Forever on the prowl for the next big thing in movie piracy, the motion picture industry is zeroing in on small and increasingly-powerful mobile-phone cameras that might be trained on theater screens. Picture and sound quality lag behind their camcorder big brothers, but the devices offer something a camcorder cannot: stealth.

The Warner Bros. Pictures invitation to screen the latest Harry Potter flick for reviewers underscored the motion picture industry's concern that the cell phone is the latest bootlegging tool.

Despite the industry's growing alarm, the poor quality of cell phone recordings make them unpopular among downloaders -- rating a distant fourth behind ripped DVDs, films recorded with professional-grade video cameras and movies pirated with handheld camcorders.

"That was the worst copy I have ever seen," one pirate wrote. "I hate you and wish death on you. Why not take a long walk off a short pier you complete smack tard? You are a pathetic excuse for a human being. I hope you suffer when it comes your time you vile piece of scum. Have a nice day."

Key organisational failures that left Virginia Tech student Seung-hui Cho free to kill 32 people should never be repeated, Virginia's governor has said.

Tim Kaine lamented a series of "missed opportunities" that allowed Cho to remain at large despite serious concerns over his mental health.

The independent eight-member panel also concluded that though Cho had shown earlier signs of mental instability, college staff had not intervened effectively.

Mr Kaine, who commissioned the report, said a combination of poor college administration, inadequate mental health services and policing errors allowed Cho to live among the students he would eventually attack.

The internet should not be used as a scapegoat for society's ills, said Vint Cerf, Google's net evangelist and a founding father of the network.

Speaking on the BBC Radio 4's Today programme he rejected calls for strict control of what is put online.

"Most of the content on the network is contributed by the users of the internet," he said. "So what we're seeing on the net is a reflection of the society we live in."

"Maybe it is important for us to look at that society and try to do something about what's happening, what we are seeing"

He added: "When you have a problem in the mirror you do not fix the mirror, you fix that which is reflected in the mirror."

Singapore-based Odex is one of the largest regional distributors of licensed Japanese anime VCDs, but the company believes that unauthorized Internet downloads are eating into its profitability. In November 2006, the company hired US-based BayTSP to help it track down anime downloaders in Singapore.

By April 2007, BayTSP's system had tracked 50 specific titles for six months and found that they had been downloaded a total of 400,000 times in Singapore alone. According to Odex, that is the "highest level of anime downloading in the world by population."

Judge Earnest Lau tossed the case last week after saying that Odex was only a "sub-licensee" from the Japanese firms that created the anime, not an "exclusive licensee." Only exclusive licensees or the actual copyright holder can bring civil suits for infringement.

Anime fans, as one might expect, aren't happy about the entire situation. Even those who acknowledge that Odex has a legal right to enforce its claims argue that the current strategy is counterproductive and likely to turn people against the company.

We received a report that our F-Secure DeepGuard HIPS system was warning about a USB stick software driver. The USB stick in question has a built-in fingerprint reader. The case seemed unusual so we ordered a couple of USB sticks with fingerprint authentication. We installed the software on a test machine and were quite surprised to see that after installation our F-Secure BlackLight rootkit detector was reporting hidden files on the system.

This USB stick with rootkit-like behavior is closely related to the Sony BMG case. First of all, it is another case where rootkit-like cloaking is ill advisedly used in commercial software. Also, the USB sticks we ordered are products of the same company - Sony Corporation.

The Sony MicroVault USM-F fingerprint reader software that comes with the USB stick installs a driver that is hiding a directory under "c:\windows\". So, when enumerating files and subdirectories in the Windows directory, the directory and files inside it are not visible through Windows API.

Files in this directory are also hidden from some antivirus scanners (as with the Sony BMG DRM case) - depending on the techniques employed by the antivirus software. It is therefore technically possible for malware to use the hidden directory as a hiding place.

As with the Sony BMG case we, of course, contacted Sony before we decided to go public with the case. However, this time we received no reply from them.

I have received a response to the Vista network performance issue from Microsoft. Here are some points of interest:

"Please note that some of what we are seeing is expected behavior, and some of it is not. In certain circumstances Windows Vista will trade off network performance in order to improve multimedia playback. This is by design."

"The connection between media playback and networking is not immediately obvious. But as you know, the drivers involved in both activities run at extremely high priority. As a result, the network driver can cause media playback to degrade. This shows up to the user as things like popping and crackling during audio playback. Users generally hate this, hence the trade off."

"Two other things to note. First, we have not seen any cases where a users internet performance would be degraded, in our tests this issue only shows up with local network operations."

Tom Wood, a Year 10 student, probably 15 - 16 years old has cracked the federal government's $84-million internet porn filter in just 30 minutes. He can deactivate the filter in several clicks in such a way that the software's icon is not deleted which will make his parents believe the filter is still working.

Australian communications Minister Helen Coonan said the government had anticipated kids would find their ways around the NetFilter. Yes Minister but 30 minutes for a teenager to crack a 84 million dollar filter is simply ridiculous.

A court has ordered a pirate, and Linux user, to dump his favourite open sauce software and install Microsoft Windows instead.

Scott McCausland, ex-administrator of the Elite Torrents Bit Torrent tracker, pleaded guilty to two charges - 'conspiracy to commit copyright infringement' and 'criminal copyright infringement'. He was sentenced to five months in jail and five months home confinement.

The probation service have ordered that his Internet connection is monitored by the US Government to make sure he doesn't do any more pirating.

Unfortunately the Government does not have any monitoring software which is not Windows based. So, McCausland is forced to lose all his Linux street cred and become an enthusiastic Vole supporter.

So far the US has lost an initial hearing and two appeals on its policies regarding Antiguan offshore gambling sites. Now the lawyer pressing the case has asked for a rarely invoked, but codified, recourse under WTO rules: letting Antiguans copy and distribute American music, movies, and software. The game may be to get Hollywood and Microsoft, et al., to pressure Washington to cut a deal. But their influence may not be sufficient to move lawmakers on the question of online gambling.

"But not complying with the decision presents big problems of its own for Washington. That's because Mr. Mendel, who is claiming $3.4 billion in damages on behalf of Antigua, has asked the trade organization to grant a rare form of compensation if the American government refuses to accept the ruling: permission for Antiguans to violate intellectual property laws by allowing them to distribute copies of American music, movie and software products, among others."

The teen arrested last month for filming 20 seconds of Transformers in a Virginia theater has pleaded guilty to one count of unlawfully recording a motion picture in violation of state law.

The case is believed to be the first in which somebody was arrested and convicted for filming part of a movie for personal, noncommercial use in the United States.

Under last week's deal in Arlington County General District Court, Sejas was fined $71 in court costs and could have been on the hook for a maximum $2,500 fine, according to court records.

When arrested on her birthday last month, the Annandale, Virginia, resident said she was taking the short clip with a Canon PowerShot to show her 13-year-old brother.

"We hope that this case reinforces our efforts to educate the public that unauthorized recording, whether a clip or the whole film, in movie theaters is against the law."