We wrote about an uproar in the gamer community over EA's decision to include some incredibly cumbersome DRM on some new games, including the highly anticipated Spore.

Spore is getting slammed in reviews on its Amazon review page, as well over a thousand reviewers have all given the product one star, while trashing EA for the use of the DRM. Yet another lesson in what happens when your customers warn you ahead of time that they don't want you to cripple the products they buy from you -- and you fail to listen.

The Google home page mustn't contain any more than 28 words. Yes, 28.

But it seems the 28-word limit doesn't apply when Google is pushing its very own web browser.

Since Chrome launched early last week, a download link has appeared at least twice on Google's supposedly sacred home page - and then disappeared.

Over a period of twelve hours, between this Thursday night and Friday morning, American Rights Counsel LLC sent out over 4000 DMCA takedown notices to YouTube, all making copyright infringement claims against videos with content critical of the Church of Scientology.

Whether or not American Rights Counsel, LLC represents the notoriously litigious Church of Scientology is unclear, but this would not be the first time that the Church of Scientology has used the DMCA to silence Scientology critics.

It should be possible to counteract the global warming associated with a doubling of carbon dioxide levels by enhancing the reflectivity of low-lying clouds above the oceans, according to researchers in the US and UK.

The idea relies on the "Twomey effect", which says that increasing the concentration of water droplets within a cloud raises the overall surface area of the droplets and thereby enhances the cloud's albedo.

The 300-tonne unmanned ships used to seed the clouds would be powered by the wind, but would not use conventional sails.

Fraudsters have begun cold-calling householders to accuse them of copyright infringement online and threaten them with court action, an ISP has reported.

Small ADSL provider UKFSN received a support call yesterday from an elderly customer who was concerned after being contacted by a scammer on Tuesday.

Accused of illegally sharing music, UKFSN's subscriber was savvy enough to refuse to give any details, and turned the tables on the caller, demanding to know where they were calling from. When they refused to provide credentials he hung up.

HiVision has managed to create a UMPC that sells right now for $120.00. They say they have refined the manufacturing process and have learned from building this laptop how to mass produce a laptop that will sell for $98.00.

MIPS based processor, WiFi, 1GB flash storage, it runs Linux, has 3 USB ports, Ethernet, SDHC card reader, audio in and out, multi-tabbed Firefox browser support and Abiword for word processing. Running a custom Chinese Linux distrubution named Xip.

Controversial Silicon Valley advertising startup NebuAd drops plan to sell deep packet inspection technology to Internet service providers after Congress and public interest groups slam privacy implications of deep packet inspection. NebuAd suffered through a summer of losing customers and congressional hearing before bailing on the plan that promised ISPs additional revenue sources.

According to the report, NebuAd uses special equipment that "monitors, intercepts and modifies the contents of Internet packets" as consumers go online. The report found that NebuAd inserts extra hidden code into users' Web browsers that was not sent by the Web site being visited.

St. Paul police fired chemical agents and projectiles into a large crowd of protesters outside the Republican National Convention on Tuesday night.

The incident comes after almost 300 people were set to be formally charged in Ramsey County District Court on Tuesday after they were arrested during protests Monday at the Republican National Convention, police said.

On Monday, police arrested 283 people after firing projectiles, pepper spray and tear gas to disperse a crowd demonstrating near the convention site, St. Paul Police Department Chief John Harrington said.

IE 8 consumed just under 380MB of memory during a 10-site, multi-tab browsing scenario of popular general media, technical media and humor-related Web destinations.

By contrast, IE 7 consumed just under 250MB rendering this same workload, while Firefox 3.01 put both IE versions to shame by completing the same browsing scenario in just 159MB of RAM.

No matter how you slice the data, IE 8 represents a massive expansion of the baseline runtime requirements for Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser.

The owner and editor of a web site that was critical of police abuse of the citizens of a troubled southern Russian province was arrested and apparently shot to death by police on Sunday.

Kautiyev said Yevloyev was taken away in a car by police and dumped beside the road a short time later with a gunshot wound to the head. He subsequently died at a hospital.