The new study by US psychologists found that people shown erotic or gory images frequently fail to process images they see immediately afterwards. And the researchers say some personality types appear to be affected more than others by the phenomenon, known as "emotion-induced blindness".

David Zald, from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and Marvin Chun and colleagues from Yale University in Connecticut, showed hundreds of images to volunteers and asked them to pick a specific image from the rapid sequence. Most of the images were landscape or architectural scenes, but the psychologists included a few emotionally charged images, portraying violent or sexually provocative scenes.

Rockstar, maker of a video game which caused controversy after secret sex scenes were found in it, has issued a fix to disable access to the scenes.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the best-selling game of 2004, were unlocked by a fan who created software called Hot Coffee.

As a result, the US Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) changed the rating to Adults Only.

In Australia, the game was stripped of its official classification, meaning that shops could no longer sell the title.

The storm of protest over the game even attracted the attention of US senator Hillary Clinton.

She called for an investigation into who was responsible for including the scenes in the game.

When students at Princeton University, the University of Utah and eight other colleges start combing their school bookstore shelves for fall semester textbooks, they'll find a new alternative to the hard-covered tomes they're used to buying.

Alongside the new and used versions of Dante's "Inferno" and "Essentials of Psychology" will be little cards offering 33 percent off if students decide to download a digital version of a text instead of buying a hard copy.

That's not a bad deal for a cash-strapped student facing book bills in the hundreds of dollars. But there are trade-offs. The new digital textbook program imposes strict guidelines on how the books can be used, including locking the downloaded books to a single computer and setting a five-month expiration date, after which the book can't be read.

American University is one of the latest schools to realize that students aren't nearly as excited as the university administrations have assumed they would be. Their semester-long trial of Ruckus, which provides music, movies, and a degree of social networking, was met with little interest. 36 percent of students flat out said that Ruckus should be nixed entirely, and 41 percent said that Ruckus should be only made available to those who want it (i.e., no forced enrollment). A whopping 47 percent of students surveyed said that they never even used Ruckus, and here's the best part: it was free. That's right: half of the student body didn't even bother to use this service at a time when it cost them nothing.

The University of Rochester, which was one of the first schools to get on board with Napster, conducted a survey last fall (PDF) that cast some light on how Napster use fares on campus.

Napster is used as a streaming audio service, and that's about it. Of the nearly 350 students surveyed, not one of them actually bought a song off Napster. They'll stream music and some will use tethered downloads, but no one is buying. Let me rephrase that: no one is buying from Napster. 56 percent of students are turning to other services when it's time to buy music. Of those, 71 percent are buying from the iTunes Music Store.

But wait, it gets worse. In a more recent survey conducted but not yet published, it has been revealed that only 8 percent of eligible subscribers even responded to the survey, and of those 8 percent, only 24 percent were even registered to use Napster.

There were several contests at Defcon, about 10 official ones, and a lot of unofficial ones, most of those involving copious amounts of alcohol. Some of the official ones were the Wi-Fi wardriving and fox and hound competitions that Renderman brought his rig for, a scavenger hunt and lockpicking contest.

There was also a lockpicking contest, if you want physical access, you need to get through the door first. Umm.... I mean, if you lock your keys in your house, it is a handy skill to have. The best of the bunch were picking locks in under ten seconds to get to the final rounds, where a bunch of extremely difficult locks slowed things down.

There was a lot of interest in lockpicking at Defcon 13, it seems to be the new in thing for the modern hacker. In addition to the contest, there were a lot of workshops to teach you the skills you need to, umm, free your keys from an evil car, and almost anyone could walk away with enough knowledge to start picking. Advanced classes went all the way up to safecracking, a very useful skill in the modern world.

We all know that Microsoft has a tentacle in just about every pie on the planet, but what exactly is Redmond's black ops department up to in Nevada?

This chilling question arises because Microsoft's Virtual Earth has excised all satellite data of the legendary Area 51, leaving a great big grey void filled only with hundreds of hovering black helicopters.

Until such time as the truth is known, we wonder what exactly MS has to gain from this cloak of invisibity. After all, the internet is chock-full of Area 51 info, maps and satellite images. Try this website, for example - a veritable cornucopia of conspiracy goodies.

Various organisations have criticised Microsoft for attempting to patent the creation of custom emoticons.

The patent, which was published by the US patent office on Thursday, covers selecting pixels to create an emoticon image, assigning a character sequence to these pixels and reconstructing the emoticon after transmission.

Mark Taylor, the executive director of the Open Source Consortium, said on Friday said this is such a basic concept that he would not have been surprised to see it posted as a fictional patent on a technology site.

He said the patent could be particularly problematic as it covers basic human communication. "Emoticons are a form of language, and a precedent allowing patenting of language constructs is very dangerous indeed," said Taylor.

Jonas Maebe, a spokesman for the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII), said that such a patent could be used by Microsoft to prevent competitors from developing applications that compete with its MSN Messenger application.

Author J.K. Rowling has been branded a "Luddite fool" for inadvertently encouraging fans to pirate the latest Harry Potter book only hours after its official release.

The sixth installment in the popular series was published worldwide Friday and is expected to further enhance what has become a multibillion-dollar publishing phenomenon.

But within hours, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince had been scanned and put online by an underground collection of fans capitalizing on Rowling's decision not to release an official e-book version.

Although Potter has become a multimedia cash cow, with 52 million books sold and products ranging from figurines to a $2.35 billion movie series, Rowling has so far decided against publishing the stories in e-book format, a medium growing by up to 40 percent annually, according to the New York-based Open eBook Forum, a trade body.

The runaway success of the Potter series has seen British author Rowling amass a personal fortune estimated by Forbes at $1 billion. Her latest installment shifted 2 million copies in the United Kingdom alone on its first day, breaking a record. But Rowling's camp has declined to publish Potter in electronic format, citing security concerns.

"For the next book, we're going to be prepared," said the Half-Blood Prince scanner. "The people who'll be helping me will be at their computers waiting for me to get home with it and I'll be calling in sick to work for a day or two so I can scan it without interruptions."

On July 16, 1945, the world's first nuclear bomb exploded at Trinity Site, New Mexico, marking the beginning of the Nuclear Age. Manhattan Project veteran Herb Lehr has no regrets: 'In a lot of respects I felt as if I had done something worthwhile. I am in no way ashamed of what I had done in any way, shape, matter or form. I did what I was told to do. I did it to the best of my ability.' Lehr will return to Trinity Site for the first time since the explosion. He said, 'I'm just interested in going and seeing it and maybe getting some memories back. Los Alamos was a whole interesting experience. It was something unique. I worked very hard down there.'

Raincoast Books of Vancouver discovered last Friday that Real Canadian Superstore in Coquitlam, B.C. had sold 15 copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. So on Saturday, it sought the injunction from the province's Supreme Court.

Anyone who has directly or indirectly received a copy or any other form of disclosure of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is forbidden from revealing any information before 12:01 a.m. on July 16, the official release date.

The court order also calls for anyone who has received unauthorized material from the sixth book in the series to turn it over to the publishers and to erase any electronic copies.

Recently, two men in England were charged with theft after allegedly stealing copies of the latest book from a distribution centre. Police say the two tried to sell the book to a newspaper reporter.