Diebold Election Systems, a target of many electronic-voting critics during the 2004 U.S. election, announced Thursday it has completed the design for a printer that would give its e-voting machines a paper trail.

Diebold's printer, submitted for federal government approval several weeks ago, would create a so-called voter-verified paper trail, a function that many critics have demanded of e-voting machine manufacturers.

Voter-verified paper trails would virtually eliminate machine error in which votes aren't counted, says Will Doherty, executive director of the Verified Voting Foundation. In the November 2004 election, one county in North Carolina lost more than 4500 votes when a misunderstanding occurred over the capacity of the e-voting machines used there.

An influential congressional committee has dropped a political bombshell by suggesting that a tax originally created to pay for the Spanish American War could be extended to all Internet and data connections this year.

The congressional report comes not long after the Internal Revenue Service and Treasury Department said they were considering how the Spanish American War tax should be reinterpreted "to reflect changes in technology" used in "telephonic or telephonic quality communications."

Congress enacted the so-called "luxury" excise tax at 1 cent a phone call to pay for the Spanish American War back in 1898, when only a few thousand phone lines existed in the country. It was repealed in 1902, but was reimposed at 1 cent a call in 1914 to pay for World War I and eventually became permanent at a rate of 3 percent in 1990.

The MPAA have released their Parent File Scan tool, which 'helps consumers check whether their computers have peer-to-peer software and potentially infringing copies of motion pictures and other copyrighted material'. According to the MPAA, the software does not report any data back to the MPAA. However, users have noted that the software is not accurate; 'tagging' virtually every audio or video file it finds based on file extensions.

Hollywood studios filed a second round of lawsuits against online movie-swappers on Wednesday, stepping up legal pressure on the file-trading community.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) also made available a new free software tool so parents can scan their computers for file-swapping programs and for movie or music files which may be copyrighted.

"We cannot allow people to steal our motion pictures and other products online, and we will use all the options we have available to encourage people to obey the law," MPAA Chief Executive Officer Dan Glickman said in a statement.

Parent File Scan also uses a very liberal definition of file-swapping software. In a test on a CNET News.com computer, the software identified Mirc--a client for the Internet Relay Chat network, where files can be swapped, but where tens of thousands of wholly legal conversations happen every day--and Mercora, a streaming Web radio service that uses peer-to-peer technology but does not allow file swapping.

A british bloke who tried to flog a deactivated Soviet FROG missile on Ebay has fallen foul of one of the auction site's more bizarre rules.

Richard Moore, from Cambridgeshire, was told to remove the missile offer, because he broke eBay regulations. According to Reuters, it was not the fact that he was selling a missile which could have once been used to deliver a weapon of mass destruction that broke the rules.

Ebay was miffed that he had chosen to sell the missile in the same auction as its fully functional rocket launcher. Ebay said that the missile should have appeared as a separate item. This is because the auctioneer bans the sale of any ammunition, replica guns or firearms on its sites. If missile and launcher were put together they become a complete 'weapon' said Ebay.

Scientists have begun blurring the line between human and animal by producing chimeras—a hybrid creature that's part human, part animal.

Chinese scientists at the Shanghai Second Medical University in 2003 successfully fused human cells with rabbit eggs. The embryos were reportedly the first human-animal chimeras successfully created. They were allowed to develop for several days in a laboratory dish before the scientists destroyed the embryos to harvest their stem cells.

Irv Weissman, director of Stanford University's Institute of Cancer/Stem Cell Biology and Medicine in California, is against a ban in the United States.

"Anybody who puts their own moral guidance in the way of this biomedical science, where they want to impose their will—not just be part of an argument—if that leads to a ban or moratorium. … they are stopping research that would save human lives," he said.

Backed by a diverse coalition of influential groups, including the Bush administration's top lawyer and the Christian Coalition, the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America on Monday asked the court to overturn previous rulings that have let file-swapping software companies such as Grokster operate with only minimal legal restrictions.

"The Sgt. Schultz defense for Grokster doesn't work," RIAA Chief Executive Mitch Bainwol said at a press conference Tuesday, alluding to the bumbling camp guard from the "Hogan's Heroes" sitcom. "'See nothing, hear nothing,' doesn't apply."

At the case's heart is the 20-year-old Supreme Court ruling that made Sony Betamax videocassette recorders legal to sell. That ruling said technology that could be used for illegal purposes could still be legal to sell without liability, as long as it had substantial commercial noninfringing uses.

Those groups, which included the Christian Coalition, the Concerned Women for America, Morality in Media and others, wrote that the lower-court decisions relieving file-swapping companies of legal liability could lead to a "proliferation of anonymous, decentralized, unfiltered and untraceable peer-to-peer networks that facilitate crimes against children and that frustrate law enforcement efforts to detect and investigate these crimes."

A survey of taxi drivers showed that people are losing their mobile phones, their PDAs, their notebooks, and even their lives in the back of cabs, worldwide.

According to Pointsec, which surveyed 900 licensed cabbies in London, Sydney, Paris, Munich, Oslo, Helsinki, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Chicago, one driver turned round to find his passenger dead.

Other cabbies have found passengers' false teeth and their artificial limbs in the back of their vehicles.

The survey claimed to show that in the last six months, drivers of London's black cab unearthed 63,135 mobile phones, 5,838 Pocket PCs, and 4,973 notebooks.

The London survey was conducted by the Licensed Taxi Drivers Association, Taxi. But Pointsec claimed that an average of 80% of passengers were re-united with their mobiles after the cabbies tracked down their owners.

A teenage boy described as "an angel" by his grandmother has been arrested and bailed amid allegations that he netted £20,000 flogging non-existent gear from his website.

The l4 year-old, who cannot be named for legal reasons, allegedly ran an ecommerce operation from his bedroom at his gran's house. He offered cheap plasma TVs for sale but never sent any out, according to the Mirror.

By the time the police had tracked down the boy his operation was so successful that he had rented an office and even hired staff.

The teenage boy, from Chiswick, London, was arrested on fraud and deception charges and bailed until April.

His gran told the newspaper: "He is an angel and never been in trouble. I'm going to kill him when I get hold of him."

Mozilla contributor Henrik Gemal wrote last week in a blog that a phishing detector has been added to Thunderbird. This feature is likely to be available in the next release of Thunderbird, version 1.1, according to the Mozilla bug report.

With the new Thunderbird feature, when a user clicks on a link in an e-mail that appears to be a phishing URL, the detector will prompt the user with a dialog box before the Web site is opened, Gemal wrote. The detector is triggered if the URL has a numeric Internet Protocol address rather than a domain name, or if the URL does not match the address displayed in the link text.

Firefox, the Mozilla Organization's browser software, and Mozilla Suite, its Internet application package, can already detect some phishing scams, according to a posting on the Mozilla news site, MozillaZine. These applications will warn people who try to visit a URL that includes an unnecessary username--a trick used by phishers to hide the true domain name of a site.