The company has also been accused of a variety of different denial of service attacks against sites it believes are promoting file sharing. On the whole, pretty much everything the company seems to be associated with would be considered dirty tactics. What's amazing is that in pulling all these dirty tricks, MediaDefender never seems to get in much trouble for it.

MediaDefender, however, used a backdoor into Revision3's BitTorrent tracker to inject its own nefarious torrents -- basically piggybacking off of Revision3's tracker. Revision3 noticed the backdoor and closed it -- at which point, MediaDefender's system started flooding Revision3's servers with over 8,000 pings per second.

What do you do with a robot armed with a million-round-per-minute gun? "Crowd control," naturally.

Metal Storm's 40mm weapons mount, the company tells us, can deliver both high-explosive and less-lethal rounds. Which makes it perfect for everything from urban assaults to "border patrol" to "infrastructure protection" to "crowd control."

Its rival, Foster-Miller, has already tried out its machines with Metal Storm weapons, and has three machine gun-toting 'bots in Iraq. Because of safety concerns, however, they're not seeing much action. Not even crowd control.

TJX Companies, the mammoth US retailer whose substandard security led to the world's biggest credit card heist, has fired an employee after he left posts in an online forum that made disturbing claims about security practices at the store where he worked.

Security was so lax at the TJ Maxx outlet located in Lawrence, Kansas, that employees were able to log onto company servers using blank passwords, the fired employee, Nick Benson, told The Register. This policy was in effect as recently as May 8, more than 18 months after company officials learned a massive network breach had leaked the details of more than 94 million customer credit cards.

Speaking at yesterday's Wedbush Morgan Securities annual Management Access Conference, the Atari founder suggested that game piracy will soon be a thing of the past thanks to a new chip.

"What that says is that in the games business we will be able to encrypt with an absolutely verifiable private key in the encryption world - which is uncrackable by people on the internet and by giving away passwords - which will allow for a huge market to develop in some of the areas where piracy has been a real problem."

"The TPM will, in fact, absolutely stop piracy of gameplay."

A police spokesperson in the Bavarian town of Krumbach said law enforcement is investigating the couple for possible child trafficking, even though the 23-year-old woman of the duo insists the post was a joke.

"Offering my nearly new baby for sale because it cries too much. Male, 70 cm long and can be used either in a baby carrier or a stroller." Not that the price matters one way or the other, but the parents offered to sell the child for one euro ($1.57).

Todd Davis has dared criminals for two years to try stealing his identity: Ads for his fraud-prevention company, LifeLock, even offer his Social Security number next to his smiling mug.

Now, LifeLock customers in Maryland, New Jersey and West Virginia are suing Davis, claiming his service didn't work as promised and he knew it wouldn't, because the service had failed even him.

"There's nothing on my actual credit report about uncollected funds, no outstanding tickets or warrants or anything," he said. "There's nothing to indicate my identity has been successfully compromised other than the one instance. I know I'm taking a slightly higher risk. But I'll take my risk for the tremendous benefit we're bringing to society and to consumers."

Steve Ballmer is in no way disappointed with Windows Vista. It is selling "incredibly well", he told a press conference in Herzeliya, Israel today.

"Vista sells on almost 100 per cent of all the new consumer PCs around the world," the Microsoft CEO proclaimed.

Whether Vista really is an upgrade, or just something of a weighty and awkward downgrade can still be argued, but Ballmer puts the problems down to the "tricky" balance between compatibility and security.

With the US and other G8 countries trying to outlaw The Pirate Bay and its ilk, an anonymous reader suggests that a solution may have emerged out of Cornell University. A new open-source project called Cubit is an Azureus plugin that provides decentralized approximate keyword search of torrents in the network.

Wikinews - like its sister site, Wikipedia - bills itself as a place without bias. Ostensibly, it's a democratic news source that never answers to a higher power. But that's just a setup for the latest act in the world's greatest online farce.

"Wikimedia has been doing things that are out of the ordinary and, in my opinion, against everything it stands for - such as free information for all and the fact that they claim to not censor anything," says Jason Safoutin.

Late last month, Wikimedia general counsel Mike Godwin filed a declaration with the court, pointing out that an article on Barbara Bauer "no longer appears on the Wikipedia site."

In telling Wikipedians to avoid re-posting a Barbara Bauer article, Godwin also tells them he's not telling them to avoid re-posting a Barbara article.

According to WorldNetDaily, the FBI is investigating Wikipedia after someone uploaded a photo of a nude adolescent. Safoutin's piece focused on the FBI probe, but it also mentioned other reports that Wikimedia Number Two Eric Moeller has advocated the free exchange of child pornography and posted a child pornography image to his web site.

Godwin killed this story too.

Thousands of Chinese fled for cover in fear of an earthquake Tuesday, alarmed not only by warnings from seismologists but also by an unusual mass movement of frogs, state media said.

Residents of Zunyi, a southern city that saw little damage in China's massive earthquake last week, noticed the amphibians' march on Monday, Xinhua said, quoting Vice Mayor Zeng Yongtao.

Local forestry officials had said the toads' movement was simply because it was mating season, although their explanations were attacked on China's lively Internet discussion boards.