• Nasa's latest humanoid robot is due to join a space mission on 1 November, writes Andrea Petrou at Tech Eye:

"The humanoid Robotnaut 2 (or R2 for short) resembles you and me a bit and is specifically designed to operate like you and me, a bit. It consists of a head and torso with two arms and two five-fingered hands. Advanced control and sensor technologies allow R2 to operate as an assistant to the station astronauts."

R2 is also a sociable chap - he has his own Twitter account with over 12,800 followers.

• Meanwhile blogger Sean over at web security firm F-Secure wants a few fewer friends. He's been keeping a close eye on Facebook's "people you may know" generator and found that quite a few of his recommended profiles were serial spammers:

"Searching for the name 'Elma Fewell' yielded a few doppelgangers. Checking incremental Facebook IDs yielded even more... I also found five Sueann Dehart accounts and a Janiece Duval. All of the profile pictures are of attractive young woman (and one of Kim Kardashian). Several of the photos appear to be of Ukrainian models, based on a reverse image search."

All the profiles contained links to spam websites.

• There were five men in a boat: not the start of a bad gag but a scientific experiment into how access to technology affects the mind. New York Times reporter Matt Richtel went along for the ride:

"Behavioral studies have shown that performance suffers when people multitask. These researchers are wondering whether attention and focus can take a hit when people merely anticipate the arrival of more digital stimulation."

Sorry, where were we?

• Finally, if you're a dating disaster, it might just be your handset rather than your halitosis that's the problem.

Dating website OKCupid asked its 11.4m users to rate profile pictures taken at different times, using various cameras and mobile phones.

Those rated the least attractive were taken by mobile phones, writes Christian Rudder at the website's blog UKTrend:

"[T]he general pattern is that more complex cameras take better pictures. Interchangable lens cameras (like digital SLRs) make you look more attractive than your basic point and shoot cameras, and those in turn make you look better than your camera phone. "

The light-hearted survey also concluded that iPhone users had the most sexual partners by the age of 30, and Android owners the fewest. Is there an app for that yet?

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to @bbctechbrief on Twitter, tag them bbctechbrief on Delicious or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

• Are you human? If you've ever struggled to read the sequence of letters and numbers in those messy boxes that often appear at the end of an online form, a computer may well have decided that you are not.

Now a company called NuCaptcha has come up with a more legible alternative in the form of video, writes Jolie O'Dell at Mashable .

"NuCaptcha's technology substitutes a brief video display of characters for the usual smash or squiggle of letters. It's definitely easier on the human eye, and its creators say it's also much more secure.
 
"Moreover, if humans find NuCaptcha as legible as machines find it illegible, it should help increase signups while decreasing spambots for web services and applications."

Captcha is a refreshingly simple acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.

• Brands getting involved with social media are "asking for trouble" says expert Zaid Al-Zaidy at Marketing Week.

"We don't spend enough time imagining what might happen when we open our doors to real conversation with real people. Instead, in our little insular marketing twitter-sphere, for instance, we can read hundreds of micro blog statements such as 'can social media drive sales?', '5 ways to measure the effectiveness of social media'... etc."

Sounds like it might be time for a little less conversation.

• It didn't take long for newbie smartphone the BlackBerry Torch to get its kit off.

The Crackberry crew has posted a YouTube video of the device being dissected - and Engadget's Vlad Savov describes the results.

"[M]ost internals are either integrated or soldered down, but this undressing does afford us an opportunity to take a look at the biggest novelty in this new BlackBerry, namely its slider mechanism. It's impressively thin, rated for 150,000+ cycles..."

• Patrick Goss, a gamer at TechRadar, tried a wireless mouse out and he reckons they are simply not reliable enough.

"I have dabbled with wireless mice, but a series of horror stories involving death, destruction (only of my avatar fortunately) and severe gamer rage put pay to that brief foray. "

In other words, an average evening chez-Tech Brief.

