Security researchers recently found that IM conversations on the Chinese Skype program were not only filtered, but also recorded on a massive, nonsecure, server. The possibility of surveillance flies in the face of Skype's supposed strong encryption, and has provoked outcry among privacy advocates.

In fact, evidence suggests that the servers used to store captyured data have been compromised in the past and used to host pirated movies and torrents (for peer-to-peer file sharing).

The veiled threat to shut down iTunes if royalty rates on downloaded songs were hiked has been averted.

The National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) asked for the rise while Apple opposed it and said it could result in iTunes being shut down.

"Apple has repeatedly made clear that it is in this business to make money and would most likely not continue to operate iTS (the iTunes Store) if it were no longer possible to do so profitably."

The CRB also rejected a call to cut the rate to 4.8 cents and in the end agreed to peg it at 9.1 cents a song for the next five years.

The summary? Almost every move the RIAA has made in its legal campaign has backfired.

All that's done is turn many more people against the RIAA, while continuing to educate them that file sharing exists. In fact, many more people engage in file sharing now than five years ago when the campaign started.

About the only "success" of the strategy is that it's turned into something of a cash generator for the RIAA, by frightening people, with strong legal language around flimsy evidence, into paying "presettlements" to avoid being sued. It's like a protection racket from organized crime. Oh yeah, it's worth noting that the musicians don't actually see any of that money.

Detective work by an Australian online poker player has uncovered a $US10 million cheating scandal at two major poker websites and triggered a $US75 million legal claim.

Josem plotted the win rate of several thousand players against the suspicious accounts and found the cheats won money at a rate that was 100 times faster than a good player could reasonably win.

The findings led to an investigation by the Kahnawake Gaming Commission, which licenses several hundred online casinos and poker rooms. It found Absolute Poker attempted to cover up the cheating by deleting gaming logs and records and fined it $US500,000.

The lawyers, who asked that their names not be published, said they were concerned "Consumers will think this is a legal product...when in fact it is totally illegal."

Wait wait wait wait: what? These unnamed lawyers are on a press-call with the media, as spokespeople for their company, and they "asked that their names not be published?"

The Swedish book publishers organization recently issued a report in which they revealed that 85% of the best-selling books in Sweden are available on The Pirate Bay.

In the report they write that they had to code a specialized tool to scrape the Pirate Bay database for book titles, since there were no ready-made tools available.

Peter Sunde is now arguing that they were breaking the law by scraping the site multiple times without permission. "The Pirate Bay actually owns the copyright to its own database of torrents," Sunde writes on his blog.

After getting sued by a German copyright holder, the company argued that it was doing all it could to screen out copyrighted material.

Simply twiddling a few bits could defeat the hash-based screening, the court ruled, and the six employees were insufficient to proactively examine everything posted to the company's servers before it was made available for download.

A camera purchased on Ebay for just £17 contained sensitive data about terrorist suspects according to a report from Reuters.

The Nikon camera, which was handed into a Hertfordshire police station, was apparently lost by a British MI6 agent and contained pictures of rocket launchers and missiles as well as the names, fingerprints and academic records of several members of the terrorist organisation.

For less than a pound a security expert has got front-door access to a council's internal network.

When he switched it on and plugged it in, the device automatically connected to the internal network of Kirklees Council in West Yorkshire.

A connection such as this allows privileged access to networks. In the wrong hands, such as criminally-minded hackers, it would allow them to conduct reconnaissance and find out if the network had any vulnerabilities worth exploiting.

The leaders of three of Australia's largest ISP's have declared the Net neutrality debate as solely a US problem - and further, that the nation that pioneered the internet might want to study the Australian market for clues as to how to solve the dilemma.

"The [Net neutrality] problem isn't about running out of capacity. It's a business model that's about to explode due to stress. The problem, in my opinion, is the US business model," said Hackett.

American customers have never been able to put much of a dollar value on traffic, as historically, US ISPs have "had it very easy" in terms of bandwidth costs.