Google has always claimed that under the new policy, it "anonymizes" IPs - even though it doesn't.

And as Soghoian has pointed out, if a cookie stays intact for 18 months, then restoring those missing eight bits is trivial. Though Google erases the bits on your nine-month-old search queries, they remain intact on your newer queries - and both sets of queries carry the same cookie info.

The doc suggests that it may be possible in future to simply grow new organs and limbs for injuried or sick humans - even, perhaps, to repair their damaged brain in situ.

"If we know what is happening when tissues are regenerated under normal circumstances, we can begin to formulate how to replace damaged and diseased organs, tissues and cells in an organised and safe way following an injury caused by trauma or disease."

In a series for the Discovery Channel the renowned astrophysicist said it was "perfectly rational" to assume intelligent life exists elsewhere.

"If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans," he said.

He explained: "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet."

Facebook's privacy policy once promised, "No personal information that you submit to Facebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings."

Today, Facebook removed its users' ability to control who can see their own interests and personal information. Certain parts of users' profiles, "including your current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests" will now be transformed into "connections," meaning that they will be shared publicly.

Facebook has consistently ignored demands from its users to create an easy "exit plan" for migrating their personal data to another social networking website.

Ubisoft's latest game to carry this DRM, Assasin's Creed 2, has also now been cracked, with hackers sending a personal message to Ubisoft in the pirated copy's .nfo thanking them for the challenge.

This latest title lasted all of a month before being fully cracked (there was an earlier crack that worked, but only for certain localized versions), and while the crackers may not be the best spellers, they apparently understand that Ubisoft leeches value from their products by layering them with obnoxious DRM solutions.

Google won't allow the co-inventor of Unix and the C language to check-in code, because he won't take the mandatory language test.

Between 1969 and 1973, Ken Thompson implemented a version of the Multics system at Bell, called Unix, with Dennis Ritchie. At the same time he also developed the C language.

The American Civil Liberties Union is applauding Google's latest information service: a database and map of nations that have either asked the company to delete content from one of its features or forward them details about Google users.

Google has provided a useful general overview of the requests, which the company received from government law enforcement agencies from July 1 through December 31 of last year.

Chinese officials censor their censorship demands, classifying them as state secrets, "so we cannot disclose that information at this time," Google explains.

Game publisher and developer Ubisoft on Monday announced that it would no longer be shipping them in its future console titles on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

This is the same kind of offering Ubisoft's been doing with its PC games since last month. According to the company, the first console title to feature such a paperless experience will be Shaun White Skateboarding, which is set for release sometime this holiday season.

Sun released the Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office, as a closed source but free application which allowed Microsoft Office users to export and import documents in Open Document Format.

Users clicking through will find that Oracle are now charging $90, per user, for a right-to-use license for the plug-in and offering support costing $19.80 per user for the first year. Oracle also requires a minimum order of 100 licenses, which means the minimum purchase is $9,000.

Now, thanks to the court order asking the district to preserve evidence on all school-issued computers, the family has discovered more than 400 photos of Blake alone, not to mention the "thousands" more taken of other students in their homes.

Even if you think the school district is within its rights to install monitoring software on school laptops, the IT staff appear to have gotten the whole district into a hairy situation by turning laptop security into their own real-life high school "soap opera."