Swedish anti-piracy group Antipiratbyran (APB) has been disciplined by the country's Data Inspection Board for breaking privacy data rules in its hunt for illegal file-sharers.

ABP used special software to record the IP-addresses of file swappers, the file name and the server through which the connection was made, Sweden's The Local says. The company, a private organisation, reported hundreds of people to the police recently and has sent up to 2,000 emails a day to internet service providers notifying them of abuse.

ABP believed that there is nothing illegal about collecting IP addresses, but linking them to an individual can't be done without permission, Swedish Data Inspection Board now says.

It isn't the first time that ABP's actions have been questioned. Earlier this year, Swedish ISP Bahnhof pondered legal action after it emerged that illegal material uncovered in a raid on its premises was placed there by a paid informant of ABP.

Instead, the controversial post-9/11 law would be expanded to give the FBI new powers to demand documents from companies without a judge's approval, according to a vote late Tuesday by the Senate Intelligence committee.

But the proposal appears to grant the FBI more power to seek information from banks, hospitals, libraries, and so on through "administrative subpoenas" without prior judicial oversight. The subpoenas are only supposed to be used for terrorism or clandestine intelligence cases.

One other detail: the FBI may designate that the subpoenas are secret and punish disclosure of their existence with up to one year in prison (and five years if the disclosure is deemed to "obstruct an investigation.")

In testimony in April, FBI director Robert Mueller said: "The administrative subpoena power would be a valuable complement to (existing) tools and provide added efficiency to the FBI's ability to investigate and disrupt terrorism operations and our intelligence gathering efforts."

Japan has taken a step into the science-fiction world with the release of a 'robot suit' that can help workers lift heavy loads or assist people with disabilities climb stairs.

"Humans may be able to mutate into supermen in the near future," said Yoshiyuki Sankai, professor and engineer at Tsukuba University who led the project.

The 15-kilogram battery-powered suit, code-named Hal-5, detects muscle movements through electrical-signal flows on the skin surface and then amplifies them.

The prototype suit will be displayed at the world exposition that is currently taking place in Aichi Prefecture, Central Japan.

Japan has seen a growing market for technology geared toward the elderly, who are making up an increasing chunk of the population as fewer younger Japanese choose to start families.

China soon will close unregistered domestic Web sites and blogs as the government tightens its grip on the Internet, a media watchdog said.

Beijing announced in March that every China-based Web site now had to register and provide complete information on its organizers by June 30 or face being declared illegal, the Paris-based media-advocacy group Reporters Without Borders (RWB) said in a statement released on Tuesday.

"The authorities also hope to push the most outspoken online sites to migrate abroad, where they will become inaccessible to those inside China because of the Chinese filtering systems," RWB said.

China is the world's second-largest Internet market, with about 100 million users. That number is growing.

Instead of visiting some dry, boring Web site to download your favorite open source software, why not put some spice in your life and get it from Playboy?

That spice is in name only, because you won't find any interesting pictures or stories at mirrors.playboy.com -- just a few unadorned directories linking to mirrors of the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) and the latest releases of FreeBSD, Apache, Fedora, and mod_ssl.

mirrors.playboy.com is even an official mirror site for Firefox and Thunderbird, says Playboy Unix administrator Tim Yocum. He wanted to give something back to the community from which his company has drawn so deeply.

Playboy's corporate management has warmly welcomed Yocum's moves toward open source. They appreciate the cost savings and, Yocum says, display an attitude of "whatever works." The push toward open source, he says, comes from the bottom up; the real fans of Apache and Perl are the network administrators, including himself, and they are fortunate to have bosses who give them the freedom to use open alternatives.

A goldfish bowl in which 3D video images appear suspended in mid-air could help surgeons target tumours more precisely, air-traffic controllers prevent air accidents, and drug designers better understand the structures of promising molecules.

As Favalora walks around his display, a 3D computer model of a protein molecule hovers inside its smoky white soccer-ball-sized sphere. At the click of a mouse, the molecule disappears and is replaced by images of two airliners on a collision course in simulated 3D airspace.

A prototype version appeared in 2001 that could only show a low-resolution, static 3D image. Now, with the addition of dedicated graphics-processing hardware, the system is able to twist and turn images in real time at video rates.

Several applications have already emerged. Two oil companies, three medical centres and the US air force have bought or loaned Perspectas and are using them respectively to visualise slices of the Earth's crust from seismic data, human organs from MRI and CT scans, and squadrons of aircraft from radar data.

Rich pickings for the Schadenfreude minded at the China Post this morning. The paper reports that John Jenkins will sue a coal company after he lit a cigarette in a mobile toilet and suffered burns after being blown off the toilet seat and out of the door.

Jenkins alleges that methane gas was leaking from a pipe underneath the pedestal.

Oddly enough, Mr Jenkins is a methane power plant operator with North West Fuels Development. He wants $10 million damages from Eastern Associated Coal and Chisler Inc, the paper said.

His face, neck, torso and legs were badly burned. Ouch!

Computer Associates has warned of a co-ordinated malware attack (CMA) described as among the most sophisticated yet unleashed on the net. The attack involves three different Trojans – Glieder, Fantibag and Mitglieder – in a co-ordinated assault designed to establish a huge botnet under the control of hackers. CA reckons that access to the compromised PCs is for sale on a black market, at prices as low as five cents per PC.

Glieder-AK: the "infantry element" of the malware attack infects systems, open up backdoors that exploited by the follow-on Trojans. On 1 June, 2005, eight new Glieder variants appeared in rapid succession and quickly spread. "The apparent objective is to get to as many victims as fast as possible with a lightweight piece of malware," CA said.

The Fantibag Trojan further disables the security features of compromised systems. It exploits networking features of target systems to prevent those systems from being able to communicate with anti-virus firms or with Microsoft’s Windows update site, so isolating infected systems.

The Mitglieder Trojan opens a backdoor on a compromised system, leaving them under the control of hackers.

Leave it to lawmakers to replace one problem with a totally inane and dangerously misguided one. The California Assembly just passed a bill that bans textbooks longer than 200 pages, requiring publishers to shorten their tomes and include -- get this -- an appendix of related websites. The bill, California AB 756, ostensibly addresses the problem of outdated textbooks while encouraging use of the internet for learning. There are so many things wrong with this bill, it's hard to know where to begin. Well-meaning as it is, catering to the short attention spans of kids is the most counterproductive thing the state could do. Teachers are complaining all the time they can't get students to read more books and spend less time online. If the books are long and boring, find better books. Don't commission shorter boring books. Failing that, maybe they should just go with the best books they can find and understand that education requires a modicum of an attention span. And kids don't need a soon-to-be-outdated list of websites to encourage web research. On the contrary, they need more guidance on how to use it more judiciously and appropriately. Also, the law defines the books in question as "instructional materials." Does that include novels? Dictionaries? Reference guides? If this bill does become law, looks like the makers of Cliffs Notes and Reader's Digest will be pleasantly surprised.

Software giant Microsoft has confirmed that its coming version of IE 7 will not work with Windows 2000.

Although there are still a fair number of people using Windows 2000, Vole has been gradually pulling the plug on supporting the aged operating system. However there were some who hoped that Microsoft would make IE7, which is supposed to be a lot more secure, backwardly compatible to cut down on the number of security attacks on Win2000 machines.

However according to Microsoft IE programme manager, Chris Wilson, wrote on the Internet Explorer Weblog here, IE 7 will need Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) when it releases in beta. He said that some of the security work in IE7 relies XPSP2 and it is too much like hard work to port back to Windows 2000.