A UK court has sentenced former MI6 software engineer Daniel Houghton, 25, to a mere 12-months in jail for attempting to sell top-secret material to the Dutch for more than $3 million.

And on top of the seemingly light sentence, Houghton was expected to be released today after spending the last nearly 6-months in custody while his case came to trial.

According to the U.S. Justice Department, "Juan Javier Cardenas of Miami pleaded guilty [Wednesday] to one count of conspiracy to traffic in and possess unauthorized credit card numbers with intent to defraud, and one count of trafficking in unauthorized credit card numbers."

When the Secret Service raided Cardenas' home they found more than 25,000 credit card numbers stored on his computer.

The server failure that rendered more than two-dozen Virginia state agencies unable to use their computer systems is finally fixed after a week. The last agency affected by the outage, the Department of Motor Vehicles, was able to reopen for all services Thursday (9/2).

China has begun requiring people show identification before they can purchase a mobile phone or a SIM (subscriber identity module) card. The law extends to foreigners and short-term visitors.

Mexico enacted a simliar law for pre-paid cell phones earlier this year. And U.S. Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and John Cornyn (R-TX) in May proposed legislation that would require individuals in the U.S. to "register" pre-paid cell phones.

First India forced Research in Motion (RIM) to open up BlackBerry messaging data to government monitoring and now it appears it is Google's and Skype's turns.

It is being reported that the Indian government plans to send the search giant and the VoIP provider letters insisting they set up servers in India and give access to their data.

The UK's Telegraph reports that last week the website for Britain's Belvoir Castle, the family seat of the 11th Duke of Rutland, was hijacked by a group of Algerian hackers who changed the home page to "a black page displaying the Algerian flag and a tirade against the Jewish state in Arabic."

You might ask why someone might do this? Well turns out the "hapless Middle-Eastern 'cyber-pirates', as the Telegraph describes them, mistook Belvoir Castle's website for that of the one belonging to Belvoir Fortress in Israel.

Virginia's Department of Motor Vehicles still cannot process driver's licenses or identification cards at any of its customer service centers because of what the Virginia Information Technologies Agency describes as the state's "unprecedented" storage system outage that began last Wednesday.