The CIA's inspector general warned last year that interrogation procedures approved by the Bush administration could violate the UN convention against torture, it emerged yesterday.

The leaking of the inspector general's classified report represented an embarrassment for President George Bush, only a few days after he emphatically declared: "We do not torture." It also comes at a sensitive time when the vice-president, Dick Cheney, is lobbying to have the CIA exempted from legislation establishing stricter interrogation rules.

A new law sponsored by Senator John McCain - a former Republican presidential candidate and a war hero who was tortured in Vietnam - would ban inhumane treatment and oblige all US agencies to abide by international law on torture. The draft law was approved by 90 votes to nine in the Senate earlier this month, but the House of Representatives has yet to give its support and Mr Cheney has launched an aggressive effort to modify the legislation to allow the CIA to be exempted.

Negotiations are under way to resolve the impasse, after the White House threatened that Mr Bush would make his first use of the presidential veto if the McCain draft law remained unchanged.

The new Sprint Music Store is the first legal music downloading service you can access right from a cellphone, and Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg gives high marks to the interface, download speed and playback quality. But he criticizes the 'stratospheric new price for the legal download of a single song: $2.50.' Sprint justifies the price because of the convenience and usability of its store. Mossberg responds, 'I believe something else is at work here: a lethal combination of two industries many consumers believe typically charge too much. One is the bumbling record industry, which has been seeking to raise prices in the fledgling legal downloading market even as it continues to bleed from free, illegal downloading. The other is the cellphone carriers, or, as I like to call them, "the Soviet ministries," which too often treat their customers as captive and refuse to allow open competition for services they offer over their networks.'

Bruce Perens posts in his blog about an amusing encounter between Richard Stallman and United Nations security at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis. It seems that RFID technology, which Stallman opposes for privacy reasons, was used in the identification badges for the conference. From the blog: 'You can't give Richard a visible RF ID strip without expecting him to protest. Richard acquired an entire roll of aluminum foil and wore his foil-shielded pass prominently.' During a keynote speech, Stallman also passed around the tinfoil for other to use as well. It seems that UN security was not amused, however, as they would not let him leave the room for some time.

Close examination of the rootkit that Sony's audio CDs attack their customers' PCs with has revealed that their malicious software is built on code that infringes on copyright. Indications are that Sony has included the LAME music encoder, which is licensed under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL), which requires that those who use it attribute the original software and publish some of the code they write to use the library. Sony has done none of this.

The evidence against Sony is compelling, and this further reveals the hypocrisy of Sony's actions. Sony claims that it needs to install dangerous, malicious, underhanded software on its customers' computers to protect its copyrights, but in order to write this malware, it has no compunction about infringing on the copyrights of public-spirited software authors who make their works available under free software licenses like the GPL.

A Russian politician has offered to send the country's violent football thugs to France to sort out the rioters.

Far right politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky says he already has hundreds of volunteers many with special forces training.

In a telegram sent to France, Zhirinovsky, who is also Deputy Speaker of the Duma, said: "We are ready with volunteer units of football fans and activists who have served in military combat hot spots."

"I am convinced that our initiative would restore total order and calm the rioting within 48 hours."

French authorities have had to use emergency powers in a bid to tackle rioters who have swept the country in the last two weeks.

While, at some level, this seems like just piling on to the PR disaster facing Sony-BMG following the rootkit fiasco, it's still important to highlight some of the ridiculous things the company has done. After telling everyone that rootkits don't matter, because no one knows what they are, and doing various other questionable moves -- almost all of which amount to "trust us," some people decided to figure out just what kind of bargain they were getting when they trust Sony-BMG. While it's already been shown that the end user license agreement that comes with Sony's copy protected CDs doesn't disclose the rootkit functionality that weakens the security on your computer and is quite difficult to uninstall without breaking parts of your computer -- and also doesn't disclose that the CD phones home occasionally -- there's a lot of things that the EULA does tell you. The folks at the EFF went through it and pulled out some of the more ridiculous terms. By far, the absolute best term in the EULA is that if you file for bankruptcy, you need to delete the music. Recall, of course, that when you buy a standard, non-copy protected CD, there is no EULA at all. However, Sony would apparently prefer that all of you out there who have gone through any form of bankruptcy didn't listen to their music.

