In their eagerness to prosecutor a 49-year-old woman involved in the Megan Meier suicide tragedy, federal officials are making novel use of an anti-hacking law, potentially making a felon out of anybody who violates the terms-of-service on any website they visit.

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Apple opens its largest store in the United States at 6 p.m. EST today, a glass-and-steel extravaganza in downtown Boston.

The Thursday grand opening is unusual for Apple, and likely coincides with an off day for the Boston Red Sox. Players are rumored to be showing up for the event.

The line to be among the first inside the store numbers more than 300, and stretches back four blocks. Many in line hope to get a free poster and maybe something more. At previous openings, Apple has randomly given away MacBooks, iPods and iTunes gift cards.

Left: The three-story, 20,000-square-foot store sits smack in the middle of the posh Boylston Street shopping strip. The glass-fronted store is sandwiched between a pair of older stone buildings, a juxtaposition described by one Gizmodo commentator as "a diamond in a rock pile."

Photo: Michael Oh/Tech Superpowers

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The Boston store is Apple's second-largest store: The store on London's Regent Street is 28,000 square feet.

Ron Johnson, the head of Apple retailing, said Apple had been eyeing the spot for several years, and that the size of the store is in line with Apple's growth.

“If we had opened this store in 2001, it would have been one level,” Johnson said at a media event Wednesday. “If we had opened it in 2005, it would have been a two-level store. But in 2008, it’s the largest store in the U.S.”

The store will be open for extended hours, but won’t operate 24/7.

Photo: sushiesque/Flickr

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The store has three stories connected by a glass spiral staircase. Computers are on the first floor; iPods, iPhones and accessories on the second; and the troubleshooting Genius Bar on the third floor. The Genius Bar is large enough to handle up to 1,000 queries a day, Apple says.

The product placement is reminiscent of the old supermarket strategy of making shoppers walk through the store to get to staples like bread and milk. Customers are led down the aisles in the hope that they'll pick up more expensive products along the way.

The third floor will also have a "Studio" section for tutorials and personal training. Members of Apple's One to One training program will receive personal tutorials in moviemaking, music, office productivity and more. The store will also host school nights and summer-camp programs.

Photo: sushiesque/Flickr

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The new store is right across the street from another Apple dealer, Tech Superpowers. Afraid his business will be crushed by the new store, owner Michael Oh buried a company shirt below the Apple store to curse it, a la the Red Sox shirt initially buried below the new Yankee Stadium.

"We're doing it with a wink," Oh told the Boston Globe.

Apple now has 210 stores: 183 in the United States and 17 more in Japan, Canada, Britain and Italy. The stores are a cash cow, earning $1.45 billion in the second quarter. Apple plans to open 45 more stores during 2008, concentrating on overseas expansion in China, Europe and Australia.

Photo: sushiesque/Flickr

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Apple received more than 5,000 applications for 165 jobs at the store, according to the Globe.

The staff wears different colored shirts to indicate their roles: "Concierges" who greet new customers wear orange, sales "specialists" wear light blue, and the "geniuses" wear dark blue.

Photo: sushiesque/Flickr

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The design of the store was carefully supervised by Apple CEO Steve Jobs, co-holder of a patent for the signature glass staircase used in many of Apple's "flagship" stores.

The stores use a lot of the same materials and design cues as Apple's products -- steel, glass and aluminum.

Johnson told reporters that the floor is the same stone used in sidewalks in Florence, Italy. “It’s a common palette of materials,” he told Reuters, “both old and new.”

Photo: sushiesque/Flickr

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Apple's stores are built on the idea of bringing "high-touch" service to selling technology. Instead of cacophonous big-box stores staffed by ill-informed and unkempt teenagers, Apple's stores are no-pressure spaces where consumers can get comfortable with machines before making a purchase.

Photo: sushiesque/Flickr

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The store has a number of green touches. There's a characteristic skylight in the roof -- Steve Jobs and his architects are fans of natural light. And the rooftop features a small garden, covered in grass (the kind that's mown, not smoked).

The building collects and filters rainwater, which is fed into Boston's Back Bay water table.

"We're highly confident that we've built a store here that is going to have a great [positive] environmental impact," Johnston said.

Photo: jdlouhy/Flickr

Deals with a couple of indie labels get the service off the ground.

