Using a doctored passport at a self-serve passport machine, the hacker was cleared for travel after just a few seconds and a picture of the King himself appeared on the monitor's display.

But Laurie and Van Beek insist that confidence in technology could be misplaced, because biometric passports can be faked, with pictures and chips that match.

They have now issued a cease and desist order to a team which has worked for eight years on a fan-made project initially dubbed a sequel to the last official installment, King's Quest 8. This stands against the fact that Vivendi granted a non-commercial license to the team, subject to Vivendi's approval of the game after submission.

Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Deborah Blum has an article in Slate about the US government's mostly forgotten policy in the 1920s and 1930s of poisoning industrial alcohols manufactured in the US to scare people into giving up illicit drinking during Prohibition.

The government put its chemists to work designing ever more unpalatable toxins - adding such chemicals as kerosene, brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone.

The Court ruled that RapidShare must monitor user uploads to ensure that none of the book titles are put onto their servers and go on to ensure that the public never gains access to copies that somehow slip through this filtering.

According to Inside Higher Ed, every time a prohibited book named in the injunction is made available on RapidShare it could cost the company up to 250,000 euros ($339,000) or even earn company bosses 2 years in jail.

eBay Germany is being investigated by competition authorities concerned that its tying of PayPal to certain eBay purchases is in breach of consumer law.

The FCO said it had yet to launch a full investigation but was looking into the complaints. The regulator noted that the rule change meant sellers were charged an extra 1.9 per cent on sales made.

eBay has already got into trouble in Australia where it tried to force almost all transactions to go through PayPal. Users were unimpressed, as were Ozzie consumer protection groups, and eBay performed a swift U-turn. Similar moves in the US also went down badly.

Microsoft's server and tools chief Bob Muglia has chided Oracle for peddling a return to "1960s computing," accusing its rival of going against industry trends and backing a dying and expensive operating-system architecture.

He knocked Oracle for going down a vertical route of integrated and proprietary hardware and software that would deny customers choice and take us right back to an age that was anything other than golden and was renowned for just one thing: stagnation.

Muglia also slammed virtualization rival VMware for exaggerating the cost savings from Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).

It turns out that the International Intellectual Property Alliance, an umbrella group for organisations including the MPAA and RIAA, has requested with the US Trade Representative to consider countries like Indonesia, Brazil and India for its "Special 301 watchlist" because they use open source software.

What's Special 301? It's a report that examines the "adequacy and effectiveness of intellectual property rights" around the planet - effectively the list of countries that the US government considers enemies of capitalism.

The technology ministry said the measures were designed to tackle online pornography, but internet activists see it as increased government censorship.

But the technology ministry said would-be website operators would now have to submit identity cards and photos of themselves, as well as meeting regulators before their sites could be registered.

Chillifresh claimed in a Saturday post that a discussion with Apple revealed that more than 5,000 apps have been affected by its new App Store content policy.

AppShopper sister site MacRumors on Sunday reported that app removals went from about 100 a day to a high of almost 4,000 on Friday.

Interestingly, some apps that include sexual content, such as Playboy's, seem to have been missed by the recent purge--so far, at least.

Two days after a New York Times report linked two Chinese schools to hack attacks on Google and other Silicon Valley companies, both schools are denying those claims.

Shanghai Jiaotong University is known for its computer science program. The Lanxiang Vocational School was established with military support, according to the Times, and trains computer scientists for the military.