After 15 punishing rounds of combat involving 32 of America's most hated companies, 100,000 voters have spoken: More hated than Halliburton, more despised than Walmart, the RIAA has defeated all comers to become the Worst Company in America 2007.

Currently foreign travellers must have their index fingers scanned into a database when they enter the US by agents of the Department of Homeland Security. Those prints can then be checked against a database of fingerprints held by police forces or the FBI.

That number will increase to all 10 fingerprints on a trial at 10 US airports. It is planned that the programme will be in place in all airports in around a year, according to a report in The Daily Telegraph.

There are already concerns in Europe about the amount and importance of data held by US authorities on European air passengers. The US has a less stringent privacy regime than Europe.

Airlines are currently forced to hand over 34 pieces of information about every passenger that travels to the US. Called Passenger Name Records, the information is transferred in line with a deal signed by the European Commission and US authorities.

The Department of Homeland Security is said to have arrested 1,800 suspects since biometric identification was introduced, but in order to do that they collected the fingerprints of 80 million passengers.

Musicload said in a letter distributed last week that customers are having consistent problems with DRM, so much so that 3 out of 4 customer service calls are ultimately the result of the frustrations that come with DRM. In a business where the major music labels expect to be paid well for their source material, the costs of supporting DRM are borne entirely by the music retailers. If the labels' love affair with DRM is hurting the companies trying to make a go at selling music online, something is horribly wrong.

According to Musicload, DRM "makes the use of music quite difficult and hinders the development of a mass-market for legal downloads." The lack of interoperability is unfair to customers and prevents true competition between music services, in other words.

Championing the "Comeback of MP3," Musicload said that artists choosing to drop DRM saw a 40 percent increase in sales since December, and that more artists and labels are showing interest. The company hopes that DRM-free MP3s make a comeback, though there have been few signs that the major labels are interested.

When a piece of music is purchased you might assume you can listen to it in on any number of different devices: at home, in the car or on a portable music player. But, in the UK at least, you would be wrong.

"You can't copy any form of music or film without the copyright owner's consent," explained copyright lawyer Hamish Porter.

"DRM can allow copyright holders to protect their intellectual property but considering that over 90% of the music sold in the music market today is on a non-DRM format called the CD, then that's not necessarily an answer."

"It's best summed up by the old computer security maxim: whatever you can do in software, you can undo in software. In the case of music, whatever complicated system you have in place, the music has to come out of two wires that you have plugged into a loud speaker."

The fight back against DRM has already begun. In Europe, Apple's system is under fire for being anti-competitive and is facing legal action in various European countries.

Consumers are also making their voices heard through various organisations which oppose DRM, which they term Digital Restrictions Management.

A Texas-based software company is offering a free tool allowing web users to check the likelihood of a particular name being flagged up by US government's Transportation Safety Administration (TSA), the body which operates the infamous "No Fly" list.

Engineers at S3 Matching Technologies have put together their own Soundex-based engine and loaded in "a compilation of the best available data regarding suspected and known terrorists. Publicly available terrorist names from various reliable government and non-governmental sources were merged to create a comprehensive list." They claim that their website list is constantly updated, just like the TSA's. Users can put in any name they like. If both first and last names throw up a red terrorist-related connection, S3 reckon there's a sporting chance that an individual with that name will be on the TSA's Watch List.

El Reg has naturally tested a few obvious names on the site. Ones which throw up a both-names indication of terrorist links include "George Bush", "Tony Blair," and interestingly, "Gordon Brown", Britain's chancellor of the exchequer. Names which seem to be in the clear include "Oliver North" and "Hugo Chavez".

The illicit availability of appetite suppressant pills online is fuelling a slimming obsession and putting lives at risk, experts warn.

Last year, a study found more than half of 1,230 UK women surveyed by Closerdiets.com admitted using slimming pills.

Dr Emafo said: "It is important for consumers to realise that what they think is a cut-price medication bought on an unregulated market may however have potentially lethal effects whenever the consumed drugs are not the genuine product or are taken without medical advice."

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency said the global availability of counterfeit medicine had increased in recent years, through unregulated web sites operating on the internet.

Earlier this month it was widely reported that EMI was indeed ready to cast DRM into the dark abyss and earn the company the honorable status of being the first major music label to realize that DRM alienates honest customers. As it turns out, the company is indeed open to the possibility of ditching DRM, but they expect to be paid well for it, and the online music retailers aren't ready to meet their demands.

EMI is the only major record label to seriously consider abandoning the disaster that is DRM, but earlier reports that focused on the company's reformist attitude apparently missed the mark: EMI is willing to lose the DRM, but they demand a considerable advance payment to make it happen. According to Bloomberg, EMI has backed out of talks for now because no one will pay what they're asking. No dollar amounts are known at this time.

The intense effort by the fair-use community to circumvent AACS (the content protection protocol of HD DVD and Blu-Ray) has produced yet another stunning result: The AACS Device Key of the WinDVD 8 has been found, allowing any movie playable by it to be decrypted. This new discovery by ATARI Vampire of the Doom9 forum is based on the previous research of two other forum members, muslix64 (who found a way to locate the Title Keys of single movies) and arnezami (who extracted the Processing Key of an unspecified software player). AACS certainly seems to be falling apart bit for bit every day now.

A 330-foot-deep sinkhole killed two teenage siblings when it swallowed about a dozen homes early Friday and forced the evacuation of nearly 1,000 people in a crowded Guatemala City neighborhood.

Officials blamed the sinkhole on recent rains and an underground sewage flow from a ruptured main. They warned that the crater could widen or others could open up.

Authorities have warned that the sounds coming from the sinkhole augured further possible collapses, and possibly the destruction of more homes. The dwellings around the crater have been evacuated, and police cordoned off a 500-yard security perimeter around the hole.

The NY times is carrying an article about how the RIAA is hiring hip hop artists to make mix tapes, and then helping the police raid their studios. In the case of DJ Drama and DJ Don Cannon, they were raided by SWAT teams with their guns drawn. The local police chief said later that they were 'prepared for the worst.' Men in RIAA jackets helped cart away 'evidence'. Just the same, 'Record labels regularly hire mixtape D.J.'s to produce CDs featuring a specific artist. In many cases, these arrangements are conducted with a wink and a nod rather than with a contract; the label doesn't officially grant the D.J. the right to distribute the artist's songs or formally allow the artist to record work outside of his contract.'