. We all know that first impressions count, but this study shows that the brain can make flash judgments almost as fast as the eye can take in the information. The discovery came as a surprise to some experts. “My colleagues believed it would be impossible to really see anything in less than 500 milliseconds,” says Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa, who has published the research in the journal Behaviour and Information Technology. Instead they found that impressions were made in the first 50 milliseconds of viewing.