A photo of two peculiar dragon-shaped objects taken from a plane flying over Tibet's Himalayas piqued many users' interest when displayed on a Chinese website. The photographer is an amateur.

On June 22, 2004, the photographer went to Tibet's Amdo region to attend the Qinghai-to-Xizang Railroad laying ceremony, and then took a plane from Lhasa to fly back inland. When flying over the Himalayas, he accidentally caught these two "dragons" in a picture that he took. He called these two objects "the Tibet dragons."

Looking at the photo, these two objects appear to have the characteristics of crawling creatures: The bodies seem to be covered by scales, the backs have spine-like protuberances, and also they have gradually thinning rear ends. Although the photo caught only a portion of the entire scene, it was sufficient to create the appearance of two gigantic dragons flying in the clouds.

It's good news for hacks all over the globe, as a bunch of researchers from the National Institute of Radiological Sciences, and the Tokyo University of Science, have found that beer is actually really good for you.

Blood samples were taken from lucky test subjects before and after they had drunk about 630ml of beer. Apparently, when the samples were exposed to X-rays and other types of radiation, after the subjects had glugged the beer their samples showed at least 30% fewer aberrations in the blood cells.

According to the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, the useful ingredient that could very well save your life in a post-pub X-ray incident is beta-pseudouridine. Although the researchers are excited about the findings, group leader Koichi Ando warned that while drinking beer prior to an X-ray could be beneficial, "people should be aware that drinking beer may affect the results of other health exams." Or, indeed, any exam.

The new study by US psychologists found that people shown erotic or gory images frequently fail to process images they see immediately afterwards. And the researchers say some personality types appear to be affected more than others by the phenomenon, known as "emotion-induced blindness".

David Zald, from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and Marvin Chun and colleagues from Yale University in Connecticut, showed hundreds of images to volunteers and asked them to pick a specific image from the rapid sequence. Most of the images were landscape or architectural scenes, but the psychologists included a few emotionally charged images, portraying violent or sexually provocative scenes.

Rockstar, maker of a video game which caused controversy after secret sex scenes were found in it, has issued a fix to disable access to the scenes.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the best-selling game of 2004, were unlocked by a fan who created software called Hot Coffee.

As a result, the US Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) changed the rating to Adults Only.

In Australia, the game was stripped of its official classification, meaning that shops could no longer sell the title.

The storm of protest over the game even attracted the attention of US senator Hillary Clinton.

She called for an investigation into who was responsible for including the scenes in the game.

Would it bother you if the only browser you could use to preregister a copyright claim with the United States Copyright Office is Internet Explorer, version 5.1 and higher? Well, you might be getting bothered real soon, because that is what the Library of Congress has in mind.

In a followup to its July 22, 2005, Notice of Proprosed Rulemaking, the Copyright Office is now seeking "information as to whether persons filing the electronic-only preregistration form prescribed by the Copyright Office will experience difficulties if it is necessary to use Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser in order to preregister a work."

NewsForge tried to speak with David O. Carson, General Counsel for the Library of Congress Copyright Office, this morning. His name is given as the primary contact on the request for comments. Unfortunately, Carson is on vacation and is not available.

Next we tried Charlotte Douglass, Principal Legal Advisor, whose name is also provided as a contact point. Alas, she is out of the office until August 15th.

Our last effort was to speak with the author of the notice, Associate General Counsel Tanya Sandros. You guessed it. She is unavailable. It's not that the Library of Congress Copyright Office is closed for the summer, but the receptionist did tell us that everyone connected with situation is unavailable.

When students at Princeton University, the University of Utah and eight other colleges start combing their school bookstore shelves for fall semester textbooks, they'll find a new alternative to the hard-covered tomes they're used to buying.

Alongside the new and used versions of Dante's "Inferno" and "Essentials of Psychology" will be little cards offering 33 percent off if students decide to download a digital version of a text instead of buying a hard copy.

That's not a bad deal for a cash-strapped student facing book bills in the hundreds of dollars. But there are trade-offs. The new digital textbook program imposes strict guidelines on how the books can be used, including locking the downloaded books to a single computer and setting a five-month expiration date, after which the book can't be read.

When most people think of Web search, they think of Google. But Yahoo said Monday that it has completed a vast expansion of its search engine index and now encompasses almost double that of its main competitor.

Yahoo's Tim Mayer said Monday on the company's Search Blog that it now indexes more than 20 billion documents and images. That's almost twice the 11.3 billion Google publicly says it currently spans.

Of the 20 billion elements in Yahoo's database, 19 billion are documents, 1.5 billion images and more than 50 million audio and video files, the company said.

To be sure, Yahoo's supplanting Google as king of the search indexes--in size at least--is a surprise, and gives it a lot of grist for touting its search feature as a solid alternative to Google's. That has been a public relations challenge for Yahoo since it unveiled its own search feature last year after years of licensing Google's.

American University is one of the latest schools to realize that students aren't nearly as excited as the university administrations have assumed they would be. Their semester-long trial of Ruckus, which provides music, movies, and a degree of social networking, was met with little interest. 36 percent of students flat out said that Ruckus should be nixed entirely, and 41 percent said that Ruckus should be only made available to those who want it (i.e., no forced enrollment). A whopping 47 percent of students surveyed said that they never even used Ruckus, and here's the best part: it was free. That's right: half of the student body didn't even bother to use this service at a time when it cost them nothing.

The University of Rochester, which was one of the first schools to get on board with Napster, conducted a survey last fall (PDF) that cast some light on how Napster use fares on campus.

Napster is used as a streaming audio service, and that's about it. Of the nearly 350 students surveyed, not one of them actually bought a song off Napster. They'll stream music and some will use tethered downloads, but no one is buying. Let me rephrase that: no one is buying from Napster. 56 percent of students are turning to other services when it's time to buy music. Of those, 71 percent are buying from the iTunes Music Store.

But wait, it gets worse. In a more recent survey conducted but not yet published, it has been revealed that only 8 percent of eligible subscribers even responded to the survey, and of those 8 percent, only 24 percent were even registered to use Napster.

An unpatched flaw in a core component of Windows 2000 might be exploited to launch computer worms, security researchers warns. The flaw was discovered by security research firm eEye Digital Security. The firm is witholding details pending the release of a software patch. Microsoft is investigating the issue, which is complicated by its decision to wind down support for the operating system.

Mainstream support of Windows 2000, which is still widely used in corporate environments, came to an end at the start of July 2005. Microsoft released a final update rollup for Windows 2000 on 28 June, just two days before expiration of regular support.

Researchers from a little-known security software company named Sunbelt Software have seemingly uncovered a criminal identity theft ring of massive proportions. According to one of their employees, Alex Eckelberry, during the course of one of their recent investigations into a particular Spyware application—rumored to be called CoolWebSearch—they've discovered that the personal information of those "infected" was being captured and uploaded to a server.

One can only speculate about why someone would do such a thing; the amount of data that could be gathered would almost certainly be daunting for even a few people to sift through and exploit. On the other hand, the researchers at Sunbelt have personally uncovered the personal information of two individuals who, combined, could be taken for well over US$350,000.

The researchers initially had tried in vain to get ahold of someone who could take action on this issue but didn't get a response right away:

We have notified the FBI, but of course no response (too busy doing other more important things). We have notified a few of the parties involved...If anyone has any other ideas, send 'em to us. Right now, we're sitting upon literally thousands of pages of stolen identities that are being used right now.