An Estonian court has fined a man tied to hacking official Web sites during last year’s riots over the moving of a Soviet war memorial.

The court of Harju district, whose jurisdiction includes the capital Tallinn, said it had fined the 20-year-old 17,500 kroons ($1,635) for bringing down the server Web site of the ruling- coalition- leading Reform Party.

Securing one’s server is a waste of time if someone leaves a spreadsheet full of usernames and passwords where it can be found with a public search.

Notable blogger Robert Scoble pushed the Facebook envelope a little too hard with an automated script and ended up with a disabled account.

Ron Paul fared a little too well in a post-Republican debate poll run by CNBC, prompting the news site’s managing editor to believe astroturfing had taken place, forcing them to take down the poll.

Four days of the search industry’s biggest gathering starts in San Jose, where attendees can learn the finer points about marketing effectively and ranking well with the drivers of search-related traffic.

Third parties could hack someone’s place in Google’s SERPs right out of the index with some malicious proxy work.

GayGamers.net isn’t so gay lately. (Look, if you want me to avoid the gratuitous puns, you’re going to be severely disappointed.) The site was hate-hacked over the weekend.

Not every company believes they should be writing blogs, but that doesn’t mean they don’t find blogs important. Just listen to Steve Swasey, Director of Corporate Communications for Internet video renter Netflix: “We don’t have a Netflix blog by design—our philosophy is to let our customers speak.”

Earlier this week, U.S. Representatives Rick Boucher and John Doolittle introduced the Freedom And Innovation Revitalizing U.S. Entrepreneurship Act of 2007 (FAIR USE Act) for consideration in Congress. Mere days after its initial announcement, the bill is already being targeted for suppression by control-hungry content organizations.

Matt Cutts has posted a detailed synopsis of the reinclusion process for sites that have been removed from Google’s index under suspicion of spammy link content. He documents the misfortune of talkorigins.org and its owner, who was none to happy about being removed from Google user queries.

Long Zheng has posted instructions for changing the options in the screensavers that come with Windows Vista RC1.

Amit Agarwal has discovered that Google Talk’s new voicemail feature utilizes the Google Video player and can be hacked to play any MP3 of your choice.

Ahh, why do I fall for this stuff? Nick Carr started a whole debate about why he doesn’t get enough traffic.

Les Orchard, author of “Hacking del.icio.us,” has been in the process of making his way to Silicon Valley, where he will work for the Yahoo-owned Delicious bookmarking service.

The New York Times captured the whole new era of customer evangelism with blogs.

French tech security firm FrSIRT has reported on a high-risk flaw in HP’s network management tool.

The greatest threat to your company’s system isn’t a script kiddie on vacation, but a malicious internal employee.

Today I had coffee with Mike Kaltschnee of Hacking Netflix, Ryan Saghir of Orbitcast (a great satellite radio blog I never heard of) and …

Keith O’Brien at PRWeek.com has a terrific interview with one of my favorite bloggers …

RealNetwork’s plan to distribute iPod compatible tunes via its online music store has been sharply criticized by Apple. The new Harmony software from RealNetwoks is designed to allow users of their Rhapsody online music service to play music on the iPod and other competing devices.

Microsoft employee Laurent Chavet was arrested last week on allegations that he had illegaly accessed former employer AltaVista’s computer system.