Calling all true patriots: one of the Lads from Lagos has got himself into a right royal state and needs a quick $2k to fulfil a lifetime's ambition to hang a pic of Her Imperial Majestyness Queen Liz II on the wall.

A pleseant day to you, how are you doing,i want to ask you for a favour that is very important to me, though i dont know your state, and how you"ll take it, but honestly it is very important to me, pls can i get $2,000 from you, i need to purchase a 1960 state of the art portrait of the queen of england, it is about the oldest and best around specially when she was young, i have been longing to see one all my life, study and work on it, it was recently Auction by the museum of Lagos, Nigeria west africa.themyths of the painting is that it was painted and presented to the museum by the queen during her visit the country,during the their colonial years.

A new look at some old bones have shown that velociraptor, the dinosaur made famous in the movie Jurassic Park, had feathers.

The fossil specimen that the group examined was a velociraptor forearm unearthed in Mongolia in 1998. They found on it clear indications of quill knobs—places where the quills of secondary feathers, the flight or wing feathers of modern birds, were anchored to the bone with ligaments. Quill knobs are also found in many living bird species and are most evident in birds that are strong flyers. Those that primarily soar or that have lost the ability to fly entirely, however, were shown in the study to typically lack signs of quill knobs.

The velociraptor in the current study stood about three feet tall, was about five feet long, and weighed about 30 pounds. Combined with its relatively short forelimbs compared to a modern bird, this indicated it lacked volant, or flight, abilities. The authors suggest that perhaps an ancestor of velociraptor lost the ability to fly, but retained its feathers.

MediaDefender is now in damage control mode and hopes to slow the spread of the e-mails by intimidating P2P site operators.

Although MediaDefender president Randy Saaf was eager to tell us a fabricated cover story after the MiiVi incident, MediaDefender has not responded to our numerous requests for comment this week. Similarly, the New York General Attorney's office has declined to provide a response to our inquiries.

The isoHunt administrator explains that Gerber failed to adequately specify the allegedly infringing content as required by law. The administrator also helpfully provides a link to a valid sample complaint so that SMR&H will be less likely to send the improper information in their second attempt.

"Despite us being located in Canada, if you do actually figure out how to compose a valid DMCA notice, we will honor it," he concedes, "just as soon as we're done laughing at you."

The organization behind the leak, MediaDefender-Defenders, has set up a web site with an HTML archive that includes all of the e-mails, largely uncensored, but with minor modifications to protect MediaDefender employees from identity theft.

The site has been running intermittently since its launch, and the disruptions are thought to be the result of massive traffic coupled with a denial of service attack apparently launched by MediaDefender.

MediaDefender's entire business model has been based on recognition of the inescapable fact that litigation cannot stop the spread of content on the Internet, so it is ironic that the company has turned to legal threats.

The newly revealed attacks threaten to turn what started as an embarrassing e-mail leak into a full-blown security meltdown for the company.

At least two more MediaDefender hacks have emerged since Saturday. In one, hackers obtained a copy of an internal company database identifying some of the decoy files the company has slipped onto peer-to-peer networks. In the other, intruders released a digital recording of a private phone call that appears to be a discussion between MediaDefender personnel and staff at the New York attorney general's office.

It's unclear how the conversation was recorded by the hackers, but a note from the person who posted the audio file on BitTorrent claims that intruders have been monitoring MediaDefender's phone system for nine months.

The e-mails reveal many aspects of MediaDefender's elaborate P2P disruption strategies, illuminate previously undisclosed details about the MiiVi scandal, and bring to light details regarding MediaDefender's collaboration with the New York Attorney General's office on a secret law enforcement project.

The MediaDefender e-mails leaked this weekend confirm beyond doubt that the company intentionally attempted to draw traffic to MiiVi while obscuring its own affiliation with the site. The e-mails also show that MediaDefender immediately began to recreate the site under a different name and corporate identity soon after the original plan was exposed.

In the collection of leaked e-mails, there are several discussions with representatives of the New York Attorney General's office, including intelligence analyst Bradley J. Bartram and senior special investigator Michael G. McCartney. MediaDefender is in the process of devising a system that will enable the Attorney General's office to remotely access MediaDefender's data about P2P users.

One of the most informative documents included in the leaked e-mails is a draft of MediaDefender's confidential contract with Universal Music Group. The contract reveals exact details of MediaDefender's pricing structure and services and provides insight into which P2P networks the company is targeting. MediaDefender charges $4,000 for one month of protection for an album, and $2,000 for one month of protection for a track.

