As the first German court, the Administrative Court of Wiesbaden has found the blanket recording of the entire population's telephone, mobile phone, e-mail and Internet usage (known as data retention) disproportionate.

"The court is of the opinion that data retention violates the fundamental right to privacy. It is not necessary in a democratic society. The individual does not provoke the interference but can be intimidated by the risks of abuse and the feeling of being under surveillance [...] The directive [on data retention] does not respect the principle of proportionality guaranteed in Article 8 ECHR, which is why it is invalid."

Australia's secretive Internet filter blacklist held by its communications watchdog has been leaked, revealing the government has understated the amount of banned Web pages by more than 1000. Multiple legitimate businesses and Web sites have been banned including two bus companies, online poker sites, multiple Wikipedia entries, Google and Yahoo group pages, a dental surgery and a tour operator.

The blacklists were reportedly leaked by a Web filter operator to wikileaks which has published the full list of banned URLs. Outraged privacy advocates say the government has effectively lied about the amount of URLs included in the blacklists, totalling more than 2300, and the type of content which it would ban.

Huge news for real-life ray guns: Electric lasers have hit battlefield strength for the first time -- paving the way for energy weapons to go to war.

The next step is to start trying out the ray gun, outside of the lab. The Army is planning to move the device to its High Energy Laser Systems Test Facility at White Sands Missile Range. Testing is supposed to begin by this time, next year.

"Today's hearing confirmed one of my worst fears," said Kim Alexander, founder and president of the non-profit California Voter Foundation. "The audit logs have been the top selling point for vendors hawking paperless voting systems."

"To discover that the fail-safe itself is unreliable eliminates one of the key selling points for electronic voting security," Alexander said.

Finley said his staff was also shocked to find that two of the logs contained a "clear" button that allowed officials to delete them. Finley said this violated federal voting system standards, which require voting systems to maintain an indestructible archival record of all system activity related to the vote tally and, in particular, any activity involving unusual intervention by an election official.

Broadband discussion forum Whirlpool was threatened with an A$11,000 a day fine by the Australian Communications and Media Authority because a commenter posted a link to an anti-abortion website which appeared on the regulator's list of websites banned in Australia.

But the story gets murkier - ACMA added the website to its secret blacklist after receiving a complaint about one page on the site from someone in Melbourne with the user name Foad.

Foad's intention was to highlight the stupidity of the blacklist idea by getting a site which had nothing to do with child sexual abuse added to the list. Foad succeeded.

A Scientology spokesman has confirmed that Scientologists believe that mankind's problems stem from brainwashed alien soul remnants created millions of years ago by genocidal alien overlord Xenu.

The Church of Scientology has long used copyright and trade secrecy laws in legal actions designed to suppress the tale.

Scientologist doctrine suggests that exposure to the fantastical Xenu story before the completion of numerous preparatory stages might result in pneumonia or even death. Scientologists pay an estimated $350,000 to reach OT III.

Samsung expects solid-state drives to reach price parity with hard-disk drives within the next few years amid steep annual price declines in flash memory chips.

And what will happen to the price of SSDs this year? "The rest of the year is quite unpredictable. Because the SSD price is directly tied to the price of flash, no one knows. Everyone is just giving their best guess as to what will happen in the flash market," he said. To date, flash memory prices have dropped so much that chipmakers can't make money.

The large fromage of Sony France has been held hostage overnight in the company's doomed Pontonx-sur-l'Adour manufacturing plant.

Serge Foucher has gone to the plant to meet 311 sacked workers to discuss the closure of the facility on April 17th but the fiery Frenchies decided they didn't like what was on the table by way of compensation, so they barricaded the stunned exec inside the site with tree trunks.

A Chinese new mother is producing so much breast milk that she baths her baby in the excess each day.

Mother, husband and her mother-in-law had all been drinking the extra milk but she says they still have plenty left over.

But she is looking for someone to donate her extra breast milk to as she feels that bathing her baby in breast milk is too much of an indulgence.

In the last five months the Italian Parliament has accelerated the legislation against the Internet. Probably because it's the last media that is out of control in Italy after out of seven National TV's 3 are owned by the Prime Minister, 3 are State owned and controlled by the Government (read: Prime Minister), and all major newspapers are financed by the State.

If it is true that Levi was attempting to kill the bloggers, then Cassinelli first screws them, making as if he is trying to help them and then he kills them having the same objective: get bloggers to register with the Government.

Then Senator D'Alia comes along wanting to black out the Internet.

Now Carlucci, ex show girl now member of Parliament for the right wing, is proposing to a law to forbid to publish any content in any form on line anonymously.