'Road trains' get ready to roll

Road trains that link vehicles together using wireless sensors could soon be on European roads.

An EU-financed research project is looking at inexpensive ways of getting vehicles to travel in a 'platoon' on Europe's motorways.
Each road train could include up to eight separate vehicles - cars, buses and trucks will be mixed in each one.
The EU hopes to cut fuel consumption, journey times and congestion by linking vehicles together.
Early work on the idea suggests that fuel consumption could be cut by 20% among those cars and trucks travelling behind the lead vehicle.
Spanish trials
The lead vehicle would be handled by a professional driver who would monitor the status of the road train. Those in following vehicles could take their hands off the wheel, read a book or watch TV, while they travel along the motorway. Their vehicle would be autonomously controlled by the lead vehicle.
Funded under the European Commission's Framework 7 research plan, Sartre (Safe Road Trains for the Environment) is aimed at commuters in cars who travel long distances to work every day but will also look at ways to involve commercial vehicles.
Tom Robinson, project co-ordinator at engineering firm Ricardo, said the idea was to use off-the-shelf components to make it possible for cars, buses and trucks to join the road train.       
"The goal is to try and introduce a step change in transport methods," he said.
"We're looking at what it would take to get platooning on public highways without making big changes to the public highways themselves," said Mr Robinson.
A system that involved wiring up motorways with sensors to help control the road trains would be prohibitively expensive, he said.
"Each of the vehicles will have their own control and software monitoring system," said Mr Robinson. "There may well be a platoon sensor envelope that collates information and presents it to the lead vehicle so it can understand what is happening around all the vehicles."
The idea is to make platoons active so vehicles can join and leave as they need. Mr Robinson speculated that those joining a platoon or road train may one day pay for the privilege of someone else effectively driving them closer to their destination.
Sartre will run for three years. The project partners are currently doing preliminary research to find out all the elements needed for a working system and the situations in which it might be used.
There were also behavioural elements to consider, said Mr Robinson, such as whether all the vehicles will need to have their hazard lights on while in a platoon.
Also, he said, there had to be a way to ensure the vehicles in a platoon are organised to make drivers feel safe.
"Car drivers do not want to be between trucks," he said.
Towards the end of the research project trials will be held on test tracks in the UK, Spain and Sweden. There are also plans for public road trials in Spain. The first platoon will involve two trucks and three cars.

Play.com hit by ordering glitch

Customers of Play.com have contacted the BBC to report problems with the online retailer's ordering system.

Many customers have received e-mails from Play.com reporting the despatch of an order they did not place.
Those opening the orders found contact details, including names and addresses, for other Play.com customers.
The problem appears to be widespread with many reporting Play.com help lines were jammed as they called to find out what had happened.
Simon Hurley from Clevedon near Bristol said he woke up this morning to find more than 80 e-mails from Play.com.
"I'm a big customer of theirs but not that big," he said. "I opened up each individual e-mail and it came up with another customer's name and their order."
Although there were no credit card details visible in the e-mails, Mr Hurley said all the messages had scrambled text at the bottom that could hide some information.
"People are being told to shred documents and then you have a big company like Play.com sending out hundreds of wrong e-mails to their customers," he said.
Mr Hurley said he rang Play.com to find out more but it took a long time to get through because the lines were "jammed solid".
Once he reached someone in customer services he was told that Play.com had a "massive problem."
So far it is not clear how many Play.com customers have received other people's e-mails nor how many e-mails have been sent out.
However, in other discussion forums on the web some customers talked about how many erroneous e-mails they had received.
On some forums customers said they were told that a "system error" was behind the sending of the e-mails.
In a statement a Play.com spokesperson said: "We were alerted to an incident that appears to have affected some customers for a short period of time in the early hours of this morning, and the first thing we'd like to say is that we apologise for any inconvenience our customers have experienced as a result.
"We'd like to reassure our customers that the cause of the incident has been identified and resolved.
"We take these matters very seriously and are now investigating how this incident occurred in the first place, so that we can prevent it happening in the future."
Play.com is among the most popular online shops in the UK for DVDs. CDS, games and movies. In February 2009, Play.com was the top retailer in the National Consumer Satisfaction Index.

Nokia abandons N-Gage gaming

Handset maker Nokia plans to shut down its N-Gage games service in 2010, the firm has announced.N-Gage was a mobile gaming platform launched by Nokia in April 2008 with about 30 games available for download direct to certain Nokia handsets.
No new N-Gage games will be released, although users will be able buy existing games until the end of September 2010.
The N-Gage community website will be available until the end of the year.
N-Gage had a difficult birth - an earlier version which launched in 2003 also failed to capture the market.
In the future all games available to Nokia handset owners will be shifted to its apps store, Ovi Store.
"It's much more convenient to have one place to get all your mobile games, and this it what Ovi Store provides," said Nokia on the N-Gage blog.
"Mobile gaming is one of the most popular activities in the Ovi Store, with games being the second most downloaded category for premium content."
People commenting on the blog were generally saddened by the news.
"Sorry to hear it, N-Gage was a pioneer in many ways," posted a blog reader called Jo.
But not everybody was in mourning.
"I am so happy that we get into this point," wrote Frax. "N-Gage2 was simply a joke..."
Nokia has recently taken a financial hit after sales dropped by one fifth in the last quarter.
The Finnish company made a net loss of 913m euros (£838m) between July and September 2009 - during the same period in 2008 it made a profit of 1.1bn euros.

Scareware launched from tech blog

Visitors to technology blog Gizmodo are being warned that they could have picked up more than tips about the latest must-have gadget.

According to security firm Sophos, the website was delivering advertisements "laced with malware" last week.
A statement on the Gizmodo website admits that it was tricked into running Suzuki adverts which were in fact from hackers.
It follows a similar problem on the New York Times website.
Last month the New York Times' website was targeted by a gang of hackers who purchased ad space on the site by posing as internet telephone company, Vonage.
In both cases the adverts served up fake anti-virus software - known as scareware.
Scareware attempts to convince users that their computer is infected with viruses and trojans, and tricks them into downloading "remedies" which are harmful and can be used by criminals to get at information such as credit card details.
Really sorry
Gizmodo gets a huge amount of traffic with more than 3.1 million page views per day.
It has issued an apology to readers.
"I'm really sorry but we had some malware running on our site in ad boxes for a little while last week on Suzuki ads. They somehow fooled our ad sales team through an elaborate scam.
"It's taken care of now, and only a few people should have been affected, but this isn't something we take lightly as writers, editors and tech geeks," it said in a statement on its site.
Blaming the fact that staff used Linux operating systems on their production machines for "not noticing sooner", it advised concerned users to load some up-to-date antivirus software and "make sure your system is clean".
"By hitting one of the biggest blogs in the world, these hackers are aiming high," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos.
"What is particularly audacious about this plot is that the criminals appear to have posed as legitimate representatives of Suzuki in order to plant their dangerous code on Gizmodo's popular website," he added.
According to security firm Symantec more than 40 million people have fallen victim to scareware scams in the past 12 months.
The firm has identified 250 versions of scareware and estimated that criminals can earn more than £750,000 each a year via such scams.