A powerful new telescope that will image the entire sky every three nights will be located in Chile, officials have announced. If it receives the required funding, the telescope is expected to begin operating in 2012.

The telescope will use a digital camera with 3 billion pixels to image the entire sky across three nights, producing an expected 30 terabytes of data per night. This will allow astronomers to detect objects that quickly change their position, such as near-Earth asteroids, or their brightness, such as supernovae.

This should help astronomers discover dim objects as they glide through the outer solar system. It should be able to detect Earth-sized planets more than 10 times farther from the Sun than Pluto is, testing controversial theories that predict a dozen or so Earth-sized worlds were scattered out to such distances during the solar system's youth.

The UK Government is preparing to give the police the authority to force organisations and individuals to disclose encryption keys, a move which has outraged some security and civil rights experts.

Some security experts are concerned that the plan could criminalise innocent people and drive businesses out of the UK. But the Home Office, which has just launched a consultation process, says the powers contained in Part 3 are needed to combat an increased use of encryption by criminals, paedophiles, and terrorists.

"The use of encryption is... proliferating," Liam Byrne, Home Office minister of state told Parliament last week. "Encryption products are more widely available and are integrated as security features in standard operating systems, so the Government has concluded that it is now right to implement the provisions of Part 3 of RIPA... which is not presently in force."

"It is, as ever, almost impossible to prove 'beyond a reasonable doubt' that some random-looking data is in fact ciphertext, and then prove that the accused actually has the key for it, and that he has refused a proper order to divulge it," pointed out encryption expert Peter Fairbrother on ukcrypto, a public email discussion list.

The government has given internet service providers until 2008 to block all access to websites containing illegal images of child abuse listed by the Internet Watch Foundation.

The industry-funded IWF had already seen a drastic drop in the number of illegal sites reported to be hosted in the UK, from 18 per cent in 1997 to 0.4 per cent in 2005.

New ISPs would be given nine months before they had to comply, he said, but, "If it appears that we are not going to meet our target through co-operation, we will review the options for stopping UK residents accessing websites on the IWF list. Linx Public Affairs, an Internet law news service, noted that the technology used to block news sites displaying child pornography could easily be turned to other uses.

The Home Office had admitted that it had considered blocking websites that "glorified terrorism" under the Terrorism Act (2006). It said it was not policy to require ISPs to block content, but added: "our legislation as drafted provides the flexibility to accomodate a change in Government policy should the need ever arise ."

The suit accuses XM Satellite of "massive wholesale infringement," and seeks $150,000 in damages for every song copied by XM customers using the devices, which went on sale earlier this month. XM, with more than 6.5 million subscribers, said it plays 160,000 different songs every month.

"...Because XM makes available vast catalogues of music in every genre, XM subscribers will have little need ever again to buy legitimate copies of plaintiffs' sound recordings," the lawsuit says referring to the hand held "Inno" device.

While the labels are asserting the device has transformed radio broadcasts into a download service, XM said the device does not allow consumers to transfer recorded content. XM also said that content recorded from radio broadcasts like XM's is not on demand, in contrast to the content people buy from online music stores like Apple Computer Inc.'s popular iTunes service.

XM said it will vigorously defend this lawsuit on behalf of consumers and also called the lawsuit a bargaining tactic.

"The music labels are trying to stifle innovation, limit consumer choice and roll back consumers' rights to record content for their personal use," XM added.

A new House bill seeks to further protect the music industry from piracy by limiting the ability to record digital radio broadcasts, singling out satellite radio industry competitors XM Radio and Sirius.

Bill proponents are concerned that new portable devices allow consumers to record, sort and store digital broadcasts, resulting in them turning these broadcasts into downloads and creating an unlicensed music library without adequately paying the artist.

Chair Gary Shapiro of the Home Recording Rights Coalition released a statement last week saying that the Perform Act would stifle innovation and "take away recording rights that consumers have used since the birth of the magnetic tape 50 years ago."

"Because the bill does not allow a 'transmission' of a musical recording, it also would appear to block consumers from moving one song from one room to another within their own homes via a digital network," he said.

US comms companies have been massively overcharging for ages and fear that video telly will butcher their cash cow, according to new research.

Verizon is warning that video downloads will slow the Internet down to a snail's pace unless users pay it a huge amount of cash to build a two tier web. But according to this site, the problems are down to the greed of ISPs in the past. The article quotes a research firm TeleGeography as claiming that an always-on, 1 megabit-per-second tap into the Internet backbone costs an ISP $10 to $20 a month.

ISPs sell around 30 times more bandwidth to their end users than they can connect simultaneously to the Internet. The oversubscription enables the ISP to run 40 DSL accounts, each at a maximum speed of 768 kilobits per second. So the cost of providing data to each DSL is about 25 cents to 50 cents a month per customer.

Even at the top end that means that the comms companies have been charging $20 for a service that costs them 50 cents. However video is set to kill that off. Tom Tauke, Verizon Communications top lobbyist said that oversubscription doesn't present a problem as long as people are using the Internet for Web surfing, e-mail and the occasional file download. But if everyone in a neighbourhood is trying to download the evening news at the same time, it's not going to work.

AT&T Corp., BellSouth Corp and Verizon Telecommunications are facing lawsuits seeking billions of dollars in damages for the decision to turn over calling records to the government, the New York Times reported Saturday.

Under telecommunications law, the phone companies are at risk for at least $1,000 per person whose records they disclosed without a court order, according to Orin Kerr, a former federal prosecutor and assistant professor at George Washington University

The telecommunications companies allegedly complied with an effort by the National Security Agency to build a vast database of calling records, without warrants, to increase its surveillance capabilities after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The legal experts said consumers could sue the phone service providers under communications privacy legislation that dates back to the 1930s. Relevant laws include the Communications Act, first passed in 1934, and a variety of provisions of the Electronic Communications and Privacy Act, including the Stored Communications Act, passed in 1986.

US authorities can get access to EU citizens' data on phone calls, sms' and emails, giving a recent EU data-retention law much wider-reaching consequences than first expected, reports Swedish daily Sydsvenskan.

The EU data retention bill, passed in February after much controversy and with implementation tabled for late 2007, obliges telephone operators and internet service providers to store information on who called who and who emailed who for at least six months, aimed at fighting terrorism and organised crime.

The US delegation to the meeting "indicated that it was considering approaching each [EU] member state to ensure that the data collected on the basis of the recently adopted Directive on data retention be accessible to them," according to the notes of the meeting.

In the US itself meanwhile, fury has broken out in the US congress after reports revealed that the Bush administration covertly collected domestic phone records of tens of millions of US citizens since the attacks in New York on 11 September 2001.

President George Bush did not deny the allegations in a television statement last night, but insisted that his administration had not broken any laws.

A majority of Americans initially support a controversial National Security Agency program to collect information on telephone calls made in the United States in an effort to identify and investigate potential terrorist threats, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The new survey found that 63 percent of Americans said they found the NSA program to be an acceptable way to investigate terrorism, including 44 percent who strongly endorsed the effort. Another 35 percent said the program was unacceptable, which included 24 percent who strongly objected to it.

The dogs, Lucky and Flo, faced their first test at the FedEx UK hub at Stansted Airport. "FedEx was glad to assist in Lucky and Flo's first live test in a working situation. They were amazingly successful at identifying packages containing DVDs, which were opened and checked by HM Customs' representatives. While all were legitimate shipments on the day, our message to anyone thinking about shipping counterfeit DVDs through the FedEx network is simple: you're going to get caught." Kinda makes me thing twice about shipping anything through FedEX. Seriously, this is like training drug dogs to find plastic bags.