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Recently I read about a doctor who wanted an office that was both paperless and cordless. That is, he wanted all battery-powered devices and and wireless. In a practical sense, the office was to operate on laptops accessing a wireless network.

1. All IT users must be aware of the risks.

If IT users are not aware of the risks, it is unlikely they will do something to enhance security. The first line of defense is knowledge. The risks are internal and external, and awareness of the potential harm to their organization and to others is or paramount importance. Interconnectivity and interdependency have made organizations vulnerable, so good practices that enhance security can make a real difference.

2) All IT users must be accountable for what they do.

Recent losses of personal data held on discs, laptops and USB keys by governments and companies have highlighted the need for better security. Here Dan Simmons looks to see if biometrics can help.

As the name implies biometrics is all about using a measurable biological characteristic, such as a fingerprint or iris pattern, to identify an individual.

And the field is not confined to gross physical characteristics such as facial features, more subtle measures - such as the way a person walks - can also be used to identify individuals.

Researchers at the University of Southampton have won funding from UK and US governments to establish this form of biometrics.

They claim their gait recognition system is 99% accurate when identifying people.

The final mission to service the Hubble space telescope has slipped deeper into next year, Nasa has announced.

Officials said the delay would give engineers extra time to prepare a spare control unit needed to replace one that broke on the observatory last month.

Hubble was taken offline for four weeks by the failure but has since been re-booted using a back-up system.

Meanwhile Nasa said the space shuttle Endeavour would launch on 14 November to the International Space Station.

Statistics registered that gamers from the United Kingdom spent not less than a record £1.52 billion on titles this year. This is a 25 percent increase in comparison with the last year and still more than a week to count till 2008.

Officials from the American vendor of computers, components, software, and IT services, Sun Microsystems, have stated that the company started a new program aimed towards independent software developers. The winner of the program will receive a prize of $1 million. Companies willing to take part in the program will have to contribute to the open source software projects launched by the company.

The annual meeting with financial analysts, held by AMD, turned into a wave of apologies from the company's representatives to experts from Wall Street. AMG said sorry for the mistakes that occurred this year. The company stated that in 2008 it would get in full shape by launching its renewed version of Barcelona quad-core line, the functionality of which is seriously crippled due to its design flaw.

A Norwegian company that develops Web browsers, being supported by an industry coalition, has filed a complaint against the software giant to the European Commission. It is worth mentioning that this is the first complaint after earlier this year Microsoft lost a case regarding the landmark antitrust.

Statistics for the last year show that Chinese users of mobile phones sent about 429 billion text messages. At the same time India registered an enormous growth of mobile service subscribers. Both countries joined the group of the two fastest growing countries if the field, Brazil and Russia.

The amount of mistakes the British government created in order to protect personal information critically increased when Michael Wills, the data protection minister, revealed that he had been not informed about the disappearance of the disks with information that included personal data of 25 million people.