Customers in shopping centres are having their every move tracked by a new type of surveillance that listens in on the whisperings of their mobile phones.

The technology can tell when people enter a shopping centre, what stores they visit, how long they remain there, and what route they take as they walked around.

Path Intelligence, the Portsmouth-based company which developed the technology, said its equipment was just a tool for market research. "There's absolutely no way we can link the information we gather back to the individual," a spokeswoman said. "There's nothing personal in the data."

That pesky obesity thing. First it forced Disneyland to increase the sizes of its theme-park costumes, and hospitals to buy larger hoists and beds. Now, in a letter published Friday in the medical journal Lancet, two scientists write that obese people are disproportionately responsible for high food prices and greenhouse gas emissions because they consume 18% more food energy due to their greater body mass -- and require increased quantities of fuel to transport themselves and the food they eat.

Google has murdered the AdSense account run by one of the web's most influential anti-Scientology sites.

Yesterday, the search giant cut off all ads served to Enturbulation, a fledgling site dedicated to promoting activism against the Church of Scientology and all its related organizations.

Of course, it's not Enturbulation's fault that Google was serving the site pro-Scientology ads. AdSense automatically chooses ads based on a site's content.

Google's crackdown on Enturbulation's AdSense account follows similar actions by its YouTube subsidiary. Last month, the world's most popular video site vaporized an account run by Mark Bunker, a well-known TV journalist/anti-Scientology activist.

A robotics company IN Utah have come up with a working "Iron man" suit, which is able to multiply a person's strength and endurance by up to 20 times when wearing it.

The 70kg mechanical suit has a computer "brain" that is able to sense the movement of the person wearing it, and then amplify those movements almost instantaneously through a series of hydraulic valves mimicking the tendons in the human body.

Charter Communications is planning to monitor its customers' Web surfing and then, anonymously, display relevant advertisements.

Schremp confirmed that Charter is using technology from Redwood City, Calif.-based NebuAd--which is reminiscent of how British broadband providers have been working with Phorm, which uses deep packet inspection with "anonymized ISP data to deliver the right ad to the right person at the right time."

"The enhanced advertising solution does not utilize deep packet inspection. It looks at URL level information only. That's another point of misinformation on the Net."

Pretty soon, cops won't just be packing stun guns. They'll be carrying electrically-charged riot shields, zapping their unruly without unholstering their weapons.

Taser is demoing all kinds of gear this week -- from shock-inducing shotgun rounds to "area denial" zappers that can fry groups of people at once.

The peel-and-stick zapping film will be available towards the end of the year, the company says.

The Mormon Church has instructed its lawyers to gag the Internet over WikiLeaks' release of the 1968 and 1999 versions of its confidential handbook for Church leaders. Apart from attacking WikiLeaks, legal demands were sent to Jimmy Wales of the WikiMedia foundation for a WikiNews article merely linking to the material, and scribd.com has also been censored. WikiLeaks has (of course) refused to remove the documents.

A cow was left unhurt in Switzerland after a head-on collision with a car which left the vehicle destroyed.

The animal rolled on to the bonnet of the car and was catapulted over the roof but then immediately got to its feet.

"I couldn't believe it when I saw it just standing there and looking at me afterwards. I thought it should have been dead. Instead it just mooed at me."

If you work from a Chinese Internet cafe – which is still where the vast majority of Chinese Internet activity happens, since so few people have connected computers in their own homes – you experience all of these blocking mechanisms as a matter of course.

As a matter of course I fire up my VPN at the start of any online session, not just for security but because otherwise I'll be blocked the first time I try a Wikipedia or Technorati link.

The idea is that if you're never quite sure when, why and how hard the boom might be lowered on you, you start controlling yourself, rather than being limited strictly by what the government is able to control directly.

A recently-discovered flaw in Gmail is capable of turning Google's e-mail service into a highly effective spam machine.

An e-mail from johdoe@awinnerisyou.com (or the corresponding IP address block) may be automatically blocked by any given e-mail service, while an e-mail from a trusted, authenticated source such as Gmail is automatically allowed through the gateway.

E-mail sent to Yahoo and Hotmail from a blacklisted IP didn't even necessarily reach the account's spam box, while forged e-mail sent via Gmail always arrived in the intended account's inbox.