It's easy to forget, but all USB thumb drives are not created equal. There's a difference between the plastic cheapies tech companies are constantly ennuggeting and then crapping their press releases into and, say, a Super Talent 200x... and even amongst the big boys, different file systems get wildly different results.

Kristofer Brozio took nine of the best USB flash drives around and put them in a head-to-head performance test. Overall, the OCZ and Super Talent drives come out ahead. This may all seem pretty useless: you usually don't need a flash drive to do more than transfer a document or two between colleagues. But as someone who has been installing a good chunk of OSes on his Asus 1000HA netbook lately (more to come!), this has me looking to pick up a Super Talent.

A New Zealand man has landed himself in a real-life version of Burn After Reading, the Coen brothers' film about two fitness centre employees who get their hands on a disc containing the memoirs of a CIA agent, with comic - and deadly - consequences.

Chris Ogle inadvertently found 60 US military files, including names and telephone numbers for American soldiers after buying an MP3 player in a secondhand shop in Oklahoma, USA. He came across the data when he connected the $18 (£12) device to his computer - hardly the rock tunes, snapshots and video one might expect to find on a secondhand MP3 player.

The military data included US social security numbers and even which female troops were pregna ... Read more »

YouTube wants to be on your TV set bad. It’s squeezing its way in through Apple TV, TiVo, and now videogame consoles: the Nintendo Wii and the Sony PS3. Just point those videogame browsers to www.youtube.com/tv and you can now watch a customized version of YouTube from your couch. The YouTube Blog reports:

Currently in beta, the TV Website offers a dynamic, lean-back, 10-foot television viewing experience through a streamlined interface that enables you to discover, watch and share YouTube videos on any TV screen with just a few quick clicks of your remote control. With enlarged text and simplified navigation, it makes watching YouTube on your TV as easy and intuitive as possible. Optional auto-play capability enables users to view related videos sequentially, emulating a traditional television experience. The TV Website is available internationally across 22 geographies and in over 12 languages.

Absent from the list of supported game consoles, of course, is the Xbox 360. That’ ... Read more »

A few months ago, the Google Open Source team had an offsite in our Chicago office, and we were looking for something fun, social, and geeky for the teams to do during informal discussions. Before that, my colleague Aza had shown me a cool new thing that he was making called Bloxes -- interlocking cardboard boxes that were something like giant legos that connected on all six sides. They were actually invented by Aza's father, Jef Raskin (who started the Macintosh project at Apple), and were originally intended to be used to build flexible workspaces (like easily morphable cubicles). Having seen some samples of what you could build with them, I thought it would be fun to order a bunch of Bloxes for the team to build things out of while sitting around chatting and brainstorming.

We built a number of interesting things out of the Bloxes that week, but the real fun started after the offsite was over. Several of the Chicago engineers really took to the Bloxes; every week new, fun new sc ... Read more »