The NYPD has ordered the city's 77 police precincts to stop giving out any information to the media about crimes taking place in their neighborhoods, cutting off a long-standing source of information for New Yorkers.

Reporters from DNAinfo New York, and other local news sites, experienced the crackdown this week when they were told that access to the precinct’s reports were suddenly revoked.

The move is the latest — and perhaps not the last — taken against the media by outgoing Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.

Some 60 heads of state or government have announced they will take part in the memorial service or state funeral of Nelson Mandela, South Africa says.

The event is likely to be one of the biggest such gatherings of international dignitaries in recent years. The government said 59 leaders had so far confirmed they would be attending: an indication of the special place Mr Mandela held in people's hearts across the world, officials say.

Among the patents granted to Facebook this week by the USPTO is one for Inferring Household Income for Users of a Social Networking System. 'For example,' Facebook explains, 'an assumption might be made about a user that reads CNN.com and nytimes.com every day that the user is in a higher income bracket.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said the “extremely dangerous” cargo of pellets used in hospital radiotherapy machines had been removed from its protective casing, but “there is no indication that it has been damaged or broken up” and there is “no sign of contamination to the area.”

Mexican nuclear safety officials said they believed the carjackers did not know what they were stealing and that they may die from exposure to the radioactive material.

Adblock Plus, the most popular adblocking program on the market, has been downloaded 250 million times, and has around 60 million active users.

"Advertising has become even more aggressive," says Sean Blanchfield, chief executive of Pagefair, a firm that monitors how often advertising is blocked on websites.

The MPAA will put out its press releases and bogus statements about how this will show other sites that they can't "get away with" enabling infringement, even as a dozen similar sites will pop up overseas where they'll be even less concerned with what the MPAA has to say.

The MPAA thinks that this will scare off other similar sites, but in their decades of "fighting piracy," that has never happened. Each one of these victories leads to... more such sites appearing, though in ways that are harder to shut down, less respect for the legacy Hollywood studios, and a general feeling that Hollywood refuses to adapt and compete.

The state of Oregon blames Oracle for the failures of its online health exchange, according to a new piece on NPR’s All Tech Considered blog. The health-insurance site still doesn’t fully work as intended, with many customers forced to download and fill out paper applications rather than sign up online; Oracle has reportedly informed the state that it will sort out the bulk of technical issues by December 16, a day after those paper applications are due.

Oregon state officials insist that, despite payments of $43 million, Oracle missed multiple deadlines in the months leading up to the health exchange’s bungled launch.

"In the present case, there is no evidence that the Defendants (or Hotfile’s founders) are 'pirates' or 'thieves,' nor is there evidence that they were 'stealing' or engaged in 'piracy' or 'theft,'" wrote Hotfile lawyers in arguing for the ban.

MPAA lawyers countered that it would be inappropriate and practically impossible to keep the word "piracy" out of the trial.

Today I found out that during the height of the Cold War, the US military put such an emphasis on a rapid response to an attack on American soil, that to minimize any foreseeable delay in launching a nuclear missile, for nearly two decades they intentionally set the launch codes at every silo in the US to 8 zeroes.

So to recap, for around 20 years, the Strategic Air Command went out of their way to make launching a nuclear missile as easy, and quick, as possible.

In order to protect the copyrights of film producers, the High Court of Paris has concluded a 2011 case by ordering Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to completely de-list 16 video streaming sites from their search results.

PCInpact reports that they had demanded that the search engines and ISPs foot the bill of the blocking and censorship, but the court decided otherwise.