Iran has arrested 30 people suspected of belonging to a U.S.-linked cyber network gathering information on Iranian nuclear scientists and sending people abroad for training, a news agency reported on Saturday.

It said the group sought to recruit people through the Internet for training in Iraq with the People’s Mujahideen Organization, a leftist exile group which launched attacks on the Islamic Republic from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq

“Thirty people were arrested in connection with an organized American cyber war network via a series of complex security measures in the field of information technology and communications,” the Fars news agency said.

Texas health officials secretly transferred hundreds of newborn babies’ blood samples to the federal government to build a DNA database, a newspaper investigation has revealed.

According to The Texas Tribune, the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) routinely collected blood samples from newborns to screen for a variety of health conditions, before throwing the samples out.

But beginning in 2002, the DSHS contracted Texas A&M University to store blood samples for potential use in medical research. These accumulated at rate of 800,000 per year. The DSHS did not obtain permission from parents, who sued the DSHS, which settled in November 2009.

Now the Tribune reveals that wasn’t the end of the matter. As it turns out, between 2003 and 2007, the DSHS also gave 800 anonymised blood samples to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL) to help create a national mitochondrial DNA database.

Dave, a Java developer writes about the Myths About Older Software Developers.

Our field is ripe for age discrimination in so many ways. We value hot, new technologies, the ability to absorb them at unheard of rates, working insane hours to push products out the door–all things attributed to the younger workers of our field. And did I mention that younger workers are cheaper? A lot cheaper. But the trends of computer science degrees do not bode well for having a plethora of young, cheap workers at a manager’s disposal indefinitely. In fact, all data point to one conclusion: CS degrees enrollments have been declining or flat for almost a decade. And if anything, the candidate pool for hiring is getting worse, at least according to Jeff Atwood. You’re going to have to hire someone to write your next project, and with the backlash against outsourcing, who you gonna call, Egon?

If you’re thinking you’re going to avoid the “grey matter” of software development, think again. There are a number of myths about older software developers that continue to be perpetuated in IT and software development that somehow put older, experienced workers at a disadvantage in our field. But they’re largely crap and considering the degree trends, ignoring everyone 40 and over because we’re too old seems plain foolish. Let’s debunk these myths one-by-one.

Internet telephony firm Skype made its first major leap into cellphones on Tuesday, striking a deal with the largest U.S. mobile carrier Verizon Wireless.

December 24, 2009, Segway was acquired by a company that is based in the United Kingdom. The acquiring company is backed by Jimi Heselden, a prominent U.K. businessman and the Chairman of Hesco Bastion. Mr. Heselden is also an investor in the independently owned Segway U.K. distributorship.

Additionally, Segway also received funding that will be used to support the continued growth of the company.

A computer hacker who helped orchestrate the theft of tens of millions of credit and debit card numbers from major retailers in one of the largest such thefts in U.S. history pleaded guilty Tuesday in the last of three cases brought by federal prosecutors.

Albert Gonzalez, a one-time federal informant from Miami, faces a prison sentence of up to 25 years under the terms of separate plea agreements. He is tentatively scheduled for sentencing in March.

“This is a young kid who did some reckless things and he’s going to pay a price for it,” said Gonzalez’s attorney, Martin Weinberg, after his 28-year-old client calmly answered guilty to charges of conspiracy and wire fraud.

Weinberg said Gonzalez was remorseful and that he would ask two federal judges hearing the cases to sentence Gonzalez to the lower end of the 17- to 25-year sentencing range spelled out in the plea agreements.

A former prison inmate has been ordered to serve 18 months for hacking the facility’s computer network, stealing personal details of more than 1,100 of its employees and making them available to other inmates.

Francis G. Janosko, 44, received the sentence earlier this week in federal court in Boston after pleading guilty to the hacking offenses in September.

