The AP has another story on Chinese tech espionage. Did Chinese hack U.S. official's laptop? As usual the details seem scarce on what actually happened. Stolen passwords? Stolen information on network layout? Trojan document?

U.S. authorities are investigating whether Chinese officials secretly copied the contents of a government laptop computer during a visit to China by Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez and used the information to try to hack into Commerce computers, officials and industry experts told The Associated Press.

...

In the period after Gutierrez returned from China in December, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team ...

A few old acquaintances of mine successfully got me to join a few social networking sites. Since then I've gone off to check out many others. One of the others is Plaxo. At Plaxo they have neatly provided users a method of showing the world separate professional and personal profiles. The privacy permissions on who gets to see what information is based around 3 classes of contacts.

Business Network - Colleagues, classmates, folks you've met along the way.

Friend - Your real life friends. (Not your "social network friends")

Family Member - Mom, Dad, spouse, siblings, cousins... You get the picture ...

So Steve Gillmor over at Tech Crunch has an interesting thought on the Facebook/Google spat over data access via an API.

Mac users of Facebook have already faced this issue with the slap at the developer of FacebookAB Sync.

# Please stop emailing me about FacebookSync (6/12/2007)
I have not sent anyone a copy of FacebookSync who has emailed me and asked, nor will I in the future. If you wish to obtain a copy of FacebookSync, please do so elsewhere and make a Facebook group or blog post about where it is or something. If it bothers ...

So browsing around various social sites, I decided to check out the Dead.net community. rec.music.gdead and the two Dead mailing lists administered by gumby were some major internet-based social networks/communities when the founder of Facebook was in diapers.

Signing up to new social networking sites always means a look at the terms of service. As fitting with the Dead's rather anarchic community, there were very few rules. Generally they fit in to the classic liberal mentality of "be respectful of the other person's time and space".

The last item on the list though made ...

So is Firefox 3.0 getting close to being finalised and moved from beta status? I haven't wandered over to the developers' sites to check on the discussions, but the CVS commits over the last 3 or 4 days have been minimal. Some tweaking of the xforms/install.js file and a few others. But nothing has been commited on places (the new bookmark manager) or the major interface files in days. So we could be getting very close.

On the bright side as 3.0 gets closer, more and more of the extensions are being updated to be ...