The PR boffins at LG decided it would be a good idea to release 100 helium-filled balloons, each carrying a voucher entitling the recipient to claim their 950,000 won ($852.54) smartphone. It then took to social media to promote the event, inviting people to witness the balloons' release and encouraging them to grab one of the vouchers.

People aren’t stupid. They figured out that the only way to get the voucher was to burst the balloons, and they showed up equipped to do so with BB guns, knives on sticks, and other tools.

Deutsche Telekom AG and United Internet AG announced on Friday that they were joining forces in a project dubbed “E-Mail Made in Germany,” which would see all emails sent from the T-Online, GMX or Web.de services automatically encrypted.

Under the new system, the contents, attachments and metadata of the emails are to be encrypted while in transit between the sender and receiver. The data is to be available in an unencrypted state on the companies' servers but any access to third parties, such as prosecutors, is to be granted only in compliance with German law.

Bojczak tended to drive by Newark airport in New Jersey. The enterprising souls there were trying out a new system called Smartpath. This, according to its maker Honeywell, lets airports "increase airport capacity, decrease air traffic noise, and reduce weather-related delays."

Sadly, though, it can be jammed by passing trucks that happen to enjoy a GPS jammer.

As it turns out blocked sites can easily exploit the system and add new IP-addresses to Sky’s blocklist. As a result TorrentFreak has been rendered inaccessible to the ISP’s four million customers.

This essentially means that EZTV, or any other blocked site, has the power to render entire websites inaccessible to Sky subscribers. Luckily we were the target and not Google.

It’s expected that after realizing how vulnerable to exploits their blocking system is, Sky will soon correct their mistake.

The latest NSA plan to stop the next Ed Snowden is to get rid of 90% of their sysadmins and automating many of their jobs.

Considering that sophisticated techies aren't very interested in working for the NSA these days, perhaps it all works out for them.

Also, this more or less confirms what was fairly obvious (due to the NSA leaks by Snowden) that sysadmins have near universal access in the NSA's system.

Microsoft plans to raise the price of the Datacenter edition of the upcoming R2 release of Windows Server 2012 by 28 percent, adding to what analysts call a record number of price increases for enterprise software products from Redmond.

The increase caps off a year filled with a record number of price increases for Microsoft enterprise software, according to a Tweet yesterday from Microsoft software licensing analyst Paul DeGroot of Pica Communications.

"I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit," founder Ladar Levinson said in a statement posted to the company's homepage on Thursday. "After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations."

"This experience," Levinson wrote, "has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States."

Firefox at last follows the lead of Internet Explorer and Chrome, blocking mixed use of (non-secure) HTTP content from (secure) HTTPS pages.

Arguably on the other side of the security fence, Firefox 23 removes the ability to disable JavaScript in its preferences dialog. That's not to say that Firefox 23 can't disable JavaScript (the setting in about:config still exists and still works, and Firefox 24 will add a feature to the developer tools to disable JavaScript too), but the most easy and obvious way of disabling JavaScript is gone.

Crossbar is touting impressive specs for the RRAM technology, promising 20 times the write performance at a fraction of the power consumption and size of the current best-in-class NAND flash modules.

"With our working Crossbar array, we have achieved all the major technical milestones that prove our RRAM technology is easy to manufacture and ready for commercialisation," said CEO George Minassian.

A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

"Remember that the utilization of SOD cannot be revealed or discussed in any investigative function," a document presented to agents reads. The document specifically directs agents to omit the SOD's involvement from investigative reports, affidavits, discussions with prosecutors and courtroom testimony.