A michigan teacher has been suspended after her students produced a hard hitting documentary about the perils of Myspace.com.

Devon Fralick approved the eight minute documentary by two Lakeview High School students which tried to warn classmates about the dangers of putting personal information on the Internet.

Images were taken from the Myspace.com and blurred, but school administrators felt that the broadcast's message "was lost because of the selection of photographs, language and music" that was included.

Fralick was escorted from the school soon after the show was broadcast, much to the horror of the teens who made the show. Neil Willoughby, 17, a junior at the school who helped put together the presentation said that it was ludicrous as if anyone should take the heat for this, it should be him.

In a statement, the DOJ said Derek Borchardt, 21, of North Carolina; Matthew Howard, 24, of Colorado; and Aaron Jones, 31, of Oregon obtained the music through insiders at record companies, magazine publishers and retail outlets. Songs were stored on servers run by the group.

In a separate action, the Record Industry Association of America announced it had filed another 750 lawsuits against unnamed individuals as part of its long-running legal efforts against P2P users. These "John Doe" suits include the individual's IP address, which the RIAA uses to discover his or her identity.

In a statement, RIAA president Cary Sherman hailed the lawsuits as protecting the integrity of the market so legal music services like iTunes can prosper. Sherman also coined a new phrase for those who download music illegally, likening them to retail shoplifters with the term "songlifter."

"Just as we continue to educate fans about the right ways to enjoy music online, we will continue to enforce our rights through the legal system. Songlifting is not without consequences," he said.

Heise Online is reporting about yet another example of the ever-warming relationship of copy protection and rootkit technologies. The affair started with the digital rights management system Sony BMG was using to protect audio CD's. Now, we can also confirm (thanks to Rüdiger from our German office!) that at least the German DVD release of the movie "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" contains a copy protection mechanism which uses rootkit-like cloaking technology.

The Settec Alpha-DISC copy protection system used on the DVD contains user-mode rootkit-like features to hide itself. The system will hide it's own process, but does not appear to hide any files or registry entries. This makes the feature a bit less dangerous, as anti-virus products will still be able to scan all files on the disk.

If you suspect you have this copy protection system installed on your computer and you wish to remove it, the manufacturer is providing an uninstaller.

The US Vice-President, Dick Cheney, has accidentally shot and injured a man during a quail hunting trip in Texas.

The victim, named as Harry Whittington, was on the trip with Mr Cheney at the Armstrong Ranch when the accident happened on Saturday.

Ms Armstrong said Mr Cheney had turned round to shoot at a bird but sprayed Mr Whittington with shotgun pellets instead.

A laywer from Austin, Texas, Mr Whittington was initially treated at the ranch by medical staff who normally travel with the vice-president.

Interviewed for BBC website, Lavinia Carey, head of the British Video Association suggests that their research indiciates that people who download films illegally, pay to see as many films legally as a typical legit DVD consumer. Thus undermining the argument that illegal downloads impacts legitimate sales.

UK research shows that, on average, downloaders are film fans who view the same number of legitimate films (cinema, rented and bought DVDs) as the average active DVD consumer (24). On top of that, they also consume illegitimately acquired movies.

The Motion Picure Ass. of America stands accused of breaking its own piracy guidelines after it admitted making unauthorised copies of a film submitted to it for classification.

The accuser is film director Kirby Dick who sent a copy of his documentary "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" to the MPAA back in November.

The film puts the work of the MPAA in the spotlight, accusing it of being too hard on sex, too soft on violence and publicly unaccountable. For its part, the MPAA reckons the film-maker's methods, allegedly involving rooting through MPAA's members dustbins and generally following them about, were a bit underhand.

According to the MPAA's own website, "Manufacturing, selling, distributing or making copies of motion pictures without the consent of the copyright owner is illegal."

Top selling author Terry Pratchett could be coming to the big screen, as rumour has it that his hit book the Wee Free Men is being made into a film.

The book tells the story of a girl who has to rescue her brother from fairies with the help of brawling pixies.

However this project looks like having a lot of Hollywood cash behind it, and with a big name like Sam Raimi linked to it, it could be a whole lot bigger than anything Pratchett fans have seen before.

A missile strike apparently targeting al-Qaeda's deputy leader in a village in Pakistan has prompted Islamabad to protest to its American allies.

Ayman al-Zawahiri was not in the village on the border with Afghanistan, Pakistan officials said. But the attack left at least 18 local people dead.

The US military has denied knowledge of the attack, which US media reported had been carried out by the CIA.

Russell Tice, a longtime insider at the National Security Agency, is now a whistleblower the agency would like to keep quiet.

For 20 years, Tice worked in the shadows as he helped the United States spy on other people's conversations around the world.

Tice says the technology exists to track and sort through every domestic and international phone call as they are switched through centers, such as one in New York, and to search for key words or phrases that a terrorist might use.

"If you picked the word 'jihad' out of a conversation," Tice said, "the technology exists that you focus in on that conversation, and you pull it out of the system for processing."

President Bush has admitted that he gave orders that allowed the NSA to eavesdrop on a small number of Americans without the usual requisite warrants.

But Tice disagrees. He says the number of Americans subject to eavesdropping by the NSA could be in the millions if the full range of secret NSA programs is used.

Since opening last month, Steven Spielberg's Munich has been touted as a possible Oscar contender. Hopefully for Spielberg, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will actually be able to watch a copy of the movie before having to vote. The British Film Academy (BAFTA) couldn't, thanks to a DVD mastering screw-up.

All 5,000+ BAFTA members were to be given copies of Spielberg's latest for consideration. However, due to a customs screw-up, the DVDs weren't distributed in time for the first round voting deadline. After getting the customs snafu fixed, the DVDs were finally sent out to the BAFTA screeners. Problem solved, right?

Wrong. The DVDs were encoded for Region 1 (US and Canada), not Region 2 (most of Europe). As a result, only those who had seen Munich in the theaters were able to vote on it.

Making DVDs unplayable outside of arbitrary, industry-defined geographical regions was one of the more nonsensical decisions made by the movie studios. The studios wanted the region encoding to protect revenues from staggered releases of both theatrical and DVD releases and as an antipiracy measure. However, it has the added bonus effect of allowing them to control pricing in different parts of the world.