We've pointed out many times in the past that the various Torrent tracker sites out there that the entertainment industry is suing are not particularly different than Google.

If Google is equally as effective as various torrent trackers in finding unauthorized content, why aren't the entertainment industry giants suing Google for the same thing?

The Xiph.Org Foundation announced Monday the release of Theora 1.0.

Upcoming versions of Firefox and Opera will play natively Ogg/Theora videos with the new HTML5 element <video src="file.ogv"></video>, and ffmpeg2theora offers an easy way to create content.

So now it's time to help it take over the internet, and finally push for video sites filled with Theora encoded vlogs, blurts and idle nonsense.

Sampling the bacterial DNA on human skin has revealed that while women's hands get washed more often than men's, they teem with a more diverse selection of germs.

Differences in sweat and sebum production, hormones and even the use of cosmetics might be involved, but it could simply be that men's skin is more acid - acid environments tend to have less microbial diversity.

The French Senate has overwhelmingly voted in favour of a law that would cut off access to the internet to web surfers who repeatedly download copyrighted music, films or video games without paying.

The legislation is the transposition into law of an extra-parliamentary initiative of President Nicholas Sarkozy from last November, the so-called Olivennes accord, in which some 40 stakeholders from the music, cinema and internet service provision sectors agreed that repeat illegal downloaders would have their internet cut off by ISPs.

In September, the European Parliament approved by a large majority an amendment outlawing internet cut-off.

BD+, the Blu-ray copy protection system that was supposed to last 10 years, has now been solidly broken by a group of doom9 researchers. Earlier, BD+ had been broken by the commercial company SlySoft.

Someone from SlySoft posts a hint early in the thread, but then backs off for fear of getting fired. The break is announced on page 15.

The UN says it has credible reports that camps sheltering 50,000 displaced people in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo have been destroyed.

Reports suggest the camps were forcibly emptied and looted before being burned, the UN refugee agency, the UNHCR, said.

A ceasefire is holding in and around Goma, the capital of North Kivu province, but aid agency chiefs say the situation remains highly volatile.

The recall applies to certain Sony 2.15Ah lithium-ion cell batteries made in Japan and sold around the world in laptops made by Hewlett-Packard Co., Dell Inc. and Toshiba Corp.

This also pales in comparison to the recall of more than 10 million of a different model of Sony batteries in 2006 and 2007, which affected almost every major PC manufacturer, including Dell Inc. and Apple Inc.

Sony said its own Vaio laptops don't use the battery in question. Last month, however, the company recalled 440,000 Vaio notebooks worldwide because of a wiring flaw that can cause overheating.

The "losses" from camcorded movies are minimal, though it didn't stop the MPAA from totally making up numbers that were clearly bogus.

They claimed that anti-camcording laws in the US had wiped out piracy in the US. Two months later when they were pushing for such laws in the US, suddenly New York represented 40% of all camcorded movies.

So, it's rather interesting to see that a guy who was caught camcording movies in Maryland was just sentenced to 21 months in prison under a 2005 law.

A 15-year-old high school student in New York State has been charged with three felonies after he allegedly accessed personnel records on his school's poorly configured computer network and then notified his principal of the security weakness.

Since news of the charges were reported late last week, hackers have criticized administrators for turning the student into a scapegoat for the school board's shoddy computer security.

US agents have broken up a plot to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and shoot or decapitate 102 black people in a murder spree in the state of Tennessee.

Jim Cavanaugh, special agent in charge of the Nashville field office for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said the two men planned to shoot 88 black people and decapitate another 14.

The men also sought to go on a national killing spree, with Mr Obama as their final target, Mr Cavanaugh said.