gbulmash writes "In its eagerness to clear sex offenders off its site and publish their identities, MySpace identified an innocent woman as a sex offender. She shares a name and birth month with a sex offender who lives in a neighboring state and that was apparently enough to get MySpace to wrongly brand her and completely ignore her protests."

msblack writes "The New York Times is reporting that an Office of Management and Budget website accidentally exposed at least 30,000 social security numbers publicly online. As many as 100,000 to 150,000 individuals may have been affected. The cost to taxpayers just for notifications and credit monitoring is estimated to run $4 million. 'While there was no evidence to indicate whether anyone had in fact used the information improperly, officials at the Agriculture Department and the Census Bureau removed the Social Security numbers from the Census Web site last week. Officials at the Agriculture Department said Social Security numbers were included in the public database because doing so was the common practice years ago when the database was first created, before online identity theft was as well-known a threat as it is today. '"

tcd004 writes "How do you set up a cell network when there's no power grid? Namibia, India and Nigeria are building towers using localized power sources to provide critical cell phone access to the most remote parts of their countries. Wind/solar hybrids, and biofuel power plants will power the radio towers, peripheral communications, and even the protective fencing around the installations."

Gamasutra is running a series of articles about the history of CRPGs. The first piece covers the early years, from 1980 to 1983, and deals with with games like mainframe dnd, Wizardry, and Ultima. The follow-up, The Golden Years, touches on the gold box Dungeons and Dragons titles, as well as the Bard's Tale games. "The first Gold Box game is Pool of Radiance, a game which marked an important turning point in CRPG history. The game shipped in a distinctive gold-colored box (hence the nickname for the series), which sported artwork by celebrated fantasy illustrator Clyde Caldwell (Caldwell also designed the covers for Curse of the Azure Bonds and several other TSR-licensed games and books). It was initially available only on the Atari ST and Commodore 64 platforms, though soon ports were available for most major platforms, including the NES."

C&VG offers up some news on Microsoft's next-gen games platform today. Most interesting are comments from Peter Moore indicating the company will be refocusing on fun, inspired by the financial and mass-market success of Nintendo's Wii. Says Moore "From a first-party point of view, it's not just about E-rated games, it's going to be about the experience that, quite frankly, Nintendo has done a tremendous job in capturing, in bringing back fun - if you will - to the gaming platforms." He's quick to point out that this is something they've had on the back burner for some time, and they intend to aim for 'experiential' games. The article wonders out loud, questioning whether this means Microsoft is planning to roll out a motion-sensing controller, or just more E and T rated games? Additionally, CVG points out that this week's Xbox Live Arcade release is The Behemoth's Alien Hominid . It's a tremendous side-scrolling 2d shooter, and well worth checking out.