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Germany’s Federal Commissioner for Data Protection Peter Schaar says he’s “horrified” by the discovery.

“I am appalled… I call upon Google to delete previously unlawfully collected personal data on the wireless network immediately and stop the rides for Street View,” according to German broadcaster ARD.

Spooks have long desired the ability to cross reference the Mac address of a user’s connection with their real identity and virtual identity, such as their Gmail or Facebook account.

Other companies have logged broadcasting WLAN networks and published the information. By contrast Google has not published the WLAN map, or Street View in Germany; Google hopes to launch the service by the end of the year.

The suggestions come in a new documentary series in which Hawking, one of the world’s leading scientists, will set out his latest thinking on some of the universe’s greatest mysteries.

Alien life, he will suggest, is almost certain to exist in many other parts of the universe: not just in planets, but perhaps in the centre of stars or even floating in interplanetary space.

Hawking’s logic on aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. In such a big place, Earth is unlikely to be the only planet where life has evolved.

“To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational,” he said. “The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.”

The answer, he suggests, is that most of it will be the equivalent of microbes or simple animals — the sort of life that has dominated Earth for most of its history.

One scene in his documentary for the Discovery Channel shows herds of two-legged herbivores browsing on an alien cliff-face where they are picked off by flying, yellow lizard-like predators. Another shows glowing fluorescent aquatic animals forming vast shoals in the oceans thought to underlie the thick ice coating Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter.

Such scenes are speculative, but Hawking uses them to lead on to a serious point: that a few life forms could be intelligent and pose a threat. Hawking believes that contact with such a species could be devastating for humanity.

He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

The completion of the documentary marks a triumph for Hawking, now 68, who is paralysed by motor neurone disease and has very limited powers of communication. The project took him and his producers three years, during which he insisted on rewriting large chunks of the script and checking the filming.

John Smithson, executive producer for Discovery, said: “He wanted to make a programme that was entertaining for a general audience as well as scientific and that’s a tough job, given the complexity of the ideas involved.”

Hawking has suggested the possibility of alien life before but his views have been clarified by a series of scientific breakthroughs, such as the discovery, since 1995, of more than 450 planets orbiting distant stars, showing that planets are a common phenomenon.

So far, all the new planets found have been far larger than Earth, but only because the telescopes used to detect them are not sensitive enough to detect Earth-sized bodies at such distances.

Another breakthrough is the discovery that life on Earth has proven able to colonise its most extreme environments. If life can survive and evolve there, scientists reason, then perhaps nowhere is out of bounds.

Hawking’s belief in aliens places him in good scientific company. In his recent Wonders of the Solar System BBC series, Professor Brian Cox backed the idea, too, suggesting Mars, Europa and Titan, a moon of Saturn, as likely places to look.

Similarly, Lord Rees, the astronomer royal, warned in a lecture earlier this year that aliens might prove to be beyond human understanding.

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A small winged glider designed by Pentagon researchers was the payload for Thursday’s launch. The craft, called the Hypersonic Test Vehicle 2a, apparently did not complete all of its planned maneuvers to demonstrate new hypersonic flight systems.

“Preliminary review of technical data indicates the Minotaur Lite launch system successfully delivered the Falcon HTV 2 glide vehicle to the desired separation conditions,” the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said in a statement. “The launch vehicle executed first of its kind energy management maneuvers, clamshell payload fairing release and HTV 2 deployment.”

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The HTV 2a payload launched Thursday separated from the Minotaur high in the upper atmosphere at a velocity more than 20 times the speed of sound.

But tracking assets lost contact with the triangle-shaped craft 9 minutes after liftoff. “An engineering team is reviewing available data to understand this event,” DARPA said in a written statement.

After its release from the Minotaur third stage, the craft was designed to try out its aerodynamic control system and conduct sweeping turns to bleed off excess energy and demonstrate its cross-range capabilities.

The DARPA press release did not specify whether any of the test maneuvers were completed before controllers lost communications with the craft.

