During a hearing held yesterday by the House Oversight Committee, Committee Chairman Darrel Issa said that it was “unbelievable” that the IRS had lost the e-mails of former IRS official Lois Lerner.

To keep mailboxes within size limits, employees were told to archive e-mails locally in Outlook .PST mailbox files—including messages that they thought met the definition of “official correspondence” for retention purposes.

Google and Nest have taken two big steps toward this vision of the smart home. Late Friday, Nest—the home automation company Google acquired for $3.2 billion in January—announced its acquisition of Dropcam, a startup that sells internet-connected security cameras.

The prospect of the web giant tapping into your home devices—which could provide an even broader window into your personal life—doesn’t sit well with many who know this world.

You can never be sure how Google will use your personal data. As Meiri points out, Google has already said, in a letter to SEC, that it plans on delivering ads to thermostats and other connected devices.

Joining a crowded field of cyber-consultants, the former National Security Agency chief is pitching his services for as much as $1 million a month.

Alexander offered to provide advice to Sifma for $1 million a month, according to two people briefed on the talks. The asking price later dropped to $600,000, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the negotiation was private.

A waste dealer has been sentenced to 16 months in prison for illegally exporting tonnes of hazardous electrical waste to Africa, the Environment Agency said.

Joe Benson, 54, of Broad Street, Loughton, Essex, was sentenced to 16 months in prison at Snaresbrook Crown Court for illegally exporting 46 tonnes of hazardous waste to Nigeria, Ghana, the Ivory Coast and the Congo.

The US and the EU are the main proponents of the agreement, and the authors of most joint changes, which also covers cross-border data flow. In a significant anti-transparency manoeuvre by the parties, the draft has been classified to keep it secret not just during the negotiations but for five years after the TISA enters into force.

Despite the failures in financial regulation evident during the 2007-2008 Global Financial Crisis and calls for improvement of relevant regulatory structures, proponents of TISA aim to further deregulate global financial services markets.

Half the major publishers in Germany have started a process of arbitration — which, no doubt, will lead to suits — to demand that Google pay them for quoting from and thus linking to their content. And now we know how much they think they deserve: 11% of Google’s revenue related to their snippets.

Google is never going to pay for the right to quote and link to content. That would ruin not only its business but also the infrastructure of knowledge online.

The IRS recently blamed a "computer crash" for the disappearance of two years of email correspondence involving Lois Lerner, the IRS official at the center of the controversy surrounding the agency's apparent targeting of certain non-profit groups.

Apparently, this computer crash also destroyed any backups of the email between Lerner's office and outside government agencies, along with the hard copy backups IRS employees are required to maintain as part of its public records obligations.

One computer crash nuking vital emails is unfortunate. Six computers all taking out relevant email from a specific time period goes far past coincidental.

In an attempt to tame the beast that is Twitter lingo, one such agency, the FBI, has compiled a “Twitter Shorthand” Guide.

Presented with this bizarre list, we thought we’d take the opportunity to highlight a few of the entries we found particularly strange, obscure, or just plain silly.

YouTube will remove music videos by artists such as Adele, Arctic Monkeys and Radiohead, because the independent labels to which they belong have refused to agree terms with the site.

Robert Kyncl, YouTube's head of content and business operations, said videos from independents could be blocked "in a matter of days," if new licenses are not negotiated.

Apple has announced that it will spoof the MAC addresses emitted by its wireless devices as an anti-tracking measure.

One notable and sad irony here is that MAC spoofing was held up as evidence of criminality in the indictment of Aaron Swartz: the US prosecutors characterized changing your MAC address as the sort of thing that only criminals do.