Wikileaks has released a sensitive 219 page US military counterinsurgency manual. The manual, Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces (1994, 2004), may be critically described as "what we learned about running death squads and propping up corrupt government in Latin America and how to apply it to other places".

The manual directly advocates training paramilitaries, pervasive surveillance, censorship, press control and restrictions on labor unions & political parties. It directly advocates warrantless searches, detainment without charge and (under varying circumstances) the suspension of habeas corpus. It directly advocates employing terrorists or prosecuting individuals for terrorism who are not terrorists, running false flag operations and concealing human rights abuses from journalists. And it repeatedly advocates the use of subterfuge and "psychological operations" (propaganda) to make these and other "population & resource control" measures more palatable.

This Wednesday at 9am the Swedish Parliament is voting on a new wiretapping law which would enable the civil agency (FRA - Defense Radio Agency) to snoop on all traffic crossing the Swedish border. E-mail, fax, telephone, web, SMS, etc. 24/7 without any requirement to obtain a court order.

Nonetheless, the ruling party block is supposedly pressuring its members to vote 'yes' to this new proposed law with threats to unseat any dissidents. After massive activity on blogs by ordinary citizens, and street protests, the story has finally been picked up by major Swedish news sources. The result will likely be huge street protests on Wednesday.

A Briton is taking his fight against US extradition for allegedly carrying out the "biggest military computer hack of all time" to the House of Lords.

If extradited, they said, he would face an unknown length of time in pre-trial detention, with no likelihood of bail.

Mr McKinnon has always maintained he was motivated by curiosity and only managed to get into the networks because of lax security.

AVG rolled Linkscanner into its anti-virus engine, which has about 70 million active users worldwide. The company estimates that 20 million machines have upgraded to the tool's new incarnation, AVG version 8, and this has already cooked up enough ghost clicks to skew traffic not only on The Reg but any number of other sites as well.

Webmasters deal with robot traffic and other rogue visits all the time. But this is a little different. In an effort to fool even the sneakiest malware exploits, Linkscanner does its best to imitate real user clicks - which means most webmasters are completely unaware of the problem.

Another in a long series of claimed "powered by water" cars, this one by a Japanese company called "Genepax," which interestingly enough does not have so much as a Wikipedia entry.

"Almost sounds too good to be true" isn't the half of it; if cars could be made which would run as "long as you have a bottle of water inside" to pour into the fuel tank ("even tea," repeats this report), not only would you know about the car, but you'd notice the long lines of people buying generators, laptops, and power tools that run on the same technology.

"The car has an energy generator that extracts hydrogen from water that is poured into the car's tank. The generator then releases electrons that produce electric power to run the car."

Mathew Ingram alerts us to the news that the band Metallica has responded on its own website to the controversy over representatives from the band demanding reviews of the band's latest album get taken offline.

It seems like a weak cop-out to say "oh, it was our managers' fault" when the band has had so much controversy concerning how it has interacted with the internet community. Besides, even this response rings hollow. The band only seemed concerned that the management team took down "mostly positive reviews," not the fact that it took down reviews.

The reality is that it may actually make the problem worse. It turns out that these efforts to make it harder to access child porn have serious unintended consequences: basically, those involved with child porn still have plenty of ways to access it, but it's much more underground than before. It makes it that much harder for law enforcement officials to track down those actually responsible and to stop child porn at its source.

What Cuomo has done is make it harder to stop child pornography while also opening the door to others censoring the internet.

New York's Attorney General has just launched a blacklist-based initiative to quell undesirable Internet content. Child pornography is the target, although like all blacklists there will be a large number of blocked innocents and civilian casualties.

An undercover investigation by the Attorney General's office uncovered a major source of online child pornography known as "Newsgroups," an online service not associated with websites. The Newsgroups act as online public bulletin boards where users can upload and download files. Users access Newsgroups through their Internet Service Providers.

According to a report by Declan McCullagh, Sprint will be blocking the entire alt. hierarchy of Usenet, while good old Time Warner Cable has no time for such fussiness and will just stop offering all Usenet access.

This is the BMW Gina. Ostensibly a two-seater roadster, it's actually more of a philosophical statement that has informed BMW's current production line-up and will influence future vehicles.

Built on the short-lived Z8 Roadster platform, the Gina consists of a flexible 'skin' stretched over a metal wire structure enforced with carbon fibre. It allows the driver to change the shape of the car 'on the fly' - the rear spoiler can be raised, for example, while the rocker panels can effectively be bodykitted out.

The band seemed to have learned somewhat from the dark days of the Napster debacle by offering fans online access to pre-release material and in-studio video footage, but now it has apparently unleashed another potentially damaging fiasco upon itself by forcing bloggers to take down reviews of their upcoming album.

Metallica representatives played the album for The Quietus contributor "Bob Mulhouse" in London last Wednesday, after he did what one would expect: he posted a review on his blog.

Metallica held a listening party for music reviewers and was surprised when some of them wrote reviews? That has to be a public relations first.

It's still unclear why Metallica's management didn't require the reviewers to sign non-disclosure agreements if they didn't want them to write about it.