Screeners at Newark Liberty International Airport failed 20 of 22 security tests conducted by undercover U.S. agents last week, missing an array of concealed bombs and guns at checkpoints throughout the hub's three terminals, federal security officials familiar with the results said.

One of the security officials familiar with last week's tests said screeners at Newark missed fake explosive devices that were hidden under bottles of water in carry-on luggage, taped beneath an agent's clothing and concealed under a leg bandage another tester wore.

Additionally, the official said screeners failed to use hand-held metal detector wands when required, missed an explosive device during a pat-down and failed to properly hand-check suspicious carry-on bags. Supervisors also were cited for failing to properly monitor checkpoint screeners, the official said.

"We just totally missed everything," the official said.

While many countries block off some Web sites, China has long drawn heightened scrutiny because of the breadth and sophistication of its Internet censorship.

Which is why it came as a surprise on Tuesday when a Chinese government official claimed at a United Nations summit here that no Net censorship existed at all.

The only problem: Few cases of Net censorship are as carefully and publicly documented as the Great Firewall of China. A study by researchers at Harvard Law School found 19,032 Web sites that were inaccessible inside China.

A report from a consortium of British, American and Canadian universities concluded: "China's Internet-filtering regime is the most sophisticated effort of its kind in the world. Compared to similar efforts in other states, China's filtering regime is pervasive, sophisticated and effective."

Well, here's a story that combines a few different things we've seen lately, from police (and star basketball players) raiding the home of the wrong person due to a faulty IP address to the fact that all these big data mining companies often have wrong info about you, including incorrect criminal records. In this case, a guy who got a job as a security guard as a retailer ended up spending a week in jail after the company did a background check on him and data mining firm Choicepoint (whose name became well known when they sold info to a group of identity theft scammers) incorrectly found that there were arrest warrants out for this guy for child molestation and rape. The problem was that the guy had been a victim of identity theft earlier, and while he had reported it, Choicepoint didn't take that into account. It's somewhat amusing (if disturbing) that a firm that had sold data to identity thieves later was unable to fix the false data in someone's file that was due to identity theft.

The next version of Windows is just around the corner, so the next time we discuss software licensing in my course, the EULA for Vista will be front and center. You can read the Microsoft Vista EULA yourself by going to the official Find License Terms for Software Licensed from Microsoft page and searching for Vista.

Worse, another requirement dictates that any benchmarks must "be performed using all performance tuning and best practice guidance set forth in the product documentation and/or on Microsoft's support Web sites," thus forcing testers to use settings that aren't found in the workaday world, potentially distorting results.

So you can't create a virtual image using Home Basic ($199) or Home Premium ($239). However, the EULA does allow you to use Vista Business ($299) or Vista Ultimate ($399). Hmmm... I wonder why? It couldn't possibly be because those editions cost more, could it? Wanna bet? The fact that there aren't any technical restrictions in place to prevent users from loading Home editions into VMWare, only legal and support barriers, sure lends credence to that supposition.

Section 6 also appears to block the opening and reading of documents "protected" with Microsoft's "Rights Management Services," which I covered a couple of years ago. Basically, this means that if you want to run a Windows version of Office inside Parallels or VMWare so you can create, read, and work on documents that have DRM'd, you're out of luck. Want to test Windows and DRM (those two great tastes that taste great together)? You gotta buy a new PC!

What happens when a film studio and a fanbase get into bed? Fans of Joss Whedon's Firefly, and the movie by Universal Studios - Serenity - are not amused. After being encouraged to viral market Serenity, the studio has started legal action against fans (demanding $9000 in retroactive licensing fees in one case and demanding fan promotion stop), and going after Cafepress. The fans response? Retroactively invoice Universal for their services.

The 23 year old Grant Stanley has been sentenced to five months in prison, followed by five months of home detention, and a $3000 fine for the work he put in the private BitTorrent tracker Elitetorrents.

This ruling is the first BitTorrent related conviction in the US. Stanley pleaded guilty earlier this year to "conspiracy to commit copyright infringement" and "criminal copyright infringement". He is one of the three defendants in the Elitetorrents operation better known as "Operation D-Elite".

Operation D-Elite (they love word tricks) was orchestrated by the FBI with a little help from the MPAA in May 2005, and resulted in the shutdown of one of the largest private BitTorrent trackers at that time.

In a response to the present case US Attorney John Brownlee said:

"This is the first criminal enforcement action against copyright infringement on a P2P network using BitTorrent technology. We hope this case sends the message that cyberspace will not provide a shield of anonymity for those who choose to break our copyright laws."

We've had a series of posts lately about ways in which people seem to be beating the RIAA when they're sued without much real evidence, such as pointing out that the IP address does not identify who actually was involved in file sharing. Ray Beckerman, who is the source for so many interesting posts on these types of cases, now has one about how the RIAA is running scared after they discovered that a lawyer who beat them before (and made them liable for the attorney's fees of the person they falsely accused of file sharing). The interesting part here is that they're trying to drop out of the case they already filed, but are asking the judge specifically to have the case dropped "without prejudice." Why? Because in the last case, the case was dropped "with prejudice," which was the reason they are on the hook for legal fees. So, now, when they see the same lawyer, they know they don't want to go through with the case, but they want to make sure they can drop it in a way without admitting they made a mistake and without paying the legal fees for the person they dragged into court incorrectly.

The music, movie and software cartels claim so-called 'piracy' is a Number One problem not only for themselves, but for the world as a whole.

The industries have fabricated a multi-headed monster by turning a simple commercial concept - copyright infringement which in truth, affects only them - into a huge, international conspiracy involving millions of their own innocent customers around the world, and genuine criminal counterfeiters.

However, the cartels are also frequently accused of fabricating statistics upon which they base their claims and according to the Havocscope global index of illicit markets, far from being at the top of the pile, movie and music piracy are way, way down the list, ranking 16th and 20th, respectively.

And even those positions are highly questionable given that in both instances, to reach them, Havocscope relies on statistics tainted more than somewhat by the industries concerned.

A study debuted in New Orleans has suggested that electromagnetic radiation from cell phones may have an effect on a man's sperm count.

They said data from 364 men being treated for infertility revealed that men who do not use cell phones averaged sperm counts of 86 million per milliliter with 40 percent normal forms and 68 percent motility, while men who used their phones for more than four hours per day averaged sperm counts of 66 million per milliliter with 21 percent normal forms and 48 percent motility.

IBM is suing Amazon.com, accusing the bookseller turned Web megastore of knowingly using IBM's techniques for selling things online. Initially at issue was an IBM request for hundreds of millions of dollars in license fees, but the federal court could expose Amazon to even stiffer penalties.

IBM attorneys say they have been trying to negotiate with Amazon for more than four years-since September 2002-but talks did not go anywhere and Amazon ultimately stopped responding. "We have given them an opportunity over four years," said Gail Zarick, intellectual property counsel within corporate litigation at IBM.

The case traces its routes to 1988, Zarick said, when IBM started to patent a wide range of e-commerce techniques back when it owned Prodigy, which was an online service that predated the Web and was a rival to the early AOL and CompuServe.

"This is somewhat akin to patenting the concept of putting up storm shutters before a hurricane," said Cathy Hotka, senior vice president of technology and business development for the Retail Industry Leaders Association. "One should not be able to patent obvious business processes, like selling things. If these issues are not resolved, business innovation is in danger if the most obvious things can be reserved for one company."