Any time a person crosses the US border, the Department of Homeland Security assigns travelers with a "risk assessment" score to divine their likelihood of any involvement with a terrorist cell or criminal activity.

While portions of the document are redacted by the Department, it still reveals the ATS records include: credit card numbers and their expiration dates, IP addresses used to make travel arrangements, birth date and passport numbers, frequent flyer numbers (including those not used for the trip), travel agent information, hotel reservation data, and even travel preferences specified in the airline reservations (Window seat eh? Very suspicious).

At 0600 local time (1700GMT) sirens sounded and drivers were told to move from the right side to the left.

Bus drivers have also protested that their doors will now open on the wrong side, in the middle of the road.

It hopes that Samoan expatriates in Australia and New Zealand will now ship used, more affordable vehicles back to their homeland.

Villarreal contacted MLB to request "express written consent" to provide an "account" of the game he had watched to a friend. To its credit, MLB responded and asked him to call someone in its business development department... who (perhaps reasonably) thought it was a joke and did not provide the written consent (and stopped responding to calls and emails).

Copyright holders are pretty regularly claiming significantly more rights than they actually hold over content, and many people simply assume that they can do this.

The latest-generation Kindle DX, with a 9.7-inch screen, sells for $489 from Amazon.com, while the original Kindle sells for $299. On Aug. 5, Sony announced that it would release two e-readers within a month with $299 and $199 price points, in a bid to counter Amazon.com.

Like digital cameras, e-readers could effect a change in consumer behavior, specifically by making broad swaths of the population embrace reading from digital screens in lieu of paper.

Thousands of music videos pulled from YouTube in a royalties dispute will go back online after peace broke out today between the website and the music industry.

A rift has opened between music's creators and its record labels, with a broad alliance of musicians, songwriters and producers fiercely criticising the business secretary Lord Mandelson's plans to cut off the broadband connections of internet users who illegally download music.

Every few months for the past year and a half or so, the MPAA has basically begged the FCC to let it make use of "selectable output control" on televisions to block DVRs from recording stuff shown on TV.

Matthew Lasar notes that the MPAA is finally admitting that if it gets its way, it may actually require some people to buy new equipment. So, not only will the plan functionally break lots of DVRs by not letting them do the one thing they're designed to do (record what's on TV), but they may break other parts of the process as well, such that people will need to buy new equipment.

The biggest U.S. Internet service providers urged regulators to adopt a conservative definition of "broadband," arguing for minimum speeds that were substantially below many other nations.

Some of the submissions from service providers argued for a definition that even undercut an international ranking of U.S. Internet speed.

A new report based on data from 100 US and European ISPs claims P2P traffic has dropped to around 20% of all Internet traffic.

'In fact, the P2P daily trend is pretty much completely inverted from daily traffic. In other words, P2P reaches its low at 4pm when web and overall Internet traffic approaches its peak ... trend is highly suggestive of either persistent congestion or, more likely, evidence of widespread provider manipulation of P2P traffic rates.'

"Most people's idea of a computer is a piece of hardware with software designed to carry out specific tasks. This mould, or plasmodium, is a naturally occurring substance with its own embedded intelligence. It propagates and searches for sources of nutrients and when it finds such sources it branches out in a series of veins of protoplasm."

"This new plasmodium robot, called plasmobot, will sense objects, span them in the shortest and best way possible, and transport tiny objects along pre-programmed directions. The robots will have parallel inputs and outputs, a network of sensors and the number crunching power of super computers."

US drama Heroes was the most popular illegal download this year, according to research firm Big Champagne.

About 55 million people downloaded the show, while 51 million chose to access Lost, the second most popular show.

"Millions of television viewers now access free, unauthorised versions of favourite shows at least some of the time," says Eric Garland, chief executive of Big Champagne.