Sony said Wednesday it would permanently block PlayStation 3 owners from the PlayStation Network if they are using jailbroken consoles.

The demands came six weeks after the first full-fledged PS3 hack was released. The hack was designed to allow PlayStation 3 owners the ability to play home-brewed games, but can be tweaked to allow the console to play pirated games.

In federal court in New York, prosecutors had portrayed Muse as a ringleader of the pirate gang who seized the Maersk Alabama some 450km (280 miles) off the coast of Somalia.

Muse pleaded guilty in May to what were said to be the first piracy charges to have been brought in the US in more than a century.

Apple finally unveiled the shape of its new subscription model for the App store today, confirming that it will force magazine and newspaper publishers to hand over 30 per cent of their cover price.

Apple's process will give buyers the "option" of providing their name, email, and zip code.

It's almost certainly going to be too much for Amazon, who may discontinue their iOS Kindle app, rather than make a substantial loss on sales.

Researchers have discovered the first case of a direct transfer of a human DNA fragment to a bacterial genome. The guilty party? Gonorrhea.

"This has evolutionary significance because it shows you can take broad evolutionary steps when you're able to acquire these pieces of DNA. The bacterium is getting a genetic sequence from the very host it's infecting."

The reverberations of Wikileaks publication of so many confidential and secret documents will be felt for many years, and he has attracted a large band of supporters, but the support for Assange is as much about his personal situation as it is an expression of support for what Wikileaks does or proposes to do.

Napster was neutered by court action in the US, but its failure inspired peer-to-peer services that were far harder to control. The sharing of music is now unstoppable, and Wikileaks and the organisations that come after it will ensure that the same is now true of secrets.

Petro was an elementary school teacher in the Bronx. She taught art. And it just so happened she used to be paid for performance art. Yes, Petro used to be a stripper and a prostitute.

It's just that she decided to write about her past for The Huffington Post. Her post was thoughtful. She wrote about what it felt like to use Craigslist to advertise for clients. She suggested Craigslist was wrong to shut down its adult services section.

Unfortunately, this led to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg saying: "We're just not going to have this woman in front of a class."

In the last three years, America's military and intelligence agencies have spent more than $125 million on computer models that are supposed to forecast political unrest.

The head of the CIA is getting hauled in front of Congress, making calls about Egypt's future based on what he read in the press, and getting proven wrong hours later.

"All of our models are bad, some are less bad than others," says Mark Abdollahian, a political scientist and executive at Sentia Group, which has built dozens of predictive models for government agencies.

Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak has said he will stay in office and transfer all power only after September's presidential election.

Thousands of anti-government protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square reacted angrily to his announcement.

Activist Mustafa Naggar responded to the leadership's statements, saying: "The street is fed up with Mubarak. If Mubarak leaves the country, he will help to calm the crisis. If he continues, he will lead Egyptians into chaos."

When Craigslist withdrew from the adult services business last year, some wondered whether the prostitution business would be driven to less obvious and, perhaps, more dangerous places.

Venkatesh estimates that 83 percent of prostitutes have a Facebook page. Moreover, he believes that by the end of 2011, Facebook "will be the leading online recruitment space."

Even in 2008, he estimates that 25 percent of prostitutes' regular clients came through Facebook (compared with only 3 percent through Craigslist).

In recent months Google has received dozens of copyright infringement warnings from MPAA-affiliated movies studios.

The movie studios are not happy and are warning the search giant that it might get disconnected from the Internet.

This is an awkward situation for a company that is trying to help out the entertainment industry, and has even revealed a censorship policy towards certain BitTorrent-related terms.