Welcome to Cold War City (population: 4). It covers 240 acres and has 60 miles of roads and its own railway station. It even includes a pub called the Rose and Crown.

The most underpopulated town in Britain is being put on the market. But there will be no estate agent's blurb extolling the marvellous views of the town for sale: true, it has a Wiltshire address, but it is 120ft underground.

The subterranean complex that was built in the 1950s to house the Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan's cabinet and 4,000 civil servants in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack is being thrown open to commercial use. Just four maintenance men are left.

Already two uses are being considered: a massive data store for City firms or the biggest wine cellar in Europe. More outlandish ideas put forward include a nightclub for rave parties, a 1950s theme park or a reception centre for asylum seekers. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has ruled out any suggestion of using it to store nuclear waste or providing open public access because of the dangers that still lurk below.

A system of underground power stations would have provided electricity to the 100,000 lamps that lit its streets and guided the way to a pub modelled on the Red Lion in Whitehall.

In the real world, users prefer the notion of the perpetual licence, which works in exactly the same way as when a consumer buys a book, a CD or a DVD. You pay a one-time fee, and you can replay the contents for your own private use as often as you like. Of course, music publishers are starting to devise fiendish tricks to thwart that basic principle. The first step was discovering that consumers can be persuaded to adopt a new playback medium every few years or so, necessitating the repurchase of their entire back catalog on the new format. As David Berlind has been explaining in several recent blog posts, the latest wheeze is the use of digital restrictions management (DRM) technology to erect artificial barriers between different format generations (or even contemporaneous implementations by different vendors). Heaven forbid that home networking should thwart the music and movie industries' strategy of forcing consumers to rebuy exactly the same content with the emergence of each new format generation.

But the software industry is greedy enough to want to go even further. Ignoring the subtleties of DRM - which snares users by glossing over the unseen ties between content and format - vendors from BEA to Microsoft are eager to take up the blunt cudgel of subscription licensing, which merely asserts that, if you don't pay up again at the end of the year, your software stops working. The best way to deploy the mechanism of subscription licensing, of course, is as a hosted service, because it gives the software vendor the ability to instantly turn off the software-on-tap if the renewal is not forthcoming. Perhaps this explains Microsoft's new-found attraction to 'hosted everything' (whether or not it can work).

Attackers can easily crack even strong Oracle database passwords and gain access to critical enterprise data because of weak password protection mechanisms, researchers have warned.

The duo's paper, "An Assessment of the Oracle Password Hashing Algorithm," calls for Oracle to bolster its password hashing mechanism.

As it now stands, malicious users can recover even strong, well-constructed passwords within minutes, the researchers have found.

It is only the most recent of a long run of security embarrassments for the database company that cooked up the marketing tag "unbreakable"-a brag that it has quietly stepped back from ever since its inception.

The British "Permanent Secretary of Government Communications" has been working on a new government communications plan in the wake of some scandals there, and he's come up with a new idea for the government to get its message to the people: spam -- or rather, "direct marketing". This would include sending anti-drug text messages to kids (another sterling example of adults communicating with kids, surely), and what the BBC calls "targeting messages directly to companies' own internal communications". It's not all that clear exactly what that means, but it sounds like they want to spam companies' internal email systems or somehow post news on their intranets. This sounds great, because if there's anything people like better than government spin, it's being spammed with it. While the British government may try to act tough on spam, this seems like another example of a government hating spam -- except when they use it.

More than 470 physicists, including seven Nobel laureates, have signed a petition to oppose a new U.S. Defense Department proposal that allows the United States to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states.

"While it has long been a U.S. policy to use nuclear weapons in order to respond to a nuclear attack," said Hirsch, "the new policy allows the U.S. to use nuclear weapons against states that do not have nuclear weapons and for a host of new reasons, including rapid termination of a conflict on U.S. terms or to ensure success of the U.S. forces."

"Humanity has gone more than half a century without using nuclear weapons, in large part because of the success of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty," said Griest. "The U.S. use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states will destroy the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and give strong incentive for other countries to develop and use nuclear weapons, thus making nuclear war more likely. As physicists we feel we need to bring this to the attention of policy makers and the public, in order to engender discussion, debate, and hopefully repudiation of the new policy."

