The device is an extension of its controversial Active Denial System, which uses microwaves to heat the surface of the skin, creating a painful sensation without burning that strongly motivates the target to flee.

"Independent of the mode of production, with this size of antenna the beam will show variations of intensity with distance - not just a simple decrease - up to about 500 metres," says Altmann. Shooting it on the move with any accuracy will be difficult, he adds.

Their scheme, called Vanish, encrypts the message, and then essentially throws away the key. The trick is that the key will take a set amount of time before disappearing from view; during that time, it's still possible to access the data.

Because the online storage system purges data after set periods of time, once that time is up, the key is permanently lost. In essence, the message has self-destructed.

Management put a hefty check on the table - I'm sure our beloved sysadmins felt like kids before Christmas - and salivating sales people from major hardware vendors grabbed our requirements spec, dived into their CRMs and crunched their spreadsheets.

However, one of the world's biggest hardware vendors - whose name every single reader will be familiar with, and whose hardware a good share of you will be using right now - apparently didn't do their homework. When Opera's sysadmin booted up the server to test its web-based administration interface, they came across a single JavaScript statement that managed to piss off everyone up to and including the CTO.

According to manufacturers, CD-Rs should last for decades. Some even quoted an upper limit of 120 years based on accelerated aging tests! That sure is a long time, isn't it? But will CD-Rs really last that long?

Of the corrupted CD-Rs, many of them only had a few files corrupted, but two of the CD-Rs were completely unreadable. Neither one of the two CD/DVD drives we used could even recognize the CD-Rs, much less read anything off them.

It should be pretty obvious by now - CD-Rs don't last forever. Although manufacturers may quote lifespans of decades in length, they are unlikely to last more than a few years. Our simple test showed that even when stored properly, CD-Rs that were just 7-9 years old were failing at a significant rate.

Jamie Neale, 19, told Australia's 60 Minutes television programme that he was "a total idiot" to venture unprepared into the Blue Mountains, 60 miles west of Sydney.

He said he ate seeds and weeds, and kept warm at night under strips of bark. He waved his blue shirt at circling helicopters, but the forest was so thick that he was not seen.

Two hikers happened upon Jamie last Wednesday. He spent two days in the hospital for treatment of dehydration and exposure.

Users of Amazon.com's e-reader device were surprised and unsettled over the past day to receive notice that George Orwell works they had purchased, including "1984" and "Animal Farm," had been removed from their Kindle and their money refunded.

Herdener's explanation differed from what Kindle users were told by Amazon's customer service, which made no reference to piracy, but implied that the removal was the publisher's choice.

Norton Internet Security 2010 won't be available for a few more months, but the beta version is available now.

Built upon the dramatic performance improvements are deeper integration with other security tools like OnlineFamily.

Swedish cops are on the look-out for a quintet of tattooed girls who dragged a 50-year-old man off his bicycle, pulled down his trousers and smalls and "sexually molested" the poor bloke.

Having had their evil way, the five assailants made good their escape. The man was "not otherwise beaten or physically assaulted".

An update pushed out to BlackBerry users on the Etisalat network in the United Arab Emirates appears to contain remotely-triggered spyware that allows the interception of messages and emails, as well as crippling battery life.

Closer examination (as reported by itp.net) seems to indicate that all instances of the application were expected to register with a central server, which couldn't cope with the traffic - thus forcing all the instances to repeatedly attempt to connect while draining the battery.

The 10 inkblot images that form the classic Rorschach test have fallen into the public domain, and so including them on Wikipedia would seem to be a simple choice. However, some editors have cited the American Psychological Association's statement that exposure of the images to the public is an unethical act, since prior exposure to the images could render them ineffective as a psychological test.