The campaign of running mate John McCain condemned their action as "a shocking invasion of the governor's privacy and a violation of the law".

According to law, all e-mails relating to the official business of government must be archived and not destroyed. However, personal e-mails can be deleted.

The Department of Homeland Security has been actively (though with really weak arguments) defending its policy of searching laptops at the border, even without probable cause. Yet, at the very same time that it was staunchly defending the policy and refusing to testify in front of Congress over it, it was also issuing a report warning international travelers not to take laptops, since foreign governments often search them.

There's been no public proof to date of terrorists hatching plots in virtual worlds. But online spaces like World of Warcraft are making some spooks, generals and Congressmen extremely nervous.

Toavs, for one, believes that spies will have to spend more time in virtual worlds like WoW, if they want to have a hope of keeping tabs on what goes on inside 'em. Which means, some day soon, we might find secret agents in World of Warcraft, along with the druids and orcs and night elves.

In a paper published last week in the Astrophysical Journal, scientists detail the discovery of a new unidentified object in the middle of nowhere.

After a hundred days of observation, it disappeared from the sky with no explanation.

The object also appeared out of nowhere. It just wasn't there before. In fact, they don't even know where it is exactly located because it didn't behave like anything they know. Apparently, it can't be closer than 130 light-years but it can be as far as 11 billion light-years away. It's not in any known galaxy either. And they have ruled out a supernova too. It's something that they have never encountered before. In other words: they don't have a single clue about where or what the heck this thing is.

A would-be social network called Wallop has shut its doors, according to a message on the homepage.

But Wallop wasn't just another tale of crushed Silicon Valley dreams. The site, which once aimed to compete with the likes of MySpace, had backing from none other than Microsoft.

Obviously, it never really caught on: Wallop was never talked about in the same sentences of even third-tier social networks.

In US patent application 2008/0218310, the company details a way to stop us using unauthorised training shoes with the in-sole sensors it sells as part of the Nike + iPod kit.

Apple's patent explains that "some people have taken it upon themselves to remove the sensor from the special pocket of the Nike shoe and place it in inappropriate locations - shoelaces, for example - or place it on non-Nike shoes".

Last year they tried to patent a system that would prevent you from recharging a music player if you ever use it with unauthorised software.

A United Nations agency is quietly drafting technical standards, proposed by the Chinese government, to define methods of tracing the original source of Internet communications and potentially curbing the ability of users to remain anonymous.

The potential for eroding Internet users' right to remain anonymous, which is protected by law in the United States and recognized in international law by groups such as the Council of Europe, has alarmed some technologists and privacy advocates.

Bellovin said in a blog post this week that "institutionalizing a means for governments to quash their opposition is in direct contravention" of the U.N.'s own Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Earlier this week we wrote about the controversy of EA's decision to put cumbersome DRM on the highly anticipated video game, Spore. The response was that thousands of people started posting one star reviews of Spore, noting the problems with the DRM.

Now, a bunch of people have noticed that Amazon appears to have deleted all of the reviews on the Spore page. This is only going to end badly.

It appears that some, or potentially all, of the reviews are now back on the site, and Amazon is claiming that it was a "glitch" that they disappeared. Some people claim that their own reviews are not back yet, though, so the whole situation is a bit fluid.

More than a year ago, the company said it would "anonymize" its server logs after eighteen months. And sometime between March and July, it actually put this plan into action.

In this case, anonymize meant "change some of the bits in the IP address in the logs as well as change the cookie information."

But as CNet points out, if your cookie data remains intact, restoring the full IP address is trivial.

Google argues that users can always delete their cookies. "We have focused on IP addresses, because we recognize that users cannot control IP addresses in logs," the company says. "On the other hand, users can control their cookies.

"When a user clears cookies, s/he will effectively break any link between the cleared cookie and our raw IP logs once those logs hit the 9-month anonymization point. Moreover, we are still continuing to focus on ways to help users exert better controls over their cookies."

As soon as an iPod or iPhone is plugged into the PC, Vista crashes and shows the "blue screen of death" (BSOD), the critical error screen on a blue background that requires a reboot to recover, users said.

Numerous users reported that they were able to avoid the BSOD by unplugging peripherals from their PCs' USB ports, particularly Hewlett-Packard Co. printers and scanners, and in some cases, keyboards, mice and cameras made by Logitech International SA.