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to @bbctechbrief on Twitter, tag them bbctechbrief on Delicious or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

• "Gordon's alive" - Brian Blessed's performance with extra gusto from cult film Flash Gordon could now change to "Gordon's arrived". That's thanks to a Facebook campaign calling for Brian Blessed to become the voice of Sat Nav. It's claimed a victory after over 25,000 people spurred the man himself into action, reports Carry-Ann Skinner at PC Advisor.

The actor, renowned for his performances in I, Claudius and Flash Gordon will now join the ranks of John Cleese, Homer Simpson and Snoop Dogg, all of whom have lent their voices to Sat Nav manufacturer Tom Tom.

"Richard Gardner from Manchester started the campaign to get the Yorkshire born actor and comedian to voice driving directions in April 2008. After attracting a handful of members, the campaign really started to gain momentum earlier this year, and subsequently has more than 25,000 supporters.."

Mr Blessed has even made a YouTube video to express his delight.

• A universal phone charger that will be able to recharge lots of different handset models is to be introduced in Europe in 2011 according to Wired.

Ten brands including BlackBerry makers RIM, Apple, Samsung and Motorola have signed the agreement - something similar is also underway in the US but no deadline has been set.

"A universal charger means consumers don't have to get a new charger with every mobile phone. As a bonus, it will be easier to borrow a charger when in need. And if all that isn't enough, there's the green aspect. One-size-fits-all means fewer chargers will wind up in landfill, less pressure on recycling of the electronic waste, and fewer resources consumed in manufacturing chargers."

Tech Brief will be keeping its phone charger under lock and key in the office from now on.

• An interesting competition for the electric-car-loving algorithm experts among you (don't be shy) ">has caught Makezine blog's eye.

The challenge is to come up with algorithms designed to make electric cars more economical.

It won't make you a millionaire but organiser CarCharge is offering a $100 Amazon gift certificate to the most efficient entry each month.

"We're hoping that with your help and intuition, we can improve the efficiency, longevity, and range of electric vehicles. "

• Tim Carmody at Snarkmarket reports on the success of "one week I one tool", in which a group at the US Center for Digital Humanity spent a week designing and building a digital tool from scratch.

They posted teasers about the project online but did not reveal the result of their work until the seven days were up:

"They put together a great open-source tool: Anthol­o­gize, a Word­Press plu­gin that helps you take online con­tent like blog posts and col­lect, edit, design, and for­mat them into a book -- for either dig­i­tal or print. Solid soft­ware, with obvi­ous util­ity for lots of peo­ple, not just aca­d­e­mics."

And it's open source too - which makes it a free for all. Bookbinding is certainly a lot less fiddly these days...

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to @bbctechbrief on Twitter, tag them bbctechbrief on Delicious or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

Links in full

• Carry-Ann Skinner| PC Advisor | Brian Blessed to voice driving directions for TomTom
• Priya Ganapati | Mashable | Europeans Realize Dream of a Single Charger for All Cellphones
• Make |Design a better electric car algorithm, win a prize!
• Tim Carmody |Snarkmarket | The generative web event

• We've been hearing rather a lot about airbrushing this week, including an airbrushing for me. Hillel Aron at allAfrica.com tells a cautionary tale of, well, how not do to it.

Moved by a TV documentary, Carl Stevens contacted a South African orphanage and asked whether he could pay for its resident children to attend a World Cup game during the tournament.

The orphanage agreed, but things went awry when Mr Stevens asked to see photos of their trip,

"Amina Madien, Al Noor's director... stalled for more than a week, offering Stevens several excuses. Finally, she sent him the pictures - five of the worst Photoshop jobs he had ever seen, Stevens said."

Ms Madien said the money had instead been spent on several field trips but not to the stadium itself. She also apologised to Mr Stevens, who said:

"She meant well... (I'm just the) wrong person to send Photoshopped pics to."

Tech Brief fears that anyone would have been the wrong person to send these particular gems to - published on Independent Online.

• Over at Mashable Jolie O'Dell is waxing lyrical about an updated Facebook app for Android phones.

She cites changes to the notifications bar and the fact that Android Facebookers no longer need to leave the app and go online in order to deal with friend requests and event RSVPs as big improvements, although the Facebook Chat instant message facility is still missing.

