North Korea does not let in journalists, except for the odd random one with a great cover story. If you're a reporter sneaking in, you better have big time backup. Not, for example, Current TV.

GhostNet, a "cyber espioniage network," has broken into 1,295 computers in 103 countries. Canadian researchers have traced the operation to China. The Dalai Lama and NATO were among its targets.

In the "They don't make em like this any more" category: foreign correspondent, dapper author, and WWII Allied spy Paul Hofmann is dead at the age of 96. He outlived Hitler by 63 years.

Milan Kundera, who wrote such novels as “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and “The Joke,” turned in a supposed spy amidst the Stalinist terror sweeping Czechoslovakia in 1950, resulting in the man's 14-years imprisonment and hard labor in a uranium mine. Supposedly, Kundera was a fervent communist true believer at the time, 18 years before the anti-authoritarian's work was banned and 35 years before he said "indiscretion is a capital sin... We live in an age when private life is being destroyed. The police destroy it in Communist countries, journalists threaten it in democratic countries, and little by little the people themselves lose their taste for private life and their sense of it." Now he's implying these accusations will lead to his own death:

TV chef and cookbook author Julia Child was secretly more awesome than you already thought, because she was part of a very exciting World War II-era U.S. spy ring, government files revealed this morning. It was already known that Child had worked in an administrative capacity for the Office of Strategic Services, the less evil precursor to the CIA. And anyone who knew her biography had to wonder about her long career at various U.S. stations abroad. And about that recipe for "poached secrets."

I'm hearing an incredible rumor about David Sobeski, the former Microsoft general manager now opening a Seattle-area office for Yahoo, and I'm not sure whether to believe it. Whispers from well-placed Yahoos are that he took the job under "false pretenses." Translation: They think he's a spy for Microsoft, planted at Yahoo to learn the company's secrets. The new office is to work on something called "DataOS," the technical underpinnings for Yahoo's large-scale Web operations. Microsoft is playing catch-up with Google in Web-based software, and getting hold of Yahoo's technology would be one way to take a massive leap. There may be nothing to the allegations. But if Microsoft hasn't placed a corporate spy at Yahoo yet, I'd have to say I wonder what's taking them so long.

California's attorney general plans to indict former Hewlett-Packard chair Patricia Dunn for her role in investigating a boardroom news leak, according to the New York Times. Other indictees will include a former HP senior lawyer and three outside investigators.

• Why is Yahoo's stock stuck in the mud while Google's soars? Because Yahoo is slow, the CEO is "non-confrontational," and they don't "throw things against the wall and see what sticks." In other words, it's a good old media company. Hey, at least it takes those things decades to die, not the months of a real dot-com. [Economist]

Washington Post:

U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has a real porn problem. The Washington Post reported last year that Gonzales is fighting consensual adult porn, sometimes under the guise of fighting child porn, sometimes not. Now the country's top cop is pushing — hard — for Congress to force Internet service providers to save their users' records.

This week's tech news is all about "pretexting," the method that investigators hired by Hewlett-Packard used to get the personal phone records of reporters and HP board members. But what is it? You'd better know, because it's about to blow up the business world.