It might sound like the company is out to steal your collection, but according to iPodMeister's site, the business model is successful because CDs can still fetch high prices overseas in areas where MP3 players haven't yet penetrated the market.

iPodMeister will only accept CDs in their jewel cases with all the original cover art (i.e., sending them your Case Logic binder full of discs will get you nothing in return).

"In 2009, PETA euthanized 2,301 dogs and cats -- 97 percent of those brought in -- and adopted only eight, according to Virginia state figures. And the rate of these killings has been increasing."

"It's whoring itself out for media coverage," David Martosko, director of research at the Center for Consumer Freedom, said of PETA. "They'll do the ridiculous stuff, but they won't put an ad in the Norfolk press saying, 'We have puppies and kittens, come adopt one.'"

A federal appeals court rebuked a Pennsylvania district attorney who threatened to file felony child pornography charges against teens who were photographed semi-nude unless they attended an "education program."

When the parent of the girl who posed in her bathing suit publicly complained, Skumanick responded that she was posing "provocatively" and concluded by saying: "These are the rules. If you don't like them, too bad."

The offending image of Nancy Doe showed the teen in a "white, opaque towel, just below her breasts, appearing as if she just had emerged from the shower," according to the decision.

Given EA's serious problems with bad DRM pissing off customers, you would think that EA would tread carefully here.

On top of that, we all saw what happened when Ubisoft tried to require an online connection as a form of DRM. The game was cracked within hours of release -- and then the DRM servers crashed and were offline and slow for quite sometime -- pissing off all sorts of legitimate customers.

Universal Music Group plans to soften the fall of CD sales by dropping prices across the board, to a maximum of $10.

Furthermore, it will be hard to justify spending $10 on a compressed digital download over $6 for an actual physical disc that can be ripped into iTunes or any other media software in a matter of minutes, and can be done using lossless encoding (if so desired).

The system, developed by lab members Takashi Nakashima and Yoshihiro Watanabe, lets you scan a book by rapidly flipping its pages in front of a high-speed camera. They call this method book flipping scanning. They told me they can digitize a 200-page book in one minute, and hope to make that even faster.

The laser pattern allows the system to obtain a page's three-dimensional deformation using active stereo methods. So they wrote software that builds a 3-D model of the page and reconstructs it into a regular, flat shape.

One researcher said that Waledac now seems to be abandoned. "It looks crippled, if not dead," said Jose Nazario, a senior security researcher at Arbor Networks.

Waledac was not nearly the largest botnet in operation, nor was it even one of the top spam-producing botnets. It numbered somewhere fewer than 100,000 infected PCs.

The plan, which involved working with law enforcement and ISPs to take down nearly 300 .com domains involved in the botnet as well as disrupting the communications among the bots, appears to have worked as designed.

The 32-page report entitled "Wikileaks.org - An Online Reference to Foreign Intelligence Services, Insurgents, or Terrorist Groups?" indicates the government's concern that "current employees or moles" within the Defense Department or the U.S. government "are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks."

"The identification, exposure, or termination of employment of or legal actions against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others from using Wikileaks.org to make such information public."

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Saturday called for Internet regulations and demanded that authorities crack down on a news Web site he accused of spreading false information, according to media reports.

"We have to act. We are going to ask the attorney general for help, because this is a crime. I have information that this page periodically publishes stories calling for a coup d'etat. That cannot be permitted," Chavez reportedly said.

In a new report, the Commons Intelligence and Security Committee expressed concern that GCHQ appeared to be entirely unaware whether or not the computers, lost in 2008, contained top secret information on people posing an imminent security threat to the country.

In a hearing for the report, the spy centre said its work was at a level about one third below what was planned, because of difficulty attracting and retaining enough internet experts.