'Chris Hood remembers the day in August 2002 that he began to question what was really going on in Georgia... "It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state," Hood told me. "We were told not to talk to county personnel about it. I received instructions directly from [president of Diebold election unit Bob] Urosevich...' According to Hood, Diebold employees altered software in some 5,000 machines in DeKalb and Fulton counties, the state's largest Democratic strongholds. The tally in Georgia that November surprised even the most seasoned political observers. (Hint: Republicans won.)

When paleontologists find fossilized dinosaur bones during a dig, they usually do everything in their power to protect them, using tools like toothbrushes to carefully unearth the bones without inflicting any damage. However, when scientists found a massive Tyrannosaurus rex thigh bone in a remote region of Montana a few months ago, they were forced to break the bone in two in order to fit it into the transport helicopter. This act of necessity revealed a startling surprise: soft tissue that had seemingly resisted fossilization still existed inside the bone. This tissue, including blood vessels, bone cells, and perhaps even blood cells, was so well preserved that it was still stretchy and flexible.

Does this discovery of soft dinosaur tissue mean that scientists will soon be able to clone a Tyrannosaurus rex? Probably not – most scientists believe that DNA cannot survive for 70 million years. Then again, before this discovery, most scientists believed that soft tissue could not survive for 70 million years either.

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone has announced data transmission at a rate of 14 terabits per second over a single optical fiber. The paper claims the previous record was "about 10 Tbps." In the new experiment, NTT sent data over 160 kilometers (nearly 100 miles) of optical fiber, in 140 channels of 111 Gbps each.

Reuters reports that separate studies from casual game publishers RealNetworks and PopCap Games reveal that more than 70 percent of casual gamers are females over the age of 40. Most of whom use gaming as a way to ease stress.

Self-help author and life coach Jennifer Louden was quoted as saying women play for self care, in all different flavours and variations.

They were so aware of what they were doing and why. They know what games to use for which situations, she said.

Some women played to dull pain, others used them to cope with insomnia.

Viral media is all the rage these days, and Bauman runs one of the few viral sites actually making money. Without spending a penny on direct advertising, he's turned the high school hobby he ran out of his bedroom into one of the Internet's top-ranked humor sites, getting 1.2 million hits a day. There's a television pilot in the can, a book deal in negotiation, and a potential pact to bring eBaum content to cell phones. Annual ad revenue has doubled over the past year to $10 million, and the only overhead is bandwidth and salaries: Bauman is becoming a rich man.

Detractors say Bauman built his empire on stolen goods – snatching obscure media from around the Web, erasing or denying credits, slapping on the eBaum watermark, then selling millions of dollars' worth of ads around the purloined content. "He steals work and makes all the money," says Kevin Flynn, an animator who is considering joining a class-action suit against eBaum's World.

Bauman is fighting back. "We try to let everyone know this is crap," he says. "We try to clear our name, but it's fucking impossible."

Asked where he got the video, he shrugs between laughs. "I don't know," he says. "I stole it from someplace."

Void Communications had better be ready for a call from Department of Homeland Security. Why? Because in a world where a bottle of shampoo is considered a risk to commercial aviation it's likely that federal security officials will see red flags in a service designed to provide any two people -- say, Osama bin Laden and his right-hand man in the U.S. -- with an electronic communications channel that leaves not a trace of its contents or the identities of the participants.

Key to Void's Web-based VaporStream service is the fact that at no time does the body of the message and the header information appear together, thus leaving no record of the interaction on any computer or server. The message cannot be forwarded, edited, printed or saved, and, once it's been read, it disappears; nothing is cached anywhere. No attachments allowed.

What they're trying to do with VaporStream is provide a secure, confidential means of communication that also happens to be recordless.

Microsoft has filed a federal lawsuit against an alleged hacker who broke through its copy protection technology, charging that the mystery developer somehow gained access to its copyrighted source code.

For more than a month, the Redmond, Wash., company has been combating a program released online called FairUse4WM, which successfully stripped anticopying guards from songs downloaded through subscription media services such as Napster or Yahoo Music.

Microsoft has released two successive patches aimed at disabling the tool. The first worked--but the hacker, known only by the pseudonym "Viodentia," quickly found a way around the update, the company alleges. Now the company says this was because the hacker had apparently gained access to copyrighted source code unavailable to previous generations of would-be crackers.

Microsoft is also contacting other Web sites that have posted the FairUse4WM tool, asking them to remove the software, on the grounds that it contains copyrighted company code.

European Commissioner Neelie Kroes has revealed that the US Embassy pressured her over the Microsoft antitrust case

The US government sought to influence the European Commission over Microsoft's antitrust case, according to competition commissioner Neelie Kroes.

Kroes said the US embassy in Brussels had asked her to be "nicer" to Microsoft ahead of her decision to fine the software giant €280m in July.

The commissioner criticised the approach. "This is of course an intervention which is not possible," Kroes told Dutch newspaper Financieele Dagblad this week.

Lime Wire's case is that the RIAA is an anti-trust operation out to destroy any online music distribution service they did not own or control, or force such services to do business with them.

The countersuit charges that the RIAA is carrying out antitrust violations, consumer fraud, and other misconduct.

Its big idea was to limit and ultimately control the distribution and pricing of digital music, all to the detriment of consumers.

Lime Wire claims that the case against it is part of a much larger modern conspiracy to destroy all innovation that content owners cannot control and that disrupts their historical business models.

Lime Wire is so far the only P2P outfit that is going to court to fight the RIAA, which is confident that a Supreme Court ruling backs it up.

I call it "the myth of the 40-hour gamer." Whenever you pick up a narrative adventure game these days, it always comes with this guarantee: This game offers about 40 hours of play.

This is precisely what I was told by Eidos -- and countless game reviewers -- when I picked up Tomb Raider: Legend earlier this year. As I gushed at the time, Legend was the first genuinely superb Lara Croft game in years, with a reinvigorated control system, elegant puzzles, and an epic storyline involving one of Lara's long-vanished colleagues. I was hooked -- and eager to finish the game and solve the mystery. So I shoved it into my PS2, dual-wielded the pistols and began playing ...

... until about four weeks later, when I finally threw in the towel. Why? Because I couldn't get anywhere near the end. I plugged away at the game whenever I could squeeze an hour away from my day job and my family. All told, I spent far more than 40 hours -- but still only got two-thirds through.