Theresa Chu, spokesperson for NTD AP, said in an e-mail that a "massive, grass-roots call from all walks of life in Taiwan helped move the executive and legislature to support NTD AP's contract renewal." Ms. Chu cited "thousands of letters" sent from Taiwanese citizens to the offices of the president, the premier, and legislators around the island.

"People in China have no place to express themselves," said the show's host, Anna Chang. "As an independent media we deeply look at all the information and its background and explain it to people-this is what we do."

What's interesting is that several tech companies, at least according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, are ranked below Bank of America, which is actually listed last among the 19 companies with a satisfaction rating of 68 out of 100.

Right there at No. 10, among immensely unpopular utility companies, airlines and cable providers, is social networking giant Facebook.

If Facebook's customer satisfaction rating drops, it could be an indication that Facebook may be peaking.

Their pen dispenses a silver solution that allows the user to draw functioning electrical circuits on a wide variety of surfaces. Here a flexible array of LEDs was mounted on paper, and then interconnected by hand-drawn silver ink lines.

"Pen-based printing allows one to construct electronic devices 'on-the-fly', using very low cost, ubiquitous printing tools," said Jennifer Lewis, one of the lead researchers and director of the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois.

The proposal would require open Internet locations, such as cafes and libraries, to confirm a user's identity before granting access to the Web. Data harvested from the open Internet locations--including, but not limited to, IP addresses, browser histories, and records of who the user has interacted with--will then be reported to the Danish government under the guise of helping to combat terrorism.

This is on par with the censorship enacted by traditionally stricter countries such as Iran and China.

We've discussed many times just how easy it is to get around the NY Times' paywall. I've never run up against it because I don't have javascript enabled, and the whole system is javascript based.

Of course, now that the paywalls been out for a while, people are finding even more ways to get around the paywall, including merely removing the string at the end of the URL.

I'm wondering if just this video alone violates the DMCA's anti-circumvention clause.

Prince claims he is sitting atop a treasure trove of unreleased songs and has no intention of offering them to the public while Web piracy goes unchecked.

"Nobody's making money now except phone companies, Apple and Google...It's like the gold rush out there. Or a carjacking. There's no boundaries."

Every time Prince opens his mouth about the Web he reinforces the stereotype of a spoiled, out-of-touch pop star. For instance, in the Guardian interview he said that analog music is superior to digital because "it affects a different place in your brain" and that when you play back digital songs "you can't feel anything."

The Transportation Security Administration stood by its security officers Sunday after a Florida woman complained that her cancer-stricken, 95-year-old mother was patted down and forced to remove her adult diaper while going through security.

"My mother is very ill, she has a form of leukemia," Weber said. "She had a blood transfusion the week before, just to bolster up her strength for this travel."

More recently, outrage erupted over a video-recorded pat-down of a 6-year-old passenger last April at New Orleans' airport.

Funded primarily by the personal savings of group members and a grant from the National Science Foundation, residents of Jalalabad have built the FabFi network: an open-source system that uses common building materials and off-the-shelf electronics to transmit wireless ethernet signals across distances of up to several miles.

Jalalabad's longest link is currently 2.41 miles, between the FabLab and the water tower at the public hospital in Jalalabad, transmitting with a real throughput of 11.5Mbps (compared to 22Mbps ideal-case for a standards compliant off-the-shelf 802.11g router transitting at a distance of only a few feet). The system works consistently through heavy rain, smog and a couple of good sized trees.

The voluntary internet filter for child abuse is facing a major setback, with Telstra wavering on the commitment it made to the scheme last July.

"One option being considered is the blocking of a list of illegal child sexual abuse sites identified as being the worst globally by international policing body Interpol."

It is understood Telstra was last night still grappling with the decision as to whether to commit to the voluntary filter because of fears of reprisals from the internet vigilantes behind a spate of recent cyber attacks.

One of the really fun projects that Andy did was to record an album called Kind of Bloop -- an 8-bit tribute to the classic Miles Davis album, Kind of Blue.

For the cover, the obvious choice was to do an 8-bit rendering of the original Davis cover, and he, Andy, got a friend to put it together.

Andy had a very strong argument to explain how what he did was legal... and still agreed to pay $32,500 for a fun little side project he was making no money on. He was chilled into paying up, because the fight is just too expensive.