A Beijing bloke repeatedly burgled a neighbour's house to repair her computer, a Chinese court heard.

The man told the court he had a huge crush on his neighbour but was too shy to tell her about it. So he broke into her house five times, sometimes to leave her snacks and other times to do the dishes.

Police caught him walking out of the neighbour's apartment with a key to her door, a bra, two photographs and her MP3 player, which he said he was taking to get fixed.

For some reason the court dismissed the charges against the unnamed burglar, despite the fact that he did steal some photographs and a bra 'out of love'.

Allegations that the CIA abducted and illegally transported terror suspects across European borders are credible, an investigator has said.

Swiss senator Dick Marty has submitted a report on the claims, made in the media, to a meeting of the human rights committee of the Council of Europe.

Mr Marty criticised the US for refusing to confirm or deny the allegations.

"The elements we have gathered so far tend to reinforce the credibility of the allegations concerning the transport and temporary detention of detainees - outside all judicial procedure - in European countries," he said.

Tony Lloyd, a member of the Council's parliamentary assembly, told the BBC the charges that people may have been effectively kidnapped and taken to other countries for possible torture "were of such magnitude that they have to have proper answers".

At the time, Ms Rice refused to address claims the CIA operated secret prisons abroad, where suspects could be interrogated without reference to international law.

A service offering Mission Impossible-style text messages that "self-destruct" after they have been read has been launched.

Staellium UK said that its StealthText service will allow business executive dealing in sensitive information to send texts which will delete themselves from the recipient's mobile phone as soon as the person has read them.

Once opened, the message will disappear after about 40 seconds. Staellium said it has already had interest from financial services companies, the Ministry of Defence and celebrity agents.

"In spring 2006 we will be launching new services such as self-destruct email, voice and picture messages, so ultimately no one will ever have to worry about their messages or pictures ending up in the wrong hands ever again," she added.

Whenever discussing some new device that incorporates fingerprint scanning, we always make that stupid joke about how "now the crooks just need to cut off your finger to steal your ____." Well it turns out that criminals don't even need to go through the hassle of breaking out that hacksaw as long as they have some dental molding and Play-Doh handy. Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Stephanie Schuckers and her team at Clarkson University found that most scanning systems can be fooled 90% of the time by taking a mold of the mark's finger, filling the mold with Play-Doh, and using the fake digit to gain access. Don't go running out to Toys 'R Us just yet, though, as the Clarkson team also designed an algorithm that detects the spread of perspiration from the pores out to the ridges of a live person's finger, and is only foiled by the Play-Doh method 10% of the time. Still, until this new tech becomes more widespread, along with iris scans, facial and voice recognition, and implanted RFID verification, we're gonna continue keeping our cash under the mattress that we fiercely guard as we telecommute from atop it.

At least 40 people have been killed after firecrackers exploded on a bus carrying guests back from a wedding in Lahore, eastern Pakistan.

Police said there were about 50 people on the bus. The other passengers were taken to hospital and eight are in a serious condition.

"It took seconds until the bus was engulfed by flames and people hardly had any chance to rescue anyone," said Senior Superintendent Aamir Zulfikar of Lahore's North Cantonment.

Local residents told AFP news agency the blast occurred after a small boy threw firecrackers from a rear window of the bus.

Many people have died in similar accidents, he says, although this is one of the worst tragedies of its kind in terms of casualties.

The mayor of a Brazilian town is trying to bring in a law making it illegal for residents to die.

Mayor Roberto Pereira da Silva, of Biritiba-Mirim, came up with the idea because the town's only cemetery is full.

He wants to bring in a law that would see relatives of people who die before their time face fines or even jail.

The law would make it an offence for the town's 28,000 citizens to not look after their health properly.

Gym memberships have reportedly shot up since the mayor announced his plans, and more people are visiting doctors.

Digital rights groups warned the music maker about vulnerabilities its MediaMax copy protection system created on users' PCs.

The same groups have now found that a patch Sony produced to close these holes is itself insecure and leaves users open to a separate attack.

On 6 December Sony BMG and digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) issued a joint statement about the discovery of problems with the MediaMax anti-piracy system made by SunnComm.

The statement also pointed users to a software patch that was supposed to close this loophole.

However, the EFF has now urged users not to apply this patch as separate work by security researchers Ed Felten and Alex Halderman shows it too introduces vulnerabilities.

Sony BMG said the MediaMax copy protection system, which is supposed to stop people making illegal copies of CDs, has been used on 50 titles sold in North America.

It said approximately six million CDs using MediaMax have been shipped to stores. Affected artists include Alicia Keys, Britney Spears, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Faithless.

What living person holds the most U.S. patents? In this era of information and lightning searches - when patents are both more valuable than ever and a source of raging controversy - you'd think such a simple question would be easy to answer.

America cannot identify its most prolific living inventors. We can't single out these people who should be considered national treasures.

As it turns out, the USPTO has but one guy who does statistical studies of the agency's 7 million-patent database. He last sorted for individual inventors in 1997, and has since been too busy with other projects to update that list.

Anyone can go to the USPTO's website, type in an individual's name, and get a list of all the patents granted that person. But you have to start with a name. You can't set up an open-ended search that finds the names that appear most often. There's no easy way to let the database generate a list of top inventors.

America's greatest inventor is apparently an obscure guy in Japan who makes stuff most people can't comprehend. And the nation's greatest native inventor seems to be a man who has come up with 100 different ways to make a flower pot.

PearLyrics is a program that displays the lyrics of the currently-playing track in iTunes: it gets the lyrics from the ID3 tag in the MP3 file, or if they aren't in there, it searches for them on a few different web sites, and then saves them into the MP3s.

It's very handy: I managed to use it to download the lyrics for almost half of my music collection in one fell swoop.

Except that the author got a "Cease and Desist" letter from Warner/Chappel Music, who seem to think that his program -- which is, basically, nothing more than a specialized web browser -- is somehow in violation of their copyrights.

Kazaa has opted to cut access to its file-sharing network in Australia rather than install keyword filters specified by record companies to block access to copyright music.

Kazaa was originally given two months by the court to change its search technology to prevent the sharing of pirated music.

Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI) said on Tuesday the record companies would return to court to enforce the orders of the copyright judgment which it believed was only on hold if key word filters had been put in place by midnight on December 5.

Sharman Networks, owner of the network, argued that by making the site inaccessible to Australian users it was complying appropriately with the court orders pending the outcome of the appeal.

A user of an unofficial version of the Kazaa software, Lite K++ said he was still able to download music files from artists such as Kylie Minogue from the network on Tuesday. "I don't think this will stop file sharing because there is lots of other file sharing software available," he said.