'Rogue' Internet firm shut down

An Internet firm linked to many of the Internet's criminal gangs has been shut down, says The BBC.

The US Federal Trade Commission said Belize-based 3FN aided gangs that ran botnets, carried out phishing attacks and traded in images of child abuse.

The servers and net hardware of 3FN have been seized and are due to be sold off as the firm is dismantled.

Sprint has issued a firmware update along with a warning for users running the HTC Hero smartphone, reveals Computing.co.uk.

The mobile operator said that the Android 2.1 'Eclair' update effectively wipes all data from the smartphone, and that users should back up any data before installing the update.

"You will lose contacts that have not been synchronised with an e-mail account, text messages that have not been forwarded, saved voicemail messages older than five days, voicemails older than 20 days that have not been listened to, and call history," Sprint said in an advisory.

The Facebook security gaffes keep coming, with the latest being a bug that allows hackers to delete all of a users' site friends without permission, reports The Register.

The flaw was reported Wednesday by college student Steven Abbagnaro, but 48 hours later it could still be exploited to delete an IDG reporter's Facebook friends. Abbagnaro has written proof-of-concept code that uses publicly available data from Facebook to systematically delete all of a user's friends.

"A malicious hacker could combine an exploit for this bug with spam or even a self-copying worm code to wreak havoc on the social network," IDG said.

Pac-Man has turned 30, making it one of the few early games to have survived the novelty of the arcade era, writes The Washington Post.

The addictive video offering with that minimalist chomping circle has been tweaked and remade repeatedly; there have been more than 50 versions of the landmark maze game.

More than 10 billion games of Pac-Man have been played worldwide, and back in the day, Namco licensed nearly 294 000 arcade editions of the original, and its success spawned numerous ancillary cottage industries.