The HTV 2a was supposed to glide over the Pacific Ocean at more than 13,000 mph and splash down in the sea near the U.S. Army’s Reagan Test Site at Kwajalein Atoll.

The HTV program is managed by DARPA, a Pentagon research and development division focusing on high-tech demonstrations.

Officials say the HTV demonstrations were supposed to test enabling technologies that could eventually be employed by an operational system capable of prompt global response missions.

DARPA says the HTV craft features a high lift-to-drag aerodynamic shape, lightweight thermal protection structures and autonomous guidance, control and flight safety systems.

That is the ultimate doomsday scenario with the unprecedented fiscal deficits around the world — that governments’ credit lines could run out and they couldn’t raise the cash they needed in the bond markets. At that point, after bailing out banks that had faced the same dilemma, who’s there to bail out the governments?

That hasn’t happened in Greece, ground zero in the European debt crisis. Earlier this week, Greece found ready and willing buyers for its short-term bills, albeit at yields twice what the government had to pay just a few months ago.

It was Germany that didn’t receive sufficient bids to sell all the bonds it offered. In other words, the auction failed.

This just doesn’t happen in major government bond markets. In the U.S. Treasury market, if the total of bids isn’t double the total of securities being offered, it’s considered horrific auction.

But, Wednesday, the auction of €3 billion (just over $4 billion) of 30-year German government bonds, or bunds, attracted only €2.752 billion in bids and wound up selling €2.458 billion at a yield of 3.83%.

The Wall Street Journal attributed the shortfall in demand to a combination of the bonds’ pricing and heavy supplies of new issues in the European bond markets.

And a spokesman for the German debt agency downplayed the results, saying these things happen ever so often.

But other, more disinterested observers see the failed German bond auction as an expression of the market’s concern about the effect of the proposed bailout of Greece on the finances of the core eurozone countries that will have to foot the bill, most notably German taxpayers.

All eurozone bond trading is frozen while the Greek government negotiates the bailout package provided by the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund, says from a keen observer of the global capital markets. So, he wouldn’t put too much weight just on the German bund auction flop.

Meantime, Greek government bonds spreads over bunds continued to widen Wednesday, with the yield on the 10-year note hitting 8.25%, up from 8% Tuesday.

But, this market pro continues, Greece will need to be supported with some €10 billion a year from German taxpayers — about 10% what they had to pay for unification with their brethren in communist East Germany in the 1990s. And the French would have to kick in about half as much, or €5 billion annually. All told, he sees some the rest of the eurozone diverting a total of €100 billion a year to Greece in de facto transfer payments, to the detriment of their economies.

Broadway Bank was among seven Illinois banks whose failure was announced on Friday. U.S. regulators have seized 15 banks in the past two weeks, as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp ratchets up efforts to clean up the bank industry. Regulators have closed 57 banks this year.

Amcore Bank (AMFI.O) was the largest to close on Friday, with $3.8 billion in assets and $3.4 billion in total deposits as of Dec. 31, 2009, the FDIC said. It will be purchased by Harris National Association, a part of Canada’s BMO Financial Group.

Broadway Bank, a community bank with $1.2 billion in assets, had been limping along for months under the weight of bad commercial real estate loans.

The bank is owned by the family of Alexi Giannoulias, the first-term Illinois state treasurer who is in a tight race for Obama’s previous post to be decided in the November election.

The FDIC said MB Financial (MBFI.O) is assuming the deposits of Broadway Bank.

Obama backed Giannoulias, a banking scion, for treasurer, and the two have played basketball together, with Giannoulias having played professionally. He highlighted his banking experience in running for the post.

Republicans have condemned Giannoulias’ role in the bank’s soured real estate portfolio, including loans to such figures as convicted prostitution ring operator Michael “Jaws” Giorango. Loans were also made to convicted influence peddler Antoin “Tony” Rezko, who also was a fund-raiser for Obama.

