The target of this operation, which involved more than two dozen police officers and federal agents, was not an international terrorist ring but the couple's home business, United Nuclear Scientific Supplies, a mail-order outfit that serves amateur scientists, students, teachers, and law enforcement professionals.

The search was initiated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, a federal agency best known for instigating recalls of faulty cribs and fire-prone space heaters. The CPSC's concern with United Nuclear was not the uranium, the magnets, or the backyard accelerator. It was the chemicals – specifically sulfur, potassium perchlorate, and powdered aluminum, all of which can be used to make illegal fireworks.

The lure of do-it-yourself chemistry has always been the most potent recruiting tool science has to offer. Many kids attracted by the promise of filling the garage with clouds of ammonium sulfide – the proverbial stink bomb – went on to brilliant careers in mathematics, biology, programming, and medicine.

Scientists have paved the way for the first permanently manned base on the Moon by developing a way to 'squeeze' oxygen out of lunar soil.

The space agency plans to take its extraction system to the Moon in 2011 as part of its Robotic Lunar Exploration Program, which will test a range of equipment designed to support human life. If the technique is successful, it could lead to a permanent station like Moon-base Alpha from the popular Seventies series Space: 1999.

Lunar soil brought back to Earth is in short supply and highly prized, so Nasa researchers have been using matter with the same composition for its tests.

The soil contains about 45 per cent oxygen by weight, but it is mostly 'trapped' in the form of silcon dioxide.

Amnesty International has a new online campaign against governments which censor websites, monitor online communications, and persecute citizens who express dissent in blogs, emails, or chat-rooms. The website, Irrepressible.info contains a web-based petition (to be presented at a UN conference in November 2006) and also a downloadable web gadget which displays random excerpts of censored material on your own website.

In a private meeting with industry representatives, Gonzales, Mueller and other senior members of the Justice Department said Internet service providers should retain subscriber information and network data for two years, according to two sources familiar with the discussion who spoke on condition of anonymity.

During Friday's meeting, Justice Department officials passed around pixellated (that is, slightly obscured) photographs of child pornography to emphasize the lurid nature of the crimes police are trying to prevent, according to one source.

Privacy advocates have been alarmed by the idea of legally mandated data retention, saying that, while child exploitation may be the justification today, those records would be available in all kinds of criminal and civil suits--including terrorism, tax evasion, drug, and even divorce cases.

A more extensive mandate would require companies to keep track of e-mail messages sent, Web pages visited and perhaps even instant-messaging correspondents.

The Europe-wide requirement applies to a wide variety of "traffic" and "location" data, including the identities of the customers' correspondents; the date, time and duration of phone calls, voice over Internet Protocol calls or e-mail messages; and the location of the device used for the communications. But the "content" of the communications is not supposed to be retained.

If it is up to Microsoft, the omnipresent JPEG image format will be replaced by Windows Media Photo.

Windows Media Photo will be supported in Windows Vista and also be made available for Windows XP, Bill Crow, program manager for Windows Media Photo, said in a presentation.

Typically digital cameras today use 6:1 compression, Crow said. Windows Media Photo should offer better pictures at double that level, he said. "We can do it in half the size of a JPEG file."

Microsoft will need to get players such as Adobe Systems and Apple Computer on board to win over the graphics professionals, he noted. A major unknown is licensing, which Microsoft has not yet addressed. "Licensing can kill this," Wells said.

The Motion Picture Association of America hired a hacker to steal information from a company that the MPAA has accused of helping copyright violators, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday.

Torrentspy's complaint includes claims that the man whom the MPAA allegedly paid $15,000 to steal e-mail correspondence and trade secrets has admitted his role in the plot and is cooperating with the company.

"These claims (by Torrentspy) are false," Kori Bernards, the MPAA's vice president of corporate communications, said in an e-mail to CNET News.com. "Torrentspy is trying to obscure the facts to hide the fact that they are facilitating thievery. We are confident that our lawsuit against them will be successful because the law is on our side."

