Around 70 teenagers had gathered for this weekend event which is the brainchild of Rewired State - an organisation thinking of clever ways to free up public data.

different groups as they spread themselves across the third floor of the Googleplex, taking advantage of the free wi-fi - and food - laid on by the search company.

different groups as they spread themselves across the third floor of the Googleplex, taking advantage of the free wi-fi - and food - laid on by the search company.

If your job involves having to destroy hard disks and make sure that their data is impossible to recover, you’ll know that it can be an expensive business: properly disposing of each hard disk can cost between £5 and £10 and, when you’re managing the IT affairs of potentially large businesses, these costs can mount up.

simply chopping the platter in half wouldn’t remove the data” and confirmed that it could be recovered – but the costs of retrieving any remaining information “would be prohibitive”. That’s because you’d need “something along the lines of an electron scanning microscope” to read the data from the remains of the platter – and those currently sell second-hand for at least £40,000. Tanfield-Johnson also confirmed that, once you’d cracked open a hard disk to extract the platters within, recovering any data would become even more difficult, because you’d need “the same model and make of [circuit] board” to access each track of data on the disk. So, unless you’re willing to spend tens of thousands of pounds, it looks like your data is safe.

cyberspace is dominated by it

Today, computer scientists outline a new way of predicting the next attack so that you can block it in advance.

Last year, computer scientists began exploring a potentially more effective approach: predicting the sites most likely to attack and blocking them in advance. The technique, called highly predictive blacklisting, uses data from past attacks to create a network-type graph out of the pattern of links between victims .

In the UK, full versions of Windows 7 Home Premium -- not an upgrade edition -- are going to cost around £65. That's less than the price the Yanks have to pay just for an upgrade version -- $120 (£72) -- and half what they'll have to cough up for a full version -- $200 (£122).

Anyway: good news, everyone! For once, we can sit back and watch Americans shafting Americans, instead of us. Over pricing, that is. Is this the end of rip-off Britain, or a glorious one-off? Sadly, we suspect the latter, but let us know what you think in the comments.