UK

Accused NASA and U.S. government hacker Gary McKinnon reportedly has denied a court-requested medical procedure to assess whether he is fit to be extradited to the United States.

McKinnon, 46, accused in 2002 of hacking into nearly a hundred computers belonging to the Pentagon and NASA, has been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism that induces repetitive behaviors and makes social interactions difficult. His mother and lawyers have argued that he is at risk of committing suicide if he is extradited,

We've talked about how the Olympics are so focused on hiding any non-sponsor brand that they had officials in Beijing during the last Olympics tape over bathroom fixtures from non-sponsoring companies. And it was clear that this same sort of activity was set to continue this time around in London, including a specific law against "ambush marketing."

Two men have been jailed for their part in a cleverly-targeted phishing scam that managed to steal a total of £1.5 million ($2.3 million) from UK students by impersonating the official loans company.

Timed to coincide with the award of loans last August, the men - Britons Damola Clement Olatunji and Amos Njoroge Mwangi  - were found to have separately sent out large numbers of emails asking students to confirm their bank account details via a bogus website.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has announced a contract extension for cyber security services from BT Global Services.

The seven-year contract builds extra capabilities on top of an existing commercial off the shelf-based cyber defence solution that BT provides to protect the MoD's global IT estate, called eCND (enhanced computer network defence). The system also has an incident archive to enable the MoD to learn from previous events.

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has told MPs that its Edinburgh-based IT staff were responsible for the systems failure that affected millions of customers for more than a week last month.

It contradicts media reports that claimed a junior IT worker based in India made the error that led to the IT problem that affected 17 million customers of RBS, NatWest and Ulster Bank.

West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS trust is planning to invest £67m in an information management and technology (IM&T) strategy over the next five years.

A spokeswoman for the trust told Guardian Government Computing that the board in approving the plan noted "that where capital funding is required to progress the workstreams, business cases would be developed to support investment decisions".

As part of what one Member of Parliament calls “the most intrusive surveillance regime in the west,” the British government's Home Office is hoping to require ISPs to route all of the data that gets transferred over their servers through a 'black box.' In addition to spying on you, the box will also slow down everyone's connection speed. Sounds like fun.

Two members of the computer hacking group Lulzsec have pleaded guilty to charges they attacked several high profile websites.

Ryan Cleary, 19, and Jake Davis, 18, admitted being part of Lulzsec, an offshoot of the Anonymous collective. They and two others - Ryan Ackroyd, 25, and a 17-year-old boy - deny other similar hacking charges.

Police will arrest Julian Assange even if he is granted asylum with one legal expert claiming his only way out of the country is becoming Ecuador's representative to the UN.

The WikiLeaks founder has spent the past two nights holed up in the South American country’s London embassy, in an attempt to avoid extradition to Sweden for questioning over alleged sex crimes. He will discover later today if Ecuador plans to grant him asylum.

The US government does not plan to request the extradition of alleged LulzSec member Ryan Cleary, the British man's attorney has said. 

"We understand that the US prosecutor has stated that should Mr. Cleary be dealt with by the UK courts in respect of these charges then the US will not seek Mr. Cleary's extradition," according to a statement attributed to Karen Todner, managing director of Kaim Todner Solicitors.