I was recently in Brussels attending some meetings with members of International Consumer Research & Testing, a consortium of consumer organizations of which Consumers Union is a member. I planned to spend two days on my own after the meetings, in the medieval town of Bruges, an hour’s train trip from Brussels. While on a train platform in north Brussels, I was victimized by a team of robbers who skillfully distracted me and snatched my laptop bag. Among other items, it contained my laptop, cell phone, iPod Touch MP3 player, noise-canceling headphones, and a few USB thumb drives. All gone.

While such an incident could well ruin more than just a trip, some personal practices and quick actions prevented that from happening in my case. Here’s what I recommend you do if your personal electronics  items are stolen on the road, with notes on what I did:

Change passwords. Fortunately, I had not put my financial files or account data on any of the stolen storage devices. I have no need to carry that info when traveling, so it resides only at home.

But the laptop did have a file from Microsoft Outlook that could conceivably be accessed by someone who was able to crack the password to log into my Windows account. (That’s not difficult with hacker tools readily available for free online.) My Outlook file had a few emails and Notes that, with a bit of searching and some guesswork, might reveal login information to my online banking account. So, I went online at my hotel’s internet cafe, logged in securely to my bank’s website, and changed my bank account password. Just for good measure, I changed my password for my PayPal online payment account as well.

Finally, to keep the thieves from retrieving new messages, I went to my ISP’s website and changed my e-mail password. I get to my company email only through a secure "VPN" web page, which scrambles everything transmitted, and doesn’t save the password.

Freeze your credit reports. I also went to a credit bureau website and put a 90-day freeze on credit reports, which would presumably stop anyone trying to open an account in my name, armed with any financial info they might find on the laptop. The temporary freeze is extended to all three U.S. credit-reporting agencies.

Back up documents, even on the road. I don’t keep any files or documents on my laptop that aren’t backed up at home, a hedge against hard drive failure as well as theft. I did lose some meeting notes from my trip, but knew I could re-construct them from the formal minutes taken by another participant. If I had done anything that was original work, I would have emailed it to myself at my company email address, so I would have a safe copy.

Suspend service to a stolen phone. The phone I lost was useless in Europe, being a Verizon phone with only CDMA compatibility. Even so, I temporarily suspended my cell phone service (and billing) while obtaining a new phone. If I had had banking access through the phone, I would have deactivated it. My iPod was synced to iTunes on my home computer, but a new iPod will sync just as well.

The lessons learned? My new laptop will have Windows Vista Ultimate, which includes the optional "Bitlocker" feature that encrypts the entire hard drive, making it impenetrable to anyone but me. Also, I will have LoJack for Laptops, a service that can help locate and retrieve a stolen computer if a thief uses it on the Internet. And, I will split up my gadgets among my luggage. Caveat viator!

—Dean Gallea

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After an intensive few days of bending, jumping, and precarious balancing by Consumer Reports staff, under the watchful eye of expert testers from our Health franchise, we have our first test reports on Nintendo’s Wii Fit, the wireless "balance board" that hit the market in North America earlier this week.

You can read on the Consumer Reports Health Blog what our testing experts have to say about the Fit.

Essentially a platform that senses and responds to body movement, the Wii Fit is an accessory to Nintendo’s Wii game console, which, since its launch in 2006 has replaced the usual passive, "couch-potato" video-game experience with a more active, "get-up-and-play" activity.

The Fit offers interactive exercises in four areas: yoga, strength training, balance, and aerobics, along with fun "mini-games," such as ski jumping and hoola-hoops. The Fit also tests your center of gravity and registers your Body Mass Index (BMI), storing personal information on the Wii console so you can track your progress.

Says Nintendo’s website:

Wii Fit combines fun and fitness in one product. It can change how you exercise, how you balance, and even how you move.

If you’re convinced that you’ve got to have a Fit, a word of caution. Demand for the device is high and many retailers are temporarily out of stock. So before you lace up your sneakers to run out to your local game store, be sure to call ahead. Or, you can take the traditional gamer’s approach: Sign up with retailers online to be e-mailed when the Wii Fit becomes available.

—Nick Mandle

May 28, 2008 UPDATE: Several readers have pointed out that the Wii Fit reviewers in our video were wearing shoes during tests of the Fit’s balance board while Nintendo’s instruction says that owners should be barefoot in order to prevent the possibility of slippage and injury. Because of the discrepancy, we have removed our video. —Ed.