The judge who presided over the nation's first file sharing trial says he is considering granting a retrial. The judge said that Jammie Thomas, who was being sued by the recording industry, may not have gotten a fair trial.

The odds General Motors will have the Volt rolling off an assembly line by the end of 2010 are much stronger now that it's got the lithium-ion battery and gas-electric drivetrain in a test car.

CNET staffers are joking that CBS bought their company purely for the coveted News.com domain name. But nobody is complaining about the windfall.

"The scuttlebutt … around here is that News.com will be used for CBS' News operations and that our News.com will end up being a tab off that page," said one staffer, who asked not to be identified.

It's inconceivable that CBS paid a staggering $1.8 billion just for a domain name, but nonetheless, most of the reporters at News.com -- the tech news division of CNET -- are expecting that CBS will take the domain name for its own news operation, the staffer said.

"It does seem clear we will lose our domain name," the staffer said. "At least we have a parent that's solid and has some money -- and isn't News Corp."

Once the highflier of online media, CNET has recently been rocked by stock option scandals, hostile takeover attempts, layoffs and staff attrition. Skeleton crews run many departments and morale is low.

While CBS is seen as stodgy, the company is stable and has a solid reputation for supporting the expensive business of news.

Delighted rank and file are busy trying to tabulate the worth of their shares, which they've been told will all vest immediately.

CBS paid a premium $11.50 per share for CNET, a 44-percent premium above CNET's closing price yesterday.

"We feel it's pretty good news, and we're all pretty happy," said another employee at CNET who also asked not to be named. "It was a good price, and we're all going to make a bit of money off of it."

None of the staffers have yet been told CBS's plans but a company-wide meeting is scheduled for next Tuesday, they said.

"Me personally, my initial reaction was 'Oh, fuck, corporate media is getting to us.'" said one CNET designer, who also asked not to be identified. "Every channel of communication in this country is owned by five or six companies, and we're joining that group … I just don't know if there's a way around that anymore."

But the designer said, generally, the staff welcomed the acquisition.

"The general feeling in the small talk going around is that this is a positive development," the designer said. "We're finally going to have some money behind us, because CNET has been hurting for the last couple of months. The first two quarters have been kind of hard, so I think this comes as good news, because obviously CBS is a big company that has a lot of capital."

"The mood is light. People are upbeat about it," said one staffer. "There's no worrying or anything. I think people think it's a good thing overall for the company."

The silly shill with the fuzzy green hair and the oversize shoes expands his empire with a pair of theme-park rides.

Toyota has sold 1,028,000 Prius hybrids in the past decade. Sales have gone through the roof as gas prices reach record levels, and Toyota can't keep up with demand. Supplies are dwindling and prices are climbing.

WWDC 2008 will undoubtedly see some major announcements from Apple. But what? Here we predict what El Jobso will proclaim at his keynote complete with easy to digest Vegas odds.

Federal prosecutors accused the Missouri woman of conspiring to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by setting up a fake MySpace profile as a 16-year-old boy, to manipulate a 13-year-old girl who wound up committing suicide.

Major parts of the government's proposed $17 billion computer-security plan are actually spying programs, according to a Senate committee's budget report. The committee also faulted the plan for excessive secrecy around privacy and civil liberties issues and for funding experimental and possibly illegal technologies.

Sci-fi show Dollhouse will center on a secret government agency that manages a team of assassins with erasable memories, deadly skills and interchangeable personalities.

MS Word lets you password-protect your documents. But if you lose or forget that password, say sayonara to your 200,000 word novel. Wired’s How-To Wiki shows you how to regain access to your orphaned docs.

Two major articles in the journal Science focus on the dangers posed by the increasing levels of reactive nitrogen on Earth driven by industry and agriculture.

In the information age, we all have a data shadow.

We leave data everywhere we go. It's not just our bank accounts and stock portfolios, or our itemized bills, listing every credit card purchase and telephone call we make. It's automatic road-toll collection systems, supermarket affinity cards, ATMs and so on.

It's also our lives. Our love letters and friendly chat. Our personal e-mails and SMS messages. Our business plans, strategies and offhand conversations. Our political leanings and positions. And this is just the data we interact with. We all have shadow selves living in the data banks of hundreds of corporations' information brokers -- information about us that is both surprisingly personal and uncannily complete -- except for the errors that you can neither see nor correct.

