Up front: Microsoft no longer needs Money

Thursday's tech headlines

Wired

• First they get Colbert for a week, and now some of our Army soldiers are getting back their access to Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. Noah Shachtman has a look at the memo from the Army's 93rd Signal Brigade.

• Federal prosecutors in Virginia have brought the hammer down on ten members of a national gang specializing in identity theft and... pickpocketing? Yes, the "Cannon to the Wiz" gang is clearly a bit of a steampunk outfit. The group apparently targeted large crowds and, in some instances, federal employees donating to charity.

• A stir-crazy reporter, housebound throughout her long workday, has to respect the moxie it took for Michael Calore to propose a story on the tech infrastructure of AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants. There's good stuff in the article, though, and some nice photos.

The Wall Street Journal

• A new use for Twitter emerges as a University of Hertfordshire researches deploys the service to test the possibility of... oh dear... extra-sensory perception. Okay, it's not exactly theoretical physics, but one must start somewhere.

• De-duplication is all the rage among the data-storage cognoscenti lately. There's the bizarre EMC-NetApp-Data Domain love triangle, of course, but Justin Scheck has news of recent Dell maneuvers in the space and what they mean.

• A number of sites have basic coverage of talks between Sprint and Level 3 Communications about combining long-distance forces, but Amol Sharma has a particularly clear account.

The Register

• The demise of Microsoft Money has made fewer headlines than one might expect, but The Reg dives in, noting that this is just one of several high-profile closures for Microsoft this year. (More on that in What's Next.)

• Various security experts are warning the Chinese government that its scheme to put "Green Dam Youth Escort" filtering software on all its machines will breed a computer monoculture vulnerable to hackers. Yeah, that'll wave them off the plan.

The New York Times

• Addressing the fury expressing by a number of iPhone owners who don't like the upgrade terms set by Apple and AT&T, Saul Hansell declares the gadget to be less of a purchase and more of a subscription.

• After a remarkably tedious introduction (so you're old and you're playing Call of Duty, so what?), Tom Vanderbilt hands in an interesting look at the role data centers play in our lives. Tech-literate readers can safely jump down to the section subtitled "Inside the Cloud."