Yeah this one's probably not a great choice...
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/09/25/0415213/HideMyAsscom-Doesnt-Hide-Logs-From-the-FBI

I'm not surprised... I was in China in the summer of 2001, and one of the things I vividly remember was riding the train from Beijing to Shanghai, and looking out the window at a factory with smokestacks belching bubblegum-pink smoke into the sky. That cannot be healthy, or likely legal, but in general in China rules and regulations are one thing on paper, and another thing in practice.

You're probably thinking of Bézier curves.

Here's a side-by-side screenshot of Linux font rendering with and without the now patent-free byte code interpretation: http://avi.alkalay.net/2007/01/freetype-with-bytecode-interpreter.html

Attacking Adobe Reader means that people who use Firefox are also at risk. For a long while, the popular security paradigm on Windows was that if you used IE you were at risk, but if you kept up with Windows Update and used only Firefox to browse the web you were pretty much safe from the majority of the exploits in the wild. Now that malicious PDFs are out there in force, users of Firefox are vulnerable once again.

I'm not too sure that gmail isn't a target... A couple weeks ago, my friend's Gmail account got hacked and the spammers sent the following message out to all his contacts:

I am willing to give you a surprising happiness! Yesterday i had
received the digtal camera which i ordered from ---www.wwooz.com--
last week. its quilty is very good , and the price is very low.i am
satisfied with it.

If the products you expect is on the site, it is a wise choice for you
to buy from this site.I believe you can get many surprising happiness
and concessions.

Incidentally,they import the products from korea.all of the products
are brand new and original. they have good credit and many good
feedback.they are worth trusting for us .
Best wishes !

Mirror doesn't seem to be working either :(

Closer makes no difference, effective transfer speed does (which BT already prioritizes peers based upon). I can get much better download rates from the guy in Finland with a 100mbit connection then I can from the guy across town on my same cable ISP with an already saturated 384kbps upload.

Aren't IDNs already available via Puncode encoding? (For example the ones at http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/0425-duerst-idniri/slide12-0.html) Or am I missing something?

Carnegie Mellon University, not Central Mich.

I was hit by this issue earlier today, more info with some malware URLs available on metafilter here.

The original use of URL shortening services was to prevent link breakage in e-mail and nntp clients that linebreak after 80 characters. They still work great for this. http://tr.im/wGhA works a lot better in e-mail than http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=1600+pennsylvania+ave,+dc&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=49.624204,58.359375&ie=UTF8&ll=38.898732,-77.038515&spn=0.012007,0.014248&z=16 . I've also heard shortened links used to good effect on internet radio, where it's easier to direct listeners to a tinyurl than a long forum URL, when there's discussion about a certain thread.

I'm betting that a good amount of the information used in this case came from posters on the WGA forum, where people can post if they're having issues with WGA. One of the tools available in that forum is a WGA diagnostic tool which will generate a sanitized text dump of a user's windows validation information. Most cases on that forum are people whose brother, cousin, or sketchy PC shop installed a common warez release of Windows on their systems, but several there are people who bought apparently legitimate software from resellers which failed validation and later turned out to be counterfeit. Microsoft got in touch with these users, identified the resellers, and I'm betting that this news story is the result.