We all know that Microsoft has a tentacle in just about every pie on the planet, but what exactly is Redmond's black ops department up to in Nevada?

This chilling question arises because Microsoft's Virtual Earth has excised all satellite data of the legendary Area 51, leaving a great big grey void filled only with hundreds of hovering black helicopters.

Until such time as the truth is known, we wonder what exactly MS has to gain from this cloak of invisibity. After all, the internet is chock-full of Area 51 info, maps and satellite images. Try this website, for example - a veritable cornucopia of conspiracy goodies.

Following the series of recent arrests of people for using open WiFi networks, the definition of illegal equipment is being stretched. In the UK arrest, the guy was arrested for "possessing equipment for fraudulent use of a communications service," which all of us who have WiFi in our laptops probably are guilty of. At least that's just in the UK. Over here in the US it's apparently still legal to have WiFi equipment -- but if you dare try to boost your signal with an antenna, watch out. According to the head of the Sacramento Valley Hi-Tech Crimes Task Force, the popular "cantenna" device is completely illegal. For those who don't know, someone a while back worked out that you could boost the range of your WiFi router with a Pringle's can. It requires a bit of work, so a small operation sprung up to sell Cantennas. They're quite popular with people who want to spread WiFi around a house where the basic router won't reach certain parts of it. Hell, even CompUSA sells them! But, according to this "high tech" police officer: "They're unsophisticated but reliable, and it's illegal to possess them." The article includes a story about how the police arrested a high school student for breaking into his school's network to change his grades and they (gasp!) found a cantenna in his room! Again, the crime he committed has nothing to do with having an antenna booster, but that doesn't stop the reporter and the cop from talking about the evils of connecting to WiFi networks.

A democratic lawmaker is hoping that a 25 per cent tax on internet porn will suddenly stop kids looking at the stuff.

Called the Internet Safety and Child Protection Act of 2005, the bill also proposes new rules for Web sites to verify they do business only with adults. It would compel sites to use specialized software to verify a customer's age. It will be enforced by the Federal Trade Commission.

Since it is a state law, all the pornsters will have to do to avoid paying it, is to shift their businesses to another country.

However, it looks like the law, like many which have been before it, is destined to run aground in the courts on free speech grounds. It could be seen as a tax on people who say things that law makers disagree with, which is pretty much, against those amendments in the constitution against that sort of stuff.

Vista is in Latin a great but rather indeterminate noun. The word indicates a landscape, so that if you were taken to the top of a mountain, for example, you might exclaim to your companion: "Sheesh! I spot a tiny vole in the vista ahead!"

Then there's the Spanish "Hasta La Vista". According to Google translate, this means "good bye", as in English, "ta ra!" or "Terminator" [shorely termites? Ed.] as the Americans call white ants.

In Italian, apparently, "vista" means "sight", a function of them things most anthropoids have two of in front of their faces.

In French, "vista" means "vista". But the INQ has to report that in the proto European language Sanskrit, Vista means something far more ugly than any of these.

Various organisations have criticised Microsoft for attempting to patent the creation of custom emoticons.

The patent, which was published by the US patent office on Thursday, covers selecting pixels to create an emoticon image, assigning a character sequence to these pixels and reconstructing the emoticon after transmission.

Mark Taylor, the executive director of the Open Source Consortium, said on Friday said this is such a basic concept that he would not have been surprised to see it posted as a fictional patent on a technology site.

He said the patent could be particularly problematic as it covers basic human communication. "Emoticons are a form of language, and a precedent allowing patenting of language constructs is very dangerous indeed," said Taylor.

Jonas Maebe, a spokesman for the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII), said that such a patent could be used by Microsoft to prevent competitors from developing applications that compete with its MSN Messenger application.

The International Federation of Phonographic Industries said that 180 million single tracks were downloaded legally in the first six months of the year, compared to 57 million tracks in the first half of 2004 and 157 million for the whole of last year.

So you might want to credit some of this growth to the massive success of things like the iPod, or to fact that the general user out there is warming up to online sales as more and more people give it a shot, but according to the IFPI, you'd be wrong. Nay, the upswing is the result of more broadband lines being installed across the globe, and of course, the recording industry's fight against file sharing.

