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.

A New Zealand man living in Queensland and believed to be behind the world’s largest spam operation, has been ordered to pay more than $16 million for running the illegal enterprise.

Lance Atkinson, 26, originally from Christchurch, was living in Pelican Waters on the Sunshine Coast when the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had his assets frozen last year.

He had previously admitted sending spam and was fined $100,000 by a New Zealand court, but the FTC saw that further punishment was due. Yesterday, the Commission fined him $16 million in a decision mirroring that of the Federal Court in Brisbane in October, which handed the same penalty to handed to two SMS spamming companies.

Pirates in Somalia have opened up a cooperative in Haradheere, where investors can pay money or guns to help their favorite pirate crew for a share of the piracy profits.

“‘Four months ago, during the monsoon rains, we decided to set up this stock exchange. We started with 15 “maritime companies” and now we are hosting 72. Ten of them have so far been successful at hijacking,’ Mohammed [a wealthy former pirate who took a Reuters reporter to the facility] said. … Piracy investor Sahra Ibrahim, a 22-year-old divorcee, was lined up with others waiting for her cut of a ransom pay-out after one of the gangs freed a Spanish tuna fishing vessel. ‘I am waiting for my share after I contributed a rocket-propelled grenade for the operation,’ she said, adding that she got the weapon from her ex-husband in alimony. ‘I am really happy and lucky. I have made $75,000 in only 38 days since I joined the “company.”‘”

The EU justice and home affairs minister are about to agree on a large-scale banking data sharing plan with the United States. The agreement will have a massive impact on the privacy of banking data of European businesses and citizens.

It’s everything about SWIFT, a company that handles the bank transactions for thousands of bank, inluding most European banks. SWIFT is based in Belgium but has also a branch in the USA. Under the TFTP programme the US government forced the US branch (which mirrors all data based in Belgium) to allow government access to all these bank transactions in order to help anti-terrorism operations.

The struggling Internet company AOL plans to shed up to 2,500 jobs - more than a third of its work force - as it prepares to separate from Time Warner and finally sever their ill-fated marriage.

Major job cuts had been expected and seemed certain after Time Warner said last week that AOL would take $200 million in charges for severance and other restructuring-related costs. But the magnitude was not known until Thursday.

AOL, which has already pared thousands of workers in recent years and now employs about 6,900, is asking for volunteers to accept buyouts. If it falls short of the 2,500 target, it plans layoffs to reach a payroll cut of up to 2,300 positions, a third of its current total.

Federal officials have put the PS3 to work breaking passwords on computer equipment confiscated from suspected child pornographers.

the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Cyber Crimes Center, known as C3, has replaced its ‘$8,000 Tableau/Dell server combination’ with more efficient and much cheaper $300 PS3s. Each PS3 is capable of 4 million passwords per second, and C3 currently has 20 PS3s with plans to buy 40 more.