Torrentspy alleges in the suit that the man, whom the company refers to as the "informant," has provided documents that prove the nature of his relationship with the MPAA, including a written agreement signed by the hacker and an MPAA executive, said Torrentspy attorney Rothken.

"We have very significant proof of wrongdoing and the MPAA's involvement," Rothken said. "We think it's ironic for the MPAA to claim that they are protecting the rights of the movie studios and then go out and pirate other people's property."

Fraudsters who deal in stolen credit card data have devised a means to extract money from sponsors of junk mail campaigns.

Carders have signed up as affiliates to spam campaigns, but instead of sending out junk mail themselves they are using stolen credit card data to make purchases from the sponsors of spam campaigns, such as online pharmacies.

The carders earn a cut of these sales of anything between 40 to 50 per cent, the Washington Post's security blog reports, more than enough to make the scam viable.

But the sponsors of spam campaigns end up losing out because of charge backs generated when fraudulent purchases are identified. Higher incidents of charge-backs result in higher merchant fees while drawing the attention of banks and credit cards sponsors to dubious businesses. Far from benefiting from increased sales, spam sponsors end up losing out. In this way, card fraudsters are scamming the backers of spam.

Spam sponsors are complaining about been ripped off, a factor that allowed net security firm CipherTrust to identify the new ruse during the course of its work monitoring online spam and fraud forums.

The Business Software Alliance (BSA) has just released their annual report on software piracy around the globe. This year, they're claiming US$34 billion in worldwide losses—a claim worth investigating in a bit more detail.

One obvious issue is the fact that the US$34 billion in "losses" isn't actually "losses" at all; it's simply the estimated retail value of the pirated software. It's obvious, however, that not every pirated piece of software would be purchased at the full retail price, making any talk of "losses" suspect. IDC estimates, in fact, that only 1 out of every 10 pieces of pirated software should be counted as an actual loss. US$3 billion in worldwide piracy losses? That doesn't actually sound like a major crisis.

The other glaring problem is methodological. There is obviously no way to actually count the number of pirated pieces of software in existence. So how do come up with US$34 billion in losses? Simple—you estimate. IDC's formula is to take the amount of installed software around the world and then to subtract out the amount that was actually sold, which tells them how much software was pirated. Of course, no one actually knows how much software is installed around the world, so IDC uses another formula to figure it out. They take the worldwide number of hardware shipments and multiply it by the average amount of the installed software. How do they know the average amount of installed software? Through surveys and local analyst research.

The winners of the European Eco-Shell Marathon 2006 weren't the fastest but they were the most fuel efficient. Teams had to battle changing temperatures and wind conditions and use the least amount of fuel after completing seven laps of the Nogaro Circuit in southwest France.

The first 27 teams broke the 1,000-kilometer-per-liter (2,825-mile-per-gallon) barrier, according to officials.

Engineering students from the Lycee La Joliverie school in France won the big prize with an ethanol-powered vehicle that, according to race officials, averaged an astounding energy consumption equivalent of 2,885 kilometers per liter or 6,786 miles per gallon. And this didn't even meet the car's trial run of 2,914 kilometers per liter or 6,854 miles per gallon. This car also won the Climate Friendly award for the least greenhouse gas emissions.

As many experts had already announced, Windows Vista will require much from the PCs where it will be installed when it comes to resources. For minimum functionality, Windows Vista will need an 800 MHz processor, at least 512 MB of RAM, a 20GB HDD and at least 15GB free, as well as a SVGA- and DirectX 9- compliant video card.

However, the users who want to be thrilled by the Aero interface experience – presented as one of Windows Vista's biggest innovations – will have to own a PC with a processor of at least 1 GHz, 1GB or RAM memory, a video card with 128MB, a HDD of at least 40GB and an internal or external DVD-ROM.

After their promised OS set a new record for the most postponed Windows in the history of the company different release dates were also set for companies and for regular users, now Microsoft comes up with system requirements which aren't even met by more than half of the computers in a company's labs.

And, as experience taught us with the last Windows version, the offiical system requirements are really minimum, so those who'll want to run other software applications as well aside from Windows Vista will need to add even more RAM, processing power or a better video card.