In a highly unusual move, a federal judge has ordered Google to deactivate the email account of a user who was mistakenly sent confidential financial information by a bank.

The ruling stems from a monumental error by the Wilson, Wyo.-based Rocky Mountain Bank. On Aug. 12, the bank mistakenly sent names, addresses, social security numbers and loan information of more than 1,300 customers to a Gmail address.

"It's outrageous that the bank asked for this, and it's outrageous that the court granted it," says John Morris, general counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology

They complain that without new business models journalism itself is doomed. Leave aside how ridiculous all of that is (and, yes, it's totally ridiculous), when a new project comes along that will enable more reporting in the San Francisco Bay Area, via a partnership between radio station KQED and journalism students at Berkeley, along come the professional reporters complaining about how this is the death of journalism and must be stopped. That's the view of the East Bay Express's Robert Gammon. Why? Well, because it involves students instead of pro journalists, and thus is unfair competition.

As part of a bitter and ongoing fight with Canada's large carriers, a group of small Canadian Internet Service Providers has launched a campaign to try to drum up consumer support for keeping key network infrastructure affordable to small ISPs.

The centre of the fight is the network infrastructure built and run by the large carriers. The small ISPs want to ensure that Bell and Telus can't refuse to give them access to the broadband networks or offer them a access at a price that makes it impossible for the small ISPs to compete.

A new AIDS vaccine tested on more than 16,000 volunteers in Thailand has protected a significant minority against infection, the first time any vaccine against the disease has even partly succeeded in a clinical trial.

Although the difference was small, Dr. Kim said it was statistically significant and meant the vaccine was 31.2 percent effective.

Whatever the vaccine does, he said, it does not seem to mimic the defenses of the rare individuals known to AIDS doctors as "long-term nonprogressors," who do not get sick even though they are infected.

If the BPI's 'losses' figures are to be believed (and we have to go along with the ridiculous premise of 1 download = 1 lost sale in order to do so), saving £200m worth of business will end up costing ISPs almost double that amount.

"Their [music industry] claims are melodramatic and assume people would buy all the music that is illegally downloaded, which is nonsense," said Petter.

Indeed, by spending a measly £3.00 per month on a cheapo VPN service from the likes of SwissVPN, it's possible for any user to tunnel right out of the UK and no-one in the country will have a clue what they are doing on their connection.

In less than two months after a group of University of Washington computer researchers proposed a novel system for making electronic messages "disappear" after a certain period of time, a rival group of researchers based at the University of Texas at Austin, Princeton, and the University of Michigan, has claimed to have undermined the scheme.

"In our experiments with Unvanish, we have shown that it is possible to make Vanish messages "reappear" long after they should have "disappeared" nearly 100 percent of the time," the researchers wrote on a Web site that describes their experiment.

In my book, animated GIFs are one step above glitter graphics in terms of junk trends of the Internet, but I'm a big fan of any tool that makes creating them easy and fun.

To do this, it first downloads the clip to its servers, and then gives you simple controls to choose when you want it to begin and end. When you've picked out that perfect 10-second (or less) section of the video, you just hit a single button to finish the job.

NASA says it successfully launched a rocket in Virginia as part of an experiment, and the blast may have caused dozens of people to report seeing strange lights in the sky.

About the time of the launch, dozens of people in the Northeast started calling local television stations to report seeing strange lights.

The attorneys that filed the lawsuit are at the head of Camara & Sibley, the Houston-based firm defending Jammie Thomas-Rasset against copyright claims made by the music industry.

In an interview for a story published in July, Sibley said he and Camara could see themselves working for copyright owners, if they believed in the issue.

They claim that the book had been downloaded more than 100 times from Scribd, which her attorneys called the "YouTube for documents."

A squirrel has been seen attempting to savage a fruit bat to death.

"No-one has recorded this type of behaviour or incident before," says Mr Stanley, who saw the squirrel try to kill the bat in a tree above his head.

"The least likely hypothesis is that the squirrel was preparing to eat the bat," says Mr Stanley.