About a year ago, we highlighted how the online MMO based on Dungeons and Dragons had gone free after trying to charge for a while, and showed how going free didn't mean you lost money, but it could work well as a part of a business model.

In fact, the success of this free effort was so well received that Turbine's owners agreed to let them open up the Lord of the Rings MMO as well.

In just a few months, they've doubled their revenue by embracing free.

Despite being allowed to tell her husband he won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, the wife of Liu Xiaobo was detained in her apartment in Beijing, China, according to a human rights group and her attorney.

Upon hearing he had received the peace prize, Schwanke said, Liu Xiaobo began to cry, and said, "This is for the martyrs of Tiananmen Square."

The Chinese government was angry at the win, calling it "blasphemy against the peace prize" that could harm relations between China and Norway, where the Norwegian Nobel Committee is located.

Type "Liu Xiaobo" -- or "Nobel Peace Prize," for that matter -- in search engines in China and hit return, you get a blaring error page.

"Nobel Prize" was the top-trending topic until the authorities acted to remove all mentions of the award.

A Shanghai-based netizen, @littley, tweeted his unfortunate experience: "My SIM card just got de-activated, turning my iPhone to an iPod touch after I texted my dad about Liu Xiaobo winning the Nobel Peace Prize."

A California student got a visit from the FBI this week after he found a secret GPS tracking device on his car, and a friend posted photos of it online.

A reader quickly identified it as an Orion Guardian ST820 tracking device made by an electronics company called Cobham, which sells the device only to law enforcement.

"We have all the information we needed," they told him. "You don't need to call your lawyer. Don't worry, you're boring."

Kaj Arnö has left Oracle quietly, having submitted his resignation in June two days before Sun Microsystems' legal entity in Germany ceased to operate. Arnö was based in Munich.

Since Oracle's acquisition, Oracle has lost raw MySQL talent including MySQL architect Brian Aker and his Drizzle engineering team.

Not only that, but Oracle has been losing some respected Sun blue-blood talent, including Java father James Gosling, XML co-creator and director of web technologies Tim Bray, and the Solaris engineering brains who'd worked on the revolutionary ZFS.

Cranick lives outside of the city limits and he admits that he forgot to pay a $75 annual service fee that would have provided him with fire protection. Firefighters wouldn't lift a finger, much less the hoses that might have saved the house.

Cranick says he offered to pay whatever it would take. The plea fell on deaf ears. Hours later, the home was gone.

While ISPs can't prevent users getting infected with bots, they are in a superb position to detect the signs of infection.

The idea is that ISPs could detect signs -- say, by intercepting outbound spam, or botnet command-and-control traffic -- and cut the infected customer off from the internet.

No, it's not a gremlin. It's not Yoda's long-lost cousin. It's a western tarsier (Tarsius bancanus), photographed in the Danum Valley Conservation Area in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo.

The image, Night Eyes, has been highly commended in the Gerald Durrell Award for Endangered Wildlife, part of this year's Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, curated by the Natural History Museum, London.

Almost one year after the introduction of Windows 7 it appears that the hype surrounding the operating has faded. The overall market share of Windows has turned into a slight decline again.

Especially Windows XP users seem to be happy with what they have and appear to be rather resistant to Microsoft's pitches that it is time to upgrade to Windows 7.

Many users are just tired of upgrades that require a lot of effort and come with the notion that the computer may not boot after the upgrade.

Last month the country denied its Busheher nuclear station, which opened in August after 35 years of building delays, has been badly affected by the the Stuxnet worm.

Mr Moslehi said Iran had discovered the "destructive activities of the arrogance (of Western powers) in cyberspace, and different ways to confront them have been designed and implemented".