Next time you flip open your laptop as you wait for a flight or work at a coffee shop, beware, says the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The person next to you may be stealing your personal bank account information, address book and other files from your computer.

The agency warned earlier this week that the information on your computers may not be protected when using some of the 68,000 Wi-Fi hot spots, or local wireless Internet connections, around the country.

"Odds are there's a hacker nearby, with his own laptop, attempting to 'eavesdrop' on your computer to obtain personal data that will provide access to your money or even to your company's sensitive information," the FBI said in a advisory on its Web site.

Wi-Fi connections are common at airports, hotels, bookstores, schools and parks. Many of the hot spots are secure, the agency said, but if you tap into some of the unsecured networks, you may be opening yourself up for a personal invasion.

The warning prompted Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum to issue a consumer advisory to warn of such risks.

"Florida users should be careful not to trade convenience of access for compromised information," McCollum said.

Think that's bad, the FBI goes further to warn that if a hacker hooks into your computer, you are also connecting to his computer. That means you could be unknowingly downloading viruses and worms.

To protect yourself, the FBI advises the following:

-Update the security protection on your computer with current versions of operating systems, web browsers, firewalls and antivirus and anti-spyware software.

-When tapped into a Wi-Fi network, don't conduct financial transactions or use e- mail and instant messaging.

-Change the default setting on your laptop so you have to manually select the Wi-Fi network you connect to.

-Turn off your laptop's Wi-Fi capabilities when you're not using them.

Do you have a MySpace profile? If you do, your personal information on MySpace could soon be made available to a number of other Web sites.

The largest social network in the U.S. said today that it is making its members' data available to third-party sites. The first partnering sites are Ebay, Yahoo, Twitter and Photobucket. That means that if you want to make your profile picture or blog available to people on your Yahoo Instant Messenger buddy list, you can. Or if you want to add more information about yourself to your Twitter account, you can sync it with your MySpace profile, and potentially find friends of yours on MySpace who are also regular Twitter-ers.

MySpace says the primary purpose of this move it to help the Web become more social and interconnected, and less like a collection of disparate Web sites. "MySpace no longer operates as an autonomous island on the Internet," said Chris DeWolfe, CEO and co-founder of MySpace, during a conference call with reporters today. "We believe your profile will become your Internet address...by being more personal and more portable."

From an advertising perspective, MySpace hopes integrating its features with other sites will encourage people to spend more time on the platform, which generates more ad revenue for the company. And if other sites have access to personal data about you, there's more potential for MySpace to sell highly targeted ads.

From a privacy perspective, this means the personal details you've included on MySpace could be visible across a number of different sites. MySpace says it will let consumers control what information they share and who they share it with. And if you delete or change information from your MySpace profile, those changes will be reflected on the other sites with whom you've chosen to share your information.

Steve Pearman, senior vice president of product development at MySpace, told me this afternoon that the company will take into account any consumer complaints about the data-availability feature as it rolls out over the next couple of weeks. "User data is sacred to us," he said.

MySpace is also part of the OpenSocial alliance spearheaded by Google, a group that was created to foster development of social network applications by third-party developers. While that initiative is supposed to give outside developers access to MySpace members, today's announcement is intended to do the opposite, Pearman said, by giving users the power to export their content and data to outside sites.

MySpace says it is open to relationships with virtually all Web sites--including Facebook, if it is so inclined.

What do you think? Does this raise privacy concerns? Does the Web need to be "more social" or are we all maxed out on status updates?

If you'd like to share your thoughts, shoot me an e-mail at hartk (at) washpost (dot) com.

The promise of mobile marketing has been talked about for several years now, yet we still haven't seen the flurry of cellphone ads that have long been predicted--let alone the sophisticated ads consumers see in other countries.

This week, the Federal Trade Commission held a "town hall" meeting to discuss the state of the mobile marketing industry and what, if any, rules need to be in place to guide its development. Several ad agency folks and other industry execs reported what we've been seeing for a while now: mobile marketing is still largely experimental for many large companies and makes up only a small fraction of overall advertising budgets.

For consumers who'd just as soon not receive ads on their cellphones, that's good news. But mobile marketing is starting to get traction in certain demographics, such as college students. Michael Hanley, professor of advertising at Ball State University, has found through his research that four in 10 students have received mobile ads, and 28 percent of college students would accept coupons on their cellphones. (Coupons for restaurants and movie theaters were most desired).

At the same time, the consumption of mobile content is leveled off, so people typically aren't increasing the amount of content they read and watch on their cellphones as much as they have over the past few years, Hanley said. However, the level of annoyance with mobile ads also seems to have subsided, even as the amount of ads out there grows.

