In a move that shows Hollywood is examining the benefits of a technology it long reviled, Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. is expected to announce today that it will sell movies and television shows online in Germany using peer-to-peer technology.

Users, who will have to register for the service, will be able to keep the movie indefinitely. But instead of getting a movie from a central server, pieces of it could come from other people on the network who also bought that movie.

The Arvato architecture is similar to that used by peer-to-peer systems like BitTorrent, a technology that enables millions of people to share copyrighted movies and other material online without paying for them.

The top climate scientist at NASA, James E. Hansen, says that the Bush Administration tried to silence him after he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming. In the talk, he said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the earth 'a different planet.' The administration's policy is to use voluntary measures to slow, but not reverse, the growth of emissions.

Bill Gates, the billionaire founder of Microsoft, took the rare step of standing up for arch-rival Google today as he argued that state censorship was no reason for technology companies not to do business in China.

The richest man in the world told delegates at the World Economic Forum in Davos that he thought the internet "is contributing to Chinese political engagement" as "access to the outside world is preventing more censorship".

This week, Google created controversy when it entered the Chinese market on Beijing's terms. Writing on Times Online today, Irene Khan, the secretary-general of Amnesty International, said that Google had "reinforced the trend in the IT industry of kowtowing to Chinese demands of censorship".

She said: "Last year, Yahoo provided the Chinese with details leading to the arrest and sentencing of a journalist; Microsoft has barred a blog critical of the government and launched a portal blocking the use of words such as 'freedom' and 'democracy'. Now Google has weeded out websites that China does not like."

A first-instance district court of Darmstadt, Germany, confirmed yesterday that Internet service providers may not store any customer data other than that required for invoicing purposes.

To abide by the ruling, ISPs are obliged to delete whatever information they garner from their customers, including ISP addresses, which would allow the ISP to track whatever web sites a customer visits.

T-Online customer Holger Voss argued that his service provider had overstepped the mark by storing data above and beyond that which it needed for invoicing purposes. The court agreed with him.

In Germany, ISPs are also obliged to hand over whatever data they may have on customers to the customer, on request.

When a worm is chopped in two, the missing part often re-grows. Researchers at several biotech companies are challenging the assumption that humans can't perform a similar feat by developing drugs that encourage self-regeneration.

Hydra Biosciences is working a regeneration drug that stimulates heart muscle-cell regrowth, and could lead to better recoveries for heart attack sufferers. The protein-based drug induces mature cells to become a little bit like stem cells.

Hydra hopes its cardiac-muscle drugs will prove to be just the tip of the regenerative medicine iceberg -- the company is already considering investigating ways to re-grow retinas in macular degeneration sufferers and pancreatic cells in diabetics.

Other companies are starting to explore regenerative techniques as well. Genzyme, for instance, has developed a little-known drug called Carticel, which is FDA-approved to regenerate damaged cartilage and has proven useful in treating slow-healing knee injuries. Meanwhile, Epicell, in the United Kingdom, is developing ways to generate sheets of extra skin from the body's own epithelial cells, techniques that are becoming instrumental in many types of reconstructive and plastic surgery.

According to the new E3 2006 exhibitor's handbook, "nudity, partial nudity and bathing suit bottoms" are this year banned from the annual gaming fest in Los Angeles.

And any babes wandering about in anything less than regulation kit will earn their sponsor a $5000 on the spot fine, the document sent to exhibitors - a copy of which we have seen - reveals.

Show director Mary Dolaher told Reuters the "update and clarification of the enforcement policies" is designed to "ensure that exhibitors are familiar with the policy and how it will be enforced."

Here's the pertinent passage from the re-written rule-book: "Materials, including live models, conduct that is sexually explicit or sexually provocative, including, but not limited to, nudity, partial-nudity and bathing suit bottoms, are prohibited on the Show floor, all common areas and at any access points to the Show. ESA, in its sole discretion, will determine whether material is acceptable."