All but 400 of the 3,000 students at San Antonio Warren High School either didn't show up or walked out of class today due to threats against the school posted on a popular teen web site, 1200 WOAI news reported today.

"About mid morning today we were able to confirm that the web site 'MySpace-dot-com' allowed several students to post threatening messages on it's web site, messages threatening Warren High School," Pascual Gonzales of the Northside School District said. "This message said two boys were planning to show up at school with guns."

Administrators say the students who posted the messages on the web site have been identified and will face felony charges, including making terroristic threats and disruption of a high school campus. Officials say all four are 'current students at Warren High School.

Gonzales said Northside officials will also hold MySpace-dot-com "accountable."

"It just seems to me that if you put up a public web site, and you allow students, teeangers, minors to post their thoughts and ideas, and not monitor it in an adult manner, you are asking for trouble," Gonzales said. "This particular web site has been a pain for all Bexar County schools for a long time now, and it just seems that the owners of MySpace-dot-com should be held accountable."

Sony BMG, the record company part of the multinational corporation that makes laptops, TVs, movies and many other things, is in trouble this week thanks to a copy protection scheme it has used on a number of its CDs.

It is one of many competing techniques used by record companies to try to stop people making copies of music files from CD as they fear that their customers will then make the music available online without permission.

If you have got a Mac or a Linux box then you can play and even copy you disc happily, because the real WAV files that a CD player uses are there on the disc.

Fortunately, it is possible to avoid buying discs like this. Philips, who defined the CD standard and then made it widely available, has been very clear that these music delivery systems do not count as Compact Discs and cannot use the CD logo.

Microsoft has told technology companies that if they want to develop system-level software that lets Vista play movies then they have to get the approval of at least three of the major studios before it will be included in Windows.

I suspect that Sony would be very interested indeed in a version of Windows that controlled music playback without the need for any extra software from them.

And of course once there is a "technological protection mechanism" in place then it is against the law - both in Europe and the US - to get round it, so open source players for Linux platforms will be illegal.

Last night (November 3rd), my girlfriend brought me along to see a screening of Derailed at the Paramount theatre in Toronto, which she had to review for a magazine she works for.

Anyway, the line was moving slowly because they were asking customers to raise their arms so that they could be electronically frisked with a metal detector, and women's purses were being searched by uniformed security guards.

Her phone was taken from her and put in a sealed plastic bag with a claim ticket, and she joined me where I was waiting, past the gate, and we walked into the theatre together.

To add further insult to the debacle at the gate, near the exits at stage right and left were two uniformed security guards at each door, all four with video cameras scanning the crowd and making themselves very conspicuous.

This was not just a bit of pre-show MPAA theatre, they stood there for the entirity of the movie, red LED's glowing, scanning the crowd to remind us that we were under close surviellence and our actions were being recorded.

If you have sat in a chair in a dark room watching disturbing scenes unfold in front of you, while four uniformed people with video cameras stand in front of your, silently recording your reactions, you might be reminded of scenarios from a Clockwork Orange, Brazil, 1984, Videodrome, and strangely, that 90's relic: SFW.

I would also say that this is further evidence that movie studios are losing revenue because of the increasingly poor movie-going experience and general low-quality of the movies they are making, as after this, I can certainly undertstand why someone would prefer to watch a movie on their 14 inch screen than suffer the indignity of a multiplex.

Forget Google. The Internet's real killer app has always been the strange little amateur videos, like the Star Wars Kid or the Numa Numa Dance, that find explosive popularity almost overnight.

A new company launching Monday in Los Angeles, co-founded by Freenet peer-to-peer developer Ian Clarke, aims to give the producers of those videos a way to make money from them at last.

Dubbed Revver, the company has set up a Web site that starts out as a kind of Flickr for videos, allowing anybody to post their videos online, and letting viewers organize them by adding their own descriptive keyword "tags." But Revver adds a new touch, inserting code into the video itself that adds a small advertisement every time it is viewed, even if the video is downloaded and distributed from another site.