California Bans Mandatory Subdermal RFID Tagging
Posted by Ben Longo at 5:10 AM on September 5, 2007
Paranoiac readers of California, you can now relax thanks to Senate Bill 362. No longer will it be lawful for employers to require you and your coworkers to have RFID chips embedded within your skin. If they are caught doing so the State of California will slap them with an initial $10,000 fine, followed by a subsequent $1,000 fine for each day that the subdermal chip stays implanted. Although to report them you'd have to know about the chip, right? And if your company is the type who'd go around implanting RFID chips within their employees, wouldn't it be within reach for them to secretly implant them as well? Oh great, new things to worry about. [Ars Technica]

Label this as unconfirmed for the moment (we've since written Microsoft for comment), but one tipster told us about a refurbished Xbox 360 that couldn't connect to Live. When he called Microsoft, they said that his box had been "banned" from the service. We attached the email after the jump.
Teachers, eh? First they came to praise the iPod, then they came to bury it. A spate of incidents involving iPods in class and exam rooms has led to a ban on digital media players in some schools. A high school in Idaho has been one of the first establishments to ban MP3 players after teachers overheard some of the kids talking about downloading formulae and other crib material onto the players. "It doesn't take long to get out of the loop with teenagers," said Aaron Maybon, principal of Mountain View High School. "They come up with new and creative ways to cheat pretty fast."