With a tin can, some copper wire and a few dollars' worth of nuts, bolts and other hardware, a do-it-yourselfer can build a makeshift directional antenna. A mobile phone, souped-up with such an antenna, can talk to a network tower that is dozens of kilometres beyond its normal range (about 5km, or 3 miles).

Some activists brought laptops to places like Tahrir Square in Cairo to collect, via short-range wireless links, demonstrators' video recordings and other electronic messages. These activists then broadcast the material to the outside world using range-extending antennae.

Directional antennae, unlike the omnidirectional sort, transmit on a narrow beam. This makes it hard for eavesdroppers to notice a signal is there.

Earlier, the Gaddafi regime announced it had stopped fighting with the rebels, and promised to follow the UN security council resolution.

Col Gaddafi has ruled Libya for more than 40 years. An uprising against him began last month after long-time leaders of neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt were toppled.

The website is free, so long as you read fewer than 20 items per month, and so are the apps, so long as you confine yourself to the "Top News" section. You can also read articles for free by going in through a side door.

If you want to read the NYT on both your smartphone and your iPad, you'll need to buy both digital subscriptions separately, and pay an eye-popping $35 every four weeks. That's $455 a year.

If you want to use the NYT's iPad app, you're marginally better off subscribing to the print newspaper on Sundays and throwing it away unread.

Users now have the option to choose the application security setting to always use HTTPS when accessing Twitter.com.

Twitter's latest security move comes after the Federal Trade Commission finalized the settlement with the microblogging site to establish a rigorous information security policy to protect user accounts.

The White House is concerned that "illegal streaming of content" may not be covered by criminal law, saying "questions have arisen about whether streaming constitutes the distribution of copyrighted works.

Under federal law, wiretaps may only be conducted in investigations of serious crimes, a list that was expanded by the 2001 Patriot Act to include offenses such as material support of terrorism and use of weapons of mass destruction. The administration is proposing to add copyright and trademark infringement.

The administration is proposing that if Homeland Security seizes circumvention devices, it be permitted to "inform rightholders," "provide samples of such devices," and assist "them in bringing civil actions."

The user in question, who has a total of $1,794.52 worth of games on his or her Steam account, decided to ask how much another person might pay for such an account.

That was a month ago. A little more than a week ago the user was unable to connect with Steam, and was later informed that the account had been disabled for violating the Steam Subscriber Agreement.

Valve has since posted on its forum that the account has been re-activated.

Sarver's message says apps that replicate Twitter's "core functionality" are no longer welcome, but those that extend that functionality are.

From the app developers' point of view the new rules are a not-so-subtle "get lost". Their argument runs like this: we put together thousands of Twitter applications, many or most of them for free, and Twitter's ridden to success on our backs.

You, dear Twitter user, are only valuable in two roles: as the uncomplaining recipient of corporate, endorsed, API-compliant advertising, or as yet-another end user filling up a data mine.

The product has been on the market for years, and normally costs about $10 per dose... but thanks to the new monopoly, the price is immediately jumping up to an astounding $1,500 per dose -- and this is something that many pregnant women need around 20 doses of during their pregnancy.

They thought that granting a monopoly to one company would mean that it would make the drug "more available."

An 8.9-magnitude earthquake and series of major tsunamis struck Japan on Friday, causing massive damage, triggering evacuations in several countries, and leading to tsunami warnings for Hawaii and the West Coast of the United States.

The death toll has been climbing, and Nikkei reported that Miyagi prefecture police said they'd found 200 to 300 bodies of people believed killed by the tsunami.

Television images of Japan on CNN showed waves exceeding 12 feet flowing inland (see video below), causing massive damage and carrying along cars, boats, and small buildings.

Google is giving users the ability to block sites that annoy them from ever showing up again in their search results, via a new link next to search results.

"In addition, while we're not currently using the domains people block as a signal in ranking, we'll look at the data and see whether it would be useful as we continue to evaluate and improve our search results in the future."