Google may have crossed a thin line last week by putting Pac-Man on its front page, its most prized asset, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the legendary game. This may well be the beginning of a new kind of marketing with Google replacing its logo with specially crafted adverts to evangelise a product or in Pac-man's case, a game. Doing so however may dilute Google's branding something they might not be too keen to make. But then, if a company like Nintendo came with $10 million for one day on Google's front page, that might be a very powerful argument.

ITProPortal 

Semiconductor giant Intel has announced the release of new Core i3, i5 and i7 ultra low voltage processors that pile even more pressure on smaller rival AMD. The processors, which are all built using Intel's 32nm manufacturing process, are set to be used in more than 40 laptops from a number of manufacturers including Dell, Acer, Gateway, Lenovo, MSI and Asus.

ITProPortal  

Facebook is to revise its privacy settings within weeks to make it simpler for people to keep their information private, according to Mark Zuckerberg, its founder and chief executive of the giant social network. Acknowledging a growing level of irritation among the site's 450m users, Zuckerberg said: "Simply put, many of you thought our controls [for determining who could see information about you] were too complex. Our intention was to give you lots of granular controls; but that may not have been what many of you wanted. We just missed the mark."

The Guardian 

The Treasury's decision to close the education ICT agency Becta by November, cutting £80m from this financial year's government budget, has dismayed its 240 staff – and some teachers who found its work especially useful because it provided a central platform for standardising on technology. The move has been made as part of the government's wider programme of cuts worth £6.2bn for 2010-11.

The Guardian 

Experts in social networking, data management and bereavement last week called for sites such as Google, Facebook and MySpace to agree a common policy for dealing with users' data after their death. The Digital Death Day meeting at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, brought together authors, lawyers, funeral directors and digital activists to discuss what should be done with the billions of pages of content held by social networks, blogging sites and online games after the users that created them have died.

ThinQ 

Fed up of your satnav being inaccurate by the odd metre? No, perhaps not. You've probably never even noticed that it isn't 100 per cent accurate. For military operations, though, the margin for error could mean the difference between life and death.  But a new fleet of satellites being launched means that the GPS system is going to become far more accurate. Still not 100 per cent mind, but pretty close. The system is, according to reports, going to be accurate to within an arm's length.  

Nasa has said that the Phoenix Mars lander has stopped transmission after being damaged by ice during the long Martian winter. The Phoenix probe, which landed on Mars two years ago almost to the day, has so far failed to respond to contact attempts by the Mars Odyssey orbiter despite over 60 fly-bys. It is thought that ice has infiltrated the landed and rendered its computer systems inoperable.

Micro-blogging site Twitter has decided to ban all third-party advertisers from injected paid Tweets into the service. The company said that it would be amending its developer terms of service to include a clause which bans third parties from using the service's API framework to inject advertising into Twitter streams.

V3 

Hand gesture technology may be on the cusp of a new era with the forthcoming launch of Project Natal, but some multicoloured Lycra could be the key to drastically reducing the cost of the technology. MIT graduate Robert Wang and associate professor Jovan Popovic have devised a simple method of capturing visual data from a human hand using nothing more than a traditional webcam and a specially designed Lycra glove costing less than $1 (65p) to mass-produce. 

Wired 

When you're building a datacentre, the biggest problem you've got is often getting rid of the heat generated by so many computers running in such a small area. Some data centres just pump it out into the outside world. Others use the excess energy to heat local homes. But TelecityGroup's newest datacentre, Condorcet -- which opened in Paris earlier in the year, uses its heat to conduct research into climate change.

Wired