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Circuit City, one of North America's leading technology retailers, could fall victim to the credit crunch. The firm is closing 155 of its 721 US stores this year in what it openly admits is an attempt to save the business. The stores closing will be ... running stock clearance sales from now until December 31 when they cease trading. That's good news for bargain hunters, but also shows how serious the problems are: aside from Black Friday sales (the day after Thanksgiving), November and December are the months in which firms would normally be most anxious to charge full price. The big problem ... (view more)

The promise of unlimited high-speed Internet access could become a thing of the past with more and more carriers putting limits on monthly downloads. The issue has become a hot one since Time Warner began a trial scheme in Texas limiting users to ... 5GB of downloads a month, charging penalty fees for any extra use. It's looking as if rival firms may feel they can get away with similar tactics. One firm, Frontier, is already planning to mirror the 5GB limit next year. What makes that particularly concerning for customers is that in Rochester, Frontier's biggest market, the main alternative is ... (view more)

A school testing company's blunder left personal details of more than 100,000 students publicly viewable on the web. The Princeton Review, which produces courses designed to help students prepare for tests including the SAT (the standard entry exam ... for US universities), recently switched Internet providers. During the move, password protected mechanisms were inadvertently disabled, allowing for full public exposure to sensitive student records. Among those which lost their cloaking were one file with names and birth dates of 74,000 Virginia students, and another with more extensive details ... (view more)

A leading cable firm has abandoned plans to monitor its customers' Internet use and sell the results to advertisers. Charter Communications, which is either the third or fourth biggest US cable company (depending on which stats you follow) announced ... the scheme in May. It planned to use the services of NebuAd, a California advertising firm which installs a physical device on an Internet provider's network. This device takes extremely detailed information about each individual customer's web use and then sends relevant adverts directly to their computer as they use the Internet. It's possible ... (view more)

AT ... (view more)