Some researchers in London say that tagging every passenger in airports with RFID could help fight terrorism. Well, they could give everybody some chewing gum, and that might help fight terrorism, too, and quite frankly, this plan sounds about as useful.

Without the device somehow being locked to or implanted in people, any potential ne'er-do-well could simply ditch it, or attach it to someone else. Never mind the problem many people would have with this type of surveillance for a moment, and focus instead on the sheer uselessness of the system: it won't stop anybody from actually doing anything dangerous or criminal, it just means that if a person's been flagged as suspicious, they can be identified, and the system can follow them, and then they do something, it might get caught on camera.

Around 655,000 people have died in Iraq as a result of the US-led coalition invasion, according to the largest scientific analysis yet. That is 2.5% of the country's entire population.

Various estimates have been made of Iraqi casualties, ranging from 48,000 to 126,000. But these have been based on reporting by the press, hospitals or the military, and tend to underestimate the dead, the researchers claim.

The death rate before the invasion was a fairly normal 5.5 per thousand people per year. Since March 2003, that figure has averaged 13.2, the researchers found. More worrying, the death rate has risen every year since the invasion: this year reaching 19.8 per thousand people per year, a near-fourfold increase over pre-invasion levels.

They estimate that there were at least 392,976 excess deaths – those that would not have occurred, has there been no war – in Iraq since 2003, and possibly as many as 942,636. The research confirmed the results of the same group’s 2004 study.

Whilst listening in on normal telephone calls over landlines or mobile phone networks has become a routine procedure, Voice over IP connections frequently present a problem for investigators, especially when the persons being monitored use Skype via foreign servers or call direct from PC to PC and encrypt their data. The Swiss Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications (UVEK) is therefore examining the use of spy software to allow it to listen in on conversations on PCs.

Installation of the software wiretap is to be carried out on the instructions of a judge only. The ISPs of the persons under investigation will then slip the program onto their computers. The program will save overheard conversations and send them to a server in small, inconspicuous packets. If the computer is turned off before all the data has been transmitted, the program will continue transmission when it is restarted.

The wiretap has some additional functions. For example, the built in microphone on a laptop can be turned on to monitor a room or webcams can be activated. As the latter is usually indicated by an LED, this is unlikely to be useful in practice. Once wiretap activities have been completed, the software can be programmed to uninstall itself at a given time.

Big nuclear bombs make big waves, with clear signatures that make them fairly easy to detect, analyze and confirm that they were caused by splitting atoms. But smaller blasts - as North Korea's appears to have been - are trickier to break down.

The natural sound of the Earth, with its constant seismic activity of tectonic plates grinding together, complicates the task of trying to determine whether a smaller blast was caused by conventional explosives or a nuclear device, said Xavier Clement of France's Atomic Energy Commission.

His agency estimated the North Korean blast at around 1 kiloton or less - equivalent to the explosive force of 1,000 tons of TNT. For a nuclear device, that would be so weak that the French defense minister suggested that "there could have been a failure" with the North Korean reported test.

The test ban treaty, which bans all nuclear explosions, will not enter into force until it has been ratified by 44 states who possess either nuclear power or research reactors. So far 34 have ratified it. Holdouts include the United States, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea.

Microsoft is telling its selected gaming industry chaps that gaming under Vista will be ten to fifteen per cent slower than XP. It is because you have to load the 3D desktop all the time. It is ironic, as the same company tells the developers that the same API can do certain things up to four times faster.

That is certainly not a good buying argument but don’t think you and I have much choice as it looks like a take it or leave it deal.

A woman who bought a bottle of shampoo at a store then attempted to resell it on eBay. She took a photo of the bottle she bought and used that in her eBay listing. The company proceeded to demand that she take down the listing completely. They appear to have two separate (but equally questionable) reasons for this. First, they claim that the photo is copyright infringement. That's a tough one to support since the woman took the photograph herself of the bottle that she bought and which she owns (yes, owns).

The second complaint from the company is that they have distributor agreements that say only certified resellers can sell their product. However, that's a contractual agreement between the company and its distributors. This woman has no contractual relationship with the shampoo company and thus cannot be violating any contract.

Allofmp3 sells music priced by file size at somewhere around a tenth of the cost per track of Western services like iTunes. America and record industry bodies say it does not pay any royalties and is illegal.

Allofmp3's owners maintain that as a Russian business it complies fully with local copyright law. It has achieved second position behind Apple in the UK digital music market, largely by word of mouth.

US trade representative Susan Schwab has been a prominent public critic of Allofmp3. Her office recently placed the company on a "notorious markets" list, and a speech last month blasted Russian authorities for allowing the site to operate freely.

An Allofmp3 spokesman local media: "Susan Schwab markets us so effectively - she could already be our press secretary."

The state ran a daylong test, and found plenty of problems still to overcome -- including the same problems with the e-poll books that caused all sorts of delays during the election. It gets better, too. While Diebold is still working on fixes for the system, they're pushing a workaround for the problem with the e-poll books: attaching mice to the machines and demanding that poll workers ignore the touchscreen and use the mouse instead. Of course, should anyone dare to touch the touchscreen, the devices may malfunction again. Not to worry, says Diebold: "poll workers would be instructed repeatedly not to touch the screens." Of course, during the test itself, those "repeated" instructions didn't stop at least one person from touching the screens and fouling the system up.

If Vista is not activated with a legitimate product registration key in time, the system will run in "reduced functionality mode" until it is activated, said Thomas Lindeman, a senior product manager at Microsoft.

Those who install Vista themselves, for example on existing PCs, will have a 30-day period to activate the operating system and validate with Microsoft that they have a legitimate license. "During those 30 days, you get warning messages, it counts down. During the last three days they get very frequent," Lindeman said.

"Piracy is one of the most significant problems facing the software industry," Hartje said. More than a third of all software installed last year was pirated or unlicensed, she said, citing figures from the Business Software Alliance, a software industry group.

New licensing systems will replace the current volume license keys, which have been widely abused, Hartje said. "Fifty percent of the piracy, we think, uses keys issued to volume licensing customers," she said.

Defective by Design is sponsoring a "Day Against DRM" today in an effort to spread the word about the trials, tribulations, and general badness of digital rights management schemes. Folks in hazmat suits (yes, hazmat suits) have dispersed across the globe to spread the gospel of unencrypted media, some of them even spotted by an Ars staffer in front of the Wrigley building in downtown Chicago.

Defective by Design is a project run by the Free Software Foundation, and it exists to protest the use of DRM in all forms. The project website quotes Peter Lee, a Disney executive, who once said, "If consumers even know there's a DRM, what it is, and how it works, we've already failed."

It's worth spreading the word about DRM, but it needs to be done in a thoughtful manner. Plenty of consumers would be fascinated to learn more about why they can't make backups of their DVDs or that they'll need DRM-compliant hardware to watch high-definition movies in Vista. If you've never had a heart-to-heart with friends or coworkers about the downsides of DRM, today's a good day to start.