The Motion Picure Ass. of America stands accused of breaking its own piracy guidelines after it admitted making unauthorised copies of a film submitted to it for classification.

The accuser is film director Kirby Dick who sent a copy of his documentary "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" to the MPAA back in November.

The film puts the work of the MPAA in the spotlight, accusing it of being too hard on sex, too soft on violence and publicly unaccountable. For its part, the MPAA reckons the film-maker's methods, allegedly involving rooting through MPAA's members dustbins and generally following them about, were a bit underhand.

According to the MPAA's own website, "Manufacturing, selling, distributing or making copies of motion pictures without the consent of the copyright owner is illegal."

Let's look at the shattering success of every DRM solution to date. Every single one has failed. The score card is hundreds if not thousands against, zero for. Name me one song, movie or software title that is DRM infected that has not found it's way to the net within a week of release, usually long before release. There are none. To protect content, DRM is an abject and total failure, and will continue to be.

It also hurts the user - there is no DRM infection that in any way benefits the consumer. It costs more to develop, costs to license, makes hardware more expensive and complex, and screws the user under legitimate uses. It has a negative value to the consumer.

Here is the problem, every DRM infection is unique, patented, copyrighted, copywronged, and DMCAd ad nauseum, They protect their code in every way possible, and make it so you have to get their approval to use it. This is all done under the guise of protecting content, but that is a lie.

have ATRAC, FairPlay (har har), Real, WMA, and a host of other DRM infections, and none can play any of the others. If you have a player that can do one, chances are that it can't do any of the others, almost like the license terms preclude it, but it would take someone much more cynical than I to say that.

The big companies are at war, and we are the casualties. So, they have to send their flying monkeys to sue single moms, 12 year olds and octogenarians to make it appear that they are doing what they say. Bull, they are lying. The sad part is that the public, and worse yet, the governments are listening to them.

Draft legislation making the rounds in the U.S. Senate gives us a preview of the MPAA and RIAA's next target: your television and radio.

You say you want the power to time-shift and space-shift TV and radio? You say you want tomorrow's innovators to invent new TV and radio gizmos you haven't thought of yet, the same way the pioneers behind the VCR, TiVo, and the iPod did?

Well, that's not what the entertainment industry has in mind. According to them, here's all tomorrow's innovators should be allowed to offer you:

"customary historic use of broadcast content by consumers to the extent such use is consistent with applicable law."

Had that been the law in 1970, there would never have been a VCR. Had it been the law in 1990, no TiVo. In 2000, no iPod.

Now the RIAA and MPAA want to betray that legacy by passing laws that will regulate new technologies in advance and freeze fair use forever. If it wasn't a "customary historic use," federal regulators will be empowered to ban the feature, prohibiting innovators from offering it. If the feature is banned, courts will never have an opportunity to pass on whether the activity is a fair use.

Voila, fair use is frozen in time. We'll continue to have devices that ape the VCRs and cassette decks of the past, but new gizmos will have to be submitted to the FCC for approval, where MPAA and RIAA lobbyists can kill it in the crib.

From the Gmail Help Center, we learn that Gmail "doesn't recognize dots" within usernames. So to Google's mail server, eric.bangeman[at]gmail.com and ericbangeman[at]gmail.com appear the same.

This Gmail "feature" routed mail we sent to different variations of our test account to the same inbox. At least Gmail respects the period when it comes to logging into Gmail accounts. That means eric.bangeman can't log into ericbangeman's account, even though he'll be getting some of his e-mail. In theory, however, the ericbangeman account shouldn't exist if the other account is already created, because Google ignores the periods when looking at available usernames.

I guess it's still in beta for a reason, but I wonder how Google will respond to this. The simplest course of action appears to be tell the mail server about periods and all their wonderful uses, viz. separating parts of a username and distinguishing it from other usernames with identical occurrences and combinations of alphanumeric characters. Why would you want to get e-mail that isn't sent to you, anyway?