Computers, Internet cellphones -- they're all an absolute essential ingredient of doing business, and a major convenience for most people.

The big problem is that the risks associated with these technologies appears to be growing at a much faster rate than the benefits they offer.

If a hacker doesn't break into your PC or send you a nasty worm/virus/trojan via email, chances are that your cellphone will fry your brain with unhealthy levels of radiation.

Readers Say (updated hourly) Nothing Yet Have Your Say

Even Microsoft's new "Trustworthy Computing" initiative and their moratorium on new feature development this month in favour of bug-hunting seems to have had absolutely no effect on the level of risk.

I see in today's headlines that an IE bug leaves MSN messenger users wide open to potential security breaches -- and what's worse, the "fix" released on Thursday seems to have failed the company's own "Trustworthy" label and had to be pulled. Not a good look and hardly something that inspires confidence in the company's ability to carry out its promises (I did suggest that they were perhaps way out of their depth on this one).

Of course cellphone users are not immune. Some models of Nokia mobiles can be scuttled by a carefully crafted SMS message -- and now there's a rather clever scam going down in the UK which has allegedly cost a few users a nice chunk of change.

According to a warning I received this weekend, someone in the UK is sending out bulk SMS messages that request the recipient to call a number (09011500065) urgently.

Apparently calls to this number incurs a much higher charge than normal (apparently something like an 0900 number) and (here's the cunning bit) such calls are automatically answered by a machine that plays a recording of the busy tone. This usually results in the caller thinking the number was engaged and trying again later. Of course they're charged for each call so the scam is capable of raking in quite a bit of cash.

Enjoy your shiny new hi-tech toys -- but please stay on your toes.

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