Google just rolled out a new set of ads, making the total number of ad-based revenue streams roughly equal to the number of petabytes they search daily. This one appears at the bottom of the map when you search for a fairly generic topic. After I saw it written up on CNet, I gave it a try, and as you can see from my image above, the ads pop up even if you're searching for things you'd really not want broadcast to to the world, a stark reminder that the thing called privacy is just a memory from a time before electrons and radio waves joined us all.

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Sleeping Beauty is Disney's first classic animated film to make its way to Blu-ray, and it's loaded with legitimately compelling BD-Live extra features. Format War Central tried to check these out, but got smacked with a 57 page EULA followed by a 63 page Privacy Policy before they could view any of them. Also upsetting: the new ending, in which Princess Aurora, upon waking up from Phillip's kiss resolves to become a copyright lawyer for a large electronics company. [Format War Central]

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Our constant reportage that border agents can snatch and frisk your laptop for basically no reason at all seems to have worked. The sighing, sweaty "feh" of nerds and barks of disapproval from hardcore business travellers, both unhappy at the thought of some macho dickhole agent tooling around in their notebook, seem to have trickled up to Congress, resulting in the Travellers' Privacy Protection Act.

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German security company SRWare likes Chrome but not as much as their tin-foil hats, which is why they have created Iron. Iron is a Chrome derivative that has been developed to protect your intimacy by stopping the control that Google has over your data. I don't know if it addresses Chrome fatal flaw, but if you don't want to relay any information to the New Galactic Empire, its features list will make you happy:

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Last week it was revealed that the Palin email "hack" was little more than a lucky guess and that a trail of evidence existed that would likely lead the authorities to an arrest. Apparently, this evidence has lead the FBI to the home of a 20-year-old student at the University of Tennessee named David Kernell. To make matters worse, David is the son of Democratic Tennessee state representative Mike Kernell. The apartment was thoroughly searched, but no criminal charges have been filed just yet. I suppose it goes without saying, but if Kernell is found guilty, this simple hack may bring both his life and his father's political career to a screeching halt. [CNET]

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If the chances of having your iPhone stolen by incredibly stupid thieves are pretty high, we recommend you download Private-I. The $US1 application shows up as an icon screaming "PRIVATE" in big red letters, which will allegedly lure your phone burglar into launching it. The app then loads up a fake screen that says "Accessing pictures" while sneakily using the iPhone's GPS (or triangulation) capabilities to email you with your phone's coordinates. I'm not sure how big the population of bumbling bandits is, but hey! Anything to keep your baby safe, right? [Wired]

The screamingly obvious trail of evidence left behind by the person who broke into Sarah Palin's Yahoo mail yesterday should have been the tip-off--this was not an elite job. According to postings on the troll-hive forum 4chan dug up by Threat Level, all the perp did was guess her password-resest security question correctly after a few seconds of Googling.

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Google has just made a change to its privacy policy, cutting the retention time for your personal data from 18 months to 9 months. This means that now Google will only be able to build a frighteningly accurate portrait of you that advertisers will salivate over based on your searches, keywords found in your Gmail, videos viewed on YouTube, feeds subscribed to in Google Reader and surf history in Chrome based on a mere 9 months of information. All together now: thank you, Google overlords, for your benevolence! [Reuters]

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Apple has acknowledged the huge iPhone security flaw we tested and reported on two days ago, promising an update for September that will fix the hole that can expose all your private emails, text messages, and contacts. But instead of calling a spade a spade and acting as soon as possible, they have decided to minimise the problem:

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CNet's Declan McCullagh wrote up an informative history of Joe Biden's tech-related voting record—if Biden's name rings a bell, it's because he's the guy Barack Obama picked to be his vice president last Friday night. Maybe you don't care about the doings in Washington, but you may want to know that Biden considers a lot of what you do care about criminal activity. Here's what I'm talking about:

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