ITS A WIRELESS WORLD.DO YOU FEEL IT??

Connecting cables are usually clumsy and ugly, but they're rapidly becoming a thing of the past, as Jason Mountney reports

They trail over the floor like tangled spaghetti, running the stark, clean lines of the rooms you spent hours poring over interior design magazines to achieve. They also go missing, rendering gadgets useless. For the electronics consumer, wires and cords were are necessary evil. But not anymore. Now, as technology improves and get more affordablr, wireless signals are transforming our homes, sending data through the air.

Most of us had our first taste of wireless local area network (LANs) at cafes-venues installed to get us to slurp and surf. Now, most internet providers offer packages to easily set up our own wireless LANs at home, enabling more than one user to go online, anywhere in the house.

With mobile phones now doubling as everything from cameras to music players, a wireless technology known as Bluetooth is in alot of people's pockets too. This wireless protocol allows us to send photos from our phones to a computer. Most computers are Bluetooth-compatible, but if you had an old model that isn't, ask about a device for your USB drive to provide wireless connectivity.

The technology can also be used to stream music from a phone to a hi-fi unit;gaming consoles, which long ago ditched the cords that connect controllers to the main unit, now use Wi-Fi networks to connect players worldwide, and some radios can connect to wireless LANs, exposing them to worldwide radio stations.

Wireless technology is also appearing in stereos. In Sony's Radio Frequency system, for example, speakers are connected wirelessly to amplifiers, so they can be placed anywhere in a room, the only cord being the plug into the wall. Cord-free electricity is some way off yet, but a wireless world no longer seems like pie in the sky.

Dark market

A nondescript Office in a business park on the banks of the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. An unnamed entrance opposite a sandwich bar near the Houses of Parliament in London. These may not look like the front line in the war against a crime wave as globally devastating as the credit crisis. But behind these unremarkable doors are the people who smoke out some of the world's biggest online crooks. And they can be as reclusive as their prey.

In Britain alone, 44 percent of small business have fallen victim to cybercrime and 2007 saw a nine percent increase. "Retailers alone lost more than $440 million in 2007 from internet fraud," says Andrew Goodwill of fraud prevention speacialist The Third Man. "And that's just the figures reported by the banks- they're a shadow of the real figure." According to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, these crimes could be worth as much as $100 billion a year globally, thanks to the fact that online criminals know no geographical boundaries and no conspire and co-operate without ever meeting.
By TIM BOUQUET