The central banks of China and Russia have joined private companies in calling on Swift, the international financial intermediary, to pull all non-US data from America, The Register has learned.

SWIFT has found itself caught between a rock and a hard place. The organisation secretly handed over personal data to comply with demands from the US to aid the country's investigation into terrorist finances after the September 11 attacks. By doing so, it broke the data protection laws of many EU countries.

China and Russia were "notable" among countries whose central banks had expressed their concerns to Swift. The European Central Bank, which also used Swift's services, has been criticised by EU authorities for letting the EU look at European financial data in secret.

Swift is trying to break into the domestic banking markets in China and Russia and is keen to get off on the right foot with local authorities. In India, where Swift is also trying to make a splash, the banks are said to be investigating alternatives.

The eagerly awaited new album by Prince is being launched as a free CD with a national Sunday newspaper in a move that has drawn widespread criticism from music retailers.

The Mail on Sunday revealed yesterday that the 10-track Planet Earth CD will be available with an "imminent" edition, making it the first place in the world to get the album. Planet Earth will go on sale on July 24.

One music store executive described the plan as "madness" while others said it was a huge insult to an industry battling fierce competition from supermarkets and online stores. Prince's label has cut its ties with the album in the UK to try to appease music stores.

The Entertainment Retailers Association said the giveaway "beggars belief". "It would be an insult to all those record stores who have supported Prince throughout his career," ERA co-chairman Paul Quirk told a music conference. "It would be yet another example of the damaging covermount culture which is destroying any perception of value around recorded music."

"The Artist Formerly Known as Prince should know that with behaviour like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores. And I say that to all the other artists who may be tempted to dally with the Mail on Sunday."

A spokesman for the group said last night that the UK arm of Sony BMG had withdrawn from Prince's global deal and would not distribute the album to UK stores.

Buying a DVD and then copying it for use on your PSP, iPod or laptop could soon become impossible, if the DVD Copy Control Association gets its way.

The association wants to amend the licence underpinning the use of its DVD copy-protection technology, CSS (Content Scrambling System). This would, if successful, oblige you to have the original disc in your DVD drive every time you watched it.

The amendment would force, say, DVD playback software from displaying ripped content. It would also imply the use of software built into PCs and optical drives to prevent ripping software from saving an unscrambled copy of a disc's contents for later playback on a device without a DVD drive, such as a PSP or an iPod.

The US Department of Homeland Insecurity, the outfit which tells other people how to make themselves safe, has suffered more than 800 hacker break-ins, virus outbreaks and other computer security problems over two years.

Red-faced departmental managers admitted to the US congress that hacker tools for stealing passwords and other files were found on two internal Homeland Security computer systems.

Coast Guard and the Transportation Security Administration workstations were infected with malicious software which spent a lot of time talking to outsiders. DHS staff had also lost a few laptops and its website has been turned over several times.

Terrorism is a real threat, and one that needs to be addressed by appropriate means. But allowing ourselves to be terrorized by wannabe terrorists and unrealistic plots -- and worse, allowing our essential freedoms to be lost by using them as an excuse -- is wrong.

The alleged plan, to blow up JFK's fuel tanks and a small segment of the 40-mile petroleum pipeline that supplies the airport, was ridiculous.

I don't think these nut jobs, with their movie-plot threats, even deserve the moniker "terrorist." But in this country, while you have to be competent to pull off a terrorist attack, you don't have to be competent to cause terror.

Following one of these abortive terror misadventures, the administration invariably jumps on the news to trumpet whatever ineffective "security" measure they're trying to push, whether it be national ID cards, wholesale National Security Agency eavesdropping or massive data mining. Never mind that in all these cases, what caught the bad guys was old-fashioned police work -- the kind of thing you'd see in decades-old spy movies.

Artists and record bosses believe that the best album is the loudest one. Sound levels are being artificially enhanced so that the music punches through when it competes against background noise in pubs or cars. 'Geoff Emerick, engineer on the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album, said: "A lot of what is released today is basically a scrunched-up mess. Whole layers of sound are missing. It is because record companies don't trust the listener to decide themselves if they want to turn the volume up." Downloading has exacerbated the effect. Songs are compressed once again into digital files before being sold on iTunes and similar sites. The reduction in quality is so marked that EMI has introduced higher-quality digital tracks, albeit at a premium price, in response to consumer demand.'

We already know that Webcasters small and large are outraged at the prospect of having to pay higher royalty fees to the music industry, particularly when compared with what is required of their satellite and terrestrial radio counterparts.

In letters distributed to various Capitol Hill offices on Thursday morning, the four companies' CEOs argue that the music industry will also be forcing collection of more than $1 billion per year from three services alone--Yahoo, RealNetworks and Pandora--in the name of covering so-called administrative costs.

Here's how they say they derived that figure: When the CRB decided earlier this year to change the rules for Internet broadcasters, it also decided to levy a $500 minimum annual fee per Internet radio "channel." SoundExchange, the non-profit music industry entity that collects the royalty and other fees on behalf of record labels, says that minimum payment is supposed to cover administrative costs.

Such an amount would far outpace the $20 million in total royalty fees collected by SoundExchange from the Internet radio industry last year, the CEOs note in their letter. And besides, it's not even clear that those payments would go to artists, as royalty payments do, the companies argue.

The launch of music tracks free of digital locks on iTunes has been overshadowed by the discovery that they contain data about who bought them.

News site Ars Technica was among the first to discover that downloaded tracks free of Fairplay have embedded within them the full name and account information, including e-mail address, of who bought them.

It suggested that this information could be an anti-piracy measure as it could help work out who was putting downloads on file-sharing sites.

But it also added that the user information was found on all the tracks that people buy on iTunes whether free of DRM or not.

It was not clear, said Ars Technica, whether the data was part of Apple's administration system for iTunes or something else. It said because the data was easy to spoof Apple needed to explain why the data was present.

Other websites said it was only a matter of time before a utility program was produced which could strip out the identifying information.

The ongoing war between content producers and hackers over the AACS copy protection used in HD DVD and Blu-ray discs produced yet another skirmish last week, and as has been the case as of late, the hackers came out on top.

The hacker "BtCB" posted the new decryption key for AACS on the Freedom to Tinker web site, just one day after the AACS Licensing Authority (AACS LA) issued the key. In true tongue-in-cheek hacker fashion, the site posted the 128-bit key as a method of decrypting a small haiku that they placed on the same page, noting that it just might accidentally (wink, wink) be the same key that will decrypt new high-definition discs as well.

The AACS LA is not happy about these Processing Keys being released. When previous keys were leaked, the organization vowed that it would remove the keys from the Internet with cease-and-desist orders. Predictably, this only encouraged people to post them more. The whole series of affairs evokes memories of when DVD decryption was all the rage, and the DeCSS code wound up being printed on t-shirts to express the futility of trying to sue anyone who used or even knew about it. The decryption code for AACS cannot fit easily on a t-shirt, but the 128-bit Processing Keys can, and it's clear that no matter how many times the AACS LA revokes old keys, the new ones are going to be found and released.

Google's global privacy lawyer has admitted that parts of the outfit's privacy policy are too vague and need to be tightened up.

In an interview with the Beeb, Peter Fleischer said the company "could do better" with policy statements that explained why user information was sometimes shared with third parties.

He said that maintaining user privacy was pretty fundamental to Google. The only time the outfit would share data was when personal information had been stripped from it. Honest.