"These upgrades are the first significant attention Facebook has paid to its Android app since its launch last fall. All things considered, we're very happy with the improvements. Facebook for Android has become a pleasure to use rather than the out-and-out hassle it was before."

The changes arrived a week after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg downloaded the app for himself, Ms O'Dell reports. Coincidentally, no doubt.

• Microsoft meanwhile is busy teasing its followers on Twitter with tantalising glimpses on Twitpic of a new device.

"Here's a hint for you: "Don't be so touchy...flat is where it's at...."

• Google announce on its website that it is rolling out a multiple sign-in option for Gmail. Users can sign in to a maximum of three accounts although it will mean that some services won't work:

"Enabling multiple sign-in will disable Offline products like Offline Gmail and Offline Calendar, as well as any browser bookmarks you've set to link to your accounts. If you use Offline Gmail, make sure to sync your offline mail before enabling multiple sign-in so you don't lose any messages in your outbox. If you would like to continue using Offline Gmail, Offline Calendar, and browser bookmarks linked to your accounts, do not enable the multiple sign-in option."

• On the subject of e-mail, there's a new provider in town, and its aim is to inject a few traditional conservative values into the apparently fluffy world of electronic communication.

Its founder is Michael Reagan, son of former US president Ronald, reports Fast Company.

"The ace up Reagan's sleeve isn't some snazzy search features, in-browser chat, or cloud-based storage... For only $39.95 per year, you can purchase your very own email handle @Reagan.com, and 'put your name next to the name of the Greatest Conservative of all, my father Ronald Reagan,' he boasts."

If that sounds like a bargain, beware the small print - the company says it is not obliged to supply support, software updates or bug fixes.

"Watch your back, Google," warns Fast Company - tongue firmly in cheek, Tech Brief suspects.

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to @bbctechbrief on Twitter, tag them bbctechbrief on Delicious or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

Links in full

• Hillel Aron | allAfrica.com | Donor Catches 'Lying' Orphanage
• Jolie O'Dell | Mashable | Facebook Brings Android an All-New App
• Google | Getting Started: Enabling multiple sign-in
• Austin Carr |Fast Company | Ronald Reagan's Son Launches @Reagan Email Alternative to Lefty Gmail, AOL, Hotmail

• It's not often that Tech Brief feels particularly fragrant but the web is buzzing today over an ad campaign launched by traditional men's aftershave Old Spice.

Former American football player Isaiah Mustafa is appearing in a string of YouTube videos voicing personal replies to tweets sent in the direction of @oldspice on Twitter - Gizmodo, the Huffington Post and Digg founder Kevin Rose are among those to have received a video answer to their tweets.

A rather breathless Jordan Stone at Digital Prescription reports :

"It's still early in the year, but I think we might have 'the social media campaign' of 2010. Managing to bridge their ATL activity with one-to-one responses via social media is brilliant, but the fact that the responses are so consistently funny puts this over the top."

• Take That once sang that it only takes a minute to fall in love... unless you're a marketing e-mail in which case you have about two seconds, according to e-mail analyst firm Litmus.

Paul at Litmus blogged about his findings, based on a trail of four million opened messages, where 51% were deleted within two seconds of being opened. He said:

"In the best email campaigns, 77% of people fully read the message - On average, 0.12% of readers printed the email - In one campaign (a coupon), 4% of people printed the message - On average, 0.63% of readers forwarded the email - In the most viral campaign, 9% of readers forwarded the email"

• Rock Paper Shotgun says a succinct goodbye to PC Zone magazine, launched in 1993, which is set to close after the next issue is published on 2 September:

"Farewell, then, to the UK's first PC games mag. Trails were blazed. It Was Important. And now it's gone."

• Jon Orwant, engineering manager for Google Books, Magazines and Patents has announced on Google's blog that the web giant will fund 15 research projects totalling almost $1m into the analysis of digitized texts:

"Shouldn't we be able to characterize Victorian society by quantifying shifts in vocabulary--not just of a few leading writers, but of every book written during the era? Shouldn't it be easy to locate electronic copies of the English and Latin editions of Hobbes' Leviathan, compare them and annotate the differences? Shouldn't a Spanish reader be able to locate every Spanish translation of "The Iliad"? Shouldn't there be an electronic dictionary and grammar for the Yao language? We think so."

