The Telegraph has a nice article about the steps that Scholastic is taking to protect the content of the print version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. They're delivering 10.8 million copies and need to ensure that this content isn't accessable by anyone before midnight. Technology includes high-tech (GPS to monitor delivery trucks progress and check that they did not deviate or stop.), low-tech (steel boxes & locks), social engineering notes (crates stacked up in the warehouses of delivery companies across America are marked: Please Do Not Open Before Midnight), and legal threats (As a final layer of security, booksellers have been forced to sign legal forms acknowledging that if they break the embargo, they will never again be supplied with a book by Scholastic). Think how much cheaper and easier it would be if they just used an E-book s with DRM. I'm all for Harry Potter protecting his rights; but it seems we keep getting closer and closer to the world described in Stallman's visionary The Right To Read article.

George Bush said it was time he grew up after cycling into a policeman - on his 59th birthday.

The US president's mishap came on his mountain bike outside the G8 venue, reports the Mirror.

Mr Bush, left with cuts to an arm and hand, showed off grazed fingers to reporters and grinned: "It goes to show I should act my age."

He said: "When you ride a mountain bike, sometimes you fall, otherwise you are not riding hard. The pavement was slick and the bike came off underneath me."

In May last year Mr Bush crashed his bike on his ranch. In 2002, he famously fainted and toppled off his sofa in the White House when he choked on a pretzel and in June 2003, he fell off a scooter at his estate in Maine.

Four blasts ripped through London during rush hour on Thursday morning, killing at least 33 people and disrupting a summit of Group of Eight leaders in Scotland in attacks Prime Minister Tony Blair called "barbaric."

Security sources told Reuters there were fatalities at all four bomb sites, and Sky Television said at least 45 people had been killed. A further 150 were seriously wounded, and hospital staff said some were unlikely to survive.

Britain has been key ally of the United States in its war in Iraq, where al-Qaida is waging a bloody insurgency. The blasts occurred one day after London was awarded the 2012 Olympics.

"If what we are looking at is a simultaneous bombing, and it does look like that, it would very certainly fit the classic al-Qaida methodology which centers precisely on that: multi-seated hits on transport and infrastructural targets," said Shane Brighton, intelligence expert at the Royal United Services Institute for Defense.

A 16-year-old girl was rescued after she climbed up a 130ft crane at a building site while sleepwalking.

She walked along the narrow beam of the lifting arm while fast asleep in the middle of the night.

A fireman had to crawl along the beam to reach her in Dulwich, South East London.

She was brought down using the fire crew's hydraulic lift reports The Sun.

She only woke up when a worried relative called her mobile.

If you're one of IBM UK's highly skilled mainframe specialists, then you may well be out of a job. IBM has shuffled a huge chunk of its mainframe support operations off to South Africa in a bid to cut costs. As a result, some of IBM's highest profile customers will find their critical mainframe support calls traveling south to a staff who recently spent just over 30 days in the UK learning the ropes.

Specifically, the South Africans were trained to handle IBM's MVS (Multiple Virtual Storage) - aka mainframe operating system - support. The workers were taught by the very people they would soon replace.

IBM won't reveal the customers affected, but our source sent a shortlist of the initial clients that will likely see their support go to Johannesburg. The list includes the likes of AT&T, ATM, Bradford and Bingley, Equifax, Heinz, Next, Royal Sun Alliance, Scottish Power, Certegy and Diageo.

A Utah woman has become the latest asset in online gambling outfit GoldenPalace.com's eBay preposterous purchase portfolio after accepting $15,000 dollars to have the casino's name permanently tattooed on her forehead.

She's not the first case of someone offering their body for permanent advertising - back in 2002, a hard-up eBayer whipped out his todger in an attempt to secure a penile sponsorship deal. In that case, however, the worst that could come of it is that the chap's long-suffering girlfriend would have to have GoldenPalace.com rammed down her throat a couple of times a month.

The Golden Palace take on this, the literally unacceptable face of capitalism, is as follows: "I think this kind of advertising will become increasingly popular as time goes on. It is a perfect way to get attention amid the clutter of advertising that people see every second of every day. Conventional forms of marketing just don't cut it anymore. To get people's attention, you have to stand out from the crowd. In light of Karolyne's story and her intentions to improve her son's education, we have given her additional $5,000 on top of the $10,000 spent on the auction."

Yet another astounding patent from the USPTO. I was browsing the patent database, and discovered that Amazon received a patent today on using customer viewing histories to generate recommendations. If a customer views product A, and then later views product B, and you use that to infer a relationship between A and B, then you've infringed on this patent. This patent is a continuation of an earlier patent (#6,317,722) on using shopping carts to generate recommendations. When will this stupidity end?

Unwanted software slithered into Patti McMann's home computer over the Internet and unleashed an annoying barrage of pop-up ads that sometimes flashed on her screen faster than she could close them.

Annoying, for sure. But the last straw came a year ago when the pop-ups began plugging such household names as J.C. Penney Co. and Capital One Financial Corp., companies McMann expected to know better.

Even Fortune 500 companies have turned to adware: Sprint Corp. for its PCS mobile phones, major banks peddling Visa credit cards, Sony Corp. and retailers including Circuit City Stores Inc. And Mercedes-Benz USA had its cars flashing on consumer's computer screens before the company, fielding complaints, put on the brakes.

Mercedes-Benz says its ad was carried to hard drives last year by an agency it has since fired, while computer maker Dell USA has fired "a handful" of affiliates for carrying Dell's coupons and ads over adware.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has reportedly issued a correction to its disputed claims that it shut down an illegal DVD/CD replicating plant and seized $30 million in illegal stampers and DVDs:

The trade group said the $30 million figure was reached by estimating the value of the DVDs that could be produced by the stamping machines that were seized.

That's right, could be produced. The MPAA presented potential losses as actual losses. Possible future infringements as current infringements. I wonder if this exemplary for the MPAA's calculation of damages allegedly brought by P2P networks and private copying, for example. Believing that the possible worst is the reality that is. This is not just bad math, this is a mind set: if users can steal, they will steal, thus they actually steal. If users can copy, they will copy. If users can share, they will share. It is in human nature to do so, to do bad.

The LA Times pulled down it's "beta" wikitorial after people began inserting obscene content faster than the editors could remove it. Though there is nothing on the LA Times editorial page or in the general coverage, the NY Times notes (free reg req) the fact that the bulk of the vandalism occurred after a posting about the wikitorial appeared on Slashdot and goes on to quote a member of the LA Times editorial staff as saying, "Slashdot has a tech-savvy audience that, to be kind, is mischievous and to be not so kind, is malicious".