Several game companies support an initiative to remove registered sex offenders from their online game worlds.

New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman announced that more than 2,100 additional accounts of registered sex offenders have been booted from online gaming platforms as part of "Operation: Game Over," a first of its kind initiative designed to protect children from online predators. This is the second major purging, with more than 3,500 accounts belonging to registered sex offenders having been removed earlier this year, Schneiderman said.

Some still contend that Google+ is a ghost town, a social playground largely devoid of active participants. Others, like Google's Senior Vice President Vic Gundotra, see Google+ as "the fastest-growing network thingy ever." Backing up his claim with numbers, Gundotra claims Google+ is home to 500 million people overall and 235 million active users who are +1ing apps, hanging out in Gmail, and connecting with friends in search. Some 135 million are active in just the stream, Vundotra says.

Opera 12.10 dashes to the desktop today, and there are plenty of feature enhancements for both Windows and Mac users alike. Chief among them is basic touch support in Windows 8, so if you're rocking a touchscreen monitor, you can pinch-to-zoom the browser. Over in Apple's orchard, Opera 12.10 introduces support for "Retina" displays and plays nice with the Notification Center in the newest version of Mac OS X.

The launch of Windows 8 last week also marked the official release of Internet Explorer 10, which ships with the new OS (Windows 7 users can download a release preview, or hang tight until November for a finished build). Microsoft thinks IE10 is the best browser on the planet, and while Mozilla might disagree with such a claim, animosity doesn't run high between the two companies. Just the opposite, actually. In fact, Mozilla sent Microsoft a cake for shipping IE10.