The News swiped the 102-story Art Deco skyscraper by drawing up a batch of bogus documents, making a fake notary stamp and filing paperwork with the city to transfer the deed to the property.

Less than 90 minutes after the bogus documents were submitted on Monday, the agency rubber-stamped the transfer from Empire State Land Associates to Nelots Properties LLC. Nelots is "stolen" spelled backward.

Python 3.0 is out now. The latest version makes some major changes to the popular programming language, and it's incompatible with version 2.x releases.

"The language is mostly the same, but many details, especially how to build-in objects like dictionaries and strings work, have changed considerably, and a lot of deprecated features have finally been removed. Also, the standard library has been reorganized in a few prominent places."

Despite the advances in anti-spam technology and spammers getting sued, shutting down and having their service providers cut off their operations, the torrent of spam hitting email inboxes continues unabated.

A BBC story cites some earlier research that says spammers sending out 350 million messages a month can earn roughly $100 per day, while the entire massive Storm botnet could generate around $2 million per year.

But the underlying issue remains the fact that people click on spam and buy stuff through it. Changing that might be even harder than developing the perfect spam filter.

The German automobile federation VDA slammed on Tuesday an EU compromise on rules to cut CO2 emissions from new cars, saying it ignored the sector's current crisis.

"Globally, the project does not take enough account of the automobile industry's difficult situation," a VDA statement said.

The deal establishes a sliding scale until 2015 and different targets for various automakers, a key position of German companies, which produce generally bigger cars that consume more fuel.

Upset about Bell Canada's system for allocating bandwidth fairly among internet users, the developers of the uTorrent P2P application have decided to make the UDP protocol the default transport protocol for file transfers.

By most estimates, P2P accounts for close to half of internet traffic today. When this traffic is immune to congestion control, the remaining half will stumble along at roughly a quarter of the bandwidth it has available today: half the raw bandwidth, used with half efficiency, by 95% of internet users.

The internet is only a stable system because application developers are gentlemanly with regard to the amount of traffic they shove onto the network.

A BBC investigation has unearthed a plan hatching online to loot US bank accounts via the checkout systems.

The gang plans to copy card details onto the magnetic stripes of fake cards and then use them in UK stores.

"The internet is the global marketplace," he said. "It's not difficult to take compromised cards from one country and exploit them in another. It's a simple and routine procedure for these guys these days."

"We would hope this will bring further pressure on the States to introduce chip-and-pin," said Jemma Smith of the UK payments organisation Apacs.

A rambling article in today's CIOL notes "the terror strike on Mumbai has once again brought to the fore how technology, especially in the communication front, is being used for anti-social, or to be precise antihuman, activities."

The article melodramatically shrieks "a terrorist can safely use a satellite phone or even a micro blogging system to implement the mission of terror".

Do you add Easter Eggs to the software that is produced at the office? I mean, if you have complete control over the final product, do you spice it up with that little personal touch, which, as unlikely as it is that anyone will see, carries with it an 'I was here' signature?

Should we developers sign our creations?

The perpetuator (presumably a male) wanted to transfer funds out a Paypal account and convert them back into US dollars. All the victim needed to do was check his Paypal account and when the money arrived and send a significantly lower amount back via Western Union.

Jennifer Perry from E-victims blamed Paypal's dispute resolution procedure system calling it a "very crude automated system."

"Paypal's guarantee doesn't really live up to expectations," Perry explained. "The public feel it [Paypal] is a gold-plated service like M&S or a credit card, but it isn't."

With e-book sales exploding in an otherwise sleepy market, Random House Inc. announced Monday that it was making thousands of additional books available in digital form.

E-books remain a tiny part of the overall market, widely estimated in the industry at 1 percent or less.