From Waikiki to Miami, the number of beaches offering wireless internet access is growing every year. Here's a rundown of the hottest spots for surfside Wi-Fi (just in case you're determined to ruin your vacation). By Marty Graham.

Meet Pleo, the snuffling, stretching, oddly convincing robotic dinosaur. You are so going to want one. By Clive Thompson from Wired magazine.

This coffee-bar staple is off-limits to vegans and could potentially explode. By Patrick Di Justo from Wired magazine.

If your morning cup of joe is maniacally important to you, consider the exciting caffeine technology that is just around the bend. Commentary by Lore Sjöberg.

Congress and the courts will take on some thorny tech issues in the coming year. Here are the two that will loom largest, and the likely outcomes. Commentary by Jennifer Granick.

The gang at Gadget Lab retools for the new year, but first they aim a double-barrel blast of reviews your way. Check out a souped-up PC gaming rig, a geeky smartphone and the ultimate Bluetooth earbuds. From Gadget Lab.

As Moore's Law runs out of steam, the big leaps in computer technology are coming from hard-drive manufacturers. How about a 300-terabit iPod in a few years -- big enough to store the entire uncompressed Library of Congress? Rob Beschizza tours Seagate's labs in Pittsburgh.

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Why Jim Christy, the Pentagon's toughest internet crime fighter, hangs out with hackers. By Robin Mejia for Wired magazine.

Hackers and sympathizers converge at the 23rd annual Chaos Communication Congress -- 4,200 of them -- flying their mini surveillance copters and wearing LED clothes.

Magical, musical, invasive and even persuasive, tomorrow's fanciful furnishings cater to our every whim, even those we're barely aware of. Commentary by Momus.

What do Technorati, Digg, FeedBurner, Zillow and Facebook have in common? They'd all make excellent trophies for the wannabe Web 2.0 entrepreneur flush with cash. By Christopher Null from Wired magazine.

Computers will be instant-on, Digg becomes the new Friendster and virtual adultery ends in real-life murder. Here are our predictions for 2007. By Wired News staff. Plus: 2006 Foot-in-Mouth Awards

Gruber Duckie writes "Apple's security update 2006-008, posted yesterday, is a little more interesting than it sounds. According to information (and a demo!) posted at Macslash the "information leak" mentioned in Apple's advisory actually makes it possible for a web site to send whatever your (isight) web cam sees up to the server. I'm glad they fixed this quickly."

mrbill writes "Seems that South Korea and China have mandated Common Cell Phone chargers and data cables. No proprietary chargers and data cables any more. Must use USB for charging etc. "

fiannaFailMan writes to point out The Economist's reporting on the way consumer-driven software products are increasingly making their presence felt in the corporate world. Some CIOs are embracing the influx while others continue to resist it. From the article: "In the past, innovation was driven by the military or corporate markets. But now the consumer market, with its vast economies of scale and appetite for novelty, leads the way. Compared with the staid corporate-software industry, using these services is like 'receiving technology from an advanced civilization,' says [one university CIO]... [M]ost IT bosses, especially at large organizations, tend to be skeptical of consumer technologies and often ban them outright. Employees, in return, tend to ignore their IT departments. Many young people... use services such as Skype to send instant messages or make free calls while in the office. FaceTime, a Californian firm that specializes in making such consumer applications safe for companies, found in a recent survey that more than half of employees in their 20s and 30s admitted to installing such software over the objections of IT staff."

An anonymous reader points out an article in IBM's Crossing Borders series about the language features of JavaScript, surely the Rodney Dangerfield of scripting languages. But with increasing use in such technologies as Ajax, Apache Cocoon, ActionScript, and Rhino, some industry leaders are taking a fresh look at the language. From the article: "Nearly every Web developer has cursed JavaScript at one time or another. Until recently, many developers had all but written off JavaScript as a necessary evil at best or a toy at worst... But JavaScript is becoming increasingly important, and it remains the most broadly available scripting language for Web development."

alphadogg writes "Badly designed Web sites may have negative effects on a user's immune, cardiovascular, and nervous systems, a study says. The study of 2,500 users was commissioned by Rackspace Managed Hosting and published by the UK's Social Issues Research Centre. It found that five technology flaws in Web sites may have deleterious effects." How long before the first class action suit in the U.S. over bad Web site design?

Michi writes "Brady Forrest at O'Reilly Radar reports that Google has deprecated their SOAP API; they aren't giving out any new SOAP Search API keys. Nelson Minar (the original author of the Google SOAP API) argues that this move is motivated by business reasons rather than technical ones. Does this mark the beginning of the end for SOAP or for ubiquitous middleware in general?" Forrest's post quotes developer Paul Bausch: "This is such a bad move because the Google API was the canonical example of how web services work. Not only is Google Hacks based on this API, but hundreds of other books and online examples use the Google API to show how to incorporate content from another site into a 3rd party application."

An anonymous reader writes to point out that a critique of Digital Rights Management made it onto the mainstream media this morning. NPR's Marketplace Morning Report ran a piece noting that with the demise of the VHS format we risk losing fair-use rights since we now have only digital media. From the article: "As our country moves forward to regulate digital copying, I urge us all to bear in mind T. S. Eliot's famous saying. 'Good poets borrow; great poets steal.'"

prostoalex writes "Ever get that warm feeling of safety, when the anti-phishing toolbar on Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 turns green, telling you it's safe to shop on the site you're visiting? Well, you probably don't, but the millions of Internet users who will soon be running IE7 probably will be paying attention to the anti-phishing warnings. WSJ.com is reporting on how Microsoft is making it tough for small businesses to assure they're treated properly by the anti-phishing algorithm." From the article: "[S]ole proprietorships, general partnerships and individuals won't be eligible for the new, stricter security certificates that Microsoft requires to display the color. There are about 20.6 million sole proprietorships and general partnerships in the U.S... though it isn't clear how many are engaged in e-commerce... 'Are people going to trust the green more than white? Yes, they will,' says Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner Inc. and an expert on online payments and fraud. 'All the business is going to go to the greens, it's kind of obvious.'"