Void Communications had better be ready for a call from Department of Homeland Security. Why? Because in a world where a bottle of shampoo is considered a risk to commercial aviation it's likely that federal security officials will see red flags in a service designed to provide any two people -- say, Osama bin Laden and his right-hand man in the U.S. -- with an electronic communications channel that leaves not a trace of its contents or the identities of the participants.

Key to Void's Web-based VaporStream service is the fact that at no time does the body of the message and the header information appear together, thus leaving no record of the interaction on any computer or server. The message cannot be forwarded, edited, printed or saved, and, once it's been read, it disappears; nothing is cached anywhere. No attachments allowed.

What they're trying to do with VaporStream is provide a secure, confidential means of communication that also happens to be recordless.

Global publishers, fearing that Web search engines such as Google Inc. are encroaching on their ability to generate revenue, plan to launch an automated system for granting permission on how to use their content.

Buoyed by a Belgian court ruling this week that Google was infringing on the copyright of French and German language newspapers by reproducing article snippets in search results, the publishers said on Friday they plan to start testing the service before the end of the year.

"Since search engine operators rely on robotic 'spiders' to manage their automated processes, publishers' Web sites need to start speaking a language which the operators can teach their robots to understand," according to a document seen by Reuters that outlines the publishers' plans.

Following a judicial action (link in French) by the 'French-speaking Belgian Association of the press,' Google.be has removed all the French-speaking press sites from its index, as can be seen by doing a search. The court order to Google is posted at Chilling Effects. In summary, the editors want a cut of the profit that Google News makes using their information. No such deal exists for the moment. Google has been ordered to remove all references, or pay one million Euros per day if it doesn't comply. Net effect: they removed all link to the sites, from Google News, but also from Google's search. Will Google become irrelevant in Belgian, and be replaced by MSN? Or will the newspapers, which gain from commercials, and thus net traffic, change their position when they'll see the drop in traffic that it is causing?

The case centered around four audiotapes recorded more than 25 years ago as part of an FBI investigation in Louisiana. An author, who is the plaintiff in the case, sought release of the tapes under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, as it's more generally known.

The FBI withheld production of the requested tapes, arguing that it had not been able to determine whether the speakers on the tapes were still living, and thus were entitled to have their privacy protected. FOIA case law holds that a person no longer has the same privacy rights upon his or her death.

The FBI could not figure out whether the speakers were over 100 years old--and thus presumed dead under FBI practice--because neither had mentioned their birth dates during conversations that were recorded surreptitiously.

The agency also took the position that it could not conclude whether the speakers were alive or dead by referencing a Social Security database. The reason? The speakers did not state their Social Security numbers during the recorded conversations.

Furthermore, the FBI failed to search its own files for the speakers' birth dates or Social Security numbers, simply because that is not its standard practice.

The words of the appellate court ring oh so true:

"Why, in short, doesn't the FBI just Google the two names? Surely, in the Internet age, a 'reasonable alternative' for finding out whether a prominent person is dead is to use Google (or any other search engine), to find a report of that person's death."

A security hole in the popular MySpace social networking site allowed users to view entries marked "private", a crucial protection for users aged under 16, according to weekend reports.

The profile of anyone under 16 was changed so that it was automatically set to "private", a status that users could previously choose, but which was not compulsory. Users over 18 attempting to contact users under 16 now have to type in the child's actual first and last name or email address in order to initiate contact, a move designed to protect children from unsolicited advances.

"Many myspacers use CSS [cascading style sheets] to hide their comments, friends list and blog links," wrote AtariBoy. "These elements are not deleted tho [sic] and are still available publicly to anyone. You can view them by one of two methods below."

While Fox was gobbling up all the hot properties, MTV was pretty much caught napping. Earlier this year, they tried to talk a good game about how they were uniquely poised to be the "MTV of the online world," but their vision of the world was uniquely old media. Rather than understanding that the internet is about communication and interaction, they claimed it was all about "video," which they had more of than anyone else. Then, rather than realizing that everyone at the company needed to "think digitally" they assigned that task to one guy -- who quickly discovered that without any real power, no one else was thinking digitally and the whole strategy failed.

Today, though, they took another step by buying Atom Entertainment, another video site that's been around for years, but never could figure out how to become YouTube. Again, it's the same "old media" thinking at MTV. Atom is much more about distribution of video than about sharing and interacting with video. Until MTV recognizes that the internet isn't just television with a mouse, they're going to have difficulty being "the MTV of the internet."

AOL on Aug. 7 blamed an internal "screw-up" for the embarrassing release of detailed keyword search data for roughly 658,000 anonymized users.

"This was a screw-up, and we're angry and upset about it," AOL spokesperson Andrew Weinstein said in a statement sent to eWEEK.

Weinstein said the release of the data was an innocent attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools.

Weinstein acknowledged that vanity searches, where users enter their own names into search engines, can sometimes lead to a privacy risk.

In some cases, Arrington said the data included personal names, addresses and Social Security numbers.

Has the shine come off online auctions? eBay chief Meg Whitman has acknowledged that the site has lots some of its "magic", as the balance tilts away from home sellers to professional retailers.

eBay said that is has 78 million active users, 20 per cent more than a year ago, and there are 35 per cent more listings. But as a sign of its changing nature, fixed price listings - usually tagged "Buy It Now" - are up 35 per cent year on year.

It's a quasi-social-networking site for teens designed to allow them to "express their individuality," yet it screens all content, tells parents their kids have joined and forbids users to e-mail one another. Oh, and it calls users "hubsters" -- a twist on hipsters that proves just how painfully uncool it is to try to be cool.

The opening page shows video of four teens -- a bubbly fashionista, a Texas football player, a quirky skateboarder and an aspiring R&B singer from New York -- who are clearly actors reading a script, although the videos are positioned to appear authentic. Within, there are pages such as "Beth's Backyard Club," where you find a picture of her in a strapless prom dress above the approved quote: "I'll school my way by looking hot in my Wal-Mart clothes to school to catch a cute boy's eye. ..."

A group representing the UK's independent music labels says it wants to change the way we pay for music online.

They say music could, in effect, be free to customers - with payment collected as part of their internet subscription.

Wenham says she envisions a two-tier system for music fans.

Customers would have access to any music track they wanted, delivered in real-time over the internet, as part of their broadband connection.

However, they would have to make separate payments for "premium content", such as exclusive performances, or to keep permanent copies of songs offline.

Most importantly, they want Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to pay for music distributed over their services.

ISPs had been contacted, he added, but "they don't reply much".