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.

Earlier this month the Indian government issued an ultimatum to Research in Motion (RIM) to either come up with a "technical solution" that allows for the "lawful interception" of data from some of its services or face a ban. Well RIM met the deadline, and the Indian government will now test RIM's solution for the next "60 days to see if it allows both its messenger and enterprise mail services to be tapped by security agencies, Indian home ministry spokesman Onkar Kedia said today", reports Bloomberg.

The failure of computer servers at the Virginia Information Technologies Agency (VITA) on Wednesday (8/25) has affected the ability of at least two-dozen state agencies to do their jobs. According to VITA, "A storage area network (SAN) failed. Redundancy also failed." The problems are still being worked on and it will be at least Monday until everything is back up and running.

The state's DMV has been particularly hard hit and as of this morning it still could not process driver's licenses at its customer centers.