The U.S. copyright lobby brought out some heavy artillery last week as it continued to pressure Canada to introduce a Canadian DMCA. U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Wilkins gave a public talk in which he described Canadian copyright law as the weakest in the G7, while Senators Dianne Feinstein and John Cornyn wrote to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to urge him to bring in movie piracy legislation.

The Library of Congress' copyright board, which sets the royalty rates for statutory licenses, proposes doubling the amount webcasters pay for their statutory license in the next the few years.

Partial details, first reported on Kurt Hanson's RAIN newsletter, see the current rate of .0762 cents of per song per listener rising retroactively to 0.08 cents for 2006, 0.11 cents in 2007, and 0.14 cents, 0.18 cents and 0.19 cents by 2010.

The details leaked so far give little idea of the final picture - many commercial broadcasters opt for the aggregate tuning hour schedule - except that royalties are set to rise steeply. Hanson described this as "undeniably a huge victory for the legal departments of record labels", represented by the Recording Industry Ass. of America, the RIAA.

The illicit availability of appetite suppressant pills online is fuelling a slimming obsession and putting lives at risk, experts warn.

Last year, a study found more than half of 1,230 UK women surveyed by Closerdiets.com admitted using slimming pills.

Dr Emafo said: "It is important for consumers to realise that what they think is a cut-price medication bought on an unregulated market may however have potentially lethal effects whenever the consumed drugs are not the genuine product or are taken without medical advice."

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency said the global availability of counterfeit medicine had increased in recent years, through unregulated web sites operating on the internet.

Tor, the system for anonymizing Internet traffic by routing it through a succession of "onion" routers, has been compromised. In the lab. Using a previously-known exploit. One that has yet to be seen in the wild. And one that was researched in consultation with Tor developers.

The paper that started the whole uproar explained that anonymity could be compromised on a Tor network if a malicious party deliberately configured its own Tor routers and advertised them as high-bandwidth devices. The Tor protocol tends to route traffic to devices which claim they have plenty of bandwidth available, but it does no checking to see if this claim is true. Setting up several of these servers allows the malicious party to be chosen as part of the routing path quite often. If two of the malicious servers are included as the start and end points in any particular path, a "correlation attack" becomes possible that can reveal both the sender and receiver of the communication.

The attack in question has never been seen in action outside the laboratory, and the researchers suggest several ways of reworking Tor to address the problem. Those suggestions include checking up on the claims made by routers (by comparing them to observed performance, for instance) and by implementing "location diversity" among the routers used by the system.

I had read somewhere that a Vista installation would take 20 minutes. Not if you upgrade from XP.

After three-and-a-half hours of churning, at long last the Vista logo filled my screen.

Where was the internet? I could see my router, but nothing beyond - even after a full day of tinkering with various network wizards.

Why did my Philips webcam refuse to work? The Upgrade Advisor had explicitly said it would.

I find myself caught in the Vista trap. Quite apart from the pain of having to reinstall XP, I do like Vista.

I've had two Vista crashes so far - not a blue but a black screen - and that really shouldn't happen. I can't even remember my last XP crash.

And everywhere I look, there are blogs and forums full of people who have problems with software drivers and suffer the poor customer support of the hundreds of hardware and software vendors that make up the Windows ecosystem.

As part of its new initiative to convince universities to turn over the names of students suspected of copyright infringement (more on that soon), the RIAA has launched its P2Plawsuits.com website, which, in a deliciously ironic twist, had previously hosted all sorts of ads for dodgy P2P clients.

On the site, students whose universities have agreed to turn over student names to the RIAA and users whose ISPs have agreed to turn over subscriber names to the RIAA can apply for a settlement by entering their case number, and even pay their settlement online, which the RIAA promises will be represent "a substantial discount" from what they would have had to settle for before this campaign launched.

The new process is a response to the RIAA's frustration with our legal system, which requires the organization to use the IP address of a suspected infringer to subpoena ISPs or universities for the name of the suspected infringer, after which settlement talks usually begin.

BitTorrent joined the masses of legal video download services yesterday with offerings from five movie studios and a handful of TV networks.

When a user signs up for the service, he or she enters a credit card and billing information so that purchases can be made quickly and seamlessly. However, when I went to purchase a movie (my first selection was Lady in the Water), BitTorrent refused to believe that I lived in the US, despite the fact that my IP geolocates to the Chicago area.

Trying to ferret out why BitTorrent would not allow me to download movies in Chicago, I tried to use my Mac. Somehow, despite the fact that my IP was still the same (behind the same firewall), BitTorrent all of the sudden decided that I was in the right country. Although the files cannot be played on a Mac, BitTorrent was happy to accept my money anyway and reminded me that I would only be able to play my movie in Windows.

Due to DRM restrictions, BitTorrent specifies that the files require Windows Media Player 10 or higher in order to play the files. I tried to open my protected .wmv file in WMP11, and was met with a curiously vague error message saying that there was a "problem playing the file".

Attempts to open the file on another PC as well as upgrade WMP however I could were fruitless. This file was not opening. Determined to get something to open, I purchased another video from BitTorrent—this time, a TV episode.

Once I authorized, I thought I was on my way to video watching nirvana, but that was not the case. As it turns out, the file's usage rights were "not yet valid," according to WMP. Unfortunately, the file's properties were no more descriptive as to when the usage rights would become available.

Our initial experiences have been disappointing and frustrating, and guess what the culprit is once again? DRM. Why the DRM failed to work on 50% of our purchases is not clear, but whatever the cause, it's simply unacceptable.

Microsoft's 'super secure' operating system Vista will be plagued by hackers just as much as its predecessor XP, a security boffin has warned.

Marc Maiffret, founder and chief hacking officer of eEye Digital Security said hackers were starting to look at how to turn over Vista and have already found five or six different Vista-specific vulnerabilities.

No other software company does more to secure its code than Microsoft, but it is weird that people think that there is going to be a point where the operating system is impenetrable as this is never going to happen, he said.

Earlier this month it was widely reported that EMI was indeed ready to cast DRM into the dark abyss and earn the company the honorable status of being the first major music label to realize that DRM alienates honest customers. As it turns out, the company is indeed open to the possibility of ditching DRM, but they expect to be paid well for it, and the online music retailers aren't ready to meet their demands.

EMI is the only major record label to seriously consider abandoning the disaster that is DRM, but earlier reports that focused on the company's reformist attitude apparently missed the mark: EMI is willing to lose the DRM, but they demand a considerable advance payment to make it happen. According to Bloomberg, EMI has backed out of talks for now because no one will pay what they're asking. No dollar amounts are known at this time.

The intense effort by the fair-use community to circumvent AACS (the content protection protocol of HD DVD and Blu-Ray) has produced yet another stunning result: The AACS Device Key of the WinDVD 8 has been found, allowing any movie playable by it to be decrypted. This new discovery by ATARI Vampire of the Doom9 forum is based on the previous research of two other forum members, muslix64 (who found a way to locate the Title Keys of single movies) and arnezami (who extracted the Processing Key of an unspecified software player). AACS certainly seems to be falling apart bit for bit every day now.