Aid agencies are struggling to cope with the scale of the Asian tsunami disaster and are hoping for a boost in online donations to help finance relief efforts.

The death toll had reached 40,000 people in 11 countries by Tuesday morning, according to the Associated Press.

"The enormity of the disaster is unbelievable," said Bekele Geleta, head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) in Southeast Asia.

Relief teams in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, two of the worst affected nations, sought to prevent the spread of disease from rotting corpses and putrefied water by burying corpses in mass graves and flying in shelter and water sanitation kits.

"This is a massive humanitarian disaster and with communications so bad in many areas, we still don't know the full scale of it," Oxfam Community Aid Abroad executive director Andrew Hewett told reporters in Australia.

A report claimed that Verizon is dumping email sent to the USA from outside the country.

And, it continues, the practice started on Christmas Eve. The filing on the message board claims that a rep for Verizon couldn't understand why any US citizen would want email from abroad.

It continues that Verizon would need a list of email addresses so it could let them through.

It's a well-known fact that we're living in an era of data explosion, and that it's not about to stop. So it's not really surprising that IBM researchers are eyeing 100T-byte tape drive. Yes, you read correctly. They want to increase the capacity storage of their largest units by 250 times, from 400 GB to 100 TB. In order to achieve this goal, they're borrowing "nanopatterning" techniques derived from the microprocessor division. Today, the size of a tape track is about 10 microns. They want to reduce it to 0.5 micron -- or 500 nanometers -- in about five years. IBM doesn't really say when a 100-Terabyte tape drive will be available. But more importantly, the company doesn't say a word about future data transfer rates, which today reach a 80 MB/s. Read this overview for more comments about this problem of data transfer rates.

The SCO Group has taken its controversial Linux licensing programme worldwide, and is warning of imminent legal action against UK companies.

SCO claims its intellectual property (IP) has been put into Linux without its consent, giving it the right to demand that Linux users buy a licence.

SCO senior vice president and general manager of SCOsource Chris Sontag said the firm expected to start legal action against Linux users in the next couple of weeks.

"There are large Linux users [in the UK] - with very large commercial usage of Linux for which our IP is being exploited - for whom we have a great deal of concern," he said.

A recently rediscovered 400-meter Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) is predicted to pass near the Earth on 13 April 2029. The flyby distance is uncertain and an Earth impact cannot yet be ruled out. The odds of impact, presently around 1 in 300, are unusual enough to merit special monitoring by astronomers, but should not be of public concern. These odds are likely to change on a day-to-day basis as new data are received. In all likelihood, the possibility of impact will eventually be eliminated as the asteroid continues to be tracked by astronomers around the world.

Since 1994 when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with Jupiter, scientists have been researching if it may be possible to deflect incoming asteroids. With the discovery in 1999 that asteroid (29075) 1950 DA may collide with the Earth in 2880, this problem has been taken more seriously by politicians and scientists. The most significant recorded impact in recent times was the Tunguska event, which occurred at Tunguska in Russia, in 1908.

The SCO Group Inc. on Tuesday reported a loss of $6.5 million, or 37 cents per share, in its latest quarter, which ended Oct. 31.

Darl McBride, SCO's president and CEO, blamed the revenue drop on the competitive market for its Unix server products and the company's declining Unix IP (intellectual property) license revenues. In last year's fourth quarter, its SCOsource revenues amounted to $10.3 million. In this most recent quarter, SCO's IP revenue came to only $120,000.

Nevertheless, McBride insisted that licensing revenues would bounce back. "There is continued interest in the licensing of our Unix technology, and we believe that when our legal claims are substantiated in a court of law, we will see an increase in the demand for this licensing business," he said.

The recording industry is asking the Red Cross to voluntarily freeze the cash pending the outcome of an Australian court case brought against Sharman by several record companies. The suit alleges that Sharman "has directly and indirectly infringed on the recording companies' copyrights, violated Australian fair trade laws and conspired to harm the music industry", according to a Wired report.

Michael Speck of Australia's Music Industry Piracy Investigations said: "We're preparing our approach to the International Red Cross. I believe this whole thing will come as a complete surprise to them, and we're only approaching them to stop them disposing of any funds."

Speck expressed his hope that the Red Cross would co-operate, adding: "It would be incredibly disappointing if we had to sue them."

Sharman has responded by declaring that the music biz's approach is "quite simply staggering", as the company's lawyer Mary Still put it.

Last week, the Motion Picture Association of America launched a series of worldwide legal actions, aimed at people who ran the infrastructure for BitTorrent networks being used to distribute movies and other copyrighted materials without permission.

Hollywood officials said last week that legal actions had already been filed against BitTorrent tracker operators in several countries and that they would continue to pursue other copyright infringers online.

"Our message is this: If you are running an infringing server, stop," John Malcolm, the MPAA's director of worldwide antipiracy operations, said last week. "There are more enriching ways to use your talents. Take down your servers immediately, or face the consequences."

There's no question that the disappearance of SuprNova and others will be felt widely around the Net, but file-swapping community insiders said it won't dramatically change behavior.

The latest MPAA copyright infringement suits expand on a new U.S. film industry initiative that first targeted individual file-swappers. This time, the defendants are operators of servers supporting BitTorrent, the program of choice for online sharers of large files.

Hollywood movie studios on Tuesday sued scores of operators of computer servers that help relay digital movie files across online file-sharing networks.

"Today's actions are aimed at individuals who deliberately set up and operate computer servers and Web sites that, by design, allow people to infringe copyrighted motion pictures," said John Malcolm, head of the Motion Picture Association of America's antipiracy unit.

"These people are parasites, leeching off the creativity of others," Malcolm added. "Their illegal conduct is brazen and blatant."

The suits target computer servers that index movies for BitTorrent users, but Malcolm said the MPAA is eyeing similar action against other servers as well.

"By bringing these suits, the MPAA runs the risk of pushing the tens of millions of file sharers to more decentralized technologies that will be harder to police," von Lohmann said.

A California court has approved a $2.6 million settlement between Diebold and the State of California and Alameda County. The state and county had sued Diebold for fraudulent claims about the security of its electronic voting machines.

The settlement is the fruit of a suit filed in September by California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, who argued that Diebold was not truthful about the security and reliability of its electronic voting machines.

Lockyer, who earlier dropped a criminal probe into Diebold, claimed that Diebold provided Alameda County with software that was not certified by the government. Researchers earlier determined the machines contained dangerous flaws.

Researchers said the voting system could easily allow someone to cast multiple votes in the same election. Last April, California set stringent standards for electronic voting by ordering new security measures for e-voting machines.