Linking to copyright music posted elsewhere online without permission can be illegal, an Australian appeals court ruled Monday.

The issue before a three-judge panel at the Federal Court of Australia was whether Stephen Cooper, a retired policeman who ran the now-defunct site MP3s4free.net, was legally allowed to post links to mostly copyright MP3 files hosted on other servers. Cooper does not appear to have hosted any copyright music on MP3s4free.net.

Cooper, a resident of the state of Queensland, had argued that he had no power to prevent illegal copying because users could "automatically" add links to the site without his control. He likened his site to Google's search engine as a mechanism for pointing users to other sites--an analogy that one judge deemed "unhelpful," in part because Google was not designed exclusively to facilitate music downloads.

Yahoo said late Friday that it has fixed a bug in its newest version of Yahoo Messenger that changed a user's mail preferences without his or her consent.

By default, the software also inserts the Yahoo Toolbar into the user's Web browser and changes the user's personalized home page and search settings to Yahoo.com. In the original download alert, people could choose to customize the installation under "options" and then uncheck these default settings. What users couldn't change, however, was that the software was adding a Yahoo Mail icon to the system tray and changed their default mail settings to Yahoo Mail.

Yahoo's Karlsten had said the engineering team was not aware of the Yahoo Mail issue and was actively working on a fix.

In the last year alone, some eight million units of toys were recalled in the U.S., according to W.A.T.C.H., a toy-safety advocacy group. But Kool Toys and Polly Pockets are kids' stuff compared to the hazardous baubles of yesteryear. In the spirit of the holidays, Radar presents the 10 most dangerous toys of all time, those treasured playthings that drew blood, chewed digits, took out eyes, and, in one case, actually irradiated. To keep things interesting, we excluded BB guns, slingshots, throwing stars, and anything else actually intended to inflict harm. Below, our toy box from hell.

Tech companies don't care much about Vista today. They know that the deadline is the end of January 2007 and they can relax until then.

Real troublemakers are peripherals such as printer, scanner and copy machines. There are no Vista drivers for our all-in-one device so I can forget about using it.

Naturally, we thought we'd try it out anyhow and tried to access the printer across the network from our Vista machine. Well, Windows Explorer crashes every single time we click on the shared printer. It really isn't a good sign.

It gets even worse. There are a few machines running on the network here in the Vienna Labs. We use a Buffalo WHR-G54S 108Mbit Wlan router and 100Mbit LAN router but there is no way to convince Vista to see the XP machines.

So take this from an office-lad perspective, in secretary mode, where you are supposed to write, print and access files. Vista doesn’t like XP and it doesn’t want to interconnect.

We are talking about build 6000, the final code - that is the scary part. Crashing Explorer every time you access your printer is just what you and your friendly Sysadmin need during your super-busy day.

The software maker said Thursday that the update is aimed at thwarting a technique that was letting some people use pirated versions of the operating system without going through the software's built-in product activation. Microsoft has dubbed the approach "frankenbuild" because it works by combining test versions of Vista with the final code to create a hybrid version.

Although Vista was only released to businesses last month--and won't hit retail shelves until late January--it has been making the rounds on the Internet, and there have been several reported hacks to bypass its built-in security mechanisms.

"Piracy is evolving and has made the expected jump from Windows XP to Windows Vista," David Lazar, director of Genuine Windows, told CNET News.com. "We are already starting to see some workarounds to the Vista licensing requirements."

"Vista is the hardest system to pirate that we have yet released," Lazar said.

Swedish website The Pirate Bay (TPB) has decided to block the Swedish ISP Perspektiv Broadband's users from accessing the TPB's website. The move comes in response to ISP Perspektiv's decision to block its users from accessing the Russian website, allofmp3.com.

One interesting thing to note is that the allofmp3 is legal under Swedish law. There is no legal reason for Perspektiv to block traffic to allofmp3, rather the broadband provider elected to do so, according the The Pirate Bay, after meeting with Swedish and Danish anti-piracy organizations.

The Pirate Bay claims that Perspektiv Bredband "clearly states in their press release that it is a moral and not legal standpoint."

Now not only can Perspektiv Broadband users not access allofmp3, but now they can't access TPB either. The end result could be: enough Perspektiv users complain and company gets rid of its blocking software.

While I agree that Perspektiv's site ban is ultimately a far more chilling threat to concepts like net neutrality, I also hope that we aren't headed toward a future where individual sites begin blocking users as an indirect way of sending a message to abusive companies.

We had already mentioned the fact that German politicians seemed to be overreacting to a recent school shooting. There was talk about outlawing violent video games and other activities like paintball. Wired's Chris Kohler has some more details on the legislation that has actually been proposed and apparently it isn't just about banning the games, but would potentially send all sorts of people to jail for just about any association with a violent video game -- including playing one. The report claims: "developers, retailers and players of videos featuring 'cruel violence' could face up to a year in jail." Players? Can you just imagine that opening conversation between cellmates when someone explains that he's been thrown in jail for playing Grand Theft Auto rather than committing grand theft auto?

Researchers are reporting significant progress in perfecting a different way to store data in semiconductors, which could replace one widely used type of memory chip and possibly become a credible competitor to disk drives. The researchers, in a paper being delivered at a technical conference in San Francisco, say they used a novel combination of materials to create prototype phase-change components that are more than 500 times as fast as flash chips, while requiring less than half of the electrical power to record data.

Throughout the beta, Deep Sleep in Windows Vista went great. It's the default option (so long as it's configured in the BIOS) when you click the shutdown button. It would put your computer in a low-power mode that recovered in a matter of 2 or 3 seconds, and didn't crash! But in the final version of Windows Vista, something is very, very majorly wrong.

When recovering from a hibernate: "Cannot find uxtheme.dll" appears whenever you attempt to run (almost) any program. No matter what you do, you can't even run Task Manager.

Failure to establish a network connection. Everything looks OK, but you can't connect to the internet.

Poor performance: though Task Manager will show normal CPU load, some of the drivers (they don't appear in TaskMan) will attempt to use 100% of the CPU, resulting in a very laggy PC.

For no reason, DWM just won't re-appear. This happens on ATi and nVidia, with or without the latest official drivers from the companies themselves.

BSOD on recovery. This is usually caused by the video drivers, and may or may not indicate something wrong with the kernel itself.

No sound. Vista goes mute. Nothing you can do about it, no way to revive it, you just have to restart and let the re-done sound-stack load-up the way it should.

All of the above errors and more occur randomly and make using hibernation down-right impossible (unless you're willing/eager to run System Recovery from the DVD!) and Deep Sleep a waste of time (seeing as you have to restart to "quick recover").

In a case that could shape firearms laws nationwide, attorneys for the District of Columbia argued Thursday that the Second Amendment right to bear arms applies only to militias, not individuals.

At issue in the case before a federal appeals court is whether the Second Amendment right to "keep and bear arms" applies to all people or only to "a well regulated militia." The Bush administration has endorsed individual gun-ownership rights but the Supreme Court has never settled the issue.

"That's quite a task for any court to decide that a right is no longer necessary," Alan Gura, an attorney for the plaintiffs, replied. "If we decide that it's no longer necessary, can we erase any part of the Constitution?"