On friday afternoon, both SCO Group and its subsidiary SCO Operations, Inc. filed voluntary petitions for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in US Bankruptcy Court in Delaware.

The bankruptcy filing canceled the SCO v. Novell trial that had been scheduled to begin Monday in the courtroom of US District Court Judge Dale A. Kimball. It automatically stayed that lawsuit and all of SCO's other pending litigation with IBM, Autozone and Red Hat.

SCO filed a lawsuit against IBM in March 2003 seeking $1 billion in damages, later raised to $5 billion, over various allegations related to IBM's support of Linux.

Along the way, SCO also sued Daimler-Chrysler and Autozone, former customers of its predecessor in interest Santa Cruz Operation. The Daimler-Chrysler case was quickly dismissed, but the Autozone case is still unresolved.

Some months after it had sued IBM, SCO apparently woke up to the fact that it didn't have written conveyances from Novell for the copyrights to UNIX SVRX. It attempted to obtain those from Novell but was rebuffed. So, in January 2004, SCO also sued Novell for alleged slander of title over the copyrights to the UNIX SVRX operating system.

When TorrentFreak reported that Media Defender (MD) was behind the video site MiiVi, they cast doubt on us. Now, in what is surely the biggest BitTorrent leak ever, nearly 700mb of MD's emails have gone public.

Unfortunately for Media Defender - a company dedicated to mitigating the effects of internet leaks - they can do nothing about being the subject of the biggest BitTorrent leak of all time. Over 700mb of their own internal emails, dating back over 6 months have been leaked to the internet in what will be a devastating blow to the company. Many are very recent, having September 2007 dates and the majority involve the most senior people in the company.

It states: "By releasing these emails we hope to secure the privacy and personal integrity of all peer-to-peer users. The emails contains information about the various tactics and technical solutions for tracking p2p users, and disrupt p2p services," and "A special thanks to Jay Maris, for circumventing there entire email-security by forwarding all your emails to your gmail account".

Hundreds of IPs and logins to their servers, lists of their decoy/entrapment trackers, decoy strategies, the effectiveness of their fake torrents (in many cases with a breakdown of success, title specific), high and low priority sites, .torrent watchlists, information on their monitoring of competitors, pictures of their weekend trips and even the anti-piracy strategy for dealing with The Simpsons Movie leak.

Prince is planning to make some doves cry over at YouTube headquarters. The symbol-loving singer has announced that he wants to go after the video-sharing site, along with eBay and the Pirate Bay, for hosting unauthorized versions of his music and merchandise.

This is the man who once changed his name to a symbol and currently runs an official web site (3121.com, of course) that looks to be written in a Princified version of "lolcat," telling members to "use their 4mer login and password 2 update ur in4mation."

Prince might not have much of a case, anyway. Unless courts find that the DMCA does not apply to YouTube, it continues to have a "safe harbor" that shelters it from these sorts of legal cannonballs so long as it complies with proper takedown requests. eBay, which has faced problems with counterfeit goods for years, is also used to dealing with such situations, and The Pirate Bay has so far proved impervious to attack.

In a new embarrassment for the Bush administration's top spymaster, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell is withdrawing an assertion he made to Congress this week that a recently passed electronic-surveillance law helped U.S. authorities foil a major terror plot in Germany.

Four intelligence-community officials, who asked for anonymity discussing sensitive material, said the new law, dubbed the "Protect America Act," played little if any role in the unraveling of the German plot. The U.S. military initially provided information that helped the Germans uncover the plot. But that exchange of information took place months before the new "Protect America" law was passed.

The developments were cited by Democratic critics on Capitol Hill as the latest example of the Bush administration's exaggerated claims - and contradictory statements - about ultrasecret surveillance activities.

After its launch in 2004 the open source browser took around a year to reach 100m downloads in February 2005 before hitting the 200m milestone in July 2006. The number, of course, does not represent the actual number of Firefox users. Even disregarding failed downloads, many users have downloaded multiple copies of the open source browser.

However, it is generally agreed that Firefox is obtaining a steadily increasing share of the browser market, which remains dominated by Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser. Firefox represents 17.4 per cent of the browser market, up 5.6 percentage points from 11.8 per cent in September 2006, according to figures from US consultancy firm Janco and the IT Productivity Center.