Fishermen in northern Thailand have netted a fish as big as a grizzly bear, a 646-pound Mekong giant catfish, the heaviest recorded since Thai officials started keeping records in 1981. The behemoth was caught in the Mekong River and may be the largest freshwater fish ever found.

The fish was caught and eaten in a remote village in Thailand along the Mekong River, home to more species of giant fish than any other river. Local environmentalists and government officials negotiated to release the record-breaking animal so it could continue its spawning migration in the far north of Thailand, near the borders of Thailand, Laos, Myanmar and China - also known as the "Golden Triangle"). But the fish, an adult male, later died.

The FBI has swooped on an alleged pirate ring 'top sites' and arrested a bloke who ran one of its servers.

Apparently the Feds had been posing for a considerable amount of time as server operators, inviting people to upload and download material.

According to Restless.ugtech.net an FBI spokesman said that once a good working relationship had been established with the pirates the trap had been set. Then all that remained to do was for the FBI to do was shut its trap.

If you ever downloaded from servers called called "Chud" and "Lad", which were run by a bloke called "Griffen", you might be wondering if you will get a knock on your door.

The US government wants to keep control of the interweb until the technology becomes redundant and is snubbing foreign governments and ICANN, the body set up to eventually run it.

Previously the US has said that it would hand over control to ICANN if the body met a number of conditions. Now it is saying, it doesn't matter what ICANN does, the Internet is still US territory.

In a move which is a change of US policy, a senior government official said that it was not giving away any control to foreigners.

In an interview with Associated Press journalist Michael Gallagher, the assistant secretary for communications and information at the Commerce Department said that America needed control because of the growing security threats and increased reliance on the Internet for communications and commerce. Apparently only Americans can secure the Internet.

It appears that some countries might want to withdraw support for the ICANN if it doesn't get control. Some commentators fear that countries refusing to accept US control could establish their own separate Domain Name System.

Self-interest group the Recording Industry Association of America has filed a fresh round of legal complaints against 784 flie-sharers, alleging violation of copyright.

In an apparent mis-interpretation of the Supreme Court decision against Grokster, RIAA chairman and chief executive Mitch Bainwol said: "If there was any doubt left, there should now be none -- individuals who download music without permission are breaking the law."

We also note that in its statement in praise of the Supreme Court ruling, the RIAA says: "With this unanimous decision, the Supreme Court has addressed a significant threat to the U.S. economy and moved to protect the livelihoods of the more than 11 million Americans employed by the copyright industries."

Yet another astounding patent from the USPTO. I was browsing the patent database, and discovered that Amazon received a patent today on using customer viewing histories to generate recommendations. If a customer views product A, and then later views product B, and you use that to infer a relationship between A and B, then you've infringed on this patent. This patent is a continuation of an earlier patent (#6,317,722) on using shopping carts to generate recommendations. When will this stupidity end?

Scientists have created eerie zombie dogs, reanimating the canines after several hours of clinical death in attempts to develop suspended animation for humans.

Pittsburgh's Safar Centre for Resuscitation Research has developed a technique in which subject's veins are drained of blood and filled with an ice-cold salt solution.

The animals are considered scientifically dead, as they stop breathing and have no heartbeat or brain activity.

But three hours later, their blood is replaced and the zombie dogs are brought back to life with an electric shock.

Duing the procedure blood is replaced with saline solution at a few degrees above zero. The dogs' body temperature drops to only 7C, compared with the usual 37C, inducing a state of hypothermia before death.

For the second time within the past year, an Indymedia server has been siezed in the United Kingdom. This time it is the Bristol Indymedia server (currently redirected to the United Kollectives IMC site); this follows on from the Ahimsa siezure last October. The current siezure was carried out using a search warrant by the UK police at approximately 16:30GMT on June 27th, 2005. This was despite being warned by lawyers "that this server was considered an item of journalistic equipment and so subject to special provision under the law" (press release). Bristol Indymedia is currently being supported by the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), Liberty and Privacy International. Other media organisations have declared their support.

Microsoft has bankrolled another "independent" study that happened to turn up some interesting results. Namely that Microsoft's software is less expensive to patch than open source products.

What Wipro's study doesn't show is that in November of last year, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer revealed multi-million dollar deals with both Wipro and Infosys - another large Indian software maker and services firm. Earlier that year, a watchdog claimed that Wipro was one of two Indian companies said to be working on parts of Microsoft's upcoming version of Windows code-named Longhorn. Microsoft denied that Indian staff were handling the core of the OS.

For the curious, Wipro found that Windows desktops cost 14 per cent less to patch than Linux desktops, that Windows servers cost 13 per cent less to patch than Linux servers and that Windows database servers cost 33 per cent less to patch than Linux database servers. The Meta Group audited the survey methodology.

"Risk is defined as the number of days between when a vulnerability was identified and when a patch was made available, combined with the amount of time it took organizations to deploy the patch. The study concludes that even when a greater number of patches are deployed for Windows, the costs are lower because it takes about half as much effort per patch to complete the task," Microsoft said.

The Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy is reporting that two new laws in Utah and Michigan are going into effect next week, creating 'do not email' registries for children's email addresses. According to ISIPP, 'Email marketers who send unpermitted messages to email addresses or domains on the child protection registries in Michigan and Utah face stiff penalties including prison and fines.'

The federal court has ruled two systems administrators from Internet service provider (ISP) Swiftel can be sued for alleged music piracy, overriding an earlier decision.

Perth-based Swiftel has been accused of copyright infringement by major record labels -- which claim the ISP's employees and customers created a BitTorrent file-sharing hub for hosting thousands of pirated sound and video recordings.

The labels allege Swiftel's senior systems administrators Melissa Ong and Ryan Briggs ignored calls to remove Web sites that were in breach of copyright, and instead "treated the infringement notices like spam."

Swiftel's laywer protested, claiming only customers were responsible. However, in a twist, the ISP said a key customer in the case, Archit Jha, has already settled with the music industry's local piracy unit, Music Industry Piracy Investigations.

Jha had been named as the creator of "Archie's hub", a BitTorrent hub central to the case. However, the music industry has not included him as a respondent in its legal action.

Justice Branson noted Jha's situation and absence from the list of respondents. "Archie's [Archit's] someone who could be carrying the can here," she said.