By Sunday afternoon, one day after its launch, MuscleNerd of the iPhone Dev-Team announced that he had cracked the iPad using security flaws that were left over from the previous iteration of the iPhone OS, iPhone 3.1.3.

It's unclear how easily the Spirit variation could be made into an automated program, though Apple generally frowns upon jailbreaking and is likely to patch up the relevant holes in the near future.

The firm said that an update to be released on 1 April will prevent people using a function that allows them to install alternative operating systems.

The move comes after a US hacker released the first code that he claimed bypassed the PS3's security systems.

"It's about whether these companies have the right to take away advertised features from a product you purchased."

The 16GB version of the iPad sells for $499 with WiFi and $629 with WiFi and 3G. The 32GB version costs $599 with WiFi and $729 with WiFi and 3G, while the 64GB version costs $699 with WiFi and $829 with WiFi and 3G.

Apple claims that some 150,000 apps will be available upon the iPad's launch. The company's App Store could hold as many as 300,000 apps by the end of the year, according to research firm IDC.

Now the Associated Press reports that smart meters have security flaws that could let hackers tamper with the power grid, opening the door for attackers to jack up strangers' power bills, remotely turn someone else's power on and off, or even allow attackers to get into the utilities' computer networks to steal data or stage bigger attacks on the grid.

'Even though these protocols were designed recently, they exhibit security failures we've known about for the past 10 years,' says Wright.

The system, developed by lab members Takashi Nakashima and Yoshihiro Watanabe, lets you scan a book by rapidly flipping its pages in front of a high-speed camera. They call this method book flipping scanning. They told me they can digitize a 200-page book in one minute, and hope to make that even faster.

The laser pattern allows the system to obtain a page's three-dimensional deformation using active stereo methods. So they wrote software that builds a 3-D model of the page and reconstructs it into a regular, flat shape.

By now, you've probably seen many of the homemade videos from people who ordered an Intel Core i7-920 processor from Newegg.com and received a bogus processor and hunk of plastic shaped like a fan.

The labels look very good; notice the embossed fake hologram in the left corner. But you can also see that that the word "socket " is spelled wrong. "Sochet"?

When we opened the box, we discovered that what we thought was a CPU fan was actually a sticker on a piece of molded plastic.

At full scale, the CRS-3 has a capacity of 322Tbit/sec., roughly three times that of the CRS-1, which was introduced in 2004. It also has more than 12 times the capacity of its nearest competitor, Chambers said.

It could transmit the whole printed contents of the Library of Congress in one second and every movie ever made in four minutes, according to Cisco.

The attack can force heavily secured computers to spill documents that likely were presumed to be safe.

"It's sort of doing the impossible," Moss said. "This is a lock on Pandora's box. And now that he's pried open the lock, it's like, ooh, where does it lead you?"

Infineon said it knew this type of attack was possible when it was testing its chips. But the company said independent tests determined that the hack would require such a high skill level that there was a limited chance of it affecting many users.

For the iPad, however, Apple is betting that the snappy interface, as demonstrated in this CNET video, will more than compensate for the lack of multitasking.

"Consumers want to do multiple things at the same time: listen to music while browsing the Web, look for directions while looking at your calendar and talking with your friends, and so on," he said in response to an e-mail query.

Many took to Twitter, Facebook, and tech blogs, including here at CNET, to voice dissatisfaction with everything from the size, the price, the specs, and the content available, to the usage model.

Many serious lovers of technology sound disappointed that Apple did not surpass or even meet the outsized expectations they placed on this new device.

It's not a laptop and it's not a phone or a music player. So what is it, and how exactly will they explain it to potential buyers?