Half of all black British males are destined to become records on the police National DNA Database by 2010, according to an analysis of government figures by the Liberal Democrats.

If you count only men of an arrestable age, 68 per cent of them will have been nabbed and dabbed by the police by 2010. Just 14.4 per cent of white males are expected to be on the DNA database in the same time.

Liberal Democrat leader Menzies Campbell used the figures to raise a question about the "disproportionate" targeting of non-white people by police, or "racial profiling", by which people's behaviours are stereotyped according to the colour of their skin.

The extent of errors on the DNA database, and the number of children contained on it, are also problems that are putting the National Police Improvement Agency, the authority responsible for its upkeep, on the defensive.

Father of two Siegfried B went awol shortly after his 50th birthday back in May 1985. He told his wife he was going out and duly exited his house in Bergholz-Rehbrücke, south of Berlin, never to return. Police subsequently searched the premises, including the garage, but didn't check a large dovecot above.

His wife recently decided to renovate the garage roof, and workers got a nasty shock when they set to work. Prosecutor Wilfried Lehmann explained: "When they removed the layers of asbestos they discovered the mummified skeleton. Siegfried B was hidden in the roof, and next to him were a schnaps bottle and a suicide note."

As an added twist to this macabre tale, there was speculation that the East German secret police might have had a hand in his death. Neighbours "reported seeing a dark limousine draw up outside the house several times, and the men inside it pulling Siegfried B into the car and driving off".

"I don't think it has been easy, but nevertheless [the AACS] is being broken... due to software implementations, although there have been hacks done on HD DVD drive firmware as well," said Alec Main, chief technology officer of Cloakware, based in Vienna, Va. "Clearly these software implementations need to take better precautions against being hacked."

Goodman said he considers that a reason to declare the technology defunct, and that DRM is a waste of time. He added that making DRM more secure would mean a trade-off in usability, and customers would be less likely to buy products that are harder to use.

At its core, DRM is not just about security, Goodman added. "It's about trying to force a business model into the marketplace," he said.

"The software developers need to use more advanced techniques such as white-box cryptography, where the keys do not appear in memory," Main said. "This technique can still be hacked ... but these techniques require much more knowledgeable hackers, or more likely a team of hackers, with a strong background in computer science, hacking, mathematics and cryptography."

Viagra could be used to help people flying eastwards recover from jetlag, according to new research.

A team of Argentine scientists found the drug helped hamsters recover up to 50% faster from forward shifts in their daily time cycles.

Injection of Viagra before the time shift meant the hamsters adjusted to the new time cycle faster, even when low doses of the drug, which did not cause penile erections, were used.

Helprin makes the same mistake that many make of thinking that just because the linguistic convention is to call such things "intellectual property," it really is the same thing as property. His entire argument is based on this simple point -- and it's why he's wrong. It is amusing to note that some are already pointing out that Helprin's argument is a blatant copy of Mark Twain's -- and yet we doubt he paid the descendants of Mark Twain for it. However, the key to Helprin's problem is his total and complete misunderstanding of the purpose of property as well as the purpose of copyright law.

The key point here is that in pretending (or simply ignorantly claiming) that intellectual property is the same as tangible property, Helprin completely misunderstands what rights copyright law gives him. It is not the same right as he has over his own property -- which, after he sells it, he no longer has control over it. Instead of "property rights," copyright gives him a monopoly right (which is what Jefferson preferred to call it) to control how his output is used even after it's sold.

During the incident, which happened last August at Unit 3 of the Browns Ferry nuclear power plant, operators manually shut down the reactor after two water recirculation pumps failed.

An investigation into the failure found that the controllers for the pumps locked up following a spike in data traffic -- referred to as a "data storm" in the NRC notice -- on the power plant's internal control system network.

"Conversations between the Homeland Security Committee staff and the NRC representatives suggest that it is possible that this incident could have come from outside the plant," Committee Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) and Subcommittee Chairman James R. Langevin (D-RI) stated in the letter. "Unless and until the cause of the excessive network load can be explained, there is no way for either the licensee (power company) or the NRC to know that this was not an external distributed denial-of-service attack."

The latest beta release of SlySoft's AnyDVD HD program can apparently be used to rip HD DVD discs that use AACS version 3. Although these won't hit store shelves until the May 22, pirates have already successfully tested SlySoft's program with early release previews of the Matrix trilogy.

The hacker collective continues to adapt to AACS revisions and is demonstrating a capacity to assimilate new volume keys at a rate which truly reveals the futility of resistance. If keys can be compromised before HD DVDs bearing those keys are even released into the wild, one has to question the viability of the entire key revocation model.

After the last AACS key spread far and wide across the breadth of the Internet, AACS LA chairman Michael Ayers stated that the organization planned to continue clamping down on key dissemination, despite the fact that attempts to do so only encouraged further dissemination. In a monument to comedic irony, the AACS LA has elected to put out the fire by pouring on more gasoline.

Warner Bros. astonishingly now claims that 70 percent of camcorded movies have been traced to Canada over the last 18 months. Given the claims of 20 percent, 23 percent, 30 percent, 40 percent, and 50 percent did not make the requisite impact (in fact, the USTR even rejected the movie industry's request to escalate Canada on the Special 301 Watch list), we now get a blockbuster number of 70 percent.

Moreover, with New York City taking 40 percent of the camcording claims and with Spiderman 3 apparently appearing on China streets weeks before the previews in Canada, the numbers just don't add up.

Last week I pointed to a U.S. GAO study that found that counterfeiting claims are massively overblown with less than one percent of randomly inspected shipments into the U.S. containing counterfeit products, a far cry from the 5 - 7 percent that is often claimed. Today, the Financial Times reports that a forthcoming OECD study concludes that losses of global counterfeiting amount to no more than $200 billion, far less than the $1 trillion claimed by the International Chamber of Commerce.

There are a few things lawmakers have decided really ought to be handled with the "care and oversight" that only the government can provide: e.g., tax collection, radioactive materials, biohazards, guns, and CDs. CDs? No, I'm not talking about financial Certificates of Deposit, though that might make more sense. I'm talking about Compact Discs.

New "pawn shop" laws are springing up across the United States that will make selling your used CDs at the local record shop something akin to getting arrested. No, you won't spend any time in jail, but you'll certainly feel like a criminal once the local record shop makes copies of all of your identifying information and even collects your fingerprints.

The legislation is supposed to stop the sale of counterfeit and/or stolen music CDs, despite the fact that there has been no proof that this is a particularly pressing problem for record shops in general.

Writer/IT contractor Matt Boyd, formerly the man who made up the words for webcomic Mac Hall and who now does the same for his and Ian McConville's new comic Three Panel Soul, was recently fired from his government job. His conversation with a co-worker about a gun he intended to buy for target shooting was overheard by someone in a nearby cubicle. As it was unfortunately the day of the Virginia Tech shootings, the eavesdropper panicked and reported him to management. That was bad enough. But when he used the comic to document the meeting where the reason for his firing was explained, he was visited by representatives of local law enforcement investigating him on suspicion of making a "terroristic threat" using the Internet. No charges have been filed. Yet. FLEEN interviewed Matt about the incident.