theft

iPhone owners who want to protect their handsets from being stolen are offered to avail themselves of a new anti-theft application dubbed Anti Theft Alarm, by LOLer Apps. The application claims to protect the iPhone the same way people protect their cars with a loud alarm.

As soon as a user arms the application he/she has five seconds to set their iPhone down before a car alarm-sounding activation "chirp" is emitted, signaling that the alarm is armed.

According to a new online poll conducted by YouGov among 6200 adults, about 32% of British notebook computers have been swiped from homes.

This data can be compared to UK’s European neighbours France and Germany, where the numbers were 22% and 17%, respectively.

As the pollster added, the proportion of recent laptop thefts that took place in US and Canada homes were only 18% and 17%, respectively.

Still, these figures also show that you're more likely to lose your laptop while it's out and about with you.

With the holiday season just around the corner, consumers are already on the hunt for the best bargains. While the bulk of holiday sales still occur in brick-and-mortar stores, surveys suggest most consumers will also go online to find deals on holiday gifts. A recent MarketLive survey reports that 55 percent of consumers plan to shop online for holiday gifts, compared to 49 percent last year, and 26 percent plan to spend more online this year compared to last year. In advance of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, blogs and social networking sites are buzzing with coupons and promotions.

 Facebook users have produced a real buzz around a thief that allegedly made off with 11.6 million euros (17.2 million dollars) in cash in a van when his co-workers were absent for a short time. A number of Facebook groups have been discussing the heist carried by Tony Musulin, a 39-year-old employee of the Loomis security firm who disappeared from the central city of Lyon on Thursday morning last week.

National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) inspector general is tracing a potential data breach affecting 70 million records of US military veterans.

 The investigation includes a defective hard drive the agency sent back to its vendor for repair without first destroying the data. Once the drive was diagnosed and found to be faulty, it was sent out for recycling, with millions of records still stored on it.

 A study by brand reputation firm MarkMonitor revealed that phishing attacks increased to a record high during the second quarter of 2009 with the number of unique attacks amounting 151,000.