It was the year corporate and university data spills just kept coming, and the Supreme Court decided technology companies can be held responsible for the bad behavior of their users. Big firms lined up to help repressive governments; governments helped themselves to private phone calls and e-mail. A medical miracle transformed, overnight, into heartbreaking scandal.

On balance the tech world's triumphs far outweighed its failures in 2005. But those who don't write top-10 lists about the passing year are doomed to repeat its mistakes. So here's our pick for the year's nastiest moments in technology.

TiVo boxes betray their owners: Yeah, we already knew in theory that TiVo was granting cable providers the power to block or expire our pay-per-view recordings at will. But that didn't prepare us for the shock of seeing free TV like King of the Hill, or, here at Wired News, a Lost rerun, suddenly marked with a bright red flag and a stern notice that our saved show would be deleted in a week whether we liked it or not.

The PVR-maker explained the September spate of rebellious TiVos as a glitch: the newly deployed Macrovision self-destruct mechanism was intended for use on premium content only, but had been accidentally triggered by noisy cable TV lines for a handful of customers. That's plausible enough, and no repeat offenses have been sighted since the company pushed a software fix. But the real damage is the liquefaction of TiVo's bedrock promise: that it would give consumers control of what we watch and when. We've now seen with our own eyes how the company has handed the sinuous, hourglass-shaped remote to the same content industry that tried to keep Sony from selling the VCR.

Commerce Department blocks .xxx domain: Around 300 top-level domains are running on the net. But when ICANN decided to carve out a new one for adult content, a Christian group called the Family Research Council saw red, predicting the move would double the amount of smut available online, and, in the words of council attorney Patrick Trueman, "the porn industry would become twice the menace it is today."

When conservative groups start using the word "menace," look out. Prompted by a flood of mail from the Republican base, Michael Gallagher, assistant secretary at the U.S. Commerce Department, drafted a letter to ICANN chairman Vint Cerf asking for the new domain to be delayed. It was, and in that moment any illusion that the internet's critical domain-name system was immune from U.S. political whims evaporated.

Gallagher's meddling in what was supposed to be a technical decision by an impartial body added fuel to an international diplomatic rebellion against the United States' unique role in internet stewardship, and an ill-conceived proposal to put the net under multilateral control was narrowly curbed on the eve of a U.N. summit in November. But it's a small price to pay to keep smut peddlers in their place – or, really, out of their place. In any case, the Family Research Council has moved onto other menaces, like gay marriage and the threatening practice of retailers saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas."

PayPal blocks Katrina aid: PayPal has always been a little squirrelly – fraud-wary to a fault and quick to lock up other people's money. But the service hit a new low in 2005 when it froze an account created by the proprietor of the popular Something Awful website to gather donations for Hurricane Katrina victims. PayPal delayed the transfer of over $25,000 to the American Red Cross. What did it think? That the Red Cross was trying to scam it? We don't know – the eBay-owned service declined to explain itself at the time, citing "privacy concerns."

Space shuttle Discovery: Nearly 2.5 years after a flying chunk of foam insulation triggered the Columbia disaster, NASA got a new shuttle off the ground – and within seconds, a flying chunk of foam insulation ripped off one of its fuel tanks. This time the debris didn't hit the spacecraft's hull, and the mission was ultimately a success. But NASA was forced to bench the program, and a review panel went on to slam the agency for slipshod work. In December NASA announced its plan to fix the problem and try again in 2006. We'd rather they do something interesting, or safe.

__Bush corrupts the NSA: __ It's hard to be surprised by the revelation that this president ordered the long-term warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens' international phone calls and e-mail, but it is sad to see the National Security Agency at the heart of the scandal.

After the 1975 Church Committee hearings exposed domestic spying abuses at NSA and elsewhere, the agency seemed to reform itself nicely, to the point that even some former critics spoke well of its ethics and professionalism – if not its fading technological glory. NSA's information-assurance branch emerged as a serious and respected voice in the computer-security community, even developing and releasing the source code to its own secure version of Linux. And when the 1998 film Enemy of the State cast the Puzzle Palace as villains, then-NSA director and Air Force general Michael Hayden led the agency into its own era of glasnost, publicly explaining its charter and acknowledging the mistakes of the past.

Today you can visit the NSA kids page, where Disney-esque cartoon characters will walk you through code-breaking Flash games, or catch the agency at a tech conference screening its own dramatic anti-cyberterror mini-films. One stars Sylvester Stallone.

