In a lengthy post online, the hackers wrote that last March, they hacked a laptop belonging to an FBI agent named Christopher K. Stangl from the bureau’s Regional Cyber Action Team and the New York FBI office’s Evidence Response Team.

The file, according to the hackers, contained a list of more than 12 million Apple iOS devices, including Unique Device Identifiers (UDID), user names, names of devices, types of devices, Apple Push Notification Service tokens, ZIP codes, cellphone numbers, and addresses.

Apple has been criticized for hard-coding the ID’s in devices, since they can be misused by application developers and others to identify a user, when combined with other information, and track them.

Beginning Aug.30, the online auction site will ban the sale of curses, spells, hexes, magic, prayers, blessing services, magic potions, healing sessions and more.

“Disgusted” wrote: “Ebay bans alternative religious items. But! Not for Christians. Holy water and other sundry ‘holy’ items are discriminately allowed. … Hm. Let me get this straight. Some guy in Rome wearing long robes can wave his hand over some water and imbue it with something, and then it’s very ‘powerful?’ How is that different from any other magical item previously sold on ebay?…”

German data protection officials today accused Facebook of “illegally compiling a vast photo database of users without their consent” and demanded that the social network destroy its archive of files based on facial recognition technology, the New York Times reported.

Facebook claims it doesn’t have to do that, in part because the data collection is legal in Ireland, where Facebook’s European operations are based. “We believe that the Photo Tag Suggest feature on Facebook is fully compliant with EU data protection laws,” Facebook said in a statement issued to the Times.

In a pair of Twitter posts on Monday, Dotcom suggested that both Megabox and an unnamed additional service would launch "this year."

Last December, Dotcom described Megabox in a guest post for TorrentFreak as a service that would allow recording artists to sell music downloads direct to consumers and keep 90 per cent of the earnings.

Google has announced that it will soon penalize sites that are repeatedly accused of copyright infringement. But one site in particular doesn’t need to worry: Google’s own YouTube. It has a unique immunity against the forthcoming penalty.

Since Google doesn’t seem to disclose the number of YouTube takedown requests it has acted upon (I have asked for a figure), there’s no way to assess YouTube against the other sites on the strikeout list above.

There’s no way to treat YouTube — or Blogger — like any other site in the search rankings, when those sites have special takedown forms that don’t allow their alleged infringing activity to measured up against other sites.

It appears to have leaked online after it was uploaded to Facebook by the director of engineering Andrew Bosworth and (presumably mistakenly) set to allow for public viewing. It was deleted "seconds later," according to the anonymous donor, but not before they had scraped a copy and published it online via Imgur.

As we often hear from Facebook itself, users must take responsibility for what they share online.

Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results.

In fact, we’re now receiving and processing more copyright removal notices every day than we did in all of 2009—more than 4.3 million URLs in the last 30 days alone.

A girl in New Mexico with the same name tried to sign in to her Facebook account on Wednesday and was denied with the following message: "Disabled - Inauthentic Account." She believes Facebook thinks she is breaking the rule "Impersonating anyone or anything is not allowed."

It's not clear how long Gomez was using her account before she was denied access. This is not the first time Facebook has run into such problems.

The company behind Farmville, Words With Friends and other games distributed mostly via Facebook reported a second quarter net loss of $22.8 million, or 3 cents a share, on revenue of $332.5 million.

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said that the company faced "new short-term challenges," but was "optimistic about the long-term growth prospects on mobile." Pincus noted that Zynga has a window of opportunity to drive the social gaming revolution.

In plain terms this means that the W3C will continue to work on the HTML5 specification. WHATWG on the other hand will continue its work with HTML5 as a "Living Standard". The idea of a living standard is that it never settles down and is always being added to and refined. The task of the browser makers and the programmers using HTML5 is to try to keep up.

Overall this doesn't seem to be a good development. It will no longer be possible to say exactly what HTML5 is - the W3C's snapshot or the living standard of WHATWG.