A Utah woman is suing the search engine Google, claiming its maps function gave her walking directions that led her onto a major highway, where she was struck by a car.

Others have pointed out that Rosenberg might have been best served by her own eyes after she reached a T-junction and found herself confronted with a patently unsafe walk.

Eircom will from today begin a process that will lead to cutting off the broadband service of customers found to be repeatedly sharing music online illegally.

It is understood that, during the pilot phase, Eircom has agreed to process about 50 IP addresses a week. Irma is using a third-party firm, Dtecnet, to identify Eircom customers who are sharing, and not simply downloading, a specific list of its members' copyrighted works on peer-to-peer networks.

A Boing Boing reader found the email for Hurt Locker producer, Nicolas Chartier, who already has something of a reputation for... well... aggressive emailing, and received quite a response.

Chartier calls him a moron and a thief and wishes his whole family ends up in jail. I guess when you have someone like that in charge, it's no wonder that they think filing tens of thousands of lawsuits against fans is a sensible position.

The producers of the movie, including Voltage Pictures, are being sued by a soldier, who claims that the movie was actually "his" story.

The district court in Hamburg, Germany has issued an injunction against Cyberbunker and its owner, Sven Olaf Kamphuis, demanding that he cut off service to The Pirate Bay.

The Pirate Bay has proved elusive, shuffling its servers, ownership, and ISPs around the world in an effort to avoid the studios.

Despite it all, the site remains accessible, though the MPA promises that "litigation is continuing against other facilitators in Sweden who are hosting trackers."

Back in January, we wrote about the story of a guy in the UK who was arrested and banned from his local airport after making a (bad) joke on Twitter about blowing the place up.

Andrew sent over a few more articles about the story, that highlight that the guy wasn't actually charged for making a fake bomb threat.

Instead, it appears that the police used a little-known part of the UK's Communications Act that outlaws sending a "message that was grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character."

He was charged with making a bad joke, that someone misinterpreted as being "menacing."

Now, thanks to the court order asking the district to preserve evidence on all school-issued computers, the family has discovered more than 400 photos of Blake alone, not to mention the "thousands" more taken of other students in their homes.

Even if you think the school district is within its rights to install monitoring software on school laptops, the IT staff appear to have gotten the whole district into a hairy situation by turning laptop security into their own real-life high school "soap opera."

The most glaring "suggestion"? That computer users install software that would scan the contents of their hard drives, looking for examples of "infringement." If the software discovers what it thinks it infringement, bam! Deleted!

The funniest is that the RIAA/MPAA expects federal agencies, like the FBI, to keep an eye out for pirates on opening weekend.

Apparently, one of the hot book series out there is the "Millennium Trilogy" by author Stieg Larsson. Apparently, the first couple of books have become incredibly popular in the US, but the third in the series has been released elsewhere, but not in the US yet. So, not surprisingly, many fans are ordering it from abroad.

"What I would say to readers is, I would encourage them to shop at their local bookseller here in the United States or their online bookseller in the United States, where no laws are being broken and you are supporting the continuing discovery of world literature."

A criminal inquiry is under way in France to find the origin of internet rumours that President Sarkozy and Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, his wife, were having affairs.

Claims that Mr Sarkozy was having an affair with Chantal Jouanno, the Ecology Minister, and Ms Bruni with Benjamin Biolay, a singer, circulated on Twitter in February.

When Mr Sarkozy complained, the blogger was sacked and Michael Amand, the director of the site, was forced to resign.

As his crawler worked, it started collecting a bunch of interesting data, and so he set up a website to let people explore some of this (again, public) data.

He noted that if others (such as professional researchers) wanted to dig into the data, he would let them access a version of the data set (with identifying info stripped).

"The attorney said that they were just about to sue me into oblivion, but in light of my previous good relationship with their security team, they'd give me one chance to stop the process."