Most people can tell that Hollywood puts out a lot of junk every year, and one wonders whether the studios realize it as well. Apparently, they do know when something is bad, and they try to limit reviewers' access to bad movies. They're probably anxious to avoid another Gigli moment, with reviewers trying to outdo each other in who can be the meanest. When one reviewer slipped through the cracks and caught a screening of the upcoming Rob Schneider vehicle The Benchwarmers, Sony marketing went on the attack. According to the reviewer, the studio called papers where his write-up might have run, called him a liar and said he scammed his way into the screening. They even tried to trick the papers, telling them they'd have to pay extra to run the review, even though they subscribe to the wire service where it was posted. Of course, none of this addresses the review itself, or in anyway casts doubt onto the reviewers ojectivity. This isn't the first time that Sony's had controversy with film reviewers. A few years ago they were discovered to have made up fake quotes from a reviewer that didn't exist (oddly, for another Rob Schneider film). What's weird is if they know the movie is bad, why they bothered distributing it in the first place. Maybe they don't want to miss the next Snakes On A Plane.

Two grandmothers have been arrested under the Government's latest anti-terror legislation.

Helen John, 68, and Sylvia Boyes, 61, both from Yorkshire, were arrested by officers acting under the new Serious Organised Crime and Police Act while protesting outside the United States military base, RAF Menwith Hill, in North Yorkshire.

The women told the Independent that they were protesting against the act, which has designated some Ministry of Defence sites as subject to criminal trespass.

Mrs Boyes said: "I am quite willing to break the law and prepared to be charged and go to prison. The Government thinks it can do whatever it wants and that it has a passive public which accepts whatever it throws at it. I find it very worrying."

Earlier this year, the EFF sued AT&T for allowing the NSA access to its databases, for the sake of the NSA's infamous wiretapping efforts. As the EFF went to file its motion for a preliminary injunction against AT&T, it appears that the Justice Department -- who is not a party to this case -- took it upon itself to ask the EFF to hold back some of the evidence. This is despite the fact that none of the evidence is classified and the EFF was providing the evidence under seal to the court, in order to keep it secret. Of course, doing so is only going to raise interest concerning what's actually in that evidence.

A Web company that offered free iPods, video games and condoms to qualified registrants now faces a lawsuit alleging it sold millions of user e-mail addresses that it had vowed to keep private.

The suit, filed in the state's supreme court in Manhattan, marks the latest chapter in Spitzer's charge against what he has labeled the largest deliberate breaches of privacy in Internet history. Earlier this month, the attorney general announced a $1.1 million settlement with Datran Media. The e-mail marketer had been accused of buying at least 6 million files from Gratis, despite knowing that the transaction ran contrary to the seller's privacy policy.

In Thursday's filing, the state claims that Gratis violated its own privacy policies by collecting and selling personal information on more than 7 million users, over a period of three and a half years. Gratis sold the information to three independent e-mail marketers, including Datran, in 2004 and 2005, according to the suit. Those marketers went on to fire off tens of millions of unsolicited e-mails to the addresses obtained, the complaint alleged.

A parental advice Internet site has sued Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research), charging it unfairly deprived the company of customers by downgrading its search-result ranking without reason or warning.

Google could not immediately be reached for comment but the company aggressively defends the secrecy of its patented search ranking system and asserts its right to adapt it to give customers what it determines to be the best results.

KinderStart charges that Google without warning in March 2005 penalized the site in its search rankings, sparking a "cataclysmic" 70 percent fall in its audience -- and a resulting 80 percent decline in revenue.

At its height, KinderStart counted 10 million page views per month, the lawsuit said. Web site page views are a basic way of measuring audience and are used to set advertising rates.

The complaint accuses Google, as the dominant provider of Web searches, of violating KinderStart's constitutional right to free speech by blocking search engine results showing Web site content and other communications.

Jacob Citrin was once employed by International Airport Centers and given a laptop to use in his company's real estate related business. The work consisted of identifying "potential acquisition targets."

