Credit card companies successfully nixed a Mythbusters segment exposing RFID's security flaws, according to Arbiter of Truth and Mythbusters co-host, Adam Savage.

They were way, way outgunned and they absolutely made it really clear to Discovery that they were not going to air this episode talking about how hackable this stuff was, and Discovery backed way down being a large corporation that depends upon the revenue of the advertisers. Now it's on Discovery's radar and they won't let us go near it.

The artist was plotting to laser-beam a billboard-size, pro-Tibet message at the Bird's Nest Stadium. Instead, he spent six days locked up and interrogated by Chinese police under conditions he likens to torture.

They did some classic torture interrogation techniques. They said they would kill us, that we were gonna spend the rest of our lives in Chinese prison...they kept us up all night and gave us water, wouldn't let us use the bathroom, wouldn't let us eat food.

The sad thing is, anything that happens to us that would be considered torture, it's nothing compared to what's happening to the Africans and Chinese nationals held, who don't get calls from embassies and senators.

A czech punter who bought a Lenovo PC didn't want the preloaded copy of Windows Vista, but Lenovo demanded that he sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) before he could receive a refund.

Instead, he wrote a complete account of the barriers Lenovo forced him to hurdle in order to negotiate the refund in the amount of CZK 1,950 (about £65, €78 or $130) that he believed he was due.

There's been a lot of debate on Threat Level recently about what's a federal crime and what is not when it comes to file sharing copyrighted music on the internet.

A 27-year-old California man, Kevin Cogill, of Culver City, learned the hard way Wednesday.

If convicted, he faces a maximum three years imprisonment under the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005.

J.K. Rowling has been an aggressive user of intellectual property laws against anyone who she feels has done her wrong, and Warner Bros. studio, which owns the rights to the movies has been equally aggressive at times.

The movie makers insist their Hari Puttar has nothing to do with Harry Potter. The storylines are entirely different. Hari is a popular Indian name and Puttar means "son" in Punjabi. Plus, when pronounced correctly, it doesn't even sound like Harry Potter.

If anything, all this effort is doing is providing a lot more free publicity for the Hari Puttar movie -- which may be exactly what the movie makers wanted.

People make a lot of technical matters in security, but the most important force behind malware is social engineering, not some vulnerability or bad design.

You must have seen them by now: ads for "Antivirus XP 2008" or some variant of that name. In fact, here are some of the newer names used for essentially the same attack.

But the most interesting way this threat has been spread has been is through advertising, most infamously through Google sponsored links.

When it launched onto the scene late last year, gOS (which stands for good OS) made quite a splash for getting Linux into the U.S. retail giant WalMart.

gOS has one simple goal: make a lightweight, web-heavy operating system that anyone can use.

As soon as gOS loads, you'll see the new Google Gadgets sitting off to the left of the screen, not unlike the Gadgets shelf that ships with Windows Vista.

A Sunday Herald investigation has discovered that late on Thursday night, a previously unknown Indian hacker successfully breached the IT defences of the Best Western Hotel group's online booking system and sold details of how to access it through an underground network operated by the Russian mafia.

The attack scooped up the personal details of every single customer that has booked into one of Best Western's 1312 continental hotels since 2007.

Amounting to a complete identity-theft kit, the stolen data includes a range of private information including home addresses, telephone numbers, credit card details and place of employment.

A Canadian bus company wants to shut down an upstart online car-pooling service called PickupPal, and even PickupPal's founder admits that his service is violating current Ontario law. But, in his view, it's the law that needs to change, not PickupPal.

Ontario has one of the strictest carpooling laws in the world. People who share rides can only travel from home to work and back again, must ride with the same driver every day, and can only pay by the week, among other restrictions.

PickupPal wants to draw a distinction between one-off ride-sharing to concerts or when traveling home on break and regular passenger services that really should be licensed by the state.

Access to Apple's online iTunes Store has been blocked in China after it emerged that Olympic athletes have been downloading and possibly listening to a pro-Tibetan music album in a subtle act of protest against China's rule over the province.

On Monday, expatriate iTunes users living in China began experiencing technical problems with their previously unfettered access.