•Craig Newmark, founder of social network Craigslist, is campaigning in Washington for a more open US government, writes the Economist. The Obama administration could learn a lot from the success of Craigslist, suggests the Babbage blog:

"Perhaps Mr Obama could tap Mr Newmark's experience more widely, appointing him as the government's own chief customer-service representative: if federal services were all as cheap, simple and useful as craigslist, that really would be a public-sector revolution."

Some of the more unusual items to appear on Craigslist over time have included replica Pope hats, 300 stuffed penguins and a bathroom for rent.

Perhaps not quite the sort of openness the Economist had in mind.

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to @bbctechbrief on Twitter, tag them bbctechbrief on Delicious or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

Links in full

• Jordan Stone | Digital Prescriptions | Old Spice - social media campaign of 2010?
• Paul | Litmus | New Email Metrics: Two seconds to make an impression
• Jon Orwant | Google Blog | Our commitment to the digital humanities
• RPS | Rock Paper Shotgun |Bye-bye PC Zone
• Babbage | The Economist | Mr Newmark goes to Washington

• The honeymoon is well and truly over for the e-reader market, says Jason Perlow at ZDNet.

There's a new kid on the block in the form of the iPad, and retailers Amazon and Barnes & Noble have both slashed the prices of their e-reader devices (but not the actual books) since its arrival.

"The 'give away the razors and sell the blades' model doesn't work with dedicated e-book readers because Amazon and Barnes & Noble's customer base is increasingly becoming iPad and iPhone users, and shortly will also be Android phone and tablet users."

The fierce undercutting means that devices marketed by smaller rivals such as Plastic Logic and Kobo will "almost certainly be gone within the next few months" Mr Perlow warns.

• The clever folk at MIT have found a way of making batteries last 10 times longer by using carbon nanotubes as positive electrodes, reports Dexter Johnson at IEEE Spectrum:

"The prototype batteries possess the positive characteristics of both capacitors in their ability to deliver very short high bursts of energy and still have the energy content of state-of-the-art lithium-ion batteries, around 200 Watt hours per kilogram. This combination makes them attractive for Electric Vehicles (EV) technology that requires quick bursts of power for acceleration."

The research has been published today in Nature Nanotechnology [subscription required].

• It's coalition time again - O2, Orange and Vodafone have teamed up to trial IMB (Integrated Mobile Broadcasts) in London and Slough, UK. IMB is a more efficient (which of course means cheaper) way of streaming TV and video using existing 3G networks, according to Julian Clover at BroadbandTVNews:

"It is increasingly becoming apparent to operators that it is more practical to use their own 3G networks than it is to build more expensive DVB-H broadcast networks. News of the IMB trial by the international operators makes it even less likely that DVB-H will ever achieve widespread deployment."

• For any football spectators who might be irritated by the World Cup vuvuzelas, this news spot from Computer Weekly will be music to their ears.

A team at the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary, University of London has developed a "devuvuzelator" app for the PC. It dampens the noise of the incessant horns to make the commentary more audible.

The researchers analysed the various sounds from a live match and noted:

"The commentator, then, is the loudest thing here... Somewhat lower in level are the nearly-flat horizontal tracks of the massed chorus of vuvuzelas. It appears that although these instruments vary, most of them are clumped in a fairly small range of fundamental frequencies - around 230Hz, roughly the B-flat below middle C. This unvarying pitch suggests why some listeners may find them so troublesome."

Best of all, the devuvuzelator is free to download.

• Finally, a bit of an oldie but it's too good to miss. The coach of the North Korea football team has told sports broadcaster ESPN that he has been receiving training tips from the country's leader Kim Jong-il via an invisible phone. As Time reports:

"Jong-il, a man of many talents, is said to have developed the technology himself. Before you laugh in disbelief, remember this is the man who scored 38 under par in his first-ever game of golf -- with five holes in one -- making him the greatest golfer of all-time. No word yet whether North Korea also has an invisible vuvuzela in the works."

