People in the US are reportedly changing their holiday plans - after petrol reached the "ridiculous" price of up to 50p a litre.

Troy Green, of the American Automobile Association, told CNN that Americans should expect the price to go up another 25 cents over the next month and continue to climb over the summer.

The most expensive city is San Francisco where commuter Debbie Jasmin has stopped driving her gas-guzzling 4WD and started taking the subway to work. She's also curbed summer travel plans.

Microsoft will no longer "support the retrieval of license keys for the songs you purchased on MSN Music or the authorization of additional computers," the company said in an e-mail to former MSN Music customers.

What the announcement means is that former MSN Music customers will risk losing their music libraries if they try to transfer songs to unauthorized computers or swap operating systems after Aug. 31.

Another alternative is to burn songs to CDs and rerip. This means the loss of sound quality but offers more peace of mind.

As a music industry trade group, the group has several other responsibilities. One of those is lobbying Congress for tougher copyright laws, an endeavor that the group spent nearly $2.1 million on in 2007.

The far-reaching PRO-IP Act was introduced to the House in December 2007. The bill would create a new executive office, the Office of the US Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative, which would be charged with coordinating IP enforcement at the national and international levels.

The Intellectual Property Enforcement Act is the latest incarnation of the PIRATE Act. The RIAA loves this bill because it would outsource the thousands of copyright infringement lawsuits filed each year to the Department of Justice, saving the group millions of dollars in legal fees.

The group's $2.08 million expenditure is a mere fraction of the $2.8 billion spent lobbying Congress and the executive branch last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

DreamWorks has acquired the rights to Ghost in the Shell and has plans to produce a "3D Live Action" version of the popular anime. This happened apparently because Spielberg is a fan. He says "'Ghost in the Shell' is one of my favorite stories ... It's a genre that has arrived, and we enthusiastically welcome it to DreamWorks."

"I will tell (you) how to break into a nuclear reactor," Ira Winkler, president of security firm ISAG said as he launched into his presentation on "How to Take Down the Power Grid" at RSA 2008 on Tuesday night.

First, you set up a Web server that downloads spyware onto the computers that visit.

Second, you send an e-mail to people who work inside a power station that entices them to click on a hyperlink to the Web server with the spyware.

Third, you wait as the recipients--and everyone else they forwarded the e-mail to--visit the server and get infected.

"Then we had full system control," he said. "Once the malware was downloaded onto their systems...we could see the screens and manipulate the cursors."

"It had to be shut down after a couple of hours because it was working too well," he said.

The tradition of an international torch relay could be discontinued for the London 2012 Olympics, organisers said.

She denied that the uncertainty about an international relay was in response to the pro-Tibetan demonstrations in London.

Police made 37 arrests as thousands of human rights campaigners tried to disrupt the procession.

Organisers were forced to cancel the final series of relays through Paris following another day of anti-China protests.

Since 2004 we've been wondering when people would get around to realizing that just because a ringtone is on a phone, it doesn't change the basic economics (which are even worse, as the industry kept trying to push the price of ringtones higher to "save" the industry). With users finally realizing that they can transfer songs they have elsewhere onto their phones as ringtones, the desire to pay huge fees just to prop up the recording industry just isn't going to work any more.

Riot police have taken to the streets of several cities in Mexico to ... defend emo kids?

A series of attacks on dyed-hair, eye-makeup-wearing emo kids began in early March when several hundred people went on an emo-beating rampage in Queretaro, a town of 1.5 million about 160 miles north of Mexico City.

"They're organizing to defend their right to be emo," wrote Daniel Hernandez of LA Weekly on his personal blog, which has provided stellar coverage of the whole affair.

The National Security Strategy, published yesterday, was vague about how exactly the UK would fortify itself against cyber attack.

It's premise was a complex interplay of threats including ecological disaster, disease, crime, burgeoning world population, dwindling food and energy resources, terrorism and starker inequalities of wealth would challenge Britain's unusually prosperous world position.

Along with the economy and the global demands of population, the internet was one of the three greatest vulnerabilities for the UK, said the report.

The election officials have backed down and agreed not to send Felten the machine to test. News.com has more details on both the reason for the test and Sequoia's response to the whole mess. The reason? Shockingly enough, Sequoia's e-voting machines malfunctioned during the primary in a way that should scare you: it gave two different vote counts.

Sequoia has tried to explain it away as a bug, but that doesn't explain why the machines shouldn't be tested by a third party.

As a last resort, Sequoia appeals to the fact that such a test would break a licensing agreement, noting that "Licensing agreements are standard practice in the technology industry." That's clearly a cop out.