The LA Times reports: Police have suggested a public appeal might help recover the stolen items.

[The thieves stole] trophies for winning 64 tour tournaments, and finalist hardware from 24 others. It includes what he was presented for winning five season-ending ATP World Tour titles, for being on two Davis Cup winners, and for taking 11 ATP Masters event titles. It includes an Olympic ring, seven ESPYs and six trophies awarded to the player who was No. 1 in the year-end rankings. Sampras, now 39, was that from 1993 to ’98.

[…]

Sampras said he never considered that his things wouldn’t be safe.

“I was like, ‘What?'” he said. “I thought there were security cameras. I thought these things were locked up tight. I was shocked.

The tennis star has discovered the hard way a storage provider may have weak or even no security.

In February 2009 Nokia launched 3.0 of their maps with 3D enhancements. It was a throw-back to VRML maps of cities in the 1990s, but more practical because of GPS integration and mobile interface. You can use a Nokia phone to walk down a street looking at 3D view — a far more accurate visual confirmation of location.

# In 3D view mode, you can tilt the view by pressing 2 and 8
# 2D/3D mode works with all map modes, i.e. with Map/Satellite/Terrain

Integration with GPS meant it tracked you and the interface turned with you. Here’s a video demonstration from 2009 of what it looks like to navigate through Paris and London. Note that even the Thames water is animated:

Google maps may soon give Android users similar functionality.

TG Daily calls it “Android Google Maps to get a whole lot cooler”. And by a lot cooler they mean a lot more like Nokia’s mobile map interface:

Google is planning a huge update to its mobile location-aware map app in Google Maps 5.0 for Android. Here’s a look at what’s new:

3D Buildings:
You’ll now get a better sense for what the area looks like without having to load up Street View. That’s because 3D renderings of buildings now show up on the main map view.

I remember when working at Space Applications in the early 1990s GPS was said to be developed to assist military flights; the next phase was a zero-visibility 3D rendering for navigation so the crew could sit inside sealed bullet-proof titanium pods. Not sure if all that happened, but these mobile 3D maps make me think I could soon drive without the risk of thin glass in my car or travel in a titanium pod with a 3D HUD and two wheels…

Computerworld wants you to know WikiLeaks is nearly immune to takedown

The Swiss site (wikileaks.ch) itself has been heavily reinforced to avoid a repeat of what happened with EveryDNS, [chief technology officer at Renesys] Cowie said. To mitigate the possibility of one DNS provider once again shutting off the domain as EveryDNS did, WikiLeaks this time has signed up with separate DNS service providers in eight different countries, including Switzerland, Canada and Malaysia.

A total of 14 different name servers across 11 different networks today provide authoritative name services for the wikileaks.ch domain, Cowie noted. “If you ask any of those 14 servers where to find wikileaks.ch, they’ll point you to one of three differently routed IP blocks,” in the Netherlands, Sweden and France, he added.

The architecture sounds resilient — more resilient than before. I do not know what nearly immune means. That’s a fun phrase, though. Would a doctor tell a patient “you are now more immune than before”? I guess I did not realize there were levels of immunity, so nearly immune meant to me that something is not yet immune.

What does a bank do if 75 million out of 149 million people (50%) have mobile phones, but only 19 million people (13%) have bank accounts? Monitise says the Central Bank of Nigeria has given the green light to start payments by mobile phone.

Monitise’s technology enables users to securely manage their money on their mobile phones and take advantage of a number of services including:

– Adding money to their handset’s mobile wallet or making withdrawals at a countrywide network of processing agents
– Transferring money to other people or organisations over the handset
– Obtaining their balances via SMS text alerts
– Future services will include savings, insurance and pensions

No word yet on the ability to manage multiple accounts for Advanced Fee Fraud messages. Just kidding.

Telecom growth in the developing world is calling. Aside from the fact that just about anyone can deploy a cellular service in just about any environment (OpenBTS), price/performance of mobile handsets has made them a reasonable investment. There are more users in the developing world now than the developed world, and they have brought a new set of security issues, as I’ve mentioned before.

Mobile banking will likely run into a new issues as well. How will the mobile payment systems handle a one-to-many user ratio for a mobile? A device that is shared among a family, for example, would have to be capable of multi-user account management. Likewise, a single mobile that is offered as a service to a whole village (one mobile owner allowing others to use the mobile for a fee) would have to be well-secured for multi-user data confidentiality and integrity. Mobile manufacturers and developers have been reluctant to address this in the past; they have argued it is easier/better to find a way to push more handsets into the market rather than figure out secure multi-user solutions. That may have to change as high value assets — financial account information — become common in markets with higher one-to-many user ratios.

I imagine a mobile device could be mounted in a box on the street, much like the classic British red box. Village users could step into the box and use it to do their (mobile) banking. That model certainly worked for the developed world as it developed telecommunications. Remember the party line?