Steve Jobs' death greatly exaggerated

Taking a page from Mark Twain, an obituary of Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs was accidentally published on Bloomberg's wire service on Wednesday, reports CRN.

The premature obituary was in the process of being updated and was marked as "hold, not for release", according to media gossip site Gawker.com, which printed the report before it was immediately taken off the wire service. It is common practice for news organisations to update obituaries of leading public figures before their death to keep information as up to date as possible.

Red-faced Bloomberg editors deleted the story and wrote: "An incomplete story referencing Apple was inadvertently published by Bloomberg News at 4.27pm, New York time today. The item was never meant for publication and has been retracted," according to Gawker.

The European Court of Human Rights has refused to intervene in preventing the US extradition of accused Pentagon hacker Gary McKinnon, says The Register.

The ruling by the seven-judge court, made Thursday, kills off McKinnon's last hope to avoid extradition to the US to face charges of hacking into US military and Nasa systems, following the rejection of his appeal by the House of Lords last month.

McKinnon's lawyers appealed to the court on the grounds that his condition of detention if extradited and convicted in the US would be degrading. However, the court decided on Thursday not to allow the case to proceed, clearing an injunction that prevented McKinnon's extradition.

Self-checkout systems in UK supermarkets are being targeted by hi-tech criminals with stolen credit card details, reports The BBC.

A BBC investigation has unearthed a plan hatching online to loot US bank accounts via the checkout systems.

Fake credit cards loaded with details from the accounts will be used to get cash or buy high-value goods.

Google has undone an earlier ban on the Mozilla Public Licence (MPL), an option for open source projects hosted at its Google Code site, says CNet.

Ostensibly as part of an effort to discourage the proliferation of open source licences, Google dropped support for the MPL earlier in August. Now, though, the company reconsidered, restoring it and adding support for the Eclipse Public Licence as well.

Before, the company had tried to discourage the increase in the number of open source licences; having multiple licences can increase legal costs and in some cases prohibit mingling code from one open source project to another.