Giannoulias has said his father was not alive to say how Giorango and Rezko became the bank’s customers. The elder Giannoulias died in 2006.

But it is these loans, says DePaul University political science professor Michael Mezey, that could hurt Giannoulias even more than the failure of the bank.

“They’ve (the Giannoulias campaign) been talking about it (the bank) and claiming it would fail. … It’s not news at this point,” he said. “The thing that may be more damaging than the closing is the loans to people of questionable character.”

Some 9 percent of $240 million in nonperforming assets at the bank originated while Giannoulias was a senior loan officer and vice president from 2002 to 2006, the bank has said.

Broadway Bank, founded 30 years ago, was recently ordered by government regulators to raise additional capital — after Giannoulias received his share of $70 million in proceeds following his father’s death.

The bank had been ordered to raise $75 million by April, but Giannoulias said he could contribute less than $1 million to try to save the bank, according to press reports.

The bank’s failure gives further ammunition to Giannoulias’ Republican opponent, five-term congressman Mark Kirk.

“While years of risky lending schemes, hot money investments and loans to organized crime led to today’s failure, it’s a sad day for Broadway Bank employees who may lose their jobs due to Mr. Giannoulias’ reckless business practices,” Kirk campaign spokesperson Kirsten Kukowski said in an email statement.

Giannoulias has characterized Broadway Bank’s troubles as similar to those of other community banks hurt by the harshest recession in decades.

His links to the failed bank comes at a time when the Illinois Democratic party is already in disarray.

The Illinois legislature impeached and removed Democrat Rod Blagojevich during his second term as governor in January 2009, after he was charged with racketeering, fraud, and lying to investigators — including an accusation he tried to sell Obama’s vacant U.S. Senate seat.

Scott Cohen, a pawnbroker-turned-politician who won the Democratic nod to run for lieutenant governor in the state’s February primary election, relinquished the nomination following embarrassing disclosures about his relationships with women.

In addition to Broadway and Amcore, the FDIC said five other Illinois banks failed on Friday. They are: New Century Bank, Citizens Bank&Trust Co, Wheatland Bank, Peotone Bank and Trust Company and Lincoln Park Savings Bank.

American college students are hooked on cellphones, social media and the Internet and showing symptoms similar to drug and alcohol addictions, according to a new study.

Researchers at the University of Maryland who asked 200 students to give up all media for one full day found that after 24 hours many showed signs of withdrawal, craving and anxiety along with an inability to function well without their media and social links.

Susan Moeller, the study’s project director and a journalism professor at the university, said many students wrote about how they hated losing their media connections, which some equated to going without friends and family.

“I clearly am addicted and the dependency is sickening,” said one student. “Between having a Blackberry, a laptop, a television, and an iPod, people have become unable to shed their media skin.”

Moeller said students complained most about their need to use text messages, instant messages, e-mail and Facebook.

“Texting and IM-ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort,” wrote one of the students, who blogged about their reactions. “When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life.”

Few students reported watching TV news or reading a newspaper.

The American Psychiatric Association does not recognize so-called Internet addiction as a disorder.

The SEC’s inspector general conducted 33 probes of employees looking at explicit images in the past five years, according to a memo obtained by The Associated Press.

The memo says 31 of those probes occurred in the 2 1/2 years since the financial system teetered and nearly crashed.

The staffers’ behavior violated government-wide ethics rules, it says.

It was written by SEC Inspector General David Kotz in response to a request from Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.

The memo was first reported Thursday evening by ABC News. It summarizes past inspector general probes and reports some shocking findings:

– A senior attorney at the SEC’s Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office. He agreed to resign, an earlier watchdog report said.

– An accountant was blocked more than 16,000 times in a month from visiting websites classified as “Sex” or “Pornography.” Yet he still managed to amass a collection of “very graphic” material on his hard drive by using Google images to bypass the SEC’s internal filter, according to an earlier report from the inspector general. The accountant refused to testify in his defense, and received a 14-day suspension.