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to @bbctechbrief on Twitter, tag them bbctechbrief on Delicious or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

Links in full

• Jason Perlow | ZDNet | Kindle, Nook and Vizplex eReader devices face mass extinction
• Dexter Johnson| ieeee Spectrum | Carbon Nanotubes Boost Lithium Ion Batteries Power Ten Times
• Julian Clover | BroadbandTVNews | UK trial for bandwidth saving Mobile TV technology
• Isophonics | What's all this about the vuvuzela?
• Kaya Webley | Time | The North Korean Soccer Coach's Invisible Phone

On Tech Brief today: HD voicemail, the limit to unlimited (not a tribute to the 90s techno band, pictured thanks to DJ Vernon) and the chance to pick your pioneer.

• Mobile phone company Orange has announced that it will launch its new HD voicemail on the 3G network at the end of the summer. It got the thumbs up from the bloggers at Cert Piles who attended a demonstration of the service:

"We... were pleasantly surprised at how it filters out background sound and provides crystal clear voice quality. Indeed, it seems as though it has a similar quality of voice to that on a DAB radio. Certainly, any tinniness is removed."

It is currently being trialled in Bristol, Reading and Southampton, after a successful launch in Moldova (and why not?).

• If the halcyon days of "unlimited broadband" packages ever existed, their days are numbered. Ronan Shields at New Media Age reports that the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) is going to investigate whether the rules governing the use of the phrase "unlimited" in broadband package adverts need to be revised:

"The move has been prompted by the increased popularity of devices like the iPhone and services like the BBC iPlayer, which are squeezing network operators' ability to keep up with demand."

A spokesperson from the ASA told Tech Brief that while the regulator had not been "inundated" with complaints, there was a "fair volume" from people who felt mislead by the claims of the broadband providers, many of whom have a fair usage policy buried in the small print.

Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today, as Lewis Carroll wisely declared.

• Mark Zuckerberg might not want to plan a holiday in Pakistan any time soon. Privacy International reports that the founder of Facebook is the subject of a formal complaint to the police known as an FIR (First Information Report), which can pave the way to a trial.

He is accused of blasphemy following the controversial images of the Prophet Muhammad which appeared on the social-networking service.

Under Pakistan law, blasphemy is punishable by death or lifelong imprisonment - although Mr Zuckerberg could not be extradited from the US to stand trial.

Says Simon Davies of Privacy International:

"This order by the High Court to the government essentially means that a prima facie case has already been made against Facebook's founder, clearing the way for a charge and prosecution to follow."

• BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT wants you to vote for your favourite information pioneer. At time of writing, Alan Turing is firmly in the lead, so if you want Sir Clive Sinclair, rather bizarrely championed by ex-cricketer Phil Tufnell, or Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Hedy Lamarr or Ada Lovelace to be in with a chance, then get clicking. It's like Britain's Got Talent. Only good.

On the BCS website, actress Miranda Raison presents a video tribute to movie star/inventor Hedy Lamarr:

"If you're watching this film right now on a wireless connection... that is, in part, thanks to Hedy Lamarr. And of all the many roles she played, that of inventor is probably the most amazing."

You've got until 30 June to cast your vote.

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to @bbctechbrief on Twitter, tag them bbctechbrief on Delicious or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

Links in full

• Certpiles | Orange trials HD Voice before late Summer rollout
• Ronan Shields | New Media Age | Broadband brands drop 'unlimited' claims
• Simon Davies | Nieman Journalism Lab | Pakistan's internet crisis
• BCS | Information pioneers

On Tech Brief today: Is your humble mobile phone a supercomputer in disguise? And bringing home the reality of the BP oil spill.

• It may have an embarrassing ringtone and a cracked screen but that mobile phone in your pocket is still a little powerhouse, says a blogger called Walking Randomly.

