Stoobalou writes "VoIP and instant messaging service Skype has disappeared from the Internet, nary a fortnight after Microsoft snaffled up the outfit in a $8.5 billion deal."

In the latest example of how just because you can do something doesn't mean you should, one credit union has decided to offer a new feature, dubbed "tweetMyMoney," that allows members to interact with their accounts via Twitter. Can't wait for the next version, "tweetSomeoneElsesMoney." "tweetMyMoney, available exclusively to Vantage members! With tweetMyMoney, you can monitor your account balance, deposits, withdrawals, holds and cleared checks with simple commands. And, you can even transfer funds within your account. It's all available on Twitter, 24/7!"

An anonymous reader writes to wonder if the glory has gone out of IT. One blogger remembered his first impression upon entering a profession in IT that made it seem like the place to be, with a new shiny around every corner. What experiences have others had? Has a more pervasive technical culture forced our IT gurus into obsolescence?

An anonymous reader writes "Apparently the police like to spend their time trawling our private information on Facebook looking for criminals. 'Riot police stormed a man's 30th birthday barbecue for 15 guests because it was advertised as an "all-night" party on Facebook. Four police cars, a riot van, and a force helicopter were dispatched to a privately-owned field in a small village near Sowton, Devon in the UK on Saturday, ordering the party shut down or everyone would be arrested. The birthday barbecue was busted up before they even had a chance to plug the music in, reports the BBC. It was about 4pm when eight officers with camouflage pants and body armor jumped out of their vehicles and ordered everyone out about an hour into the party.' The event's organizer, Andrew Poole, said, 'The police had full-on camouflage trousers on and body-armour, it was ridiculous. There were also several plain-clothes officers as well ... they kept on insisting it has been advertised it as an all-night rave on the internet. The times on it were put as "overnight" in case people wanted to sleep-over, but after being explained this they were still banging on saying it was advertised on the internet. They wouldn't accept it wasn't a rave. It was in a completely isolated field.'"

dmolnar writes "I recently helped my girlfriend move her stuff from Chicago, IL to Oakland, CA. The movers were scheduled to arrive at 8AM on the 5th of July, and we were stressing the day before about all the things that could go wrong with a move. We realized that if we knew where her stuff was, it'd make us feel better. This is a story about using the $99 iPhone to track the move ... and about a somewhat surprising potential use of Find My iPhone to track your friends' iPhones without them noticing."

Francesco Fondi writes "An Italian Company is using RC scale model submarines to lay fiber through Milan's sewage system. The RC submarine used is the Neptune SB-1, produced by Taiwanese company Thunder Tiger. It costs ca $600 in US hobby shops." In Italian, but the pictures speak for themselves.

Hugh Pickens sends along Kevin Kelly's paean to the default. "One of the greatest unappreciated inventions of modern life is the default. 'Default' is a technical concept first used in computer science in the 1960s to indicate a preset standard. ... Today the notion of a default has spread beyond computer science to the culture at large. It seems such a small thing, but the idea of the default is fundamental... It's hard to remember a time when defaults were not part of life. But defaults only arose as computing spread; they are an attribute of complex technological systems. There were no defaults in the industrial age. ... The hallmark of flexible technological systems is the ease by which they can be rewired, modified, reprogrammed, adapted, and changed to suit new uses and new users. Many (not all) of their assumptions can be altered. The upside to endless flexibility and multiple defaults lies in the genuine choice that an individual now has, if one wants it. ... Choices materialize when summoned. But these abundant choices never appeared in fixed designs. ... In properly designed default system, I always have my full freedoms, yet my choices are presented to me in a way that encourages taking those choices in time — in an incremental and educated manner. Defaults are a tool that tame expanding choice."

The Narrative Fallacy writes "Douglas Quenqua reports in the NY Times that according to a 2008 survey only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days meaning that "95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled." Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but it's probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views. "There's a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one." Many people who think blogging is a fast path to financial independence also find themselves discouraged. "I did some Craigslist postings to advertise it, and I very quickly got an audience of about 50,000 viewers a month," says Matt Goodman, an advertising executive in Atlanta who had no trouble attracting an audience to his site, Things My Dog Ate, leading to some small advertising deals. "I think I made about $20 from readers clicking on the ads.""

An anonymous reader sends in a story at Wired about the increasingly popular methods criminals are using to bypass PIN encryption and rack up millions of dollars in fraudulent withdrawals. Quoting: "According to the payment-card industry ... standards for credit card transaction security, [PINs] are supposed to be encrypted in transit, which should theoretically protect them if someone intercepts the data. The problem, however, is that a PIN must pass through multiple HSMs across multiple bank networks en route to the customer's bank. These HSMs are configured and managed differently, some by contractors not directly related to the bank. At every switching point, the PIN must be decrypted, then re-encrypted with the proper key for the next leg in its journey, which is itself encrypted under a master key that is generally stored in the module or in the module's application programming interface, or API. 'Essentially, the thief tricks the HSM into providing the encryption key,' says Sartin. 'This is possible due to poor configuration of the HSM or vulnerabilities created from having bloated functions on the device.'"

On Tuesday Blizzard rolled out the first major content patch for World of Warcraft since the launch of Wrath of the Lich King last November. The 3.1 patch includes the long-awaited dual-specialization feature, which allows players to quickly and easily switch from one set of talent choices to another. Action bars and glyph choices change as well. The patch also includes a new end-game raid dungeon, Ulduar, which expands upon the variable difficulty modes Blizzard has recently experimented with. The instance contains 14 bosses, 10 of which have an optional "hard mode" that players can attempt for better rewards. In addition, the patch contains a host of class balance changes, bug fixes, and UI improvements. You can see the full patch notes at Blizzard's website, and a brief trailer is also available.

Michael writes "A new version of Nexuiz, a GPL-licensed, first-person shooter, has been released. There are over 3,000 changes in Nexuiz 2.5, including new maps, new game-modes, enhanced graphics, new audio, and other major changes. Phoronix has posted a preview of this Nexuiz 2.5 release, with screenshots showing the impressive graphics and how it has raised the bar for open-source gaming. Details about the Nexuiz project are available at SourceForge."

magacious writes "March 10 is the 133rd anniversary of the first telephone call. It occurred between Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Thomas Watson back on this day in 1876. But there is some debate about whether Bell is actually the rightful owner of the crown for such invention. Having worked on the idea of transmitting speech using electricity for some time, Bell filed his patent on 14 February 1876, either just before or just after his main rival for the title of inventor of the telephone, Elisha Gray, filed his own. Bell won the patent and Gray died in obscurity."