MobiTV sent a letter to Howardforums.com, asking the site to take down links that provide MobiTV streams from Fox News, MSNBC, Animal Planet and other networks when entered in the Web browsers of certain phones.

"These feeds do not appear to be protected in any way, and it appears anyone with a compatible phone can view them," Chui wrote in a posting. He questioned why MobiTV was operating its service without authenticating its subscribers.

A MobiTV lawyer responded that the specific MobiTV Web address was obtained in violation of the company's intellectual property rights, according to Chui.

Tanya Andersen, the single mother who filed a countersuit against the RIAA after the organization mistakenly sued her for sharing music online, attempted to hold it responsible for all sorts of heavy infractions ("RICO violations, fraud, invasion of privacy, abuse of process, electronic trespass, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, negligent misrepresentation, the tort of 'outrage,' and deceptive business practices").

This information would likely be held under a confidential seal, but if lawsuits over mold, tobacco, and asbestos are any indication, the RIAA's secrets will likely leak out into the legal community at large, potentially culminating in a class action suit.

Even without a class action lawsuit, the RIAA nutshell is likely to split wide open after Andersen's case hits the discovery phase, causing problems in subsequent cases.

Computer security analyst Babak Pasdar says that a major mobile telecommunications carrier has a built-in backdoor that provides an undisclosed third-party with unfettered access to its internal technical infrastructure, including the ability to eavesdrop on all calls through its network.

Pasdar was instructed not to migrate the traffic for one particular DS-3, which was referred to as the "Quantico Circuit" by consultants who worked closely with the carrier (the FBI Academy is based in Quantico, Virginia).

When Pasdar insisted that the Quantico Circuit should at least have the minimum level of security access logging if not access control, the consultants called the company's Director of Security, who threatened Pasdar, telling him that he would be replaced if he didn't forget about the circuit and continue with the migration.

Wired's Threat Level blog connected the pieces and points us to the 2006 wiretapping lawsuit against the telcos, which alleges that Verizon "has engaged and maintained and still does maintain a high speed data transmission line from its wireless call center to a remote location in Quantico, Virginia, the site of a U.S. government intelligence and military base."

This is particularly disturbing if the recipient of the Quantico Circuit is the FBI, because the agency has a long history of intelligence abuses and has been found to have a serious lack of meaningful internal oversight.

The Thunderbird development community aims to release the first alpha of Thunderbird 3 next month.

Thunderbird 3 will use Gecko 1.9, a new version of the rendering engine that serves as the foundation for the Mozilla platform. Gecko 1.9, which has also been instrumental in the making of Firefox 3, offers a number of very significant improvements, including a new Cairo-based rendering backend and support for JavaScript 1.8.

Ascher believes that a better out-of-the-box experience and support for calendaring are the two killer features that will make Thunderbird a success.

A spectacular, rotating binary star system is a ticking time bomb, ready to throw out a searing beam of high-energy gamma rays - and Earth may be right in the line of fire.

"Viewed from Earth, the rotating tail appears to be laid out on the sky in an almost perfect spiral. It could only appear like that if we are looking nearly exactly down on the axis of the binary system," said Tuthill.

This means we are peering down the barrel of the gun, as when binary supernovae go off, all their energy is focussed into a narrow beam of wildly destructive gamma ray radiation that emanates (both up and down) from the poles of the system.

Though the risk may be remote, there is evidence that gamma ray bursts have swept over the planet at various points in Earth's history with a devastating effect on life.

People seem to have this weird fascination with blaming YouTube for the stuff people do on YouTube. The latest is in an article that discusses the fact that adolescent males tend to be fans of blowing stuff up -- with a fair number of them filming the activity and putting it on YouTube.

Yet, there's always someone who still thinks it's at least partially YouTube's fault. In this case, it's someone who runs a non-profit focused on kids' online safety, claiming that "YouTube and other sites have not taken responsibility for allowing such videos to be posted." That might be because it's not YouTube's responsibility. It's just a hosting platform.

The man early results suggest has won Russia's presidential election, Dmitry Medvedev, has vowed to continue the course of predecessor Vladimir Putin.

Speaking to reporters later, Mr Medvedev said his policies would be "a direct continuation of that path which is being carried out by President Putin".

Mr Putin, who has been in office for eight years, was barred by the constitution from seeking a third term, but has pledged to serve as Mr Medvedev's prime minister.

The idea of the paperless office has been around since the late 1970s but three decades on paper remains hugely popular.

One particular technology proving useful for this is Adobe's Portable Data Format.

About 15 years ago this started life as a simple way to preserve the look and feel of documents as they were passed between different operating systems and computers.

Another way to get rid of paper is to scan the documents and turn them into digital facsimiles. The relentless march of technology means today's scanners, even those found in the home, are more like the very expensive ones big corporations use.

P2P outfits Napster, Kazaa and Bolt.com all had to cough up millions to Universal Music, Warner Music and EMI to compensate artists for the illegal downloading of their music. But now managers claim that they've hardly seen a penny filter down to the artists, who are getting so frustrated that they have considered filing a few lawsuits themselves.

Record label sources responded to the accusations by saying that the big corporate bosses were still determining how best to divide the cash. In a process that could take a very long while to settle, the mathematically minded music industry boffins have decided to calculate how much every single specific artist is owed, with regard to the level of copyright infringement suffered by each.

An effort at damage control has snowballed into a public relations disaster for a Swiss bank seeking to crack down on a renegade Web site for posting classified information about some of its wealthy clients.

In federal court in San Francisco, the bank asked a judge to take down the site. Much to the outrage of free speech advocates and others, the judge did.

But instead of the information disappearing, it rocketed through cyberspace, landing on other Web sites and Wikileaks' own "mirror" sites outside the U.S.

Masnick said the bank's lawsuit demonstrates the ineffectiveness of such legal actions in the Internet age, when anyone with a computer and online connection can thumb his nose at a judge's ruling and resurrect the "banned" information elsewhere.