The United States government is assigning a terror "risk assessment" score to every person, citizen or foreign national who crosses the border. The Department of Homeland Security plans to retain that score and information about your comings and goings for up to 40 years. But you have no way of learning what the score is. The system is supposed to flag suspicious people and cargo to make it easier for the Department of Homeland Security to stop criminals, terror suspects or dangerous materials at the border. Worst of all, the system doesn’t give citizens or their legal representatives the ability to check or challenge the accuracy of that information.

Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd said the company has more cost cutting to do and is using data to become more efficient. "We have a lot more work to be done at HP," said Hurd, speaking at the company’s analyst conference in New York City. The end game for Hurd: Dictate pricing in the industry instead of reacting to it. Part of understanding HP’s costs is putting analytics around the company’s operations. For instance, HP is looking at IT costs by employee, site, and function. It also knows the cost of logistics by box, unit costs under various categories, costs out of data center and labor spend.

Intel is offering OEMs a fifth quad-core processor earlier than expected. The company announced Dec. 11 that it is has started shipping a fifth chip that is part of its Xeon 5300 family of quad-core processors. The company officially introduced its first quad-core offerings on Nov. 14. Intel had planned to introduce this particular processor in February 2007, but increased demand by OEMs led the company to roll the chip out early than expected.

The Mozilla Foundation recently released the first alpha of Firefox 3.0, and when people refer to this release of the browser as a developer version, they aren’t kidding. In fact, the only difference that a regular Firefox user will notice between this alpha and the current shipping version of Firefox 2.0 is that the top browser title bar and the About screens use the Firefox 3.0 code name Gran Paradiso instead of Firefox. But while this alpha release has no interface changes, there are some fairly important changes in the underlying engine of the browser. Gran Paradiso is also an alpha of Gecko 1.9, the forthcoming rendering engine for Mozilla browsers.

A New Jersey-based company specializing in the prevention of identity theft wants victims of the crime to participate in a free consumer education program. StrikeForce Technologies wants victims to share their stories and try out a copy of GuardedID, the company’s answer to preventing identity theft by keyloggers. Keyloggers install themselves onto computers without the knowledge of the owner to steal personal and financial information. Once installed on the user’s computer, a keylogger makes a copy of all keystrokes, the details of which are then secretly saved to a hidden file on the computer’s hard drive and retrieved by the hacker who created the keylogging program. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse estimates 15 million people will have their identity compromised in 2006, an increase of more than 350 percent over last year, StrikeForce officials said.

Winnie the Pooh and Tweety stand ready to wreck havoc on your computer. According to a survey released by security company McAfee’s SiteAdvisor, online searches for even the most innocuous terms can be dangerous to your PC’s health. For example, the terms found in the Google Zeitgeist category of "childhood favorites"–including "Winnie the Pooh" and "Tweety"–turned up risky sites in 6.7 percent of search results. The survey, which updates one conducted in May, evaluates the safety of search results returned by the top five search engines: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft’s MSN, Time Warner’s AOL and Ask.com. McAfee SiteAdvisor compiled a list of 2,500 popular keywords and evaluated the first five pages of search results for each keyword, analyzing them for malicious content.

The OpenOffice.org Community announced the release of OpenOffice.org 2.1, the latest version of the leading open-source office suite. There are a number of important new features for users in this release. The presentations application, Impress, now supports multiple monitors, with the presenter choosing where to display the presentation. The Calc spreadsheet has an improved HTML export capability, using styles to better recreate in a browser the appearance of the original spreadsheet. The database application Base has a number of enhancements, including improved support for Microsoft’s Access product. The popular Quickstarter is now available for GNU/Linux users as a GTK application. OpenOffice.org’s impressive language support is enhanced with five more localizations.

A team of scientists has announced a breakthrough in computer memory technology that heralded more sophisticated and reliable MP3 players, digital cameras and other devices. Scientists from IBM, Macronix and Qimonda said they developed a material that made "phase-change" memory 500 to 1,000 times faster than the commonly-used "flash" memory, while using half as much power. At the heart of phase-change memory is a tiny chunk of alloy that can be changed rapidly between an ordered, crystalline phase and a disordered, amorphous phase. Because no electrical power is required to maintain either phase of the material, phase-change memory is "non-volatile."

Hewlett-Packard wants to make it easier for its users of Compaq nc6400 notebooks to work on the road. The computer maker announced this notebook will be its first to integrate Cingular Wireless’ UMTS/HSDPA (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System /High Speed Downlink Data Packet Access) technology, which will allow users faster connections to a user’s corporate network, email and the Internet. The nc6400 notebook comes with a tri-band modem that supports data rates of 3.6M bps both in the United States and in several international locations.

Star quarterback Tom Brady has sued Yahoo, claiming that the Internet business used his image without his consent to advertise its fantasy football service. Brady, who led the New England Patriots to three Super Bowl championships, is demanding Yahoo stop running the ads and is seeking unspecified damages, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court in Los Angeles. A spokeswoman for Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo declined comment, saying it was company policy not to discuss pending litigation.