The company held extensive trials with the system, without letting users know that their clickstream data was being sold to advertisers in order to do more targeted advertising.

BT has apparently banned discussion of Phorm on its forums and erased earlier forum discussions about the technology. How's that for openness?

The only reason to erase these discussions is if BT knows that what's it's doing is highly questionable, and BT would rather not have to explain itself.

Max Burnet has got it all. Burnet has turned his home in the leafy suburbs of Sydney into arguably Australia's, if not the world's, largest private computer museum.

Every available space from his basement to the top floor of his two-storey home is covered with relics from the past. On top of his hardware collection are numerous punch cards, tape machines (including the original paper tape) and over 6000 computer reference books.

One PhD student, Oyvind Brandtsegg, is a graduate of the jazz program and this article describes how has developed a computer program and a musical instrument for improvisation.

His 'computer instrument' can take any recorded sound as input and split it into a number of very short sound particles that can last for between 1 and 10 milliseconds. 'These fragments may be infinitely reshuffled, making it possible to vary the music with no change in the fundamental theme.'

Solaris has a pretty decent record in the data-center. It is a solid and widely trusted paltform, however, it was showing its age pretty badly. Many of the most commonly used tools were outdated.

OpenSolaris has been started to fix some of those issues, however, nexneta takes this concept to an extreme. It basically takes the ubuntu userland and plugs underneath it an opensolaris kernel. Nexenta also integrates unique solaris features such as zfs with ubuntu tools like apt-get to provide system wide transactional safe upgrades.

Hoping to give its search engine a more personal touch, Google now lets users reshuffle results so their favorite Web sites get top billing and disliked destinations get discarded the next time they enter the same request.

Users will have to have a personal login to take advantage of the editing feature.

The decision to let people tinker with their results is a tacit acknowledgment that not even Google's seemingly omniscient search engine can possibly divine which Web sites will appeal to specific users.

PayPal, the online payment service that is a major target of phishers, has been caught sending customer emails that confuse its own login page with a third-party landing site that offers spyware protection and a bevy of other products.

This quick Yahoo search turned up this page showing a PayPal customer receiving the link more than two months ago. That's a long time for a financial services company to be sending their customers to an incorrect login page.

Championed by the RIAA, who pointed to the University of Tennessee's no. 4 position on the list of top music piracy schools, and the MPAA, which noted the school's no. 19 spot on its infringement list, the law will force both public and private schools in the state to implement policies to prevent and prohibit copyright infringement on campus computers and networks.

The Tennessee Board of Regents will have to spend nearly $2.8 million for software, over $6.5 million for hardware, and hire 21 full-time employees at a cost of $1.575 million annually.

The RIAA is understandably elated at the passage of the bill, and why not? It forces schools to crack down on copyright infringement at no cost to the industry, and sets a disturbing legislative precedent for other states to follow.

Automated infringement-detection systems really don't work that great: researchers at the University of Washington were able to attract almost 500 bogus DMCA takedown notices, some of which were directed at three networked printers.

Pirates have anchored a hijacked Saudi oil tanker off the Somali coast, as the spate of hijackings gathered pace with two more ships seized on Tuesday.

A cargo ship and a fishing vessel were the latest to join more than 90 vessels attacked by the pirates this year.

The seizure points to the inability of a multi-national naval task force sent to the region earlier this year to stop Somali piracy, he adds.

Fourteen vessels currently remain captive in Somalia, with around 268 crew being held hostage, according to the IMB.

A one-eyed woman has appealed for some gadget guidance to help her turn her artificial eye into a camcorder.

In terms of recording capabilities, Vlach's opted for the MPEG 4 format and she hopes to have a Mini SD card slot inside it for cards of up to 4GB. It should also have a 3x zoom - optical, of course.

A German Member of parliament for a left-wing party, Lutz Heilmann, has obtained a preliminary injunction against the local chapter of the Wikimedia foundation, Wikimedia Deutschland e.V..

Apparently Heilmann is not happy with the fact that his Wikipedia article contains information on his work for the former GDR Stasi, the much-hated internal secret service.