A 20-year-old man died yesterday in Frederick City, Maryland, after being tasered by a police deputy, the Frederick News Post reports.

Daniel Lugo, Gray's friend and neighbour, said "he, Gray and some other friends, got home from a party early Sunday morning". Although he did not witness the Taser incident, he claimed "a friend told him a few people were pretending to fight and a neighbour might have called police, concerned that they were actually fighting".

Lugo explained that police "commanded everyone there to get on the ground", and that the friend said the deputy "struck Gray with a Taser and administered multiple shocks for several seconds, even though Gray had said, 'I'm on the ground'."

Gray's mother, Tanya Thomas, explained her son was "deaf in one ear and might not have heard the commands as well as others", although his family said he was in good health at the time of his death.

"More than 80 police agencies in Maryland are equipped with Tasers, according to Taser International, the weapon's manufacturer." It describes the Taser as a "less-than-lethal weapon [which is] part of a deputy's regular equipment".

Storage vendors have been sieging the large business market with solid state drive offerings for years - but cost and capacity restrictions have mostly kept them at the gate.

Take BitMicro for instance, which this week unveiled a flash memory-based solid state drive with up to 1.6TB capacity. The company's E-Disk Altima, expected to ship in Q1 2008, will come in a 3.5-inch format and support 4Gbit/s Fibre Channel.

BitMicro says the Altima offers sustained rates of more than 230MB/s and upwards of 55,000 I/O operations per second. To compare, a fast disk drive will get about 400 I/O operations per second.

A court document in a drug smuggling case has shown that the private email service Hushmail has been cooperating with police in handing over user emails..

Hushmail claims to offer unreadable email as it uses PGP encryption technology and a company specific key management system that it says will ensure only the sender and recipient can read the emails. However it seems the Canadian company has been divulging keys to the American authorities.

The news will be embarrassing to the company, which has made much of its ability to ensure that emails are not read by the authorise, including the FBI's Carnivore email monitoring software.

"Hushmail's security cannot be broken or weakened by this government sponsored snooping software," the company states.

In the past WoW's Warden functions could be checked by third party gamer software which could make sure that it did not get out of control.

However the latest Warden patch includes a different random cryptographic hash function in every copy, apparently used for cryptographic key exchange.

This makes it impossible for the third party software to work and, according to Onwarden, is a security hole in its own right. A hacker, or even Blizzard itself, could use it to retrieve information from a computer at random.

All it would take is for Blizzard, or a rogue employees to decide to have a look at a punter's computer and they could do it.

The fact that the new Warden patch makes it impossible for third party software to see what Blizzard is up to means that it is almost impossible for users to tell what is going on.

Bruce Schneier has a story on Wired about the new official standard for random-number generators the NIST released this year that will likely be followed by software and hardware developers around the world.

The generator based on elliptic curves called Dual_EC_DRBG has been championed by the NSA and contains a weakness that can only be described as a backdoor. In a presentation at the CRYPTO 2007 conference (pdf) in August, Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson showed that there are constants in the standard used to define the algorithm's elliptic curve that have a relationship with a second, secret set of numbers that can act as a kind of skeleton key. If you know the secret numbers, you can completely break any instantiation of Dual_EC_DRBG.

Section Three of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) came into force at the start in October 2007, seven years after the original legislation passed through parliament. Intended primarily to deal with terror suspects, it allows police to demand encryption keys or provide a clear text transcript of encrypted text.

Failure to comply can result in up to two years imprisonment for cases not involving national security, or five years for terrorism offences and the like. Orders can be made to turn over data months or even years old.

But an animal rights activist is one of the first people at the receiving end of a notice to give up encryption keys. Her computer was seized by police in May, and she has been given 12 days to hand over a pass-phrase to unlock encrypted data held on the drive - or face the consequences.

More than 1 million cases of chlamydia were reported in the United States last year - the most ever reported for a sexually transmitted disease, federal health officials said Tuesday.

Gonorrhea rates are jumping again after hitting a record low, and an increasing number of cases are caused by a "superbug" version resistant to common antibiotics, federal officials said Tuesday.

Syphilis is rising, too. The rate of congenital syphilis - which can deform or kill babies - rose for the first time in 15 years.

Find out when we first meet Kirk in Abram’s Trek plus alternate timelines and time travel explained! If you want to stay as spoiler free as possible this article is NOT FOR YOU!

Romulans from the future, most likely TNG time frame lead by a Romulan named Nero, played by Eric Bana, finds the City on the Edge of Forever and uses the Guardian of Forever to go back in time and kill the person who has been the biggest thorn in the Romulan's side and is crucial to the success of the Federation and Starfleet, James T. Kirk.

Old Spock warns young Spock about Nero's plans and it's up to them to protect the future Captain Kirk and also help try to protect the timeline and the future of the Federation and Starfleet.

The first time the audience is introduced to James T. Kirk is while he is taking a certain test that Starfleet cadets are required to take, the Kobayashi Maru.

The Mozilla Foundation's chief executive now earns roughly half a million in pay and benefits. With $70 million in assets, the Foundation gave out less than $300,000 in grants to open source projects in 2006. And in 2006 85% of their $66 million in revenue came from Google. When these figures first came to light, people worried whether Firefox was becoming a pawn in Google's cold war with Microsoft. The Foundation addressed these fears and largely laid them to rest; but now the worry is that, even though it's clear that the community's code is what makes Firefox successful, Mozilla may be becoming dangerously reliant on Google's cash.

A schoolboy was given an unexpected surprise for his 16th birthday when a stripper turned up in his drama class.

The stripper - dressed as a policewoman - had been booked by the boy's mother, who had apparently asked for a "gorilla" to mark her son's big day.

On arriving halfway through the lesson, the stripper walked the unnamed boy around the class on all fours like a dog.

To the soundtrack of Britney Spears, she then spanked him 16 times - once for each year - before stripping down to her bra and knickers.

It was only when she asked the schoolboy to rub cream on her that the shocked teacher called a halt to the show.