Business travellers to Russia might want to keep their laptops and iPhones well-concealed - not from muggers, necessarily, but from the country’s recently formed regulatory super-agency, Rossvyazokhrankultura (short for the Russian Mass Media, Communications and Cultural Protection Service).

In the UK, Ofcom made deregulation one of its first priorities upon coming into existence, but the Russian equivalent is doing just the reverse, including an ominous-sounding policy of requiring registration for every Wi-Fi device and hotspot, according to a report this week from news agency Fontanka.

Rossvyazokhrankultura’s interpretation of current law holds that users must register any electronics that use the frequency involved in Wi-Fi communications, said Vladimir Karpov, the deputy director of the agency’s communications monitoring division, according to an English commentary provided by website The Other Russia.

Police will have powers to frisk people they suspect of carrying lasers and those without reason to have them - such as educators, architects or astronomers - will be fined up to $5000.

NSW Premier Morris Iemma said today the Government would ban the most powerful laser pointers and make it a summary offence to carry any laser pointer without a lawful reason.

Class three and four laser pointers will be declared prohibited weapons and carrying them could attract a maximum penalty of 14 years’ jail, he said.

Mr Iemma said the misuse of these devices had the potential to cause mass murder.

“It only takes a fraction of a second for a pilot to become temporarily blinded and that could have catastrophic consequences,” Mr Iemma said.

Groklaw is reporting that some people have decided to compare the OOXML schema to actual Microsoft Office 2007 documents.

It won’t surprise you to know that Office 2007 failed miserably. If you go by the strict OOXML schema, you get a 17 MiB file containing approximately 122,000 errors, and ’somewhat less’ with the transitional OOXML schema. Most of the problems reportedly relate to the serialization/deserialization code.

Holloman Air Force Base will say farewell Monday to the F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter, which the nation is retiring from its arsenal after 27 years.

The angular black radar-evading planes are being put in mothballs.

The last F-117s scheduled to fly will leave Holloman on Monday, then stop in Palmdale, Calif., for another retirement ceremony before arriving at their final destination — Tonopah Test Range Airfield in Nevada, where the fighter made its first flight in 1981.

Holloman’s ceremony will include a four-plane flyby, the last opportunity to see the stealths in the air over New Mexico, said Alan Ponder, media liaison for the base’s 49th Fighter Wing.

Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, which managed the F-117 program, held an informal, private retirement ceremony last month.

Holloman had been the only base to have the stealths since the squadron moved in mid-1992 to southern New Mexico from Tonopah.

The Air Force decided to accelerate the F-117s’ retirement to free funding to modernize the rest of the fleet. The Nighthawk is being replaced by the F-22 Raptor, which also has stealth technology.