"We are now seeing real evidence that people are increasingly put off by illegal file-sharing and turning to legal ways of enjoying music online," said John Kennedy, the IFPI's chairman. "Whether it's the fear of getting caught breaking the law, or the realization that many networks could damage your home PC, attitudes are changing, and that is good news for the whole music industry."

But yeah, it's the lawsuits. It's not access, or convenience, or a market starting up. It's the lawsuits. And hey, since it's the lawsuits creating all of this business, why don't we pass more laws to make business even better. See, I could work for the RIAA, no?

The skyrocketing U.S. trade deficit -- which reached a record $618 billion last year -- has compounded U.S. concerns about piracy and counterfeiting. Companies that produce movies, music and software and other intellectual property account for a growing share of what the United States has to sell to the rest of the world.

Knocking $250 billion off that would be great, but economic realities won't allow for that to happen overnight. The massive black market in China is spurred in part by monopoly pricing—namely, prices are too high, and the only competition to bring them down is illegal competition. While pirated copies of Star Wars might sell for $1 on the street, 20,000 sales of that pirated DVD do not translate to 20,000 sales of $15 legit DVDs in the absence of piracy.

In China, the battle will be fierce. The 1 billion DVD/year market is almost entirely composed of bootlegs, to the tune of 95 percent. Even so, Warner Brothers has fought back by dropping the price of their DVDs to the $3 range on average, making it a real competitor with the lower-quality black market versions.

Author J.K. Rowling has been branded a "Luddite fool" for inadvertently encouraging fans to pirate the latest Harry Potter book only hours after its official release.

The sixth installment in the popular series was published worldwide Friday and is expected to further enhance what has become a multibillion-dollar publishing phenomenon.

But within hours, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince had been scanned and put online by an underground collection of fans capitalizing on Rowling's decision not to release an official e-book version.

Although Potter has become a multimedia cash cow, with 52 million books sold and products ranging from figurines to a $2.35 billion movie series, Rowling has so far decided against publishing the stories in e-book format, a medium growing by up to 40 percent annually, according to the New York-based Open eBook Forum, a trade body.

The runaway success of the Potter series has seen British author Rowling amass a personal fortune estimated by Forbes at $1 billion. Her latest installment shifted 2 million copies in the United Kingdom alone on its first day, breaking a record. But Rowling's camp has declined to publish Potter in electronic format, citing security concerns.

"For the next book, we're going to be prepared," said the Half-Blood Prince scanner. "The people who'll be helping me will be at their computers waiting for me to get home with it and I'll be calling in sick to work for a day or two so I can scan it without interruptions."

We're used to bogus, inflated claims of losses due to piracy from the computer software industry, the movie business and the music industry, so it shouldn't be too surprising to see some crazy numbers saying ringtone vendors are losing money thanks to online "shoplifters". The key difference here, though, is these numbers aren't coming from the vendors themselves, blowing hot air about their perceived losses, but an even less unbiased party: a company looking to sell its "secure" commerce products. Apparently some ringtone and music vendors let users preview content before buying, and this somehow translates into "lost" sales because there's a possibility a user will swipe the preview and not buy the content, which is apparently "the mobile and cyber-equivalent of test-driving a car and then not having to give it back". Of course, like all the other bogus loss claims, the company assumes that every user that is happy to take the preview would have bought the content -- which isn't the case. In any case, plenty of companies selling ringtones are doing a perfectly adequate job of shooting themselves in the foot without having to blame pirates.

The HR-2 humanoid robot was constructed during a period of three months at Chalmers University in Sweden.

It has 22 degrees of freedom which enables it to easily move around imitating human motions. The robot is also equipped with stereovision giving it possibilities to perform hand-eye coordination. For that task an artificial neural network is evolved. Furthermore, the artificial brain is capable of tracking faces as well as recognising them. The HR-2 is also able to speak.

The website also contains a movie (35.5 Mb) of the HR-2 in action.