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Our upcoming digital cameras coverage highlights a shift in the camera marketplace that’s affected how we test cameras.

[June 4, 2008 UPDATE: The "Best digital camera" report from the July 2008 issue of Consumer Reports magazine has been posted on our website. You can access certain portions of the report—which covers point-and-shoot digital cameras, digital SLRs, SLR lenses, and snapshot printers—for free. But, only paying ConsumerReports.org subscribers can access other portions, including Consumer Reports’ digital cameras Ratings and Recommendations, digital SLRs Ratings and Recommendations, and snapshot printers Ratings and Recommendations. —Ed.]

Most digital cameras today have megapixels galore, a large LCD, fairly long battery life, and take fine pictures in good light. So new models are trying to distinguish themselves by adding new features, stylish designs and improved performance in difficult situations—shooting in low-light, compensating for back-light, and capturing fast-action sports scenes, for examples.

We’ve upgraded our digital camera tests to better evaluate these more ambitious models. How the new point-and-shoot cameras and digital SLRs fared in our more rigorous testing process can be seen in our latest digital camera Ratings (available to subscribers only) now online. These new camera Ratings, along with our new video guide to buying a digital camera (Click on the player at right), will help you find the best camera for your needs.

Here are some previews and highlights from the "Best digital cameras" report, appearing online soon:

• Our new tests reveal a wider range of performance results, with some cameras rising to the tougher challenges—and a number falling short.
• The performance distinction between point-and-shoots and SLRs is blurring. Hint: Some point-and-shoots excelled in dim conditions—traditionally an SLR strength—while a few SLRs faltered.
• Our new image-quality tests combine the judgments of our experts with software analysis for sharpness, color accuracy in a variety of conditions, and other attributes. The result: No point-and-shoot camera received an Excellent image quality score. Only two SLRs scored Excellent image quality—with some of the older models receiving lower image-quality scores than previously reported.
• A new "dynamic range" test evaluates a camera’s ability to successfully capture a shot under widely varying light conditions. Cameras with high dynamic range scores are capable of rendering detail well in the very dim and the very bright areas of an image. The worst performers all but obliterated those finer points.

If you’re taking advantage of Memorial Day weekend store sales and shopping for a new digital camera, you’ll find more free digital camera buying advice on ConsumerReports.org.

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At this year’s Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in New Haven, Conn., the room was packed for a May 22 workshop on new challenges posed by spyware. A proliferation of spyware used by stalkers, identity thieves and even spouses in acrimonious divorce cases recently prompted the Electronic Privacy Information Center to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission. (You can see a copy of EPIC’s complaint with the FCC here if you have Adobe Acrobat installed.) The sales pitches EPIC’s Guilherme Roschke described at the workshop were eye-opening to say the least.  Consider this one for a spyware package being advertised for $89.95:

"Do you need to find out what someone is doing online? Is your spouse, child or friend hiding secrets from you? If so Remote-Spy is the perfect solution for anyone that needs this information quickly and secretly. Now you can use the same software professionals use to find out the information you need in total privacy."

The spyware programs are promoted as being capable of spying on email and instant messages, recording websites visited, browsing files stored on the target’s computer and capturing all keystrokes typed. Many of them can be installed remotely via Trojan horse e-mail attacks. When I asked Roschke how victims are tricked into opening e-mails that launch the spyware, he replied: "Puppies and flowers." E-greeting cards with such warm and fuzzy visual images are among the lures spyware programs provide to entice the person being targeted to inadvertently install programs which then do their dirty work invisibly.

"We’ve heard from domestic violence survivors who are terrified because they have no clue how their stalker knows everything they are doing, and we even had one divorce case in which spyware was installed on the wife’s attorney’s computer," says Erica Olsen, technology safety specialist at the National Network to End Domestic Violence. In another case, a couple in a Philadelphia apartment complex installed spyware on the computers of several neighbors in the building to commit identity theft.

And you have to give points for over-the-top gall to a plaintiff in yet another case Guilherme described.  A man who purchased spyware is being sued by a victim who discovered he’d installed it in her computer, so he in turn is suing the software company, claiming he wasn’t properly warned about the illegality of his actions and his potential legal liability.

Anna Stepanov, anti-spyware manager for McAfee told me that examples of this type of consumer software designed for illegal surveillance were detected as early as 2002.  "But we’re seeing more of these programs now. They’re perfecting their techniques and the distribution methods are nastier. We’re detecting and classifying many of them as Trojans rather than spyware," she says.

