1. Eliot Spitzer: High-tech felt his impact and Oliver North ridicules Spitzer, calls on IT to hire war vets: It might not have seemed at first that the saga of almost-former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer had any connection to IT, but when he was attorney general of that state, he targeted the high-tech and networking industries in various investigations, including participating in the RAM price-fixing probe. His alleged penchant for hooking up with high-priced "escorts" from the Emperors Club VIP service, which investigators say was a prostitution ring, was uncovered using an electronic financial transaction system. Suspicious transactions triggered an automatic report to the Internal Revenue Service. All of this came to light on Monday, leading to Spitzer announcing his resignation on Wednesday. He leaves office Monday. The day before Spitzer resigned, Oliver North, who knows a thing or two about the hot seat, used part of his keynote speech at the Infosec World Conference to mock Spitzer. The disgraced governor "apparently forgot everything he knows about information security," said North, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel still best known for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal.

2. Update: AOL to buy Bebo for $850 million and Acquisition may be too late to help AOL prosper in Web 2.0 world: AOL continued its hoped-for transition from Internet service provider to media/content company this week with word that it is buying the social-networking site Bebo for US$850 million cash. AOL, which is part of the Time Warner media empire, hopes to rake in advertising revenue from Bebo, which has about 40 million unique users globally, and so AOL will integrate its Platform A online advertising technology with Bebo. But some analysts said that AOL may be too late to the social-networking scene for the Bebo deal to actually help in its metamorphosis.

3. Gates repeats request for more H-1B visas and Gates: Next decade will bring huge software advances: Bill Gates went to Washington, D.C., this week to -- again -- urge lawmakers to increase the cap on H-1B visas. "We provide the world's best universities ... and the students are not allowed to stay and work in the country," Gates told the House of Representatives Science and Technology Committee, speaking to them on Wednesday about foreign students and the need to allow more skilled workers into the U.S. "The fact is [other countries'] smartest people want to come here and that's a huge advantage to us, and in a sense, we're turning them away." When he finished appealing to legislators, Gates went on to talk to the Northern Virginia Technology Council the next day, offering a series of predictions about the future of technology. Tablet PCs will replace textbooks in schools, he said, and TV will be more like the Internet.