Part of the reason the RIAA is so relentless with its legal campaign against file-sharing in the US is that the group can readily obtain the names and addresses of broadband subscribers via John Doe lawsuits. In contrast, the motion picture and music industries have had mixed results with that strategy in Europe, and one firm retained by Big Content is under fire in Switzerland for what the Swiss government says are illegal tactics.

Unlike US law, which allows the identity of an ISP subscriber to be revealed via a civil action, Swiss law requires a criminal case to be filed in order for the data to be divulged.

Logistep has sidestepped that requirement by having prosecutors file criminal copyright infringement cases against suspected file-sharers. Once the company learns the identity of the alleged infringer, it files a civil lawsuit. The prosecutors will then typically drop the criminal case.

A parrot who never stopped chattering lost his voice after four days' freedom in the wilds of Cambridgeshire.

Harley, an African Grey, used to call his owners "Mum" and "Dad", could recite his telephone number and was never lost for words.

But after four days in the wild he appears to have lost his tongue and has returned traumatised, skinny and mute.

The latest version of Apple's QuickTime media player has video production people venting their spleens after discovering that new digital rights management features have crippled the use editing software from Adobe.

Shortly after updating to QuickTime 7.4, legions of people charged chat groups to report they were unable to access files created with Premier and After Effects, two pricey Adobe programs used for editing video.

Those After Effects users unfortunate enough to have installed the update get a DRM-related error when trying to access their video files. It reads: "After Effects error: opening movie - you do not have permission to open this file (-54)."

Paulo Coelho, the best-selling author of "The Alchemist", is using BitTorrent and other filesharing networks as a way to promote his books. His publishers weren't too keen on giving away free copies of his books, so he’s taken matters into his own hands.

He's convinced - and rightly so - that letting people download free copies of his books helps sales. For him the problem is getting around copyright laws that require him to get the permission of his translators if he wants to share copies of his books in other languages.

In his speech he talks about how the Internet is changing language and books, and how online "piracy" and BitTorrent have helped him not only be more widely read, but also sell more books!

A US team reports in Science magazine how it built in the lab the entire set of genetic instructions needed to drive a bacterial cell.

The group hopes eventually to use engineered genomes to make organisms that can produce clean fuels and take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

Dr Craig Venter, who was involved in the race to decode the human genome, believes tailor-made micro-organisms can become efficient producers of non-polluting fuels such as hydrogen. Other synthetic bacteria could be made to take up greenhouse gases, he believes.

This is the stage which raises the most concern among critics, and where a new lifeform could be said to be truly created. How precisely will it behave? What will its impact be on other organisms and the environment? Some say it is a step too far, but others argue that the new field of synthetic biology is an important science.

After commissioning a 2005 study from LEK Consulting that showed collegiate file-swappers were responsible for 44 percent of movie studio "losses" to piracy, the MPAA then used the report it bought to bludgeon Congress into considering legislation to address this massive problem. Now the MPAA admits that the report's conclusions weren't even close to being right; collegiate piracy accounts for only 15 percent of "losses."

The fact that one of the key data points in this lobbying for the last two years was overstated by a factor of three is bad, but the fact that it came from a secret report just makes it all worse.

According to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), the number of "vishing" complaints received by the center is increasing at what it calls "an alarming rate." Vishing and phishing are related, and both rely on e-mail as a means of delivering bait, but the two use different hooks in order to snag user data.

Vishing starts with an e-mail, like phishing, but requests that end-users contact a particular institution by phone in order to resolve an issue or re-secure personal data. People who call the provided number will be asked to provide the same types of data phishers attempt to procure.

As always, the best defense against phishing or vishing is a little common sense. If your bank or other financial institution with which you are affiliated contacts you requesting personal data, hang up (or call them) using only the number provided on the back of your card or official statement.

Outraged by the butterfly ballots and hanging chads of the disputed 2000 presidential election, political activists nationwide pushed for user-friendly voting systems that wouldn't lead to a repeat of the confusion that left the outcome in Florida - and the nation - in doubt.

Less than eight years later - after taxpayers in Maryland and other states spent hundreds of millions on easy-to-use, all-electronic, touch-screen voting machines - the debate has come full circle.

By 2010, four years before its $65 million touch-screen machines will be paid off, Maryland expects to be back on the paper trail, following states such as Florida and California, which have also decided that all-electronic systems make it too easy to compromise elections.

Jeremy Nicholson of Imperial College London and his collegues fed strains of "probiotic" Lactobacillus to mice whose gut microbes had been replaced by those that usually live in the human gut. These mice had different bile acids from the norm - favouring enzymes that reduce the amount of fat digested. "More fat is available for the microbes, and you then 'poo' the microbes out," says Nicholson.

The changes may only reduce fat absorption by a little, but this could have an impact on obesity if sustained over several years.

Players have discovered that there's a cap on how much money you can carry in the game. Apparently that amount is 214,748 gold, 36 silver, 48 copper. After you reach that lofty sum, you'll no longer be able to receive money from any source in the game. While some responses to the original posts claim that this exact limit had previously been theorized to exist, there have been no reports of anyone in the game actually achieving this amount via legal means.