Amid the banking crisis in Cyprus, an online-only currency called Bitcoin is getting new attention. Some argue it could be used as a safe-haven for people worried about have their deposits taxed in Cypriot banks. Evidence that people turned to Bitcoins amid the Cyprus mess is actually quite slim, although one company announced last week it wants to create the first Bitcoin ATM and to do it in Cyprus. Bitcoins haven’t attracted much attention from regulators, until now. U.S. authorities have new guidelines, and that has rankled some Bitcoin advocates. 

We feel compelled to do a story today about digital Easter eggs. They’re about finding hidden things in the digital world and don’t actually have to be egg-shaped. The Egyptian Navy says it caught three men trying to cut a big undersea Internet cable running into the Mediterranean. A military spokesman says the cable belonged to Telecom Egypt, the major phone and Internet company there.  No motive was suggested.  Experts say there have been Internet slowdowns recently in Egypt, and have noticed some network congestion as far away as Pakistan that could be connected.

If you found your Internet surfing coming up empty in recent days, it’s possibly part of one of the biggest cyberattacks experts have seen. A non-profit that fights junk email has been getting clobbered for days. Spamhaus had blacklisted a web hosting company in the Netherlands for allegedly helping to spread spam. The Dutch company called Cyberbunker didn’t like getting blacklisted and the result is clogging things all around the Internet.

All right, you struggling screenwriters. We’re about to hand you a plot. It will start in an unlikely place: The fact that it’s been 40-years since research was published that led to the development of LCD flat screens, which revolutionized computers and TV. British Chemist George Gray came up with a way to make liquid crystals that worked — here was the trick — at room temperature. Mark Lorch wrote about this in The Guardian. Lorch is also a chemist at Britain’s University of Hull, and he tells the story of a faked death and the British military. 

Video game years are kind of like dog years. And that makes the game Everquest, which turned 14-years-old this month, positively ancient. Everquest was one of the first big games to be an MMO — Massively Multiplayer Online — lots of people play against each other by Internet. Dave Georgesen of Sony Online Entertainment has watched these kinds of games spread using the so-called “free to play” model, where you can start without buying it. And, a new academic study shows it’s quite easy to identify someone by tracking their movements digitally. Researchers writing in Scientific Reports conclude all they need is four pieces of location data to figure out who most people are. Among the implications: When companies gather location data without names and addresses that doesn’t necessarily protect privacy.

Now that he has a federal license, the law school student who wants to use 3D printing to manufacture firearms remains wary the government could still shut him down. Cody Wilson goes to the University of Texas and is head of an enterprise called Defense Distributed. Even with the license, he’s working on more permits and issues such as protection from liability. And, how a hacker ‘researched’ the stability of the whole Internet by creating a giant network of insecure online devices.

PayPal and Google see a future where you go into a store and use your smartphone to pay. These are called electronic wallets and recently Mastercard, wary of the competition, said it will start charging a controversial extra fee to some companies that want to run Mastercard transactions through their e-wallets. But the card company isn’t stopping there. Mastercard’s Ed McLaughlin says his company has a wallet of its own.

South Korea is still recovering from an apparent cyberattack on Wednesday that shut down many cash machines, froze debit card transactions, and caused computers to go dark at banks and broadcasting companies. Power and transportation systems were not directly affected.  South Korean officials suspect North Korea but proving that will be difficult. Last week, North Korea had accused the South of getting into its computers. Is this the new norm?

When you send a text message or an email, should your Internet or phone company hang onto them in case the police ever want to take a look? That is the discussion on Capitol Hill, as lawmakers look into overhauling the federal law that covers when the authorities can get access to electronic communications and when they can’t. And software company Oracle is trying to move to the cloud.