Now Hayden, in his new role as deputy director of national intelligence, is most easily identified as the man standing behind the White House podium alongside torture-memo author Alberto Gonzales to defend Bush's lawless surveillance order. The other unheralded victims of the administration's hubris: new U.S. college graduates hoping to serve their country in the high-tech spy biz, who are rapidly running out of career options that don't demand a sacrifice of long-held American principles. Do you join the NSA to illegally spy on U.S. citizens, or the CIA to help run the secret Eastern European torture prisons? The National Reconnaissance Office has never looked so good.

Next: The blogosphere's dark places; Apple sues journalists while Yahoo helps jail them.

Hwang Woo-suk's fall: In May, Hwang published what seemed to be a breakthrough research paper in the journal Science showing how he and his team at Seoul National University successfully cloned 11 embryonic stem-cell lines, each genetically matched to an individual patient. The paper seemed to mark a giant leap toward the ability to grow replacement tissue for patients with failing organs or spinal-cord damage.

Then the scandals started. First, it came out that Hwang misrepresented the source of the eggs used in the experiment, some of which came from paid donors and staff members, raising ethical issues. Then in December, paper co-author Roh Sung Il accused Hwang of faking the results for nine of the 11 stem cells. Hwang, who was hospitalized for stress, has acknowledged "fatal errors" in the paper and asked for its withdrawal. The jury is still out on what went wrong here, but with Hwang's earlier genetic triumph, the world's first cloned dog, now being tugged into the investigation, we're starting to despair. Et tu, Snuppy?

The Sony rootkit: As if there weren't enough paths into our Windows machines already, now we have to worry about malware coming in on the new Neil Diamond CD (What? You know you like him.) Sony BMG's endless problems with its digital rights management schemes, and then its botched efforts to set things right, were an early Christmas gift for DRM opponents. But when the smoke and lawsuits clear, we may be stuck with settlements that give consumers nothing more than longer and more verbose click-wrap license agreements – a lump of coal if we ever saw one.

Yahoo helps China imprison a dissident: When it comes to Western tech firms appeasing China's repressive government, Microsoft's "seven words you can't say on a Chinese blog" routine is a hard act to follow. But Yahoo brought down the house when it helped Beijing track a dissident journalist who used the company's services to forward a government censorship order to a New York website. Shi Tao, 37, was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison as a result.

Apple attacks bloggers: Steve Jobs got 2005 off to a litigious start by suing the Mac enthusiast site Think Secret for scooping Apple on some product announcements, while two other sites with similar track records, AppleInsider and PowerPage, found themselves fighting company subpoenas aimed at unmasking their confidential sources. In a pitched court battle, Apple argued that bloggers aren't journalists and therefore don't have a right to protect anonymous tipsters. The county judge hearing the latter case went further and said even mainstream reporters can't get away with revealing corporate secrets – a decision that's now under appeal.

Accused killer blogs his descent into madness: In his first blog entry in January 2004, convicted sexual predator Joseph Duncan wrote that he was taking up blogging to document his comings and goings, in case he was "falsely accused of some crime or another." Indeed. By May of 2005 Duncan was a fugitive from fresh child molestation charges, but he didn't stop blogging, and police watched helplessly as the 42-year-old computer programmer's posts grew increasingly fraught and disturbed. A May 11 entry titled "The Demons Have Taken Over" was typical. "I am scared, alone and confused, and my reaction is to strike out toward the perceived source of my misery, society," Duncan wrote. "My intent is to harm society as much as I can, then die."

Four days later the brutalized bodies of 40-year-old Brenda Groene, her son Slade and her boyfriend Mark McKenzie were found at Groene's home near Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Duncan turned up nearly a month later at a 24-hour diner just a few miles from the murder site, in the company of Groene's 8-year-old daughter Shasta, who had been missing since the attack. Duncan was arrested and charged with the Idaho murders, and is now suspected of having abducted and killed Shasta's 9-year-old brother Dylan as well.

After Duncan's arrest, netizens spontaneously converged on his blog and occupied its comment system, filling it with a thousand messages angrily condemning Duncan, praising law enforcement or sending thoughts and prayers to Shasta and her surviving family members. By winter only the detritus remained. The most recent comments are all message board spam for low-cost mortgages, travel sites, sex dolls and Viagra.