One of Japan's biggest Internet service providers will soon begin imposing daily upload limits on its customers in response to a portion of its user base who upload massive amounts of data.

OCN, the carrier operated by NTT Communications, will introduce a daily upload limit of 30G bytes from Aug. 1.

Downloads will continue to be unlimited.

An anti-spam outfit in the UK has compiled a list of the top five most spammed individuals in the UK. Three of them use Orange as their Internet Service Provider, and the most spammed man gets an average of 44,001 junk emails on a daily basis.

Come on, that is 1,338,363 pieces of spam every month or 16,060,365 junk email messages going to this one chap every year! This chap is clearly doing something wrong when it comes to safe surfing.

The film trilogy, which grossed $2.96 billion worldwide at the box office and $3 billion or so more in DVD and ancillary markets, has not made any money for the heirs of J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the famous books.

According to the Tolkien lawsuit, part of the reason the Tolkien family has received no kwan from the films is that New Line has had to shell out so much money to previous rights holders Zaentz and Miramax (who both had 5% of the gross).

Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users' names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday.

Viacom filed suit against Google in March 2007, seeking more than $1 billion in damages for allowing users to upload clips of Viacom's copyright material. Google argues that the law provides a safe harbor for online services so long as they comply with copyright takedown requests.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has already reacted, calling the order a violation of the Video Privacy Protection act that "threatens to expose deeply private information."

Viacom also requested YouTube's source code, the code for identifying repeat copyright infringement uploads, copies of all videos marked private, and Google's advertising database schema.

Those requests were denied in whole, except that Google will have to turn over data about how often each private video has been watched and by how many persons.

"Requiring proof of actual transfers would cripple efforts to enforce copyright owners' rights online." See, there's just one problem with this. The law isn't designed to make it easy to enforce copyright owners rights. It's designed to make sure that only the guilty party is actually blamed for breaking the law.

So, once again, we have the RIAA trying to cloud the issue. Oh yeah, and, of course, the RIAA can't resist using its bogus arguments that international treaties require US courts to treat making available as distribution.

The year is 1908, and it's just after seven in the morning. A man is sitting on the front porch of a trading post at Vanavara in Siberia. Little does he know, in a few moments, he will be hurled from his chair and the heat will be so intense he will feel as though his shirt is on fire.

It is estimated the asteroid entered Earth's atmosphere traveling at a speed of about 33,500 miles per hour. During its quick plunge, the 220-million-pound space rock heated the air surrounding it to 44,500 degrees Fahrenheit. At 7:17 a.m. (local Siberia time), at a height of about 28,000 feet, the combination of pressure and heat caused the asteroid to fragment and annihilate itself, producing a fireball and releasing energy equivalent to about 185 Hiroshima bombs.

The Motion Picture Association of America has helped convict an administrator for EliteTorrents.org, a peer-to-peer site, of felony copyright infringement and conspiracy, the U.S. Justice Department announced Friday.

Homeland Security agents from several divisions served search warrants on 10 people around the country suspected of being involved with the Elite Torrents site, and took over the group's main server.

Dove faces up to 10 years in prison when he is sentenced in September, the Justice Department said.

With the full-scale rollout of Japan's cigarette vending machine age-verification system just around the corner, a Sankei Sports news reporter has confirmed the existence of a minor flaw: magazine photos can be used to fool the age-verification cameras on some machines.

Fujitaka admits that people may, on occasion, be able to fool the age-verification cameras with photographs - but only for the time being. The company is now working on a more advanced system that will make sure each face belongs to a real human, but they are unable to say when these new machines will be put into place.

The US House Science and Technology Committee voted to deny the FBI $11 million to continue work on a massive database of government records on virtually all American citizens. The vote came after the FBI refused to tell Congress about its plans.

The idea was to use all that data to somehow predict who might be a potential so-called "terrorist" -- without a hint of probable cause to indicate any specific individual was linked to any radical or extremist group or ideology.

It is the sort of plan that the former East German STASI, the secret police thought to have employed up to one in three East Germans as government informants, would have wet its pants to have implemented. Terms that come to mind are "Panopticon" and "Orwellian."

A lot of things can happen in 200 years, but one thing data storage disc manufacturer Delkin Devices guarantees won't occur is data loss. That's because the firm's launched a Blu-ray Disc reputedly capable of retaining content for two centuries.

Delkin does state that its patented "phase-change" recording materials allow the discs to withstand the effects of UV light, heat and humidity.