Scaling the Chinese wall. This week the Chaos Computer Club, a German-based hacking group, used its website, ccc.de, to launch a toolkit designed to help journalists reporting from the Olympics to get uncensored access to western websites. The toolkit will be made available to journalists on a USB key that the CCC is calling the Freedom Stick. — The Guardian

Electronic wine taster. Can’t tell the difference between paint stripper and a 1982 Château Pétrus? Well, scientists have developed a remedy: an “electronic tongue” that can distinguish between grape varieties and vintages. — The Independent

The many lives of Frédéric Bourdin. The tale of a 30 year old “serial child impersonator” whose repertoire includes “scores of identities, in more than fifteen countries and five languages.” Authorities who investigated the modern-day Peter Pan found “no evidence of sexual deviance or pedophilia … [or] any financial motive.” When “pressed about his motivations,” Bourdin said all he “wanted was love and family,” making him “the rare impostor who elicited sympathy as well as anger from those he had duped”– New Yorker

Dirk Bogard’s letters. In public, Dirk Bogarde was shy, reserved, polite to a fault. But in private, he was far more entertaining. In the first of two extracts from a new collection of his most intimate, wickedly funny personal letters, we reveal Dirk as he really was. — Telegraph