Late last month, officials from the Army and from Boeing presented to the press what appeared to be a working version of a mobile laser cannon.

The actual ray gun is being built under an entirely separate Army program - one that won't be complete for another five years. Integrating the truck and the laser could take another year or two on top of that. In other words, don't expect a working laser cannon until at least 2017.

The government has warned airlines that terrorists are considering surgically implanting explosives into people in an attempt to circumvent screening procedures, according to U.S. officials.

"Measures may include interaction with passengers, in addition to the use of other screening methods such as pat-downs and the use of enhanced tools and technologies."

That research, from internet consultancy firm Envisional, indicates that the top five box office movies were illegally downloaded in the UK a total of 1.4 million times last year.

"Research for the government has shown that film piracy costs the industry about half a billion pounds a year," he said.

But it's not just illegal film downloading that's on the rise - research suggests people are illegally downloading more TV shows too.

It has emerged that the multi-billion-dollar DCGS-A military computer system that was designed to help the US Army in Iraq and Afghanistan simply doesn't work.

This isn't the first time that the US Army - or indeed any sovereign armed force - has spent a lot of money on a system that doesn't work.

To spend almost $3 billion on a broken system, while proven, out-of-the-box alternatives like Palantir are readily and cheaply available, is pretty darn special.

At approximately 21:20 GMT a hacker took control of the Twitter account of online payment broker PayPal UK.

For almost two hours the attackers had control of the profile and have even taken to changing the avatar photo. As of 23:15 GMT the profile had been taken offline.

It appears whoever has hacked the account is having some kind of a dispute with PayPal over a frozen account.

It wasn't until after Virgin America Flight 415 took off from John F. Kennedy International Airport on Friday that the airline discovered the man, identified as Olajide Oluwaseun Noibi, wasn't supposed to be on the flight, according to an FBI affidavit.

However, the incident has raised questions about airline security and how someone could get through security and board a plane without a valid ticket and proper documentation.

In an updated statement Thursday, the agency said its "initial review of this matter indicates the officer reviewing the passenger's travel documents did not identify that the passenger was traveling with improper travel documents."

Facebook Friend Exporter is a Chrome extension developed by Mohamed Mansour, an open source software engineer, that lets you grab all the information about your Facebook friends so you can import them elsewhere. Because it got popular recently, Facebook noticed and began to block the extension.

Mansour says that Facebook removed emails from their mobile site, which were critical to the original design of his extension. He told me that the company had implemented a throttling mechanism: if you visit any friend page five times in a short period of time, the email field is removed.

The whistleblowing site and Datacell, a service provider assisting WikiLeaks, are jointly suing the credit card giants over allegedly running an "unlawful, US influenced financial blockade".

Lawyers for WikiLeaks argue that Mastercard Europe and Visa Europe are each in serious breach of EU Competition Rules in blocking all credit card transactions to WikiLeaks and DataCell since last December.

Visa and Mastercard have not shown any willingness to negotiate a settlement, according to WikiLeaks, hence the decision to place the matter into the hands of its Scandinavian lawyers.

It seems that a hacker who uses Twitter obtained parts of the Florida voting database which has been subsequently posted to Paste2.

"So, this is a little ironic. Here is inside details of florida voting systems. Now.. who still believes voting isn't rigged? If the United States Government can't even keep their ballot systems secure, why trust them at all? FAIL!"

One thing is for sure though, it's hard to imagine that this would not have very big political implications.

So The Times, a long-standing UK newspaper known across the world can stand proud and say that as of this week, 100,000 people are reading it and the Sunday Times combined every month.

Meanwhile, having seen the newspaper's latest figures as reported by Nielsen, we can tell you that in May 2011 both newspapers had 11.9 million page impressions, while in April of last year that number was 40.6 million.

The newspapers' reach has also fallen, down from around seven per cent to around two per cent, a decline of over 71 per cent from its previous readership.