Police in northern New Jersey infiltrated Facebook to learn that students were planning to bring alcohol and drugs to an after-prom party.

Police created fake identities to enter the social networking site and found what Fair Lawn High School students were going.

School Superintendent Bruce Watson says the district doesn't check Facebook on a regular basis unless there's a reason. Watson says the district generally leaves Internet patrolling to police.

Windows 7 pricing is potentially an obstacle to Windows 7 adoption for some users, though in just about every other aspect the operating system is beating Vista, according to a Dell marketing executive.

"Schools and government agencies may not be able to afford (the additional cost). Some of the smaller businesses may not be able to enjoy the software as soon as they'd like," Ward said.

Last week, the USPTO granted IBM a patent for its System and method for comprehensive automatic color customization in an email message based on cultural perspective.

IBM explains: 'For example, an email created in the U.S. in red font to indicate urgency or emphasis might be mapped to a more appropriate color (e.g., blue or black) for sending to Korea.'

A spate of "sexting" cases in the US has prompted calls for a change in the law.

It could also lead to a criminal conviction as a sex offender for any teenager who forwards them on to someone else.

It has led people to ask whether threatening children with the same law that was drawn up to protect them - and potentially creating many more sex offenders - is the best way to tackle the phenomenon of "sexting"?

Electronics giant Sony has reported its first annual loss in 14 years, after being hit by a big drop in sales.

The company blamed the global downturn and the strong yen for the loss. Worldwide sales were down 12.9%.

However, the loss was not as bad as Sony had expected. It had forecast a loss of 150bn yen back in January.

I walked over and took a picture with my iPhone of them and more interestingly of the open ATM.

The Loomis guys wanted me to give them my ID so they could write a report about me for their bosses because I took the picture of them and the open ATM. The REI security people that had been called in by now wanted the same thing.

That was when Officer GE Abed (#6270) spun me around and put handcuffs on me. They took me out the back door to the loading garage, put me in the back of Seattle Police car #805.

Fresh from a bizarre food fight with rival Giorgio Maone of NoScript, Adblock Plus developer Wladimir Palant has offered an olive branch to publishers - and along with it, an opportunity for his users to show that they're not a bunch of parasitic freeloaders.

His solution is based on the premise that "most users don't want to deny webmasters their income", and involves the addition of a tag to a page's source code, requesting that the user unblock ads for the particular site.

Adblock will look for this tag, check to see whether the user visits this site regularly, and then display a notification.

Lyse has become the largest fiber-to-the-home provider in Norway thanks to an innovative business model that asks customers to preregister before any fiber is dug, then offers them a $400 savings if they dig their own trench from the street to the home.

Lyse's Altibox service offers 10Mbps, 30Mbps, or 50Mbps connections-all of them fully symmetrical (upload and download speeds are identical).

As for the future, Lyse can ramp up the speed dramatically once all that precious fiber is in the ground; its partners are already testing both 100Mbps and 1,000Mbps connections.

Children's charities are backing a plan to make web retailers ensure young people cannot buy age-restricted goods.

The age-checking systems would have to be used if one of 20 separate products were sold including knives, alcohol, tobacco, age-restricted video games and DVDs, solvents and spray paints.

Only three of the retailers asked for the teenager to confirm his age at the time of purchase. He got round these by lying about his age.

Peter Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Fredrik Neij, and Carl Lundstroem were all found guilty last month of having assisted in making 33 copyright-protected files accessible for illegal file sharing via the Piratebay.org Web site.The four were sentenced to one year in jail and ordered to pay $3.6 million in damages to copyright holders.

As CNET has reported, Judge Tomas Norstroem, who ruled against the Pirate Bay defendants, is a member of two copyright organizations. Some allege his membership is a conflict of interest.