One of the biggest hurdles to mobile marketing lies in the fact that not everyone has an unlimited data plan on their phone. That means they pay a fee to send or receive text messages, click on a banner ad to open a mobile Web site. While the iPhone has helped to change that by making the mobile Internet more accessible, having extensive data plans isn't the norm, said Ben Ezrick, senior strategist of digital innovation for Ogilvy Interactive. He pointed to research that showed 85 percent of iPhone users access the Web on the regular basis, compared to 13 percent of the rest of cellphone users.

Some big brands, such as Cover Girl, are using mobile marketing as a piece of larger ad strategies. "It rarely stands alone," said Jean Berberich, head of Proctor & Gamble's mobile marketing practice. Another problem is that it's hard to tell how effective such campaigns are. "It's all about measurements, and there's not a lot of data to pull from," she said. But from the data she does have, Berberich said she can tell that people are eager to interact with mobile ads. Even though it's a smaller audience, those that actively receive mobile ads engage with the brand nearly five times more than they do with online ads.

I'm curious about how some of you feel about receiving mobile ads. Would you be willing to get them? And if you did, would you find them useful? Or just annoying?

Some folks from Nintendo's public relations team are in town today showing off the company's new "Mario Kart" racing game for the Wii at Union Station.

The video game company is the middle of a 12-city tour to drum up some buzz for its latest title, and is, at the moment, letting anybody who comes by try the game out for a while at several TVs the company has set up. The event lasts till 8 pm.

Funny thing: When I stopped by this morning, there were more grown-ups than kids in attendance. But they seemed to be enjoying the game as much as any kid.

Raj Aggarwal, founder of a visual communications firm in Adams Morgan called Joint Concepts, brought his entire 6-person office down to the event to check out the new Wii game. He doesn't own the game console, but he's thinking about getting one for the office.

Aggarwal, 32, said the morning's field trip is a "team building" exercise. "Everything is, if you look at it the right way," he joked.

A couple of stations away, two colleagues from a nearby Capitol Hill office were going head to head. "You know I drive better than this," groaned Joanne Brown to her colleage, Paulette Brown (no relation) as they played the game, in which players "steer" their game characters with the game's motion-sensing controller snapped into a steering-wheel that comes with the new video game.

Both women have owned Wiis, though one of them gave hers away to her grandchildren this past holiday season. Neither woman had heard of the game before seeing the Nintendo tent set up at the Metro station this morning, but they both seemed interested after having given it a spin. "I have to get this game," said Paulette Brown after winning against her colleague a few times.

As I was leaving the event, I overheard one guy on his cell phone checking in with his significant other on whether they have enough of a budget to buy the game system.

He didn't get a green light on that proposal, but he said he is strongly tempted to pick up the Wii anyway. "I'm going to be in the doghouse for a week," said Illya Smith, who is 39.

See some of the action from the day here:

Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two Interactive Software announced today that the latest version of the popular and controversial game has sold 6 million units globally in its first week on the market. Put it another way, that's $500 million in sales.

The company says it sold 3.6 million copies of GTA IV on the first day the new game launched, last Tuesday.

One industry analyst, as I mentioned in a recent column, had predicted that the game's popularity would hurt box office ticket sales Iron Man during its opening weekend, but that flick did $100 million in business during this past weekend. Looks like that forecast was a bit off.

I've played about 7 hours of GTA IV so far. I'm blown away by the quality of the acting and the writing in the game. And, as much as anything, I'm a fan of the music featured on the soundtrack -- I only wish terrestrial radio was as good as the radio stations they have there in Liberty City.

If anybody has observations about GTA IV after having played it for a while, please post away. Also, are any of you having issues with the game crashing? A colleague of mine is complaining that his copy has been freezing up periodically. I haven't had any such issues with my copy on my Xbox 360.

British comedian Eddie Izzard isn't famous for his consumer tech humor, as far as I know, but he worked many observations and riffs about technology into his act last night at DAR Constitution Hall.

Izzard, known by some for his role on the TV program The Riches, and to others for his stand-up comedy, made cracks last night about Bill Gates, Wikipedia, and Macs during his nearly-two-hour show.

He even yanked out his iPhone at one point, as he was asking and joking around with the crowd about what year the U.S. got universal suffrage. Faster typists than he looked up the year and yelled it out before he pulled up the answer.

My favorite part of his tech-related material was when he mentioned the ever-so-slightly guilty feeling that you get when you're updating iTunes and click on the button that indicates you've read (and agree to) the software's legal "terms and conditions" even though you haven't.

