Spamicles alerts us to a report just issued (PDF) by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. At least 88 White House officials used Republican National Committee email accounts for government business. The RNC has destroyed at least some of the emails from 51 of those officials. Law requires emails sent by officials to be stored or recorded. There is evidence that White House lawyers and the (current) Attorney General knew of this but did not act to stop it. From the article: "These e-mail accounts were used by White House officials for official purposes, such as communicating with federal agencies about federal appointments and policies... Given the heavy reliance by White House officials on RNC e-mail accounts, the high rank of the White House officials involved, and the large quantity of missing e-mails, the potential violation of the Presidential Records Act may be extensive."

FliesLikeABrick writes "Soldat 1.4 has finally been released. After 19 months since the announcement, this version adds multi-byte language support, many new features available to registered players, a ton of bugfixes, and a new lobby server and protocol. It took a lot of time and effort, but the largest update to Soldat has finally been posted and made available. While there are surely going to be some new bugs introduced, the new version is available for free at the game's site. From the site: 'Ladies and Gentlemen, I know you have all been (im)patiently waiting for Soldat 1.4. Thanks to all that contributed to this version. This version was a collaborative effort and it wouldn`t happen without you. ... So without further delay, it is with your encouragement, criticism and support from you all that I can happily release Soldat 1.4 to you all to enjoy. Please use the torrent link provided to help distribute Soldat 1.4 for others and ease server load, and seed for as long as you can.'"

el_flynn writes "BusinessWeek is reporting on a new submarine cable system that will link South East Asia directly with the USA. Designated Asia-America Gateway (AAG), the project will involve a consortium of 17 international telcos, including AT&T Inc, India's Bharti AirTel, BT Global Network Services, CAT Telekom (Thailand), Eastern Telecommunications Philippines Inc (Philippines), Indosat (Indonesia) and Pacific Communications Pte Ltd (Cambodia). Led by Telekom Malaysia Berhad, the project is slated for completion in 2008, where 20,000km of cables will be providing a capacity of up to 1.92 Terabits per second of data bandwidth. Interestingly, the fibre-optic cable system will be taking a different route from many existing cables to avoid quake-prone areas and a repeat of the disruption to Asian web access caused by a tremor off Taiwan four months ago."

An anonymous reader writes "The Google Librarian Central site has up a piece by Mark Aubin, a Software Engineer who works on Google Earth. Aubin explains some of the process behind capturing satellite imagery for use with the product. 'Most people are surprised to learn that we have more than one source for our imagery. We collect it via airplane and satellite, but also just about any way you can imagine getting a camera above the Earth's surface: hot air balloons, model airplanes - even kites. The traditional aerial survey involves mounting a special gyroscopic, stabilized camera in the belly of an airplane and flying it at an elevation of between 15,000 feet and 30,000 feet, depending on the resolution of imagery you're interested in. As the plane takes a predefined route over the desired area, it forms a series of parallel lines with about 40 percent overlap between lines and 60 percent overlap in the direction of flight. This overlap of images is what provides us with enough detail to remove distortions caused by the varying shape of the Earth's surface.'

An anonymous reader writes "It seems that the most recent DVDs released by Sony — specifically Stranger Than Fiction, Casino Royale, and The Pursuit of Happyness — have some kind of 'feature' that makes them unplayable on many DVD players. This doesn't appear to be covered by the major media yet, but this link to a discussion over at Amazon gives a flavor of the problems people are experiencing. A blogger called Sony and was told the problem is with the new copy protection scheme, and they do not intend to fix it. Sony says it's up to the manufacturers to update their hardware."