Inspired by our recent series about supercomputers (most kind), Mr WR used an adapted format of the Linpack benchmarks used to measure the speeds of the world's fastest machines to measure the processing speed of his Android mobile:

"[A] tweaked Motorola Droid is capable of scoring 52 Mflop/s which is over 15 times faster than the 1979 Cray 1 CPU. Put another way, if you transported that mobile phone back to 1987 then it would be on par with the processors in one of the fastest computers in the world of the time, the ETA 10-E, and they had to be cooled by liquid nitrogen."

Walking Randomly's own trusty mobile turned out to be 2.3 Mflop/s - or 66% as fast as a single processor on a Cray 1. How sweet.

• While the BP oil spill crisis rages on, Andy Lintner has made an impressive mash-up map to demonstrate how big an area the leaked oil would cover if it were a little closer to home.

You key in your location and the spill appears there. So if the leak had occurred in Nottingham UK, for example, it would have stretched widthways from Bangor to Grimsby and lengthways from Scarborough to Cheltenham:

"The data used to create the spill image comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA releases a daily report detailing where the spill is going to be within the next 24 hours. They do this by collecting data from a number of sources, including satellite imagery and reports by trained observers who have made helicopter flights back and forth across the potentially affected areas. This data is entered into several leading computer models by NOAA oceanographers along with information about currents and winds in the gulf."

• Oh dear. Wired magazine's weighty 500MB iPad app hasn't gone down very well in some parts of the blogosphere. On his blog Interfacelab Jon Gilkison compares it to an old-school CD-ROM and says it's a bit too 20th-Century for his liking:

"My gut feeling is that there is a massive opportunity to reinvent the concept of a magazine - yet we end up with something akin to what the web was like in the mid to late 90s. This basically boils down to a print designer's vision of what the web should be like - but in this case it's a print magazine person's vision of what an interactive magazine should be like."

Miaow.

• Good news for the somewhat beleaguered BitTorrent - the UK Treasury used it to release datasets about public spending today, reveals Ernesto at TorrentFreak.

"By using BitTorrent to share information with the public, the UK government is in good company. NASA too uses BitTorrent for their 'Visible Earth' project, a massive library of high resolution images of the earth. In addition, several Universities use BitTorrent powered systems to update their computers."

BitTorrent's image has been somewhat tarnished by stories about piracy in recent years, so Ernesto says it's good news for the open-source file-sharer. Tech Monitor remains unconvinced that it's going to get a hero's welcome over at the music industry, though.

• Over at Pocket Lint, Stuart Miles reports that Twitter is user-testing a "you both follow" feature that will enable tweeters to see whether others follow the same people as them:

"It is not clear whether the new feature, which will appear above the followers box on the right hand nav on the Twitter website will only be available to Twitter website users or be added to the vast array of API options available to developers."

Hmm - so you'll be able to see how your followers are networked to each other and to you. Wonder what Facebook makes of that.

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to @bbctechbrief on Twitter, tag them bbctechbrief on Delicious or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

Links in full

• Walking Randomly | Supercomputers Vs Mobile Phones
• Andy Lintner| Ifitwasmyhome |
• Jon Gilkison | Interfacelab | Is This Really The Future of Magazines?
• Ernesto | Torrentfreak | UK Government Uses BitTorrent to Share Public Spending Data
• Stuart Miles | Pocket Lint | Twitter testing "You both follow" feature

• You may have noticed a certain product launch in the UK news headlines today. For those undecided on - or, indeed, uninterested in - the iPad, comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb present you with an alternative: The "BabyBerry" [some language not safe for work]. In the words of one delighted reviewer:

"It's got a cracking 64Gb memory - which is more than can be said for my real baby."

• Actor Adam West, aka TV's original Batman, has been waxing lyrical about gaming, reports Kieron Gillen at Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

"In the same way a painting allows us to gaze upon the faces and souls of people from another age, or a book permits us to linger on the thoughts of great figures from history and fiction, videogames can expand our awareness of the world as it is, was, or might be. The medium is still in its infancy, but read this again in a few years and see if this prediction hasn't come true: as videogaming grows, we will grow."

Well, that's one way of looking at the four hours you've just spent charging about killing the residents of a virtual world.

