Last November, Shawn Hogan received an unsettling call: A lawyer representing Universal Pictures and the Motion Picture Association of America informed the 30-year-old software developer that they were suing him for downloading Meet the Fockers over BitTorrent. Hogan was baffled. Not only does he deny the accusation, he says he already owned the film on DVD. The attorney said they would settle for $2,500. Hogan declined.

Now he's embroiled in a surprisingly rare situation – a drawn-out legal fight with the MPAA. The organization and its music cousin, the Recording Industry Association of America, have filed thousands of similar lawsuits between them, but largely because of the legal costs few have been contested and none have gone to trial.

Hogan, who coded his way to millions as the CEO of Digital Point Solutions, is determined to change this. Though he expects to incur more than $100,000 in legal fees, he thinks it's a small price to pay to challenge the MPAA’s tactics. "They’re completely abusing the system," Hogan says. "I would spend well into the millions on this."

The Home Office has announced new, higher fees for the UK's shiny new biometric ePassport.

This is the second time the price of a standard passport has gone up in the last year. Last November prices rose from £42 to £51. Now, Joe Public will have to fork out an additional £15 for the privilege of being able to travel abroad - that's a rise of almost 30 per cent - because as of 5 October this year, a standard 10 year passport will cost £66.

Home Office minister Joan Ryan said in a press release that the new format "provides enhanced security and reassurance for the holders and is in line with internationally agreed standards aimed at combating the growing threat of fraud and forgery".

In a pre-emptive defense of the rising costs, Ryan continued: "There is a cost to the anti-fraud measures that we are introducing, but we are clear that it is a price that must be paid to protect the integrity of our travel documents and improve the security of our borders."

Iraq's former leader Saddam Hussein has been taken to hospital as a result of a hunger strike, prosecutors at his trial in Baghdad say.

Saddam Hussein is thought to have begun refusing food on 7 July in protest at the murder of his lawyer.

They are protesting against procedures at the tribunal, and also demanding better security for defence lawyers.

Three members of the defence team have been murdered during the course of the trial - most recently senior lawyer Khamis al-Obeidi, shot dead in June.

At a security breakfast hosted by e-mail security firm Messagelabs in Sydney on Wednesday, the general manager of the Australian Computer Emergency Response Team (AusCERT), Graham Ingram, told the audience that popular desktop antivirus applications "don't work".

"At the point we see it as a CERT, which is very early on -- the most popular brands of antivirus on the market … have an 80 percent miss rate. That is not a detection rate that is a miss rate."

"I am not suggesting that there is a difference in the quality of the antivirus products themselves. What is happening is that the bad guys, the criminals, are testing their malicious code against the antivirus products to make sure they are undetectable. This is not a representation of the software," said Ingram.

President Bush effectively blocked a Justice Department investigation of the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance program, refusing to give security clearances to attorneys who were attempting to conduct the probe, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Tuesday.

Bush's decision represents an unusually direct and unprecedented White House intervention into an investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility, the internal affairs office at Justice, according to administration officials and legal experts. It forced OPR to abandon its investigation of the role played by Justice Department officials in authorizing and monitoring the controversial NSA eavesdropping effort.

"Since its creation some 31 years ago, OPR has conducted many highly sensitive investigations involving Executive Branch programs and has obtained access to information classified at the highest levels," chief lawyer H. Marshall Jarrett wrote in a memorandum released Tuesday. "In all those years, OPR has never been prevented from initiating or pursuing an investigation."

"The president decided that protecting the secrecy and security of the program requires that a strict limit be placed on the number of persons granted access to information about the program for non-operational reasons," Gonzales wrote in a related letter sent to the committee's chairman, Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa.

Has the shine come off online auctions? eBay chief Meg Whitman has acknowledged that the site has lots some of its "magic", as the balance tilts away from home sellers to professional retailers.

eBay said that is has 78 million active users, 20 per cent more than a year ago, and there are 35 per cent more listings. But as a sign of its changing nature, fixed price listings - usually tagged "Buy It Now" - are up 35 per cent year on year.

It's a quasi-social-networking site for teens designed to allow them to "express their individuality," yet it screens all content, tells parents their kids have joined and forbids users to e-mail one another. Oh, and it calls users "hubsters" -- a twist on hipsters that proves just how painfully uncool it is to try to be cool.

The opening page shows video of four teens -- a bubbly fashionista, a Texas football player, a quirky skateboarder and an aspiring R&B singer from New York -- who are clearly actors reading a script, although the videos are positioned to appear authentic. Within, there are pages such as "Beth's Backyard Club," where you find a picture of her in a strapless prom dress above the approved quote: "I'll school my way by looking hot in my Wal-Mart clothes to school to catch a cute boy's eye. ..."

Some of Microsoft's efforts to make Windows Vista its most stable and secure operating system ever could cause instability and new security flaws, according to a Symantec report.

Researchers at Cupertino, Calif.-based Symantec examined the new networking technology in recent test releases of Vista, Microsoft's next major operating system release, according to the report. They found several security bugs and determined that Vista's networking technology will be less stable, at least in the short run, than Windows XP's, the report said.

"Microsoft has removed a large body of tried and tested code and replaced it with freshly written code, complete with new corner cases and defects," the researchers wrote in the report, scheduled for publication Tuesday.

Computer viruses could be about to take a giant leap and start spreading via smart barcodes, warn experts.

Security researchers have infected a Radio Frequency ID tag with a computer virus to show how the technology is vulnerable to malicious hackers.

"Everyone working on RFID technology has tacitly assumed that the mere act of scanning an RFID tag cannot modify back-end software and certainly not in a malicious way. Unfortunately, they are wrong," wrote the trio in their research paper.

The researchers showed how to get round the limited computational abilities of the smart tags to use them as an attack vector and corrupt databases holding information about what a company has in storage. To test out the theory the group created a virus for a smart tag that used only 127 characters, uploaded it and watched it in action.

If viruses do appear in smart tags, said the researchers, they are likely to cause problems for companies that read data off the tags. They speculated that consumer activist groups could use smart tags viruses to cause havoc at stores they are targeting.

A US judge has sent Kinderstart back to the drawing board, after dismissing the education website's anti-trust lawsuit against Google.

Kinderstart filed its suit in March after Google changed the way it ranked sites on its web search and advertising system. Allegedly, these changes led to 70 per cent drop in traffic to the site in 2005, when its ranking was changed to "zero".

It accused Google of "pervasive monopolistic practices" that denied its free speech rights, destroyed competition, and led to predatory pricing conditions.

Kinderstart attorneys are now seeking other companies who are aggrieved about Google's rankings to join Kinderstart in a class action suit.