Saint Bob was fuming over the affair and has been encouraging folk to bid stupid amounts for the tickets and "mess up the whole system".

More than two million people sent text messages in a lottery to secure the 150,000 tickets for the gig in Hyde Park, London on July 2.

But soon after the tickets were released some inevitably turned up for sale on eBay.

This got Bob all hot under the collar and he began ranting to anyone with a TV camera. He told the BBC he thought eBay's UK management should resign or be sacked.

Ebay offered to make a donation to the cause - feeding poor people - saying that in a free market people should be allowed to do what they like with their tickets.

When this failed to dampen Bob's ire, the firm said it had decided to block the sales of Live 8 tickets on its auction site.

For all the talk here on Techdirt about file sharing, I don't use any file sharing programs. I still prefer to have the actual CD. While I would like to be able to use file sharing apps to hear new songs in figuring out what to buy, the legality question is still very much up in the air, and it's not worth messing around with those apps until it's settled. A few months ago, I finally got around to the big project of converting my music to MP3s so I could listen to it on an MP3 player. Last week I bought a new CD online -- and it was the first time I've received a CD that had copy protection on it (it points it out in tiny print on the CD -- if I'd known beforehand, I wouldn't have bought it). Since I started converting my collection to MP3, I no longer listen to CDs -- even if I still like to have them for the backup and the full liner notes. It's just more convenient to have everything on the MP3 player. So, here's a CD that is more or less useless to me. I legally bought it -- and yet I'm unlikely to listen to it at all, because I can't turn it into MP3s. If anything, this only makes me more interested in finding the same songs on a file sharing program -- and less interested in ever buying a CD again. How is this possibly beneficial to the recording industry? With that in mind, it's amazing to see that EMI is following Sony BMG's lead in making more CDs copy protected, and they even admit that it's not to stop piracy, but just to annoy the legal purchasers: "Executives at EMI and Sony BMG said the point was to rein in copying by the everyday music fan, not to stop determined bootleggers." That "everyday copying" is to make it so we can actually listen to the music we bought in a way that's convenient. Since the "determined bootleggers" are getting the content on file sharing networks anyway -- there appears to be absolutely no benefit whatsoever to putting copy protection on CDs. The only thing it does is give people less incentive to buy CDs.

Instead of visiting some dry, boring Web site to download your favorite open source software, why not put some spice in your life and get it from Playboy?

That spice is in name only, because you won't find any interesting pictures or stories at mirrors.playboy.com -- just a few unadorned directories linking to mirrors of the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) and the latest releases of FreeBSD, Apache, Fedora, and mod_ssl.

mirrors.playboy.com is even an official mirror site for Firefox and Thunderbird, says Playboy Unix administrator Tim Yocum. He wanted to give something back to the community from which his company has drawn so deeply.

Playboy's corporate management has warmly welcomed Yocum's moves toward open source. They appreciate the cost savings and, Yocum says, display an attitude of "whatever works." The push toward open source, he says, comes from the bottom up; the real fans of Apache and Perl are the network administrators, including himself, and they are fortunate to have bosses who give them the freedom to use open alternatives.

Leave it to lawmakers to replace one problem with a totally inane and dangerously misguided one. The California Assembly just passed a bill that bans textbooks longer than 200 pages, requiring publishers to shorten their tomes and include -- get this -- an appendix of related websites. The bill, California AB 756, ostensibly addresses the problem of outdated textbooks while encouraging use of the internet for learning. There are so many things wrong with this bill, it's hard to know where to begin. Well-meaning as it is, catering to the short attention spans of kids is the most counterproductive thing the state could do. Teachers are complaining all the time they can't get students to read more books and spend less time online. If the books are long and boring, find better books. Don't commission shorter boring books. Failing that, maybe they should just go with the best books they can find and understand that education requires a modicum of an attention span. And kids don't need a soon-to-be-outdated list of websites to encourage web research. On the contrary, they need more guidance on how to use it more judiciously and appropriately. Also, the law defines the books in question as "instructional materials." Does that include novels? Dictionaries? Reference guides? If this bill does become law, looks like the makers of Cliffs Notes and Reader's Digest will be pleasantly surprised.

The British Medical Journal has discovered something which may have escaped the attention of the less well-informed reader: that long pointy knives are sharp and can be stuck into people thereby causing them damage or even provoking a death-related incident.

The solution? Oblige long pointy knife manufacturers to make the knives less pointy by rounding off the tips.

