A couple who bought a hard disk drive from a Best Buy store for $300 found three bags of beans instead of the computer storage device inside the package when they opened it. The buyers returned the item to the store but Best Buy referred them first to the manufacturer of the HDD before replacing the product with a $300 gift card, Engadget. com and the Money Helps blog of CNNMoney. com reported Tuesday.

A new subgenre of malware that ransoms your PC is now stalking the internet for victims, says a security developer. The so-called "ransomware" locks up your PC and demands $35 to return control to you is on the prowl, said Alex Eckelberry, CEO of Sunbelt Software Distribution in Clearwater, Florida. Victims of the Delf. ctk Trojan horse are told to dial a 900 number that can be traced to a payment processor used by hardcore pornography Web sites, he added.

Hundreds of thousands of holiday greeting cards and get-well-soon letters for injured American soldiers were returned to sender or thrown away unopened and never reached their destinations. The Pentagon and Postal service have refused to deliver mail letters addressed to wounded troops since the September 11 attacks and the anthrax scare, for fear terrorists might send toxic materials or bad messages to the recovering soldier wounded during war.

A group of Swedish female activists is campaigning for women to be allowed to go topless in the country's swimming pools. UPI mentions The Local reporting Tuesday the group, calling itself Bara Brost (Bare Breasts or Just Breasts), launched the protest following an incident in August involving two women who were refused to go topless at their local pool in Uppsala.

Security experts have debunked the reported assassination of a Russian spammer and called it a hoax. On Thursday, a blog post on the website Loonov. com claimed a spammer named Alexey Tolstokozhev was shot in the head, "a clear mark of Russian hit men. " The news even made it to the popular technology website Slashdot. org, saying "Alexy Tolstokozhev was recently found murdered in his palatial spam-bought estate near Moscow. The implications of this hands-on method of system administration are staggering. "