It had been claimed that neither title would be able to run successfully using the older DirectX 9 graphics engine, with Microsoft urging gamers to take the plunge and switch to the Vista.

The news is sure to irk Microsoft who may now face an increased delay in some consumers adopting Vista at this early stage. However, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Earlier this month Falling Leaf Systems said in a press release that it believed Microsoft was deceiving consumers by stating that the titles would only work on Vista, and announced its intentions to release compatability software to disprove the claim.

"Microsoft has, in typical Microsoft fashion, decided to launch their forced migration onslaught in full force with the release of two games that will only run on Windows Vista," said Falling Leaf Systems CEO Brian Thomason in the press release.

Tanya Andersen, the plaintiff here, is the single mother in Oregon that the RIAA prosecuted for the last couple of years and then "on the eve of summary judgment" dropped the lawsuit with prejudice. Her counterclaims remain and are restated here and supplemented. It will soon be joined into a single case. So, what started as Atlantic v. Andersen has now turned around, and it is now Andersen v. Atlantic and the defendants are the music companies making up the RIAA -- Atlantic, Priority Records, Capitol Records, UMG and BMG -- the RIAA itself, the Settlement Support Center, and SafeNet, formerly known as MediaSentry. She is asserting claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the RICO Act, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act.

Buying a DVD and then copying it for use on your PSP, iPod or laptop could soon become impossible, if the DVD Copy Control Association gets its way.

The association wants to amend the licence underpinning the use of its DVD copy-protection technology, CSS (Content Scrambling System). This would, if successful, oblige you to have the original disc in your DVD drive every time you watched it.

The amendment would force, say, DVD playback software from displaying ripped content. It would also imply the use of software built into PCs and optical drives to prevent ripping software from saving an unscrambled copy of a disc's contents for later playback on a device without a DVD drive, such as a PSP or an iPod.

Spiegel a german news site is reporting that Google is threatening to shut down the german version of its Gmail service if the german Bundestag passes it’s new Internet surveillance law. Peter Fleischer, googles german privacy representative says the new law would be a severe blow against privacy and would go against Googles practice of also offering anonymous e-mail accounts. If the law is passed then starting 2008, any connection data concerning the internet, phone calls (With position data when cell phones are used), SMS etc. of any german citizen will be saved for 6 months, anonymizing services like Tor will be made illegal.

Some ISPs are resorting to a new tactic to increase revenue: inserting advertisements into web pages requested by their end users. They use a transparent web proxy (such as this one) to insert javascript and/or HTML with the ads into pages returned to users. Neither the content provides nor the end-users have been notified that this is taking place, and I'm sure that they weren't asked for permission either.

NBC/Universal's general counsel Rick Cotton must just be trying to push his anti-piracy comments to absurd levels to see just how much he can get away with.

"In the absence of movie piracy, video retailers would sell and rent more titles. Movie theatres would sell more tickets and popcorn. Corn growers would earn greater profits and buy more farm equipment."

As Public Knowledge points out, first off, movie theaters are doing great this year, suggesting the big "threat" of piracy had a lot less to do with its troubles than the fact that it just didn't have that many compelling movies the past few years. Also, corn farmers are doing quite well (and people still eat popcorn at home while watching pirated movies).

By the very same reasoning, I could say "If all movies were pirated, then everyone would have that additional money they didn't spend on movies to spend on things like fancy dinners. Restaurants would be more crowded. Farmers would make more money by being able to sell more profitable food at higher prices."

In its first 25 years, the Central Intelligence Agency violated its charter by plotting assassinations, funding behavioral and drug studies that included "unwitting participants," opening U.S. mail, creating dossiers on nearly 10,000 American dissidents, wiretapping journalists to root out their sources, and interrogating a Soviet defector against his will for two years, according to a summary of a decades-old CIA report on the agency's activities released Thursday by the National Security Archive, an open government group.

That report was compiled in 1973 at the order of then-CIA director James Schlesinger, following revelations that the Watergate burglars had CIA help. The existence of report, referred to as the "Family Jewels" has long been known, but only a few bits have been revealed through open government requests.

The US Department of Homeland Insecurity, the outfit which tells other people how to make themselves safe, has suffered more than 800 hacker break-ins, virus outbreaks and other computer security problems over two years.

Red-faced departmental managers admitted to the US congress that hacker tools for stealing passwords and other files were found on two internal Homeland Security computer systems.

Coast Guard and the Transportation Security Administration workstations were infected with malicious software which spent a lot of time talking to outsiders. DHS staff had also lost a few laptops and its website has been turned over several times.

The video site, owned by Google, has launched nine versions across Brazil, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the UK.

Each site is translated into local languages and has country-specific video rankings and comments.

"Our mission is to entertain, inform and empower the world through video."

Odin, a five-year-old White Bengal Tiger dives for a piece of meat thrown to him by a trainer during a big cat show 14 June 2007 at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom in Vallejo, California, some 33 miles northeast of downtown San Francisco.

Where wild tigers once numbered close to 100,000, their numbers have dwindled to less than 5,000. Some scientists, said Chris Drelick, a new trainer at the park, believe that wild tigers could be extinct in a decade due to habitat loss and rampant poaching.

Trainers regularly leash the tigers and stroll them around the grounds. The claw marks on some trees indicate the cats' preferred scratching posts.

There is a tiger splash lineage in Vallejo. Odin learned his diving from a now 'retired' tiger named Kuma, and has since passed the trick on to a much younger cub named Fedor.