If FBI agents showed up at your data center bearing a warrant, would you be able to provide them prompt access to customer data? How long would it take?

CIT Hosting, also known as FooNet, markets itself as "the leader in the IRC and DDoS protection business for the last 5 years." The company posted a web page informing customers that its data center was shut down, and instructing customers to contact the FBI if they needed access to their files.

"The FBI executed a search warrant issued by the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio regarding the IRC network that we host," the company said in its statement.

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a live chat system that allows users to create private discussion rooms. While IRC has a lengthy history of legitimate use, it is also a medium for discreet communication between hackers. CIT said the FBI was "investigating whether someone hosted on our network hacked and attacked someone else."

"After several hours of attempting to track down, inspect and audit the terabytes of data that we host, the FBI determined that it was more efficient (from their point of view) to remove all of our servers and transport them to the FBI local laboratories for inspection," the statement continued.

The seizure isn't standard procedure, and there's no way to know exactly what prompted it. CIT's account suggests the FBI may have lost patience with the process. The IRC-focused nature of CIT's business may also have been a factor.

Belgian police arrested a 19-year-old female technology student who gained international notoriety for creating computer viruses, local news media reported Saturday. The woman, identified only by her nickname "Gigabyte," was charged with computer data sabotage under legislation introduced in 2000 to deal with cyber-crime, the daily La Libre Belgique reported. If convicted, she faces up to three years in prison and fines of up to euro100,000 (US$127,000).

Her youth and gender helped gain Gigabyte notoriety in the male-dominated world of computer hackers. In a 2002 interview carried on the Web site www.techtv.com, Gigabyte defended her work, saying she herself never spread the viruses she created and published on her Web site. "When people make guns, can you blame them when somebody else kills with them?" she was quoted asking. "I only write them. I don't release them." According to TechTV, Gigabyte began writing programs when she was just 6-years-old, created her first computer worm at 14 and before turning 18 became only the second person to write a virus in C-sharp, the language of Microsoft's .Net platform.

DJ Danger Mouse's recent Grey Album, which remixes Jay-Z's The Black Album and the Beatles White Album, has been hailed as a innovative hip-hop triumph. Despite that and the fact that only 3,000 copies of the album are in circulation, EMI sent cease and desist letters yesterday to Danger Mouse and the handful of stores that were selling the album, demanding that the album be destroyed.

"It’s clear that this work devalues neither of the originals. There is no legitimate artistic or economic reason to ban this record—this is just arbitrary exertion of control," said Nicholas Reville, Downhill Battle co-founder. "The framers of the constitution created copyright to promote innovation and creativity. A handful of corporations have radically perverted that purpose for their own narrow self interest."

The Grey Album has been widely shared on filesharing networks such as Kazaa and Soulseek, and has garnered critical acclaim in Rolling Stone (which called it "the ultimate remix record" and "an ingenious hip-hop record that sounds oddly ahead of its time"), the New Yorker, the Boston Globe (which called it the "most creatively captivating" album of the year), and other major news outlets.

In 1790 when Congress passed the first Copyright Act, the copyright term was 14 years, renewable for another 14 if the copyright holder was still living. In 2002, under the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, the copyright term was increased 20 years, raising copyright protection for corporations from to 95 years.

The technique, called "compositional analysis of bullet lead" (CABL), profiles the contents of seven metals which contaminate bullets when they are produced from melted battery lead. CABL implies guilt by revealing, for example, that bullets found in boxes belonging to a suspect are "analytically indistinguishable" from bullets found at the crime scene.

Since developing the technique in the 1960s, the FBI has presented incriminating CABL evidence in numerous murder cases. This has to be tempered in the future, says the report, published on Tuesday by the US National Research Council.

The panel found that bullets from different sources get mixed together in individual boxes as ammunition is distributed. The FBI itself found bullets from 14 different sources in one individual box, say the researchers.