The next front: spyware that can be downloaded on cell phones to monitor incoming and outgoing calls and text messages. "We’re just starting to see this, and it can do terrible psychological damage," says Erica Olsen.

—Andrea Rock, Senior Editor

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FiReaNGeL writes “A group of astronomers have now discovered a system of three super-Earths around a rather normal star, which is slightly less massive than our Sun, and is located 42 light-years away towards the southern Doradus and Pictor constellations. “We have made very precise measurements of the velocity of the star HD 40307 over the last five years, which clearly reveal the presence of three planets”. The planets, having 4.2, 6.7, and 9.4 times the mass of the Earth, orbit the star with periods of 4.3, 9.6, and 20.4 days, respectively. “The perturbations induced by the planets are really tiny — the mass of the smallest planets is one hundred thousand times smaller than that of the star — and only the high sensitivity of HARPS made it possible to detect them” says co-author François Bouchy, from the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, France. Clearly these planets are only the tip of the iceberg.”

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stoolpigeon writes “Hackerteen Volume 1: Internet Blackout is an interesting new project, a graphic novel being published by O’Reilly. What makes it interesting is not just that this is a rather new direction for O’Reilly but that this is, to my knowledge, a rather unique publication in that it seeks to educate teenage youth about an array of issues ranging from privacy, free software, security and the impact of politics on personal freedom as it relates to the use of technology. Making topics like that exciting, and understandable to a young person may sound like a tall order, and I think it is.” Read below for the rest of JR’s review.

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Barence writes “Nokia has revamped its E-series of business-oriented smartphones with two new models, including the “world’s thinnest” QWERTY device. The GPS-enabled E71 is the slimmer successor to the Nokia E61, with a thickness of only 1cm. It’s HSDPA-enabled, offers switchable home screens, and gives a claimed “two full days of heavy, heavy use”. The E66, on the other hand, is a slide-phone with a conventional numerical keypad and a built-in accelerometer. At the same event, Nokia also gave a tantalising hint about its plans for an iPhone rival, with its senior vice president saying, “we will have touchscreen devices coming this year”.”

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Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton has written in with a tale of media rippers and corporate giants “In 2001 RealNetworks sued and blocked Streambox from distributing the Ripper, a program that let users rip and save RealAudio and RealVideo streams even if the stream contained a proprietary “do not copy” flag. Then one year ago this month, RealNetworks caused a stir by releasing a beta of RealPlayer 11 that similarly let the user record and save streams from sites like YouTube and Pandora. YouTube rippers and the like had existed before, but this was the first time a major company had included a stream ripper in its media player. And while RealPlayer 11 didn’t explicitly ignore any copy protection flags, the release still provoked legal rumblings: in a Variety article by Scott Kirsner, an anonymous network exec said accused RealNetworks of “aiding and abetting piracy” and said that they would “more likely than not” take action against RealNetworks. But now that the feature has stayed in RealPlayer for a year, its real impact will be not on piracy but on the perceived legitimacy of ripping programs. The corporate behemoth, raked over the coals in the past for privacy violations and nuisance-ware, strikes a blow for free-culture hackers.” The rest of Bennett’s essay is available by following that magical link right below these words.

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notdagreatbrain writes “Maximum PC magazine has early benchmarks on Nvidia’s newest GPU architecture — the GTX 200 series. Benchmarks on the smokin’ fast processor reveal a graphics card that can finally tame Crysis at 1900×1200. ‘The GTX 280 delivered real-world benchmark numbers nearly 50 percent faster than a single GeForce 9800 GTX running on Windows XP, and it was 23-percent faster than that card running on Vista. In fact, it looks as though a single GTX 280 will be comparable to — and in some cases beat — two 9800 GTX cards running in SLI, a fact that explains why Nvidia expects the 9800 GX2 to fade from the scene rather quickly.’”

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funfail writes “It’s a Wii without the $250 console. It’s virtual Pong and so much more. Any object is now an input device, even your fingers. Camspace is a pure software solution that allows nearly any ordinary PC webcam (95% are supported) to track up to four objects — even as small as 5mm — in real-time and with very high accuracy and reliability (Windows only). Techcrunch has an in-depth article and a video.” Very neat idea, but it appears that it is in a limited beta only, and source doesn’t appear likely.

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