Two terrorist suspects wanted by the US Government would be exposed to "a real risk of fundamental injustice and discriminatory treatment" if extradited to America, the High court has been told.

The QC told Lord Justice Laws, sitting with Mr Justice Walker, that the men also faced the risk of extraordinary rendition - the process of removing terrorist suspects to third countries for interrogation - and being held in solitary confinement.

He said they were in danger of being indefinitely detained under a military order applying to foreign citizens or tried and sentenced by a military commission as enemy combatants in what would amount to "a flagrant denial of justice".

Stepping up its campaign against illicit file-swappers, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) has moved from targeting individual users to putting pressure on their ISPs. The BPI has just announced that 59 accounts suspected of large-scale piracy have been reported to two ISPs, which are expected to deal with the issue.

The ISPs offer no guarantee that anything will be done, but the BPI wants to move faster against suspected file-swappers than is possible in the court system.

Looking at their court records, one can see why they would prefer to change strategy. The BPI has filed only 139 charges against file uploaders—merely a drop in the bucket. Only four of these cases have actually proceeded to trial, while another 111 have been settled out of court for a few thousand pounds each.

The BPI now gathers IP addresses and supporting documentation on egregious offenders and simply turns it over to the ISPs for action.

Neither Tiscali nor Cable & Wireless will be excited about devoting resources of their own to sifting through complaints from the BPI, but neither do the ISPs want to be portrayed as looking the other way while users hoist the Jolly Roger on their networks.

Valence Media charged in its suit that on June 10, 2005, MPAA executives met with Anderson, a resident of Vancouver, Canada. Dean Garfield, the MPAA's director of legal affairs, was among the association's representatives who agreed to pay Anderson $15,000 to obtain private e-mails, financial and technology information, according to the court documents.

An MPAA executive told Anderson: "We don't care how you get it," Valence Media alleges in the court documents.

Anderson has provided a written agreement signed by an MPAA executive and other documentation related to Anderson being hired to gather information on Torrentspy and its executives, said Ira Rothken, Valence Media's attorney.

The purported contract includes a paragraph calling for the gathering of information on other peer-to-peer companies and torrent directories at odds with the MPAA, including The Pirate Bay, eXeem and Mininova.

If you spend any significant amount of time browsing around YouTube, you'll notice a surprising number of videos consisting of people busting a move to popular music.

That has led to a recent spate of cease-and-desist notices from the music trade group directed at some users of YouTube. Despite the fact that the recordings are generally of poor quality-especially where the audio is concerned-the RIAA is moving to rid the Internet of the scourge of amateur Solid Gold dancers.

Typically, when the RIAA engages in some sort of enforcement action, it claims that the infringing activities are causing it a demonstrable financial loss. It's hard to see how the RIAA is suffering in any way from the presence of the videos. In fact, the argument could be made that the RIAA is actually benefiting from the videos, much like viral marketing.

Ten companies which had their servers confiscated during the police's raids against file-sharing outfit The Pirate Bay are suing the Swedish government.

The outfits, which had nothing to do with Pirate Bay but had the misfortune of having the same ISP, are suing for between 10,000 and 200,000 kronor each.

The Swedish coppers took down all the servers belonging to the ISP PRQ, which hosted the Pirate Bay, without checking who else was using the company.

A spokesman for Inspector Knacker of the Swedish Yard has refused to telllocal media why it had confiscated the other servers.

It is quite likely that the concept of Pirate Bay using an ISP had not occurred to them.

Apparently at the behest of Jack Thompson, some sheriff's deputies in Louisiana have seized some video games from the home of a teenage murder suspect as "evidence". Evidence of what? That the kid has a games console or PC? Thompson says that he told the police to look for games because reports of the crime fit the scenario of the Grand Theft Auto games -- which would also indicate that any kid with a paper route must be an avid Paperboy player, though we've missed all the reports of Frogger driving people to play in traffic. All Thompson's trying to do (apart from drum up some publicity for himself) is shift the blame for the crime from a sick, stupid killer onto video games -- just the latest in his line of attempts to let people abdicate any responsibility for their actions. One other question -- why do law-enforcement officers in Louisiana now need an activist lawyer from Florida to tell them how to do their jobs?

The Government is to examine ways of strengthening the law on possessing knives in the wake of a string of vicious stabbings, the Home Office has announced.

Speculation had been rife that Home Secretary John Reid was considering increasing the jail term for those caught carrying a knife from two to five years.

Mr Reid met his ministerial team to discuss the nationwide knife amnesty as well as the enforcement and education campaign police forces will be leading after June 30.

"A decision on sentencing will be made before the Violent Crime Reduction Bill reaches its next stage in the Lords."

The target of this operation, which involved more than two dozen police officers and federal agents, was not an international terrorist ring but the couple's home business, United Nuclear Scientific Supplies, a mail-order outfit that serves amateur scientists, students, teachers, and law enforcement professionals.

The search was initiated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, a federal agency best known for instigating recalls of faulty cribs and fire-prone space heaters. The CPSC's concern with United Nuclear was not the uranium, the magnets, or the backyard accelerator. It was the chemicals – specifically sulfur, potassium perchlorate, and powdered aluminum, all of which can be used to make illegal fireworks.

The lure of do-it-yourself chemistry has always been the most potent recruiting tool science has to offer. Many kids attracted by the promise of filling the garage with clouds of ammonium sulfide – the proverbial stink bomb – went on to brilliant careers in mathematics, biology, programming, and medicine.

The Motion Picture Association of America hired a hacker to steal information from a company that the MPAA has accused of helping copyright violators, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday.

Torrentspy's complaint includes claims that the man whom the MPAA allegedly paid $15,000 to steal e-mail correspondence and trade secrets has admitted his role in the plot and is cooperating with the company.

"These claims (by Torrentspy) are false," Kori Bernards, the MPAA's vice president of corporate communications, said in an e-mail to CNET News.com. "Torrentspy is trying to obscure the facts to hide the fact that they are facilitating thievery. We are confident that our lawsuit against them will be successful because the law is on our side."

Torrentspy alleges in the suit that the man, whom the company refers to as the "informant," has provided documents that prove the nature of his relationship with the MPAA, including a written agreement signed by the hacker and an MPAA executive, said Torrentspy attorney Rothken.

"We have very significant proof of wrongdoing and the MPAA's involvement," Rothken said. "We think it's ironic for the MPAA to claim that they are protecting the rights of the movie studios and then go out and pirate other people's property."

The UK Government is preparing to give the police the authority to force organisations and individuals to disclose encryption keys, a move which has outraged some security and civil rights experts.

Some security experts are concerned that the plan could criminalise innocent people and drive businesses out of the UK. But the Home Office, which has just launched a consultation process, says the powers contained in Part 3 are needed to combat an increased use of encryption by criminals, paedophiles, and terrorists.

"The use of encryption is... proliferating," Liam Byrne, Home Office minister of state told Parliament last week. "Encryption products are more widely available and are integrated as security features in standard operating systems, so the Government has concluded that it is now right to implement the provisions of Part 3 of RIPA... which is not presently in force."

"It is, as ever, almost impossible to prove 'beyond a reasonable doubt' that some random-looking data is in fact ciphertext, and then prove that the accused actually has the key for it, and that he has refused a proper order to divulge it," pointed out encryption expert Peter Fairbrother on ukcrypto, a public email discussion list.