Stealing the show

       Prosecutors in Miami arrested 28-year-old Albert Gonzales and charged him and two unnamed Russians with leading a gang that stole,oh, roughly 130 million credit- and debit-card account details; debit cards,which are roughly ATM cards which can be used like credit cards, take cash directly out of the owner's account;the worst identity theft case in US history came about because firms like 7-Eleven stood around while hackers walked through their alleged "security" to steal the card information; Gonzales, when arrested, was in prison in New Jersey for stealing information on credit cards from other firms that lied to customers that their information was safe.
       Google wants to archive every book in the world and make it available in digital form; a rich, high-flying, hardhitting coalition led by Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo do not; with amazing chutzpah, the anti-Google crowd called itself the Internet Archive, and claimed that Google could be guilty of "massive copyright infringement" with its initial plans to digitise works in the New York Public Library and the libraries at Stanford and Harvard universities; Google, of course, will show adverts to anyone who wants to read its digitised works, but Amazon and others stand to lose a lot by having them available for free instead of for certain amounts of baht and readable only on devices like the Kindle ebook reader.
       So who is outsourcing in China?;take a step forward,Infosys Technologies of India, the country most people think of when they hear the word "outsourcing"; India's second largest technology firm thinks that if it gives some jobs to its China office, it can start tapping the world's second biggest market, which is kosher; but the irony is that Infosys is the second largest outsourcing company in India.
       The White House s-l-o-w-l-y admitted spamming millions of Americans over President Barack Obama's health insurance reform plan; it even used taxpaper money to hire a company,Govdelivery , to send the partisan, political spam to a still-secret list of people it will eventually have to make public,probably embarrassingly; originally, the White House lied that it did not sent any such email, and then, caught in the act, bragged that it had stopped doing it, blaming strong Obama supporters for signing up friends (and enemies) for the email; the revelation came after the White House opened an illegal "snitch email line" to collect information on opponents to the insurance plan, and then bragged that it had closed it down; thanks to the aptly named Can-Spam Act passed by the US Congress several years ago, the proObama spam was perfectly legal.
       The US justice department said that Oracle can acquire Sun Micrososystems , no (anti-trust) sweat.The big news from Sony Corp ofJapan was little PlayStation 3 Slim, due for release worldwide right now; and Sony is also finally updating the Playstation Network (PSN) to go back on the Internet and serve the teensy PSP Go, also known as a Mini; Sony is hoping that moving down in size will result in moving up in the list, where it trails both Microsoft (XBox) and Nintendo (Wii) for the set-top console market;there will be 15 games available for download immediately - but you are much too foreign for that, only Europeans qualify.
       Post offices in India, Korea, Malaysia and Singapore joined a 21-nation consortium to see if RFID chips can speed up moving stuff, including mail; the five-month experiment, monitored from Japan by the Universal Postal Union, will see volunteers mail 24,000 test letters from 38 countries, each with a 10-baht chip in the envelope; the chips may be utilised to help express mail reach higher and more reliable standards by eliminating the need for tracking by hand.
       American media mogul Rupert Murdoch decided to buy the iLike social music network to hook up with his slowly dying MySpace social network;iLike folks got a lot less than they hoped,just $20 million of Mr Murdoch's money, and it is unclear what Facebook will do about iLike.