In 2006, Janosko hacked a thin client that was connected to a prison server to access the employee database for the Plymouth County Correctional Facility in Massachusetts, prosecutors alleged. After obtaining the names, addresses, dates of birth, social security numbers and telephone numbers of the employees, he made them accessible to other inmates.

Although the machine was configured only to run a legal research program, the prisoner managed to use it to get free rein over a variety of unauthorized services. In addition to the employee database, Janosko was also able to access the internet to download videos and photographs of prison employees, inmates and aerial shots of the prison, according to court papers. The hacking took place between October 2006 and February 2007.

Cheques will be phased out by October 2018, but only if adequate alternatives are developed, the body that oversees payments strategy has said.

The board of the UK Payments Council has set the date in a bid to encourage the advance of other forms of payment.

The first cheque was written 350 years ago and the decision will be greeted with disappointment by some small businesses and consumers.

The Council said there should be “no scenario” for using cheques by 2018.

The target date for the closure of the system that processes cheques has been set for 31 October 2018, after the board described the payment method as in “terminal decline”.

However, there will be annual checks on the progress of other payments systems and a final review of the decision will be held in 2016.

The National Aviation and Transport Services (NATS) is threatening legal action against Wikileaks because the website has published a recording of the crashing of BA flight 038, call sign Speedbird 38, which came down just short of the Heathrow runway in 2008.

Earlier this month Wikileaks published an audio recording of air traffic controllers seeing, and reacting to, the crash and images of the control system. The Boeing 777 hit the ground just on the threshold of the runway at Heathrow. There were injuries, but no deaths.

NATS is claiming absolute copyright over the recording.

AOL is becoming an independent Internet company again.

With the company’s spinoff from Time Warner Inc. complete, AOL’s stock is set to officially begin trading Thursday. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong plans to ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange.

AOL’s dial-up Internet access business has just one-fifth as many subscribers as it had at its peak in 2002. Now the company is trying to boost its fading profitability with a portfolio of Web sites, supported by advertising revenue.

British billionaire Richard Branson unveiled a commercial rocket plane that will allow tourists a chance to view the Earth and experience weightlessness from suborbital space.

Branson said Monday that he hopes to offer tickets aboard his Virgin Galactic spaceliner for 200,000 US dollars each, giving adventurous, well-heeled travellers a chance to experience space for a fraction of the cost of a seat on a NASA shuttle or Russian spaceship.

Branson, who is spending between 250 million and 400 million US dollars on the space venture, also said he planned to be on the craft’s first passenger flight some 18 months from now, accompanied by his family and the US designer of the space ship, Burt Rutan.

The futuristic-looking craft is composed of two parts — the SpaceShipTwo and the WhiteKnightTwo, the prototype of which has been dubbed Virgin MotherShip Eve in a tribute to Branson’s mother.

The craft, emblazoned with the image of a young woman that represents Branson’s mother Eve diving through space, resembles two jet aircraft joined together at their wing tips.

The White Knight will transport the two-pilot, six-passenger SpaceShipTwo high above the Earth where the space pod will break away and propel beyond the atmosphere.

SpaceShipTwo “is attached to the mothership in the middle and when the mothership gets up to 60,000 feet, the spaceship will drop away,” Branson said.

“They will ignite the rocket and it will go from zero to 2,500 miles per hour in 10 seconds,” he told AFP.

Once it has reached suborbital space, SpaceShipTwo passengers will be able to view the Earth from portholes next to their seats, or unbuckle their seatbelts and float in zero gravity.

The new version of Bing Maps, released Wednesday in a “beta” test mode, offers slicker technology so users can zoom in more smoothly from the high-up graphical map to the close-up views showing actual streets from a pedestrian or driver’s viewpoint.

With this version of Bing Maps, Microsoft matches Google Inc. in sending cars with cameras down streets to capture images of every block. Microsoft is offering that in 56 U.S. cities for now, while Google has hit all 50 states and expanded the feature overseas.

Microsoft also used lasers to scan the buildings and constructed a three-dimensional map of those cities.