"No one person in the world has read the terms and conditions," he declared. "I got halfway through once... and had to kill myself." And, he asked, just how many times are we going to have to indicate that we've read the "terms and conditions" before companies like Apple start believing us?

Izzard joked about not knowing how to feel about Bill Gates. After all, "he's giving away billions... but he's keeping billions."

He also told a story about an iPhone-using lion who was tricked into thinking he's in Paris, thanks to some tricky giraffes and a dodgy GPS system. Izzard backed up the veracity of some of his tales by exclaiming "it's on Wikipedia!" (Izzard joked that Wikipedia is actually written by "three people in a toilet" and that he checks his Wiki entry every day.)

By the way, D.C.: If you're going to spend half the show checking your text messages, like a couple of folks in front of me last night, please hold your phone up high enough so the folks behind you can also read them and see what's so important.

Izzard worked in another couple of good tech cracks, but I'm off this morning to try and find a copy of a popular new video game. If you were at the show, and taking notes, please post away...

Today, several sports leagues, including the NFL, NASCAR, and NBA, formally challenged the "white spaces" proposal put forth by tech companies including Microsoft and Google.

In a filing, the leagues asked Federal Communications Commission require the technology companies that want to sell wireless white space devices to prove that their devices won't interfere with wireless microphones, which already operate in white spaces.

A group of prominent tech companies have proposed using fallow airwaves, known as white spaces, for wireless devices. The FCC is currently testing devices to determine if they can potentially be used by consumers without interfering with nearby signals.

Broadcasters have also opposed the use of white spaces for personal devices because they could get in the way of their signals. The tech companies say their devices should be able to detect existing signals and avoid them. The sports alliance's filing is the latest move in the prolonged back-and-forth on the issue.

Ken Kerschbaumer, executive director of the Sports Video Group, said the devices could knock out wireless communications systems like headsets used by coaches, microphones used by referees, and microphones used by journalists.

"Now is not the time for the Commission to be distracted by proposals that rely on unproven, yet-to-be-developed technical fixes,"said the Sports Technology Alliance in its filing. The Sports Technology Alliance was formed by the Sports Video Group and is made up of major professional and collegiate U.S. sports leagues.

No word on when the FCC will wrap up testing of the devices, but there will likely be more jabs by each side to keep us from forgetting about it. An advertising blitz on the issue was launched a couple weeks ago.

One of the main challenges for online advertisers is figuring out which Web sites are worth their advertising dollars. How do they know where their competitors are advertising? How do they figure out whether a banner ad would be more effective than a keyword search ad?

A new search engine called Yureekah launched this week to help ad agencies and advertisers find where competitors are advertising and determining the best options for future brand advertising.

Devaraj Southworth, one of its creators, said the idea stemmed from his own company's needs. He runs a small creative agency and a media planning firm, and it often took several weeks to put together an online ad strategy because he had to manually go through Web sites, ad networks and portals to figure out where his client should be visible. Southworth said he's even had to cancel a campaign because finding that information was too labor-intensive to meet the deadline.

He envisions, for example, a small boutique hotel using the service to find out out where Marriott and Hilton are advertising. The small business owner can then determine how best to spend his money to compete for patrons.

"Clients always ask us, 'Where are we and where should we be?'" he said. "This can help level the playing field so everyone can figure that out," not just the advertisers with huge budgets.

The site is currently free to use, but Southworth says more features will be rolled out that have revenue potential. Right now the information is coming from portal sites his firm works with, but he is trying to add information from more ad networks and publishers in the future.

Predictably enough, the new Grand Theft Auto game is selling briskly. One local DC game store tells me they've already sold 200 or so copies of the title, which was released yesterday. They have a few left, but those are all reserved copies for customers who already put a few dollars down.

Game industry analyst Michael Pachter has said he expects the game to sell about 9 million units in the first couple of months -- and 11 to 13 million by year's end.

One guy I know who has tried the game got his hands on a leaked version off the Internet this past weekend, in advance of the release. He gives it a thumbs up. (He says he intends to buy a copy of the game soon.)

He notes one instance where the game's developer takes a wink at the camera, so to speak. After one in-game date, one of the game's female characters tells the protagonist:
"I'd invite you in for hot coffee, but it would cost you at least $20 million." Nice little reference to one of the bigger controversies attached to GTA IV's predecessor, San Andreas.

I haven't played it yet, as I've been occupied with more family-friendy fare. Anybody out there have a take on the new game so far?