The Home Office has announced new, higher fees for the UK's shiny new biometric ePassport.

This is the second time the price of a standard passport has gone up in the last year. Last November prices rose from £42 to £51. Now, Joe Public will have to fork out an additional £15 for the privilege of being able to travel abroad - that's a rise of almost 30 per cent - because as of 5 October this year, a standard 10 year passport will cost £66.

Home Office minister Joan Ryan said in a press release that the new format "provides enhanced security and reassurance for the holders and is in line with internationally agreed standards aimed at combating the growing threat of fraud and forgery".

In a pre-emptive defense of the rising costs, Ryan continued: "There is a cost to the anti-fraud measures that we are introducing, but we are clear that it is a price that must be paid to protect the integrity of our travel documents and improve the security of our borders."

Iraq's former leader Saddam Hussein has been taken to hospital as a result of a hunger strike, prosecutors at his trial in Baghdad say.

Saddam Hussein is thought to have begun refusing food on 7 July in protest at the murder of his lawyer.

They are protesting against procedures at the tribunal, and also demanding better security for defence lawyers.

Three members of the defence team have been murdered during the course of the trial - most recently senior lawyer Khamis al-Obeidi, shot dead in June.

Things have a habit of going missing from US defence labs.

In a 2005 audit, hundreds of conventional explosives at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, could not be accounted for, says a report released last week by the US Department of Energy's Inspector General.

Plastic and powdered explosives, detonators and rocket motors were all missing. "Extremely dangerous and potentially destructive materials may be subject to theft or diversion," says the report, claiming that neither Sandia nor Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico has adequate controls or regularly tests the stability and safety of ageing explosives.

They are particularly worried about explosives stored at poorly guarded, off-site facilities. In past years, computer hard drives, including one containing nuclear secrets, have gone missing from US defence labs.

The Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD are new data carriers for high-resolution motion pictures. For fear of piracy, Hollywood had the developers install a cornucopia of copy prevention mechanisms on them. For instance, the film data on the disks are protected by means of the Advanced Access Content System (AACS). Digital output only reaches the monitor via connections encrypted by means of High Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP).

Computer magazine c't has discovered that the first software players running on Windows XP allow screenshots of the movies to be created in full resolution. To do so, you only need to press the Print key on your keyboard while the movie is running. Such a screenshot function could then be automated to produce copies of HD movies both from Blu-ray Discs and from HD DVDs picture by picture.

When asked to comment, Toshiba confirmed the security hole found by c't, which affects the computers already sold, and announced updates for the player software and graphics card driver. These new software versions should disable the screenshot function.

The Washington Post and New York Times are reporting on a Bush administration initiative that has tapped into a vast global database of confidential financial transactions for nearly five years. Relying on a presidential emergency declaration made under the International Emergency Economic Powers, the administration has been surveilling the data from the SWIFT database, which links about 7,800 banks and brokerages and handles billions of transactions a year.

Together with a hundredfold expansion of the FBI's use of "national security letters" to obtain communications and banking records, the secret NSA and Treasury programs have built unprecedented government databases of private transactions, most of them involving people who prove irrelevant to terrorism investigators.

US telco AT&T has rewritten its privacy policy to allow it to hand over customer records to whoever it wants.

The re-write has come about after the telco got into trouble for handing over phone records of ordinary Americans to the US government.

Legal experts say that AT&T seems to have re-written its so widely to avoid consumer-protection lawsuits. The outfit is being sued by San Francisco's Electronic Frontier Foundation for allegedly allowing the NSA to tap into the company's data network, providing warrantless access to customers' e-mails and Web browsing.

The move goes back on a comment made last month when AT&T said in a statement it had "a long history of vigorously protecting customer privacy" and that "our customers expect, deserve and receive nothing less than our fullest commitment to their privacy."

In fact a line in the 2004 policy which said "that privacy is an important issue for our customers and members" has been deleted.

An OpenReach techie was called out to the Manchester suburb of Chorlton on Monday after problems with voice calls. According to our correspondent, after a quick shimmy up the offending telegraph pole he calmly reported spiders had chewed through the line.

The problem was fixed and the engineer went on his way, leaving we at Vulture Central losing sleep over whether spiders are indeed seeking to bring the technological world sobbing to its knees. We contacted BT to ask whether arachnid attacks are becoming a bigger problem in Britain's telecoms infrastructure.

A spokesman said someone had the wrong end of the stick, and the engineer had just said there were spiders living in the pole top box, and the line had corroded, rather than being munched. Our correspondent assures us the engineer did say the spiders had eaten the wire.

The MPAA is fuming that aging rockers Grateful Dead have made a fortune by encouraging fans to record their concerts.

Barlow managed to get up Glickman's nose with the claim that the band did well out of letting people record their concerts for free.

Gickman said that it was "ridiculous to believe that you can give product away for free and be more successful. I mean it defies the laws of nature."

Barlow fired back that the music and movie business were aging industries run by aging men, and they're up against 17-year-olds who have turned themselves into electronic Hezbollah because they resent the content industry for its proprietary practices.

He said that despite the fact the music industry had bought out the more powerful institutions in the land, it will be the 17 and 18 year olds who would eventually win. It was in his generation and it will be in the future.

The All Party Parliamentary Internet Group looked at how copy protection systems restrict the way digital movies and music can be enjoyed.

For instance, a DRM system may allow a CD to be played on a PC but would not let tracks from that album be copied so they can be listened to on a portable player such as an iPod.

The MPs' report made several recommendations and called on the Office of Fair Trading hasten the introduction of labelling regulations that would let people know what they can do with music and movies they buy online or offline.

The report also called for the makers of DRM systems to be made aware of the consequences of using aggressive copy protection systems.

This recommendation was made because, as the report was being drawn up, information was emerging about the controversial copy protection system employed in the US by Sony BMG.

She said that DRM was less about protecting copyright and more about creating a system in which people rent rather than own the media they spend money on.

Yesterday we wrote about the new effort to "educate" Canadian children with a one-sided view on copyright laws using the mascot Captain Copyright. Since then, plenty of people have noticed some fun things about Captain Copyright, such as the fact that the disclaimer on the site bans anyone who says anything negative about the site from linking to the site (whoops!). Also, the terms of use apparently forbid people from cutting and pasting any content from the site. Specifically, their site reads: "You are not permitted to copy or cut from any page or its HTML source code to the Windows™ clipboard (or equivalent on other platforms) onto any other website." (which, yes, we cut and pasted here). Apparently, Captain Copyright does not believe in fair use. However, perhaps the most egregious, is that Captain Copyright may be violating copyrights himself, by failing to follow the license on republishing certain Wikipedia content. It sounds like Captain Copyright may need something of an educational campaign himself.