Cities around the world have been greeting the start of 2009 with celebrations and fireworks.

New Zealand and Australia were among the first to reach midnight, and staged dramatic displays from Auckland's Sky Tower and the Sydney Opera House.

It seems a teacher came upon a student demonstrating Linux to other kids and handing out LiveCDs. The teacher confiscated the CDs and wrote an angry email to HeliOS's founder, Ken Starks:

"At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful. ... This is a world where Windows runs on virtually every computer and putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all. I am sure if you contacted Microsoft, they would be more than happy to supply you with copies of an older version of Windows and that way, your computers would actually be of service to those receiving them..."

With e-book sales exploding in an otherwise sleepy market, Random House Inc. announced Monday that it was making thousands of additional books available in digital form.

E-books remain a tiny part of the overall market, widely estimated in the industry at 1 percent or less.

One PhD student, Oyvind Brandtsegg, is a graduate of the jazz program and this article describes how has developed a computer program and a musical instrument for improvisation.

His 'computer instrument' can take any recorded sound as input and split it into a number of very short sound particles that can last for between 1 and 10 milliseconds. 'These fragments may be infinitely reshuffled, making it possible to vary the music with no change in the fundamental theme.'

Pirates have anchored a hijacked Saudi oil tanker off the Somali coast, as the spate of hijackings gathered pace with two more ships seized on Tuesday.

A cargo ship and a fishing vessel were the latest to join more than 90 vessels attacked by the pirates this year.

The seizure points to the inability of a multi-national naval task force sent to the region earlier this year to stop Somali piracy, he adds.

Fourteen vessels currently remain captive in Somalia, with around 268 crew being held hostage, according to the IMB.

The UN says it has credible reports that camps sheltering 50,000 displaced people in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo have been destroyed.

Reports suggest the camps were forcibly emptied and looted before being burned, the UN refugee agency, the UNHCR, said.

A ceasefire is holding in and around Goma, the capital of North Kivu province, but aid agency chiefs say the situation remains highly volatile.

"SCEA reserves the right to monitor and record any online activity and communication throughout PSN and you give SCEA your express consent to monitor and record your activities," the agreement reads. "Any data collected in this way, including the content of your communications, the time and location of your activities, your Online ID and IP address and other related information may be used by us to enforce this Agreement or protect the interests of SCEA, its users, or licensors."

"SCEA is not responsible for providing you with replacement copies for any reason."

"To the extent permitted by law, You authorize and license SCEA a royalty free and perpetual right to use, distribute, copy, modify, display, and publish your User Material for any reason without any restrictions or payments to you or any third parties," Sony explains.

Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance.

Whitehall officials have raised the idea of a register containing the names and addresses of everyone who buys a phone in recent talks with Vodafone and other telephone companies, insiders say.

As The Sunday Times revealed earlier this month, GCHQ has already been provided with up to £1 billion to work on the pilot stage of the Big Brother database, which will see thousands of "black boxes" installed on communications lines provided by Vodafone and BT as part of a pilot interception programme.

Google's Gmail Labs has a new experimental featured dubbed "Mail Goggles" which will attempt to prevent you from sending out those ill-advised late night e-mails.

Gmail developer Jon Perlow created Mail Goggles as a kind of e-mail sobriety test. It works by stopping your message when you hit send and then presents a series of simple math problems you need to solve before you really send the e-mail.

The Motion Picture Licensing Company (MPLC), which is charged with collecting royalties for the big studios, recently wrote to 2,500 kindergartens (or playschools as they are known in Ireland), informing them that it is illegal for the kids there to watch DVDs without an appropriate license.

The MPLC actually failed to register with the Irish Patent Office, and by demanding payments in the way they have, breached the 2000 Copyright Act. A spokesman from the IPO confirmed that an organization that acts in this manner could be fined or have its staff jailed.