Yes indeed, that's the conclusion of docs Emma Hern, Will Glazebrook and Mike Beckett of the West Middlesex University Hospital in London, according to a NY Times report. They note with concern that "the rate of violent crime in Britain rose nearly 18 per cent from 2003 to 2004, and that in the first two weeks of 2005, 15 killings and 16 nonfatal attacks involved stabbings".

Dr Hern says: "We came up with the idea and tossed it into the pot to get people talking about crime reduction." She adds: "Whether it's a sensible solution to this problem or not, I'm not sure."

No further comment from us is required, but suffice it to say we look forward to proposals for the rubber housebrick (a common bludgeoning weapon), the papier mache baseball bat (ditto) and the soft plastic claw hammer (ditto).

Motion Picture Association of America head Dan Glickman has an opinion piece up at CNET explaining why, even after they and the FCC lost the legal case to force the Broadcast Flag on us, we should still as consumers be advocates for it. The gist of Glickman's argument boils down to the old 'we're taking our ball and going home' game as he tries to convince us that without this incentive good TV and movies won't get shown on broadcast television. 'Our companies want to continue to show their movies and television shows to viewers who don't or can't subscribe to cable or satellite systems. But without the broadcast flag, that option will look less and less appealing. In the end, it will be the consumers who suffer the most if the broadcast flag is not mandated for the digital era.'

Adding fuel to the debate over U.S.-international trade, a tech industry group is blasting "Buy American" legislation passed by the House of Representatives this week.

On Friday, the Information Technology Association of America called the measure bad security policy and bad economic policy. The legislation, an amendment to the Homeland Security Authorization Act, would force the Department of Homeland Security to buy products mostly made in America.

The legislation was authored by Rep. Don Manzullo, an Illinois Republican, and passed by the House on Wednesday. It would require more than 50 percent of the components in any end product procured by the department to be mined, produced or manufactured inside the United States.

"With this purchasing prohibition, I guess (the department) will have to learn to do without computers and cell phones," ITAA President Harris Miller said in a statement. "I cannot think of a single U.S. manufacturer that could meet this 50 percent threshold for these devices, and I doubt that those charged with protecting our safety here at home can either."

Ted Stevens wanted to know just how much the Internet has turned private lives into open books. So the U.S. senator, a Republican from Alaska and the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, instructed his staff to steal his identity.

His staff, Stevens reported, came back not just with digital breadcrumbs on the senator, but also with insights on his daughter's rental property and some of the comings and goings of his son, a student in California. "My staff provided me with information they got from a series of places," he said. "For $65, they were told, they could get my Social Security number."

The Johns Hopkins students demonstrated - as has a growing chorus of privacy advocates around the United States - that there is plenty of information to be had on individuals without ever buying it (or stealing it) from big database companies like ChoicePoint and LexisNexis.

In some instances, students visited local government offices and filed official requests for the data - or simply "asked nicely" - sometimes receiving whole databases burned onto a CD.

"If some citizen is concerned about dead people remaining registered to vote, he can simply obtain the database of deaths and the voter registration database and cross-correlate," said Joshua Mason, whose group discovered 1,500 dead people who were also listed as active registered voters. Fifty of those dead people somehow voted in the last election.

While Greasemonkey is still only used by Firefox users on the bleeding edge, Willison sees the extension as a harbinger of a change in the web's power dynamics.

Greasemonkey was originally written by Aaron Boodman, who wrote the program in December 2004 to amuse his friends and found himself pleasantly surprised when it grew into a cult hit.

While quite a few scripts simply block ads, Mark Pilgrim, a coder known for his work on website accessibility and XML, thinks the coolest -- and most important -- scripts are the ones that mesh sites together.

"There's a script targeting Amazon pages that lets you know if a book you are looking at on Amazon is available at your local library," Pilgrim said. "Think about that. That's amazing, and it happens automatically. You configure it once for your library, and Greasemonkey goes and gets the data."

Whether it's merely snacking to help pass the time or voraciously devouring lunch while trying to restore the CEO's files we inadvertently deleted, we all eat at our keyboard. On any given day, my keyboard is assaulted with fragments of chocolate, drops of coffee, blobs of spaghetti sauce, and those long, stringy things that fall off bananas.

During a recent keyboard degunking attempt, I found myself musing on what would constitute the absolute worst foods to eat while typing. In making this determination, three factors have to be considered:

• The propensity of the food to fall
• The likelihood of the food becoming attached to or inserted into the keyboard
• The degree of difficulty associated with the removal

With these factors in mind, here are my worst-food nominations:
• Plain whole grain rice
• Angel hair pasta
• Sunflower seeds with shells
• Rice Bubbles (with or without milk)
• Jelly
• A Flake bar