At some point, Citrin quit IAC and decided to continue in the same business for himself, a choice that IAC claims violated his employment contract.

Normally that would have been a routine business dispute. But the twist came when Citrin dutifully returned his work laptop--and IAC tried to undelete files on it to prove he did something wrong.

IAC couldn't. It turned out that (again according to IAC) Citrin had used a "secure delete" program to make sure that the files were not just deleted, but overwritten and unrecoverable.

Inevitably, perhaps, IAC sued. The relevance for Police Blotter readers is that the company claimed that Citrin's alleged secure deletion violated a federal computer crime law called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

The 7th Circuit made two remarkable leaps. First, the judges said that deleting files from a laptop counts as "damage." Second, they ruled that Citrin's implicit "authorization" evaporated when he (again, allegedly) chose to go into business for himself and violate his employment contract.

The implications of this decision are broad. It effectively says that employees better not use OS X's Secure Empty Trash feature, or any similar utility, because they could face civil and criminal charges after they leave their job.

An employee of law firm Jones Day found legal memos showing that their client, Diebold Election Systems, had used uncertified voting systems in Alameda County elections beginning in 2002 - violating California election law. The whistle-blower turned over the memos to the Oakland Tribune, which published the legal memos on its website in April 2004. The company's AccuVote-TSx model was subsequently banned in May 2004. Now, the whistle-blower, Stephen Heller, has been charged in L.A. Superior Court with felony access to computer data, commercial burglary, and receiving stolen property. If convicted on all three counts, Heller could face up to three years and eight months in state prison. Blair Berk, Heller's attorney state, "Certainly, someone who saw those documents could have reasonably believed that thousands of voters were going to be potentially disenfranchised in upcoming elections." Sandi Gibbons, spokeswoman for the L.A. County district attorney's office rebuts, "He's accused of breaking the law... If we feel that the evidence shows beyond a reasonable doubt in our minds that a crime has been committed, it's our job as a criminal prosecutor to file a case."

A police unit dedicated to combating movie piracy and those responsible for the manufacture and distribution of pirated films has launched in London.

In partnership with the Federation Against Copyright Theft (Fact), the new unit will pursue individuals and groups profiting from the sale of fake DVDs.

The unit, which will initially operate for a one-year period, will work alongside Fact collating intelligence on crime trends and activities in film piracy.

In a new series of lawsuits, Hollywood studios for the first time are targeting companies that provide access to Usenet newsgroups.

This corner of the Internet, largely a leftover from the days before the Web exploded into the mainstream, rarely gets much attention. It's still primarily a forum for text discussions (and overwhelming amounts of spam), where techies help one another with Windows and driver problems, and animal lovers share cat stories.

But in the last few years, a handful of technologies have emerged that have made newsgroups a much more fertile place for downloading copies of movies, music and software.

The MPAA says all the sites they've sued are facilitating piracy. But the legal status of search engines has never quite been clarified, and indeed, Google itself is the largest newsgroup search tool in existence.

Who could be upset by a scheme that allows free use of software? Well, Gervase Markham has found one Trading Standards officer who is.

A little while ago, I received an e-mail from a lady in the Trading Standards department of a large northern town. They had encountered businesses which were selling copies of Firefox, and wanted to confirm that this was in violation of our licence agreements before taking action against them.

I wrote back, politely explaining the principles of copyleft – that the software was free, both as in speech and as in price, and that people copying and redistributing it was a feature, not a bug. I said that selling verbatim copies of Firefox on physical media was absolutely fine with us, and we would like her to return any confiscated CDs and allow us to continue with our plan for world domination (or words to that effect).

"I can't believe that your company would allow people to make money from something that you allow people to have free access to. Is this really the case?" she asked.

"If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation, as it is difficult for us to give general advice to businesses over what is/is not permitted."

She then asked me to identify myself, so that she could confirm that I was authorised to speak for the Mozilla Foundation on this matter. I wondered if she was imagining nefarious copyright-infringing street traders taking a few moments off from shouting about the price of bananas to pop into an internet cafe, crack a router and intercept her e-mail.