PayPal suspended the account of a white-hat hacker on Tuesday, a day after someone used his research into website authentication to publish a counterfeit certificate for the online payment processor.

"This is not something I had anything to do with, and they responded by suspending my account," Marlinspike told The Reg. "I've been the one trying to warn them of this in the first place."

She didn't explain how they determined programs such as Wireshark and Cain & Abel have legitimate uses and the tools offered by Marlinspike do not. She also didn't explain why Marlinspike's banishment came less than 24 hours after the release of the bogus PayPal certificate.

A New York-based anarchist has been arrested by the FBI and charged with hindering prosecution after he allegedly used the social networking site Twitter to help protesters at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh evade the police.

Twitter has rapidly established itself as an important tool in the armoury of protest groups and demonstrators. During the summit, the police openly monitored Twitter to listen in to the protesters' communications.

A Ministry of Defence guide to preventing information leaking into the public domain has leaked into the public domain.

The Defence Manual of Security was issued in October 2001 and is marked "Restricted". The three volumes, which appear in their entirety on Wikileaks, cover: protective security, personnel security and IT security.

As you may or may not know, Windows 7 allows two display drivers to be used at once - like in Windows XP. Therefore, it is possible to use an Nvidia card for PhysX and ATI card for graphics rendering. Sadly, since the release of 186 graphics drivers, Nvidia has decided to block this feature anytime a Non-Nvidia GPU is present in the system.

As expected, this move by Nvidia generated a lot of criticism from both consumers and even Nvidia's competitors. Luckily, a forum member by the name of GenL has released an experimental beta patch which intercepts disable-PhysX-if-Radeon-is-present-code.

The Informed P2P User Act (PDF), put forward by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, sets out rules aimed at curbing the inadvertent sharing of illegal and sensitive information by providing a "clear and conspicuous notice", and requiring the "informed consent" of the user before files are shared.

A student who sued Amazon for deleting George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four from his Kindle ebook, rendering his notes useless, has won $150,000 along with protection for other Kindle users.

Fewer than 2000 copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm had been sold, so Amazon reversed history by deleting the work over the Kindle's whispernet and crediting the accounts of those who had bought a copy.

That was, according to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, "stupid, thoughtless and painfully out of line with our principles", not to mention being very bad publicity indeed.

On September 28, Nintendo released a Wii update, titled 4.2. This update was targeted squarely at homebrew, performing sweeping changes throughout the system.

During BootMii's development, its authors noticed that Nintendo's code had critical bugs and could sometimes permanently brick a console by writing incorrect or unchecked data to flash memory, so they decided to write their own, much safer flashing code.

Another interesting tidbit is that Nintendo is not believed to have any method to repair this kind of brick at a factory, short of replacing the entire motherboard.

At the heart of the auction are 24 pre-war televisions - the largest collection ever assembled for sale - with the oldest dating back to 1930.

It also comprises a vast and unfeasibly diverse collection of scientific instruments, gramophones, early looms, computers - even a medieval set of thumbscrews.

"There are all the important pieces that are firsts: you have one of the first bedwarmers, one of the first food processors, one of the world's first microscopes and one of the first light bulbs - seeing it all together gives a general impression of awe."

Holographic technology has been developed that can pack 1TB onto a DVD-sized disk that can be read by a slightly modified Blu-ray drive and is expected to last 100 years.

The first products using the technology will be 1TB or multi-terabyte drives for archival storage and will hit the market in two to three years, said Peter Lorraine.

"We think there is consumer fatigue over changing formats. Blu-ray has two to four years of life to go. After that, consumers will be clamouring for terabytes of storage."

A barmy biker has been banned by police after converting a beer crate into a mini quad bike.

The biker tried to give them the slip by fleeing into dense woodland but was halted by thick mud.

"It only has a tiny one cylinder engine but somehow he managed to break the speed limit," they added.