What happens to our data happens to ourselves.

This shadow self doesn't just sit there: It's constantly touched. It's examined and judged. When we apply for a bank loan, it's our data that determines whether or not we get it. When we try to board an airplane, it's our data that determines how thoroughly we get searched -- or whether we get to board at all. If the government wants to investigate us, they're more likely to go through our data than they are to search our homes; for a lot of that data, they don't even need a warrant.

Who controls our data controls our lives.

It's true. Whoever controls our data can decide whether we can get a bank loan, on an airplane or into a country. Or what sort of discount we get from a merchant, or even how we're treated by customer support. A potential employer can, illegally in the U.S., examine our medical data and decide whether or not to offer us a job. The police can mine our data and decide whether or not we're a terrorist risk. If a criminal can get hold of enough of our data, he can open credit cards in our names, siphon money out of our investment accounts, even sell our property. Identity theft is the ultimate proof that control of our data means control of our life.

We need to take back our data.

Our data is a part of us. It's intimate and personal, and we have basic rights to it. It should be protected from unwanted touch.

We need a comprehensive data privacy law. This law should protect all information about us, and not be limited merely to financial or health information. It should limit others' ability to buy and sell our information without our knowledge and consent. It should allow us to see information about us held by others, and correct any inaccuracies we find. It should prevent the government from going after our information without judicial oversight. It should enforce data deletion, and limit data collection, where necessary. And we need more than token penalties for deliberate violations.

This is a tall order, and it will take years for us to get there. It's easy to do nothing and let the market take over. But as we see with things like grocery store club cards and click-through privacy policies on websites, most people either don't realize the extent their privacy is being violated or don't have any real choice. And businesses, of course, are more than happy to collect, buy, and sell our most intimate information. But the long-term effects of this on society are toxic; we give up control of ourselves.

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Bruce Schneier is Chief Security Technology Officer of BT, and author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.

Researchers at Darpa, the Pentagon's advanced tech-development group, are exploring the use of electromagnetic fields and sonic waves as viable alternatives for snuffing out fires.

Prosecutors say an indictment is likely today in the case of a MySpace hoax that led to the suicide of a 13-year-old girl.

The M&A market is hopping, as evidenced by a slew of big-buck deals, including CBS' $1.8 billion acquisition of CNET.

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From "sky girls" to "stews" to "flight attendants," the story of the airline stewardess is an evolutionary tale. Originally established as an in-flight nursing corps, the earliest stewardesses also served as waitresses, baggage handlers and auxiliary ground crew. As commercial flying grew up, the role of the stewardess changed. Along the way, she reflected her time, evolving from novelty to workhorse to sex symbol, yet always serving with professional competence.

For more on the origins of what we now know as female flight attendants, see This Day In Tech.

Left: In the days before computer check-in, the stewardess kept a passenger manifest on her clipboard.

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Miniskirts, hairspray and polyester, the official look of the 1960s air hostess.

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With a stew's welcoming smile and casual manner, how could flying possibly be scary?

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These waving TWA stews pose in front of the distinctive tail of a Constellation, a workhorse in the 1950s and one of the more successful planes in the history of commercial aviation.

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Remember walking across the tarmac and boarding the aircraft from the rear door? This TWA stewardess does.

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United Airlines stewardesses were prized for their manual dexterity. At least, that's what this ad from the '60s would have you believe.

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Working hard, yet fresh as a daisy. Notice all those stops along the way home.

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Which do you prefer? High hair with hot pants, or the more restrained miniskirt?

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No carrier traded on the female charms of its hostesses quite like Pacific Southwest Airlines did. The neon-colored micro minis were regulation, as were those unfortunate hats.

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Southwest Airlines did not staff each Boeing 727 with a dozen stewardesses. This is merely a publicity shot.

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In the 1960s, regional carriers used sexy stews in hot pants to lure passengers aboard. This one appears to be rolling a joint, although she probably isn't.

It sure looks like Cox and Comcast are blocking file-sharing connections. The Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Saarbruecken, Germany surveyed 8,175 Internet users around the world and found conclusive evidence of the practice at only three ISPs, including StarHub in Singapore.