A bill radically redefining and expanding the government's ability to eavesdrop and search the houses of U.S. citizens without court approval passed a key Senate committee Wednesday, and may be voted on by the full Senate as early as next week.

In contrast, Specter's bill concedes the government's right to wiretap Americans without warrants, and allows the U.S. Attorney General to authorize, on his own, dragnet surveillance of Americans so long as the stated purpose of the surveillance is to monitor suspected terrorists or spies.

"The administration has taken their illegal conduct in wiretapping Americans without court orders, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Constitution, and used it as springboard to not only get FISA changed to allow the Terrorist Surveillance Program, but to actually, going forward, not give protections to Americans' privacy rights," Graves said.

Jim Dempsey, the policy director for the more moderate Center for Democracy and Technology, described the bill's passage out of committee as "light years or miles beyond the Patriot Act."

The case centered around four audiotapes recorded more than 25 years ago as part of an FBI investigation in Louisiana. An author, who is the plaintiff in the case, sought release of the tapes under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, as it's more generally known.

The FBI withheld production of the requested tapes, arguing that it had not been able to determine whether the speakers on the tapes were still living, and thus were entitled to have their privacy protected. FOIA case law holds that a person no longer has the same privacy rights upon his or her death.

The FBI could not figure out whether the speakers were over 100 years old--and thus presumed dead under FBI practice--because neither had mentioned their birth dates during conversations that were recorded surreptitiously.

The agency also took the position that it could not conclude whether the speakers were alive or dead by referencing a Social Security database. The reason? The speakers did not state their Social Security numbers during the recorded conversations.

Furthermore, the FBI failed to search its own files for the speakers' birth dates or Social Security numbers, simply because that is not its standard practice.

The words of the appellate court ring oh so true:

"Why, in short, doesn't the FBI just Google the two names? Surely, in the Internet age, a 'reasonable alternative' for finding out whether a prominent person is dead is to use Google (or any other search engine), to find a report of that person's death."

According to Xinhuanet.com, Xinhua News Agency on Sunday promulgated a set of measures to regulate the release of news and information in China by foreign news agencies. From the article: 'Where a foreign news agency violates the Measures in one of the following manners, Xinhua News Agency shall give it a warning, demand rectification within a prescribed time limit, suspend its release of specified content, suspend or cancel its qualifications of a foreign news agency for releasing news and information in China, on the merits of each case.'

We have already mentioned how Vole has tried to be helpful and released a little program that scans your system and tells what you need to get an upgrade, and over the weekend we saw another one from ATI here.

The ATI Vista says to get it all running smoothly I will need to buy a card that supports a PCI Express bus type that would offer greater bandwidth at higher frequencies over AGP or PCI bus types.

The VoleWare version is clunky, it requires you to download .net, but it does tell you which types of software will not work under Vista at the moment too. In my case Nero 7 Premium Nero will have to be uninstalled as well as a little thing called Sun J2SE Runtime Environment 5.0 Update 6.

The question is, which one is right? It seems that ATi want me to dump my Nvidia card and Microsoft wants me to abandon Java. We wonder what they are really trying to say?

Sources at ATI confirmed that seventy per cent of people who took the test are not ready for Premium. The only thing I failed to meet was the minimum disk space - you need to have at least 15GB free and I don't.

This is what ATI said: "Sorry, your video card does not meet this recommended requirement. Upgrading to a more powerful video card will make all your applications look better. Click the 'We Recommend' button to see some great options." The company recommends a $400 card to make us all happy, something like X1900 XTX. Surprise, surprise.

The producer of a mashup album that combined the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band has been threatened with a multi-million-dollar lawsuit by EMI, the Beatles' music publisher. EMI has also demanded that he turn over the IP addresses of the hundreds of thousands of people who downloaded the mash-ups, presumably so that EMI can sue all of us, too.

This follows a pattern set by EMI of indiscriminate censorship of people who do to the Beatles what the Beatles did to the artists who inspired them. First EMI tried to crush DJ Danger Mouse's incredible "Grey Album" (the White Album plus Jay-Z's Black Album), then they took down djBC's Beastles (The Beatles plus the Beastie Boys) and now they're coming after The Beachles.

A Dutch gravedigger had a lucky escape after he accidentally buried himself.

The 62-year-old man, from Nieuwleusen, was digging a grave in Zwolle cemetery when it happened, reports Gva.be.

A trailer containing the earth he had removed tipped over and fell into the grave, knocking over the man and covering him completely.

Luckily, a workmate was able to move the trailer and uncover the gravedigger's face to let him breathe.

He called the fire brigade who managed to free the man after an hour. He was unhurt apart from a bump on the head.

If you really want to see Microsoft scramble to patch a hole in its software, don't look to vulnerabilities that impact countless Internet Explorer users or give intruders control of thousands of Windows machines. Just crack Redmond's DRM.

Since 2003, Microsoft's strategy to balance these costs and benefits has been to batch patches: instead of issuing them one at a time, it's been issuing them all together on the second Tuesday of each month.

Last week, a hacker developed an application called FairUse4WM that strips the copy protection from Windows Media DRM 10 and 11 files.

Now, this isn't a "vulnerability" in the normal sense of the word: digital rights management is not a feature that users want. Being able to remove copy protection is a good thing for some users, and completely irrelevant for everyone else. No user is ever going to say: "Oh no. I can now play the music I bought for my PC on my Mac. I must install a patch so I can't do that anymore."

So Microsoft wasted no time; it issued a patch three days after learning about the hack. There's no month-long wait for copyright holders who rely on Microsoft's DRM.

It should surprise no one that the system didn't stay patched for long. FairUse4WM 1.2 gets around Microsoft's patch, and also circumvents the copy protection in Windows Media DRM 9 and 11beta2 files.

Teachers everywhere can be heard shouting "look at me when I'm talking to you". But research presented today at the British Association's Festival of Science in Norwich, UK, suggests that they should be doing exactly the opposite.

When posed with a conundrum, it is normal for adults and older children to look away, staring in an unfocused way out of the window or at a patch of the carpet. This aimless gaze isn't necessarily thanks to an attitude of indifference or indolence, but instead might be helping the brain to concentrate.

We are so distracted by the barrage of emotional information transmitted in faces that it stops us from thinking clearly, Doherty-Sneddon says.

The ScummVM developers have received notice that their use of PayPal for donations is in violation of PayPal's AUP. According to a forum post, the AUP bans 'Game enhancers (which enable the play of import software and/or back up versions of software).