From a distance, iMesh looks like another subscription service à la Yahoo Music. You pay your US$6.99 per month and are able to access all the legal music on the iMesh network. Like the other subscription services, the music is tied to the PC on which iMesh is installed. Unlike NapsterToGo and Yahoo Music, there's no option to copy the music to your digital music player; a future update will include that functionality. Naturally, if you want to keep the music, you still have to buy it.

iMesh will still search Gnutella and other P2P networks for files, but users will not be able to download them. That's due to a filtering function that will keep users from downloading "illegitimate" files found on other PCs on the network. Some free downloads will be allowed, such as those in the public domain or by artists who release the songs themselves. Videos less than 15 minutes long or 50MB in size can also be downloaded, which rules out most of the stuff file-sharers would be looking for (e.g., tv shows, movies).

Melbourne council is unlikely to collect a parking fine imposed on a 71-year-old man for exceeding his alloted time in the car park of the Croydon Market shopping centre since he had lain dead for "several days" in the vehicle when an enforcement officer moved in.

The Mayor of the eastern suburb of Maroondah, Paul Denham, explained that the "parking officer had not noticed the man when he attached the parking fine to the windscreen", offering: "The parking bays are 90-degree with cars parked nose in. A small garden bed is located immediately at the front of the parking bays. Our local laws officer checked and wrote out the ticket at the rear of the vehicle and placed the ticket from the passenger side on the windscreen. The local laws officer did not notice anything unusual regarding the vehicle, and is extremely distressed to have learned of the situation."

Three lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives called on Friday for the Internet's core infrastructure to remain under U.S. control, echoing similar language introduced in the Senate earlier this week.

"Turning the Internet over to countries with problematic human-rights records, muted free-speech laws, and questionable taxation practices will prevent the Internet from remaining the thriving medium it has become today," said California Republican Rep. John Doolittle in a statement.

U.S. lawmakers have backed the Bush administration's stance, arguing that a U.N. group would stifle innovation with excessive bureaucracy and enable repressive regimes to curtail free expression online.

"The United States is uniquely positioned in the world to protect the fundamental principles of free press and free speech, upon which the Internet has thrived," Goodlatte said in a statement.

The presiding judge, Rizgar Mohammad Amin, must have known beforehand that he was going to have a battle on his hands.

He and the other four judges on the bench had to maintain their control over Saddam Hussein. He, for his part, was determined to try to take over the proceedings.

He was free of the chains and handcuffs which were imposed on him in the past, but two Iraqi guards in bullet-proof jackets gripped him firmly by the arms.

Yet when the judge finally ordered him to sit down, he did so meekly, shambling away from the microphone to his seat a little apart from the other seven defendants.

There was the same switch between defiance and obedience later. When the prosecutor outlined the case against him he interrupted several times, accusing the prosecutor of lying.

Saddam had finally acknowledged the other defendants for the first time, smiling and making jokes about the changes in their appearance since the last time he had seen them, when they were still serving his regime.

LG.Philips LCD and E Ink have built a 10.1" flexible electronic paper display. Less than 300 microns thick, the paper-white display is as thin and flexible as construction paper. With a 10.1" diagonal, the prototype achieves SVGA (600x800) resolution at 100 pixels per inch and has a 10:1 contrast ratio with 4 levels of grayscale.

E Ink Imaging Film is a novel display material that looks like printed ink on paper and has been designed for use in paper-like electronic displays. Like paper, the material can be flexed and rolled. As an additional benefit, the E Ink Imaging Film uses 100 times less energy than a liquid crystal display because it can hold an image without power and without a backlight.

"We all need flexible displays," said Russ Wilcox, CEO of E Ink, "They are 80% thinner and lighter than glass displays, and they do not break like glass displays. You can roll them up and put them in your pocket. You can curve them around the outside of a cellphone. Or you can throw them in your briefcase like a newspaper. As Galileo famously told us, the world is not flat."