Also, millions of identical bullets can come from a single smelting operation, and so an individual box of them cannot be incontrovertibly linked to a specific crime scene.

A California publisher of a pornographic magazine and website sued Visa, MasterCard and other financial institutions Wednesday, saying they facilitated the illegal sale of pirated sex images flooding the Internet.

"The defendants in this case ... are knowingly providing crucial transactional support services for the sale of millions of stolen photos and film clips worth billions of dollars that belong to Perfect 10 and third-parties," the suit reads.

The publisher of Perfect 10, Norman Zada, said in an interview that he had lost $29 million since setting up his business in 1996, including $8 million on legal fees. He said the problem was that he was spending thousands of dollars for nude photography sessions while many Internet sites were stealing his and other images.

Britain's music lovers are facing the prospect of paying more for their CDs today, after the music industry forced an online retailer to stop importing cheaper CDs for sale in the UK.

CD Wow!, the Hong Kong-based online retailer, has agreed to stop sourcing its CDs from Asia and other regions outside the European Union, which will add £2 to the retail price of its CDs.

Mr Robinson said the price of CDs would rise from £8.99 to £10.99 from Sunday.

The BPI admitted that the CDs imported by CD Wow! were genuine products bought from subsidiaries of UK record companies, but argued that they had been sold in the UK without their consent.

In what could easily be mistaken for an Onion story, Microsoft has unleashed the full fury of its lawyers on 17-year-old Canadian high-school student, Mike Rowe, demanding the handover of his Internet domain.

The domain? MikeRoweSoft.com. No, seriously.

Mike told us that when an email from Microsoft's Canadian lawyers Smart & Biggar arrived on 19 November laying out its complaint, he was "amazed and appalled". He replied saying he didn't want to hand over the domain and didn't feel there was any risk it would damage Microsoft's name.

By making the situation public though, Mike tells us he has been bolstered. "After going to the press, I have realised that I should stick it out till the end. After the massive amount of support I have received from people across the globe I am motivated to stick with what I believe in."

A spurious mail claiming to be from Citibank has started appearing in inboxes everywhere, again.

The emal purporting to be from the bank, claims that Citibank had to block accounts because of "money laundering, credit card fraud, terrorism and check fraud activity".

Also, over the weekend, a rash of other fraudulent emals purporting to be from Paypal and Barclays started tipping up in inboxes.

Though no guns were brandished, the bust from a distance looked like classic LAPD, DEA or FBI work, right down to the black "raid" vests the unit members wore. The fact that their yellow stenciled lettering read "RIAA" instead of something from an official law-enforcement agency was lost on 55-year-old parking-lot attendant Ceasar Borrayo.

"They said they were police from the recording industry or something, and next time they’d take me away in handcuffs," he said through an interpreter. Borrayo says he has no way of knowing if the records, with titles like Como Te Extraño Vol. IV — Musica de los 70’s y 80’s, are illegal, but he thought better of arguing the point.

But if an anti-piracy team crossed the line between looking like cops and implying or telling vendors that they are cops, the Los Angeles Police Department would take a pretty dim view, said LAPD spokesman Jason Lee.

"But it doesn’t really matter what your status is. If that person feels he was wrongly interrogated or under the false pretense that these people were cops, they should contact their local police station as a victim. We’ll sort it all out."

A mother's enquiry about buying Microsoft Flight Simulator for her ten-year-old son prompted a night-time visit to her home from a state trooper.

Julie Olearcek, a USAF Reserve pilot made the enquiry at a Staples store in Massachusetts, home to an earlier bout of hysteria, during the Salem witch trials.

So alarmed was the Staples clerk at the prospect of the ten year old learning to fly, that he informed the police, the Greenfield Recorder reports. The authorities moved into action, leaving nothing to chance. A few days later, Olearcek was alarmed to discover a state trooper flashing a torch into to her home through a sliding glass door at 8:30 pm on a rainy night.