Visitors to the former British colony of Virginia will have to undergo a further humiliation of registering online.

Normally they would be able to visit under the US Visa Waiver Program but now they will have to apply online for an Electronic System of Travel Authorisation before boarding a plane to the Land of the Free.

On December 19th, it was announced that the RIAA was giving up on its legal strategy of suing individual file sharers, and instead was going to go with some mysterious agreements with ISPs.

Of course, now it's looking even worse, as on December 26th, well after it announced an end to the lawsuits, and insisted no more were going to be filed, a new lawsuit was served on an individual for file sharing.

Many "reply all" fiascos result in mere embarrassment, but American diplomats have been told they may be punished for sending mass responses after an e-mail storm nearly knocked out one of the State Department's main electronic communications systems.

He said the result was "effectively a denial of service as e-mail queues, especially between posts, back up while processing the extra volume of e-mails."

Georg Wicherski, Tillmann Werner, Felix Leder and Mark Schlösser have developed software which they have partially disclosed claiming that they can rapidly eliminate the Storm Worm botnet.

However, there is a problem with this discovery. The team has not yet tested this on a real Storm Worm botnet because it might face legal issues in doing so.

Although legal issues would only come up if someone complained, which no one likely would, they are still unable at present to go ahead with eliminating the botnet.

A six-year-old who recently stole his parents' car and drove it into a utility pole has passed the buck onto a familiar scapegoat: the video game, Grand Theft Auto.

However, not as of yet has anyone under the age of, oh, ten, blamed the game for a car theft.

The first public trial, or beta, version of Windows 7 has been released.

Although Windows 7 was a trial version it was, said Mr Ballmer, almost "feature complete" and would help to re-define the way people thought of the software.

Instead of it being an operating system mainly associated with a PC, he said, Windows was becoming a "connected platform and experience".

New forms of spam and similar abuse find a welcome home at Google, and the company doesn't yet seem up to the security task of fighting them.

Spammers have had success cracking the CAPTCHA tests and creating Gmail accounts from which to spam. Because the spam comes from a domain reputation systems can't block because it's so popular, spam from these accounts has an advantage in getting past many anti-spam systems.

Aside from generating over $1.6 million in revenue for NIN in its first week, and hitting #1 on Billboard's Electronic charts, Last.fm has the album ranked as the 4th-most-listened to album of the year, with over 5,222,525 scrobbles.

Even more exciting, however, is that Ghosts I-IV is ranked the best selling MP3 album of 2008 on Amazon's MP3 store.

NIN fans could have gone to any file sharing network to download the entire CC-BY-NC-SA album legally. Many did, and thousands will continue to do so.

The next time someone tries to convince you that releasing music under CC will cannibalize digital sales, remember that Ghosts I-IV broke that rule, and point them here.

The Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain routinely to hack into people's personal computers without a warrant.

The strategy will allow French, German and other EU forces to ask British officers to hack into someone's UK computer and pass over any material gleaned.

Police might also send an e-mail to a suspect's computer. The message would include an attachment that contained a virus or "malware". If the attachment was opened, the remote search facility would be covertly activated. Alternatively, police could park outside a suspect's home and hack into his or her hard drive using the wireless network.

Considering that it took the original researchers four tries over at least a month to successfully accomplish their attack against the RapidSSL brand, we're fully confident that no malicious organization had the opportunity to use this information against RapidSSL, or any other certificate authority authorized by VeriSign.

As it happens the most expedient and safest method of mitigating the attack was to switch it out for SHA-1. We had been planning this migration to occur on RapidSSL in January 2009 anyway, so we had a high degree of confidence in accelerating that deployment.