Watson, an IBM computer (or supercomputer) that serves as a highly-advanced Question Answering system (QA system), is tied with Brad Rutter, the all-time Jeopardy! money winner (3.2 million) who has never lost a game of Jeopardy!, after the first round of the game show concluded tonight.

There’s been a lot of talk this week about the announcement of President Obama’s planned “Internet ID”, but very little of it actually contains any substance about how such an Internet identity plan would actually work. That’s because nobody really knows. There really is no plan yet; as far as anybody can tell at this point it’s all just a proposal to plan to have a plan to create a national Cyber ID, although that proposed plan does have a name, the “National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace”, and is said to be being drafted as we speak. Really, the most important part of the announcement of the national cyber identity plan is that it names the U.S. Commerce Department as having authority over any such plan, rather than Homeland Security or the NSA.

The growing backlash against the arrest of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, and the suspension of Internet hosting and financial funding services such as MasterCard, Visa and Paypal (through which Wikileaks was receiving donations) have led to retaliation by so-called ‘hacktavists’ in the form of DOS and other cyber-attacks against the websites of MasterCard, Visa, Paypal, and those Internet hosting and DNS services which have disconnected Wikileaks, in some cases bringing the services to their knees. Paypal was brought down yesterday, as were MasterCard and Visa.

Work sucks, or so a lot of people say. With 92 percent of the American workforce unsatisfied with their jobs, this much is obvious. But what isn’t so obvious is that adjustments can be made in the workplace that greatly increase employee morale, according to Lynda Barbaccia. In this interview, Ms. Barbaccia talks with us about workplace issues and how to address them.

Andrea Raynor has seen her share of suffering. She served as chaplain to the morgue at Ground Zero in the aftermath of September 11th, and she is currently a hospice chaplain. The challenges that Raynor has faced uniquely qualify her to discuss and advise on the similarities and differences of losing a loved one unexpectedly through unanticipated tragedy, versus the (relatively) long goodbye of an illness, and, most importantly, how to support those left behind in each case. In this interview, Andrea addresses precisely these topics, among others, as well as shares some of the stories of her incredible life.

Spamza.com is a website that recently went live, where you can enter someone’s – anyone’s – email address, and they will start getting instantly spammed by dozens of newsletters for which they did not sign up. If you’ve had a sudden increase in spam or suddenly found yourself signed up for a lot of mailing lists and newsletters that you didn’t request, Spamza may be why. You see, the Spamza site runs a script that takes their email address and then Spamza signs them up for those newsletters, without their permission.

The Defonic Crew, also known as the Defonic Team Screen Name Club, or just DFNCTSC for short, is the hacking group to which the young hacker who hacked Paris Hilton’s Sidekick belonged. Now the youngest member of Defonic Crew has pleaded guilty to the hacking.

Apparently despairing of what is happening to Chinese youth as a result of violent online games (can’t wait for Aunty’s groupie, Kailee, to chime in here), the Chinese government has said that from now on, minors are prohibited from playing games which involve players killing other players (known as “PK”,…

The below which came across Aunty’s desk today is somewhat dense to read, but the bottom line is that they are suggesting what is being called a “reverse 911” – that mobile communications devices are the next new line of defense for citizens during a crisis such as a terror…

It’s finally happened. Send-Safe, the choice of spammers the world ’round, has finally been kicked off the MCI network. Of course Send-Safe had a safe harbour in MCI for way too long – Send-Safe was able to to provide safe sending services to spammers through the MCI network despite months…