Neij explained that an extended group of people have privileges on the server, and contribute haphazardly as they see fit. The prosecutor seemed not to grasp the concept.

"But someone must ultimately decide whether to put up a certain text or graphic," he protested.

"No," Neij answered. "Why? If someone believes a new text is needed, he just inputs it. Or if a graphic is ugly, someone makes a better one. The one who wants to do something just does it."

Two new federal proposals that Republican supporters claim will protect children have alarmed Internet companies, who say the measures could make it a crime to provide e-mail.

The mere provision of e-mail, electronic storage, cloud-computing services, and social-networking sites could be viewed as an act that "facilitates access to" illegal content, especially if the provider knows that some users in the past have been less than law-abiding.

In order to prevent the full album from leaking before launch, U2 organized 'private hearings' for the press, but these failed. Today, ten hours after the album leaked, downloads on BitTorrent are 100K - and counting.

U2 manager Paul McGuiness has been particularly aggressive in his stance against file-sharers and has suggested that people who share copyrighted files should have their connection to the Internet severed.

It would be trivial for the authors of filesharing software to enable the encryption of traffic flowing between peer-to-peer clients.

The US government spent 25 years trying to prevent the widespread availability of encryption software, and failed spectacularly.

"Well-known" sites that contain infringing content and hence might be blocked by ISPS are easily duplicated at less well-known sites - at a speed that would likely outpace the ability of right holders to keep up.

The widespread availability of multi-gigabyte hard disks and USB data sticks is making it ever�easier for users to exchange entire music collections face-to-face.

Server virtualization juggernaut - well, at least on x64 iron - VMware is beside itself with glee that a virtualized Linux server running atop ESX Server hypervisor narrowly beat out real Linux boxes on a popular Web serving benchmark test.

Unfortunately for anyone trying to figure out what overhead ESX Server imposes, VMware's VMark benchmark is explicitly designed to obfuscate any calculations you might want to make.

The Pirate Bay is the world's most high-profile file-sharing site and is being taken to court by media firms including Sony and Warner Bros.

Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde Kolmsioppi and Carl Lundstorm have portrayed themselves as digital libertarians and say that they cannot be prosecuted for copyright theft because none of the content is hosted on their computer servers.

"It is legal to offer a service that can be used in both a legal and illegal way, according to Swedish law," Mr Samuelsson said at the opening of the trial, which is expected to last three weeks.

There could be one hundred billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy, a US conference has heard.

"Not only are they probably habitable but they probably are also going to be inhabited," Dr Boss told BBC News. "But I think that most likely the nearby 'Earths' are going to be inhabited with things which are perhaps more common to what Earth was like three or four billion years ago." That means bacterial lifeforms.

Recent work at Edinburgh University tried to quantify how many intelligent civilisations might be out there. The research suggested there could be thousands of them.

Fast-growing micro-blogging service Twitter has reportedly raised an additional 35 million dollars in funding and said Friday that it is ready to "begin building revenue-generating products."

"Twitter is growing at a phenomenal rate," he added. "Active users have increased 900 percent in a year."

Twitter, which allows users to pepper one another with messages of 140 characters or less, has grown rapidly in popularity since it was launched in August 2006 but has been unable so far to generate revenue.

In an interesting turn of events, Ryukishi07 of the doujin circle 07th Expansion has acknowledged and approved of Witch Hunt's translation project for Umineko no Naku Koro ni via email, according to a post by one of the translators.

In closing, he mentioned that he will warmly watch over this endeavour and hope that everyone will continue to enjoy Umineko no Naku Koro ni.

According to its creators, the approach can monitor networks without interrupting the flow of data and provides investigators with hard evidence of illicit file transfers.

When the tool detects such a file, it keeps a record of the network addresses involved for later analysis, says Major Karl Schrader, who led the work at the Air Force Institute of Technology, in Kettering, OH.

"Our system differs in that it is completely passive, meaning that it does not change any information entering or leaving a network," says Schrader.