A draft study commissioned by the Australian Attorney General's office finds that the music and software industries attributes sales losses to piracy without any evidence to back their claims, The Australian reports.

According to a draft report by the Australian Institute of Criminology, the music industry can't explain how it arrives at its statistics for staggering losses through piracy. The Business Software Association's claim of $361m per year in lost sales is "unverified and epistemologically unreliable", the report says.

According to The Australian, the study is due to be revised after the institute's senior members disagreed with its conclusions. "We have an extensive quality control system in the institute, so that drafts are read by most senior staff," principal criminologist Russell Smith told the paper.

It will be interesting to compare the final revision with the current draft to learn if the language is merely softened or if the aforementioned "quality control system" should involve reaching conclusions that the report's purchasers would prefer.

Internet service providers (ISPs) should be made legally liable for the damage caused by "denial of service" (DoS) attacks carried out via their networks, a leading internet lawyer says.

The idea of requiring ISPs to guard against DoS attacks will be strongly resisted by the companies concerned, says Malcolm Hutty of the London Internet Exchange, an association of London-based internet providers. "That idea is guaranteed to fail," he says. "It's not the ISP's fault that DoS attacks happen - it is the computer's fault for allowing the bots to be planted."

"Recognising DoS attacks is not easy," Hutty says. He notes that the public blog of the Internet Governance Forum, an event in Athens, Greece, last week was so popular that its servers went down. "That was not a DoS attack," Hutty says, "but it looked like one. How is the ISP to know that it is not genuine site popularity, rather than some nefarious purpose?"

Ollie Whitehouse of antivirus firm Symantec in the UK says criminals could begin encrypting their attack commands if ISPs start inspecting every packet they handle. "That will make spotting a DoS attack a whole lot harder for an ISP," he says. Hutty agrees: "If we try to tell the good traffic from the bad, it'll only incentivise the bad guys to make it more indistinguishable."

The Quadruple Bypass Burger has four slabs of beef weighing 2lbs, three cheese layers, four bacon rashers, lettuce and tomato.

The Heart Attack Grill in Tempe, Arizona, has wheelchairs to carry customers out of the restaurant.

Customers can also order the smaller Triple Bypass Burger and Flatliner fries cooked in pure lard.

The Internet enemies list numbers 13: Belarus, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.

These are the countries singled out by the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders as the worst culprits for systematic online censorship, and they were targeted in the group's 24-hour online protest ending at 5 a.m. Wednesday.

The 13 countries "censor and block online content that criticizes them," the organization said in defining its protest. "Multinationals such as Yahoo! cooperate with the Chinese government in filtering the Internet and tracking down cyber-dissidents."

"It's one thing to turn a blind eye to censorship - it's another thing to collaborate," Morillon said.

Programming errors and inexperience dealing with electronic voting machines frustrated poll workers in hundreds of precincts early Tuesday, delaying voters in Indiana, Ohio and Florida and leaving some with little choice but to use paper ballots instead.

In Cleveland, voters rolled their eyes as election workers fumbled with new touchscreen machines that they couldn't get to start properly until about 10 minutes after polls opened.

In Indiana's Marion County, about 175 of 914 precincts turned to paper ballots because poll workers didn't know how to run the machines, said Marion County Clerk Doris Ann Sadler. She said it could take most of the day to fix all of the machine-related issues.

Election officials in Delaware County, Indiana, extended voting hours because voters initially couldn't cast ballots in 75 precincts. County Clerk Karen Wenger said the cards that activate the push-button machines were programmed incorrectly but the problems were fixed by late morning.

Pennsylvania's Lebanon County also extended polling hours because a programming error forced some voters to cast paper ballots.

The Brazilian senate is considering a bill that will make it a crime to join a chat, blog, or download from the Internet without fully identifying oneself first. Privacy groups and Internet providers are very concerned, and are trying to lobby against the bill, but it seems they won't have much success.

If approved, it will be a crime, punishable with up to 4 years of jail time, to disseminate virus or trojans, unauthorizedly access data banks or networks and send e-mail, join chat, write a blog or download content anonymously.

The Iraqi prime minister has hailed the sentencing of Saddam Hussein to death by hanging for crimes against humanity as "a verdict on a whole dark era".

The former Iraqi leader was convicted over the killing of 148 people in the mainly Shia town of Dujail following an assassination attempt on him in 1982.

Mr Maliki welcomed the conviction in a televised address, saying it did "not represent a verdict for any one person", but "a verdict on a whole dark era... unmatched in Iraq's history".

"Maybe this will help alleviate the pain of the widows and the orphans... and those who have paid at the hands of torturers," he said.

President Bush called the verdict a "milestone" in the efforts of the Iraqi people "to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law".

Mr Bush's Republican Party is at risk of losing control of Congress, in part because of voter dissatisfaction over its handling of the Iraq conflict.

A Morocco-born computer virus that crashed the Department of Homeland Security's US-VISIT border screening system last year first passed though the backbone network of the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement bureau, according to newly released documents on the incident.

The workstations at the front end of US-VISIT run Windows 2000 Professional, so they were vulnerable to attack. Those computers are administered by the DHS' Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, which learned of the plug-and-play vulnerability Aug. 11, according to the new documents.

But as CBP started pushing the patch to its internal desktop machines Aug. 17, it made the fateful decision not to patch the 1,313 US-VISIT workstations.

On Aug. 18, Zotob finally hit the US-VISIT workstations, rapidly spreading from one to another. Phone logs offer a glimpse of the mayhem that ensued. Calls flooded the CBP help desk, with callers complaining that their workstations were rebooting every five minutes.

By then, Wired News had already filed a Freedom of Information Act request with CBP seeking documents about the incident. The request received a cool response. An agency representative phoned us and asked that we withdraw it, while refusing to answer any questions about the outage. When we declined, CBP misplaced the FOIA request. We refiled it, and it was officially denied, in total, a month later. After an administrative appeal went unanswered, we filed a federal lawsuit in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, represented by the Stanford Law School Cyberlaw Clinic.

Diebold Inc. insisted that cable network HBO cancel a documentary that questions the integrity of its voting machines, calling the program inaccurate and unfair.

The program, "Hacking Democracy," is scheduled to debut Thursday, , five days before the 2006 U.S. midterm elections. The film claims that Diebold voting machines aren't tamper-proof and can be manipulated to change voting results.

This is Diebold's second recent defense of its system. On Sept. 26, Byrd wrote to Jann Wenner, editor and publisher of Rolling Stone, saying a story written by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., "Will the Next Election Be Hacked?" was "error-riddled" and that readers "deserve a better researched and reported article."

The HBO documentary is based on the work of Bev Harris, the Renton woman who founded BlackBoxVoting.org, which monitors election accuracy. In 2004 the attorney general of California took up a whistle-blower claim filed by Harris against Diebold and settled with the company for $2.6 million in December.

A few years ago, when the recording industry filed a bunch of lawsuits against those accused of file sharing in Spain, we noted that the country's laws required "an intent to profit" for their to be copyright violations. Of course, the recording industry responded by saying that "the intent to save money" is the equivalent of "the intent to profit" but that's a pretty slippery slope. Apparently, at least one judge in Spain isn't buying it. Ben S writes in to let us know that a judge in Spain has dismissed the case against one man accused of file sharing (not sure what's happened with all the others). Even more interesting is the judge's choice of words in his decision, saying that to have ruled otherwise "would imply the criminalization of socially accepted and widely practiced behavior in which the aim is in no way to make money illicitly, but rather to obtain copies for private use."