IOActive researcher Barnaby Jack has reverse-engineered a pacemaker transmitter to make it possible to deliver deadly electric shocks to pacemakers within 30 feet and rewrite their firmware.

In reverse-engineering the terminals – which communicate with the pacemakers – he discovered no obfuscation efforts and even found usernames and passwords for what appeared to be the manufacturer’s development server.

Zynga, the company that has long been accused of stealing other companies' game concepts and adding the word "Ville" to them, is now accusing a former employee of stealing ideas from them.

In a statement to AllThingsD, a Kixeye spokesperson said that the company is not involved in the suit. "Unfortunately, this appears to be Zynga's new employee retention strategy: Suing former employees to scare current employees into staying."

Meanwhile, Zynga still faces legal challenges of its own, including suits filed by Electronic Arts and Maxis over wholesale copying of EA's The Sims Social for Zynga's The Ville, accusing Zynga of stealing "private information" about the game.

Customers whose accounts are repeatedly flagged for alleged copyright infringements will have their access to frequently visited websites blocked, until they complete an online copyright course. It’s expected that most other participating ISPs will start their versions of the anti-piracy plan on the same date.

“The reports are made by the content owners and are of IP-addresses that are associated with copyright infringing activities. AT&T will not share any personally identifiable information about its customers with content owners until authorized by the customer or required to do so by law.”

When repeated infringers try to access certain websites they will be redirected to an educational page. To lift the blockade, AT&T will require these customers to complete an “online education tutorial on copyright”.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Facebook revealed the sexual preferences of users despite those users have chosen 'privacy lock-down' settings on Facebook. The article describes two students who were casualties of a privacy loophole on Facebook—the fact that anyone can be added to a group by a friend without their approval.

Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes responded with a statement blaming the users: 'Our hearts go out to these young people. Their unfortunate experience reminds us that we must continue our work to empower and educate users about our robust privacy controls.'

Firefox 17 introduces the first bit of Mozilla’s plan to bring the social web into the web browser. Firefox 17 lays the groundwork for Mozilla’s new Social API. There’s nothing to see right now, but under the hood Firefox 17 is getting ready to move your social web interactions from individual websites into a sidebar within Firefox.

If social network integration isn’t your bag, fear not, Firefox does have a few changes aimed at web developers, most notably the new Markup Panel in the developer tools.

"Once you reach a certain size, you become more of a target," Alan Schoenbaum told us in a recent interview. Schoenbaum is the general counsel of Rackspace, which achieved $1 billion in revenue for the first time last year. He said that patent litigation against the San Antonio company has "accelerated over the last two years."

Until recently, Red Hat was virtually alone among large technology companies in explicitly advocating abolition, not just reform, of patents on software. Now, the fast-growing hosting company promises to be a key ally in the free software movement's fight against software patents.

On Friday, a researcher by the name of Suriya Prakash claimed that the majority of phone numbers on Facebook are not safe.

Suriya decide to write a simple script that read and saved the user names for a range of generated phone numbers. Facebook of course limits the number of times you can search on the site, but Suriya claims he bypassed this all by simply using the mobile site, which he argues doesn’t do this (Facebook says otherwise).

PETA has a good premise, anti-cruelty to animals, but the organization seems to like to ensure it won't be relevant by doubling down on the stupid and crazy.

PETA is now coming out against Pokemon, claiming that the game franchise teaches children to see real world animals as objects that should fight one another for our amusement.

Anyone with half a brain knows that there is zero reason to correlate cartoonish animal universes like Pokemon to real-world cruelty.

A Halliburton spokesman said Friday that the device was found late Thursday on a road in Reeves County used by oilfield services companies to get to and from well locations. The company first reported it missing to the state health department on Sept. 11, according to another report to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

In recent months the number of DMCA takedown requests sent out by copyright holders has increased dramatically, and it’s starting to turn the Internet into a big mess.

This apparent screw up in the automated filter mistakenly attempts to censor AMC Theatres, BBC, Buzzfeed, CNN, HuffPo, TechCrunch, RealClearPolitics, Rotten Tomatoes, ScienceDirect, Washington Post, Wikipedia and even the U.S. Government.

Microsoft and other rightsholders are censoring large parts of the Internet, often completely unfounded, and there is absolutely no one to hold them responsible. Websites can’t possibly verify every DMCA claim and the problem will only increase as more takedown notices are sent week after week.