• Staying with gaming, web security firm Symantec claims to have found a database server containing the stolen account credentials of 44 million online gamers.

If you think your secret life as Zorro the Destroyer isn't worth much hard cash, think again - Symantec says an established World of Warcraft login can fetch up to $28,000. You probably wouldn't be able to get your hands on that cash legitimately:

"It's worth noting that the actual buying and selling of accounts is typically banned by many online gaming and hosting sites, as evidenced by the terms of their EULAs."

• Word reaches Tech Brief that, approximately a million years after the world settled on alternating rather than direct electric current in sockets, DC is enjoying a bit of a revival in the world of data centres. Intel research blogger Guy Allee reports that DC has been found to be far more energy-efficient than its more-popular rival:

"In 2006 we participated with Lawrence Berkley Lab in a study of power for the datacenter. The published, peer- reviewed findings are that you save an astounding 28% over the current North American AC power distribution practices by using DC."

There may be hope for Betamax yet.

• Google has launched its own trading floor reports Douglas MacMillan at Bloomberg Businessweek:

"The plan is to keep the war chest growing safely and ready to be deployed should the right mergers-and-acquisitions opportunities arise."

MacMillan says the traders themselves are well looked after in an office space which includes a climbing wall, massage chairs and murals of tropical sunsets. All that's missing is the margaritas.

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to @bbctechbrief on Twitter, tag them bbctechbrief on Delicious or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

Links in full

• Madeleine Brettingham | BBC Comedy | The Babyberry
• Kieron Gillen| Rock Paper Shotgun | Adam West on video games
• Eoin Ward | Symantec | 44m stolen gaming credentials uncovered
• Guy Allee | Research@Intel | DC: An idea whose time has come and gone?
• Douglas MacMillan| Bloomberg Businessweek | Google's own trading floor

• Self-styled internet entrepreneur Jason Calacanis is planning to delete his Facebook profile live online today, reports Mike Butcher on the Techcrunch blog. Calacanis decided to announce his intentions via JasonNation, a daily e-mail brief with over 23,000 subscribers.

However, the e-mail distribution list somehow turned into a "reply all" free-for-all to the increasing annoyance of everybody on the receiving end, including Mr Calacanis himself. In a tweet, he blames a "newbie" for the error, which has now been resolved:

"wow.... this is not fun. i have so many bounces in my email I can't even diagnose the problem and it's 4am and the baby is awake... nice!"

• Speaking of Twitter, eagle-eyed Tim Ireland, AKA Bloggerheads spotted that the UK's new culture minister, Jeremy Hunt, has deleted all his tweets and cleared his blog history, essentially removing everything he wrote during the election campaign. An explanation has now popped up on his feed:

"For those of you 'concerned' about deleted tweets was just 'new job, new tweets' rather than to hide anything!!"

Whatever you say, Mr Hunt.

• Singer M.I.A has scored a bit of an own goal by giving her new album a name that completely foxes the search engines. Blogger Hipster Runoff reports that the only letter Google recognizes from the cunningly titled "/\/\/\Y/\" (a combination of forward- and back-slashes) is the "Y"... leading to over 2 million results about a certain web directory and search engine. Hipster speculates whether this was M.I.A.'s intention all along:

"Maybe her new album is some sort of marketing gimmick for Yahoo."

• Codebreaker extraordinaire Alan Turing practised his lectures in front of a teddy bear called Porgy. The practice of working through your dilemmas with an inanimate object rather than boring your friends, family or colleagues is known by some as "rubber ducking".

Fast forward to the 21st Century and Porgy has his own Facebook page, set up for him by Bletchley Park fan John Graham-Cumming:

"It's common in the computer industry, at least, to find that talking aloud your problem (even to a teddy) can help organize your thoughts. So, here's Porgy. If you've got a problem: talk to the teddy."

Tech Brief hopes that Porgy understands the privacy settings.

