The card companies joined forces with scary-sounding U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to block the sales of cigarettes over state lines.

A spokesman for the AFT claimed its investigations showed, "that millions of dollars each year in illegal sales of cigarettes are diverted to fund terrorists and criminal organizations."

In some states – such as New York - the sale of tobacco products over the Internet is banned. The ATF claims that many New Yorkers buy their fags from other states in order to get around the ban - depriving the state of an estimated $100 million a year in cigarette sales taxes.

Microsoft will be doing a lot to make developers and customers happy with its pending Internet Explorer release, if partner sources with inside information on the IE 7.0 browser are right.

The company will continue to drag its feet by refusing to provide full support for the CSS2 (Cascading Style Sheets Level 2) W3C (Worldwide Web Consortium) standard, Microsoft partners say.

Sources claiming familiarity with Microsoft's IE 7.0 plans said the company will add some additional CSS2 support to its new standalone browser.

But Microsoft isn't planning to go the whole way and make IE 7.0 fully CSS2 compliant, sources said.

One partner said that Microsoft considers CSS2 to be a "flawed" standard and that the company is waiting for a later point release, such as CSS2.1 or CSS3, before throwing its complete support behind it.

Market research outfit Jupiter Research has published a study that shows more than half of Internet users delete cookies. This seriously undermines website operators' ability to measure consumer behaviour on their sites, the report said.

Eric Peterson, analyst for Jupiter Research, said that most users feared that if they took cookies from a site they will have their personal details blasted all over the interweb or get sucked into spam campaigns.

Peterson said such moves were making it impossible for companies to do any monitoring of customers and the problems caused by cookie deletion were going to get worse.

He said that website operators need to look for new technologies to solve the problem. He thinks more companies will start using Flash to track consumers each time they visit a site.

A raid by Swedish authorities last week against Bahnhof, Sweden's oldest and largest ISP, has been hailed by Hollywood as a major blow against movie piracy. But questions have been raised about whether the 10 March raid, orchestrated by Swedish anti-piracy organisation Antipiratbyran, and involving the seizure of data involving thousands of users, might have violated the country's strict data privacy laws.

Bahnhof has issued a statement (in Swedish) expressing concerns that data involving as many as 20,000 users was seized during the raid. The raid against Bahnhof is not the first anti-piracy bust in the country but it's reportedly the first to take place without any advance notice.

Reg readers inform us that the Swedish Data Inspection Board is to investigate alleged collection and computation of personal data conducted by the Swedish antipiracy office in connection with the Bahnhof raid. This remains unconfirmed since we were unable to reach anyone at the board for comment.

The entertainment industry certainly loves to raid ISPs these days. Perhaps it's payback for all those recent court rulings saying that ISPs shouldn't just roll over and hand out private data every time the entertainment industry suspects wrongdoing. Last week, they raided an Australian ISP and a Swedish one. The Swedish one was with the help of authorities (the Australian one wasn't), but it was still organized by the entertainment industry. However, in raiding the ISP and carting away lots of info, some are wondering if the raid violated strict data privacy laws in that country. It certainly raises some interesting questions in the light of all of the many, many data leaks over the past couple of weeks. If your data happens to be stored on the same server as someone who is breaking the law, does that mean your data is open to review from private sources?

America Online, Inc. has quietly updated the terms of service for its AIM instant messaging application, making several changes that is sure to raise the hackles of Internet privacy advocates.

The revamped terms of service, which apply only to users who downloaded the free AIM software on or after Feb. 5, 2004, gives AOL the right to "reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote" all content distributed across the chat network by users.

"You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the content or to be compensated for any such uses," according to the AIM terms-of-service.

Although the user will retain ownership of the content passed through the AIM network, the terms give AOL ownership of "all right, title and interest in any compilation, collective work or other derivative work created by AOL using or incorporating this [user] content."

"In addition, by posting content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this content in any medium," it added.

At the Powerhouse Museum LOTR Exhibition in Sydney, Peter Jackson has said a film version of The Hobbit is three years away at least. Reasons for the delay include the sale of MGM, which part-owns the movie rights to The Hobbit, and Jackson's recently filed suit against New Line Cinema, the other part-owner. Jackson is currently filming King Kong at his new facility in Wellington, NZ. Slashdot readers will also be interested in the high security planned for King Kong's pre-release screenings.

Benjamin Edelman, a PhD candidate in Economics and a Law student at Harvard, has analyzed the hidden (or not) additions to a user's machine when they install some of the major Windows P2P clients. He analyzes the length and readabilty of their licenses, what is revealed or hidden in the software's installer and includes screenshots for illustration. Clear, concise and eye-opening.

A french appeal court ruled yesterday in favour of somebody who downloaded about 500 movies, on the ground that those were private copies, and that he didn't redistributed them, and that a tax was payed on blank media. This sets the huge precedent that P2P is legal over there. For the details, apparently no distinction was made on the method used to download the movies (upload issues) and the famous EUCD directive was even used by the defending lawyer.

Yesterday the French security researcher Guillame Tena, aka Guillermito, has been fined a suspended fine of 5000 euros by a French court for publishing a vulnerability in the Viguard anti-virus software of the company Tegam.

That the fine is suspended means that Guillermito will have to pay up if he continues to publish about the vulnerability and other software vulnerabilities. As a result he has taken the Tegam publication, and a dozen others, from his website. He writes:

No more demonstration of security software weaknesses. It's now forbidden in my country. On march 8 2005 I've been condemned for exposing flaws in the anti-virus software and publishing proof of concept programs to demonstrate them. That's exactly what I did for a dozen or so steganography program, which often contained security holes so big you could pass a truck through.

So now you have to believe the editors marketing. Welcome in DisneyWorld. All steganography programs are perfect, super-solid, unbreakable, undetectable, without bugs nor flaws. They are all perfect. Use them. Hahaha. What a joke.