Crumbs

ZDNet's readers have been quick to pour scorn on Boeing, the aeroplane maker, for letting a thief run away with its sensitive employee data.

If you didn't catch the story first time , a now-former employee lost their laptop after (s)he left it in a car. The company surrendered information on 382,000 current and prior employees. It is the third such incident to affect the global manufacturer in the last 13 months.

Interesting to see three talkbacks posted by readers almost immediately.

One pointed out that it was a total failure of business processes. The other two said why on earth was such sensitive data stored on the hard drive of a portable device.

There's more on the story here, with some interesting comments from Boeing itself, which is now starting to rollout mandatory encryption. About time...

I've spent a large chunk of today chasing a bit of divine inspiration. OK, the headline was cheap, but the message important.

If you haven't read it yet, a company founded by an-ex O2 chief executive has launched to aggregate the rather disparate sets of WiFi hotspots dotted around the country.

Although usage of WiFi hotspots has been reasonable, one of the big reasons why there hasn't been more is that you need a separate account for each service provider.

So if you're having a coffee at Starbucks, you can use your T-Mobile account, but if you have your next meeting in the Hilton, you need an account with BT.

The market has been crying out for some sort of aggregator to pull all this together, and provide access regardless of service provider.

The new-founded company, Divine Wireless, seems to have the right idea — and it has the key deals with BT Openzone and The Cloud already lined up.

Of course, BT and The Cloud already have their own arrangement, and so are doing this already. And iPass, among its wider offering, also offers this capacity.

Divine will need to push beyond this and sign more deals: the next couple of months will be crucial for this.

And of course its business model - pay-by-the-minute - is as yet unproven.

It's only a small company, but certainly one to watch with interest.

So 100Gbps ethernet is on the way. Well, kind of.

With international standards body the IEEE starting development of the proposed technology, it can only be good news, but anyone who thinks they'll see such ethernet speeds this decade is much mistaken.

But let's just get a grip for a moment. 10Gbps (over copper) is here. It's not deployed much, and it's been one huge headache to develop: the frequency needed to get 10Gbps down a twisted copper pair at 100metres is high enough to cause havoc (the problem is called alien crosstalk, if you're wondering - a problem caused by cables lying next to each other in risers interfering with each other).

Don't get me wrong, 100Gbps will get here, but it will be one bumpy ride. It'll hit the carrier domain first, but it might creep into the largest corporate datacentres (on fibre or copper) early next decade.

Don't hold your breath on 100Gbps to the desktop, though.

The findings of a hefty Danish survey has fortunately revealed no evidence of a link between the use of mobile phones and the occurence of brain cancer.

The survey monitored a huge sample of 420,000 users of mobile phones, and the findings have been printed in depth in a key health industry journal.

The Danish work follows in the same vein as other well-respected research, including findings from the Institute of Cancer Research, which concluded with the same outcome.

Hopefully this will settle a few nerves among users of both cellular and WiFi technology.

Concerns have been rife recently, topped by calls by Ian Gibson - an MP and a cancer specialist - for an inquiry by the Department of Health into WiFi radiation, in the manner of the Stewart Report.

There will always be pessimists, but hopefully some will be more persuaded to tolerate the technology now.

Call me an egotistical pedant, but surely the plural of BlackBerry - both the fruit and the ever-popular email device - is BlackBerries.

Not that I wish to have a bite at his Excellency Andrew Donoghue (ZDNet UK's Executive Editor) but Mr Donoghue, along with many thousands of others seems to have coined the term BlackBerrys (pronounced Blak-Berris, in my book).

Why is it that whenever we invent technology, we think we can re-write the rules of English?

Think Viiv and Wii. Quite awful.

Oh, and while I'm at it, the plural of PC is PCs. No apostrophe.

Now call me Lynne Truss and feed me to an armed panda, but I'm not letting this slip. I'm off for a juicy discussion with Mr Donoghue.