• Say goodbye to awkward meeting venues. Researchers at the University of Tsukuba have created a conference room that re-arranges itself, writes Josh Romero on IEEE Spectrum:

"Select the arrangement you want from a graphical interface, and the tables will move to their new locations. The movement is monitored by an overhead camera with a fish-eye lens, and the software uses a trial-and-error approach to determine the best sequence of motion."

It was designed to save time, but who could resist playing around with the seating arrangements during a particularly boring meeting?

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to @bbctechbrief on Twitter, tag them bbctechbrief on Delicious or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

Links in full

• Mike Butcher | Techcrunch | Jason Calacanis lets his JasonNation Army hit reply all
• Tim Ireland | Bloggerheads | Jeremy Hunt: a minister and his memory hole
• Hipster Runoff | Gewgle: the ultimate hype machine
• John Graham-Cumming | Talking to Porgy
• Josh Romero, | IEEE Spectrum | The conference that re-arranges itself

• Playstation users in Europe had to wait an extra day for the latest map updates to Modern Warfare 2: Call of Duty. The Playstation Store now updates on a Wednesday in Europe but on a Tuesday in the US, which was when the MW2 maps were released.

In the old days, European gamers would have been even more frustrated as the store used to update on a Thursday, according to Playstation Store team blogger Mike Kebby.

• Ryan Naraine at Zdnet reports that popular web browser Opera has issued a fix for a "severe security flaw" in version 10.53 which affects Windows and Mac users. Opera also wins Tech Brief's Tech Jargon Of The Week award for this rather marvellous explanation of what the flaw means:

"Multiple asynchronous calls to a script that modifies the document contents can cause Opera to reference an uninitialized value, which may lead to a crash. To inject code, additional techniques will have to be employed."

You have been warned... We think.

• Petabytes are so 2009, Tech Briefers. Word on the street - OK, in Richard Wray's piece in The Guardian - is that there's a new measurement big enough to describe all the digital data out there - and it's called the zettabyte.

"Research published today estimates that the so-called digital universe grew by 62% last year to 800,000 petabytes - a petabyte is a million gigabytes - or 0.8 zettabytes. That is the equivalent of all the information that could be stored on 75bn Apple iPads, which would equal the digital output from a century's worth of constant tweeting by all of Earth's inhabitants."

• The US Air Force is to issue a cyberwings medal to digital warriors, says Lewis Page in The Register. At first, we didn't quite believe it either. And now we all want one.

Tech. Sgt. Kevin Williams at Airforce Space Command explains the meaning behind the design of the medal, available at basic, senior and masters levels:

"The design element of the badge holds significant meaning. The lightning bolt wings signify the cyberspace domain while the globe signifies the projection of cyber power world-wide. The globe, combined with lightning bolt wings, signifies the Air Force's common communications heritage. The bolted wings, centered on the globe, are a design element from the Air Force Seal signifying the striking power through air, space and cyberspace. The orbits signify the space dimension of the cyberspace domain."

Move over Blue Peter, there's a new badge in town.

• Parlez-vous lolcat? The Tech's Meghan Nelson reports from the 2010 ROFLcon (Roll On The Floor Laughing Convention) at MIT, a gathering of the brains behind internationally popular memes such as I Can Haz Cheezburger and Keyboard Cat.

The group met to discuss how memes translate and travel through different cultures. Keynote speaker Ethan Zuckerman from Havard explained:

"While historically Africa had produced no memes, Kenya had recently created its first. Makmende Amerudi, a pseudo-Chuck Norris, has quickly gone viral in Kenya. Web sites have been established listing Makmende facts, and his portrait has found its way onto parody 10,000 shillings notes."

Cyberwings to the first person who can send one Tech Brief's way.

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to @bbctechbrief on Twitter, tag them bbctechbrief on Delicious or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

Links in full

• Mike Kebby | Playstation Blog | 'Heads-Up' PlayStation Store Update
• Ryan Naraine | ZD Net | Extremely severe flaw in opera web browser
• Richard Wray | The Guardian | Goodbye petabytes, hello zettabytes
• Lewis Page | The Register | US netwar-force Cyber Wings badge unveiled
• Meghan Nelson | The Tech Online | As memes go mainstream, lols