A Colorado sheriff's department mistakenly exposed a sensitive database that contained names, addresses and other details on about 200,000 people, including confidential drug informants.

2010: it's a wrap

Apple has dropped support for the API that allows applications to ask if an iOS device has been jailbroken, though it seems that not a lot of people trusted it anyway.

Microsoft has another tough year ahead, a Goldman Sachs tech analyst has warned.

A Mississippi man found naked in a cemetery explained to Sheriff's deputies that he was not indulging in indecent exposure but was simply looking to snap some "spirit orb" photos.

Capita has bought part of the troubled Australian healthcare IT provider iSoft for £23m.

Tosh has announced an enterprise SSD with competitor-beating performance numbers.

Pro-Wikileaks hacktivists have begun targeting the fax machines rather than the websites of firms who have withdrawn services from Wikileaks.

Microsoft kicked its Windows Small Business Server 2011 out the door yesterday.

PicUS arms'n'aerospace megacorp Boeing has now moved its Phantom Ray robot stealth fighter to Edwards Air Force Base in California for flight testing. The unmanned jet was shipped there on the back of one of NASA's well-known piggyback jumbo jets, more usually employed moving space shuttles about.

Prisoners in Georgia (the US one) are striking for better conditions and pay, in an action coordinated across institutions thanks to the wonders of modern technology and poor contraband enforcement.

Hardware spending is a leading indicator for overall IT spending, even after you adjust for Moore's Law improvements, because the appetite for processing, memory, and I/O capacity has not abated much in the past 40 years.

IBM has been hoping for years that Linux would drive new workloads on Power-based systems where OS/400-i platforms are the back-end systems – just as Linux-based partitions have, to a certain extent, been the salvation of the System z mainframe.

Railway union boss Bob Crow reckons putting a one-penny tax on text messaging would wipe out half the UK's deficit, demonstrating a rather optimistic approach to financial planning.

Toshiba is building a factory to make LCDs for iPhones and allow it to double its output, it has been claimed.

UK government websites are bracing themselves for an attack from Anonymous.

You can now watch Freeview shows on your iPad or iPhone - on the move.

The BBC has agreed to make its web presence more “distinctive”, following the Corporation’s director-general Mark Thompson’s decision in July to scale back its online operation and cut the budget by a quarter.

IBM took five per cent of the money spent by the Department for Transport with its 100 biggest suppliers in 2009-10.

The US Army is working on plans to issue every one of its soldiers with a smartphone – either an iPhone, Android device or perhaps even a "Palm Trio" [sic]. Windows 7 was not mentioned.

BT has said sorry to subscribers to its "Infinity" packages, who have seen their "superfast" broadband connections slowed to a relative crawl in the evening recently.

An unknown number of personal details about McDonald's customers was exposed after hackers broke into the database of a partner of the burger giant.

Ethically-responsible shoppers can get the help they obviously need with a new app that will scan a bar code and decide if your coffee was ethically sourced, or is actually a Compaq server.

Buy an e-car next year and the government will pay a quarter of the asking price - up to a maximum of £5000.

WikiLeaks supremo Julian Assange was granted bail on appeal by a London court this afternoon.

EMC has added a self-service capability to Atmos so that service providers can add a cloud storage offering to their services – because they don't have to write their own user-metering modules.

Microsoft is reportedly going to attempt to conjure some magic from slate computing at next month's CES event in Las Vegas.

The creator of Google's AdSense technology and lead developer of Gmail reckons Chrome OS will be merged with Android or killed off within the next 12 months.

A former IT worker at a Florida medical facility has been jailed for 19 months after she was convicted of hacking into the network of her former employers, deleting records and locking out legitimate users by deleting passwords.

Oracle and a hot-selling Java mobile software maker have fired lawsuits at each other over who controls Java - and at what price.

ReviewMicrosoft gives you the Windows Explorer. Apple gives you the Mac OS X Finder. And Google gives you, well, nothing. With Google's Chrome OS – the browser-based operating system that reached a handful of outside beta testers late last week – there's no ready means of browsing files on your own machine.

Update: This story has been updated to show that PayPal shut WikiLeaks' account after reading a letter sent to WikiLeaks by the US government.