A novel idea has been proposed to take the fight to the RIAA and the BPI. Since P2P filesharing has a discovery element which permits people to discover new music at no cost - why shouldn't filesharers be compensated for filesharing?

"Studies point to filesharing as a driver for *increased* music sales (among the heaviest downloaders). Possibly filesharers should start trying to recover promotional costs from the music industry?" asked anti-copyright campaigner Rob Myers.

Feargal's reaction?

"That's one of the most fanciful and non-practical ideas I've heard for quite some time. But God bless them for making me laugh and cheering me up today!"

Canadian soldiers fighting in Afghanistan have been warned that terrorists might be attacking them through their Facebook notworking sites.

According to CBC, the Defence Department is telling soldiers not to post personal photos and information on Facebook because they have proof that Al Qaeda operatives are monitoring the site.

A federal judge in Connecticut has rejected the RIAA's 'making available' theory, which is the basis of all of the RIAA's peer to peer file sharing cases. In Atlantic v. Brennan, in a 9-page opinion [PDF], Judge Janet Bond Arterton held that the RIAA needs to prove 'actual distribution of copies', and cannot rely - as it was permitted to do in Capitol v. Thomas - upon the mere fact that there are song files on the defendant's computer and that they were 'available'.

Tools for removing DRM from iTunes-purchased songs (myFairTunes7, QtFairUse6) have been available from the Hymn Project Web site for some time.

But on the 20th Apple sent a Cease and Desist note to Hymn's ISP, forcing the site admins to remove all download links. It is speculated that this is due to a new tool being created (Requiem) that attacks Apple's FairPlay DRM through cryptographic means instead of by copying the unprotected music from memory while it is being played.

Apple may be on dangerous ground here, since those users might now start checking out competing services.

Be careful who you frag. Having eliminated all terrorism in the real world, the U.S. intelligence community is working to develop software that will detect violent extremists infiltrating World of Warcraft and other massive multiplayer games, according to a data-mining report from the Director of National Intelligence.

The cultural and behavioral norms of virtual worlds and gaming are generally unstudied. Therefore, Reynard will seek to identify the emerging social, behavioral and cultural norms in virtual worlds and gaming environments. The project would then apply the lessons learned to determine the feasibility of automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world.

Felten and a group of colleagues have now shown that hard disk encryption is incredibly easy to beat. This should be a huge concern, considering how many people and organizations rely on data encryption to protect important data. In fact, with many of the "lost" hard drive stories over the past few years, many organizations have insisted the risk was minimal, since the data was all encrypted.

As the video notes, this won't work on some systems if the computer is turned completely off and the encryption package opens up before the operating system boots -- but otherwise, most systems are vulnerable.

The RIAA apparently produced a new video, already available on a variety of torrent tracker sites, in conjunction with the National District Attorneys Association with the goal of instructing U.S. prosecutors on how to deal with music piracy cases.

The video apparently isn't as old as it seems, and pertains mostly to physical CD piracy, with ex-Maryland state trooper Frank Walters pointing to a CD burner tower and showing how prosecutors can identify a pirated CD (no printing on the CD).

Jim Dedman, National District Attorneys Association: "If I have my drug officers out there, and they see what seems like a nice music collection, this may be something you could help me out with."

Deborah Robinson, Regional Counsel, Anti-Piracy Div., RIAA: "Exactly, exactly. And sometimes drug officers call us and say, 'we know they're selling music, can you help us?... We're trying to arrest this drug dealer, what should I look for, what should I put in that affidavit?"

"Immediately after receiving reports of this error, we made the decision to temporarily suspend automatic distribution of the update to avoid further customer impact while we investigate possible causes," said Volish Vista bogger Nick White, yesterday.

The update number 937287 is designed as a prelude to Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1). Unfortunately, it sent some PCs into an eternal cycle of reboots that only ceased when the plug was pulled.

Ailing revolutionary icon Fidel Castro permanently gave up the Cuban presidency on Tuesday, ending five decades of ironclad rule of the island marked by his brash defiance of the United States.

"I neither will aspire to nor will I accept -- I repeat -- I neither will aspire to nor will I accept, the position of president of the Council of State and commander-in-chief," Castro wrote, almost 19 months after undergoing intestinal surgery and handing power temporarily to his brother Raul Castro.

"Eventually this transition ought to lead to free and fair elections. And I mean free, and I mean fair -- not these kinds of staged elections that the Castro brothers tried to foist off as being true democracy," Bush said, on the road in Rwanda.

The transparency group WikiLeaks.org currently seems to be under heavy fire. The main WikiLeaks.org DNS entry is unavailable, reportedly due to a restraining order relating to a series of articles and documents released by WikiLeaks about off-shore trust structures in the Cayman Islands.

WikiLeaks alternate names remained available until Saturday, when there seems to have been a heavy DDoS attack and a fire at the ISP. The documents in question are still available on other WikiLeaks sites, such as wikileaks.be, and are also mirrored on Cryptome.