Hacktivists pwned the website of Wolfgang Schaeuble on Tuesday in protest against new wiretapping and data retention laws They posted links inviting visitors to a protest website "Vorratsdatenspeicherung".

Later reports suggest that hackers were able to gain control over the site after breaking into it using a dictionary attack that revealed the password for the Typo3 CMS was "gewinner" (or winner in English).

SanDisk on Tuesday said it will begin mass producing flash memory cards with an unprecedented 64 gigabytes of storage capacity.

"The microSD form factor has grown in popularity due to rising demand for high capacity storage on mobile phones, and X3 will enable us to bring exciting new products to this market," said SanDisk executive vice president Yoram Cedar.

Wikileaks now has 6,780 reports from the Congressional Research Service free to download. As the post on Wikileaks notes, CRS reports are technically public domain, but have remained in a quasi-secret state, because CRS only releases them to members of Congress.

However, the really interesting thing will be what the response is from both Congress and the CRS -- both of whom have mostly fought against any attempts to publicly release the documents.

Sixty years ago the "modern computer" was born in a lab in Manchester.

The room-sized computer's ability to carry out different tasks - without having to be rebuilt - has led some to describe it as the "first modern PC".

Using just 128 bytes of memory, it successfully ran its first set of instructions - to determine the highest factor of a number - on 21 June 1948.

A free service called OpenDNS is offering a new feature designed to alert administrators to the damage and help them contain it.

The service will also help network admins to quickly pinpoint any infected machines by checking their OpenDNS Dashboard. Starting Monday, any networks with PCs that try to connect to the Conficker addresses will be flagged on an admin's private statistics page. The service is available for free to both businesses and home users.

The RIAA has been outed as a lying toad as it claimed in a letter sent out on December 23rd last year that it was discontinuing lawsuits when in fact, this was simply not the case.

Mitch Bainwol's letter to the Congressional Committees claimed that the Recording Industry Association of America "discontinued initiating new lawsuits in August."

Of course this information was taken as red, yet after a bit of digging around, this was found to be utter tosh.

The culprit is ESPN's strategy of licensing ISPs rather than users. If your ISP doesn't want to pay for you to watch ESPN360, there's nothing you can do about it, short of switching to a provider that pays for it.

But Free Press' Ben Scott thinks the this new internet model will ultimately be bad for providers. "My gut reaction is that it's a terrible business model," says Scott. "The beauty of the internet is that you put a piece of content on your server, and it's available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world that's connected to the internet. If you begin walling off your content and selling network operators [the right to distribute content], that defeats the whole idea of maximizing the exposure of your content."

Currently no police stations, border entry points or job centres have readers for the card's biometric chip, the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) revealed in response to an FoI (Freedom of Information) request by silicon.com about the £4.7bn identity cards scheme.

With no readers in place, police and immigration officers are currently still relying on traditional methods of checking ID cardholders' identity, running a fresh set of prints against existing identity databases.

Cambridge University security expert Richard Clayton told silicon.com: "If this capability is not there then the biometrics are, in short, a waste of time."

Scott Wiltermuth of Stanford University in California and colleagues have found that activities performed in unison, such as marching or dancing, increase loyalty to the group.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville thinks this research helps explain why fascist leaders, amongst others, use organised marching and chanting to whip crowds into a frenzy of devotion to their cause, though these tactics can be used just as well for peace, he stresses.

A Chinese man was reportedly killed at a computer shop last Friday after the cell phone in his chest pocket exploded, severing a major artery in his neck and leading to massive blood loss.

Police have not released the make or model of the phone. Some reports indicate the fatal explosion occurred at a Lenovo store in Guangzhou, China — although it's not clear if the shop was an official outlet or if it just advertised Lenovo products.