A posting in Robert Fripp's online diary provides some fascinating inside information on the poor and starving but caring, sharing music industry. Fripp and obscure but legendary band King Crimson have parted company with EMI/Virgin over digital download rights; not, apparently, because Fripp is agin downloading as such, but because he has just a couple of minor quibbles about distribution of the royalties.

King Crimson and Fripp never granted any digital download rights to Virgin, as the technology didn't exist when the original deal was struck in 1993. This expired at the end of 2003 (we presume the "2004" in Fripp's diary is a typo), with existing stock sale being permissible until 30th June 2004. King Crimson downloads however started appearing on iTunes Europe and OD2 in July, while various "partners" appear to have been selling back catalogue well after the cut-off date.

But hang on, what kind of process is going on where a company shares digital music it doesn't own with other companies? Good lord, it's not illegal filesharing, is it? Not unauthorised distribution, is it? Will EMI have to sue itself?

Democratic Sen. John Kerry conceded the White House race to President Bush in a phone call on Wednesday, ending uncertainty about ballot counting in Ohio and cementing Bush's re-election to a second four-year term.

Bush's election win sends him into a second term facing daunting challenges, from a worsening insurgency in Iraq--the aftermath of his decision to invade the country in 2003--and soaring federal budget deficits.

Kerry's running mate, Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, told supporters in Boston there would be no concession until all votes had been counted in Ohio.

"With a bigger majority, we can do even more exciting things," said House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a Republican from Texas.

Messaging security vendor CipherTrust Inc. on Monday released a new component of its IronMail appliances designed to stop spam messages before they get to customers' networks.

If a particular IP address racks up too many messages with scores of 100, the system drops connection attempts from those machines for a period of time, typically a few days.

Most spammers use rotating groups of proxies to send their messages and often will simply move on to another one if a particular IP address is blackholed. But that technique will be of little use against systems such as Connection Control that can quickly identify machines being used as bulk mailers and ignore them.

Warlick said Connection Control blocked nearly 4,000 individual IP addresses the first night that it was installed on Cox's internal network. The company's total mail volume dropped by about 40 percent.

US presidential candidates George W Bush and John Kerry are campaigning in key swing states in a final push ahead of Tuesday's election.

A fresh video message from Osama Bin Laden, released on Friday, has pushed national security back to the top of the agenda.

President Bush started Sunday's campaigning in Florida, which he won by just 537 votes in 2000 after a series of recounts that decided the overall election. He then moves on to Ohio.

Also in Florida, President Bush cheered supporters in Miami with an attack on Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

"I strongly believe the people of Cuba should be free from the tyrant," the president said.

Are republicans dyslexic we wonder? One keen Bush supporter has signed up for the latest propaganda from the Bush-Cheney '04 team. He appears to know where he lives but apparently he doesn't know what his email address should actually be.

So The INQ's email address on MSN (the precursor to Hotmail) has just been bombarded with emails explaining the nuances of the campaign trail. Including one entitled 'Two articles on Osama politics.'

Unfortunately, the unsubscribe URL generated the following error message. "You don't have permission to access http://www.georgewbush.com/email/Unsubscribe.aspx on this server".

Snippets of a purported new video clip of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden appeared on the Web on Friday, shortly after the clip was broadcast on the Arabic language Al-Jazeera TV network.

"Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al-Qaida. Your security is in your own hands," bin Laden said, according to the MSNBC translation of the clip. In addition, bin Laden threatened new attacks on the United States.

Bin Laden has released several video and audio messages since he went into hiding after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001. The last purported recorded message from bin Laden was posted on the Web on several sites on May 6. The audiotape urged the assassination of top U.S. and U.N. officials in Iraq.

The chaps at Perkins Coie law firm are unhappy that a registered member of the SuicideGirls site, a chap by the name of Runelateralus, has listed in his 'Interests' bio that he likes Metroid, Zelda and F-Zero - all Nintendo games. Nintendo is unhappy that its intellectual property is being used in conjunction with a site that is sexually explicit. Poor old Runey, it appears, simply wanted other porn viewers to know his gaming habits.

To say that Nintendo doesn't have a hope in hell of pulling this off, fnarr, would be an understatement. Americans benefit from very strong free speech laws, and since this is not a commercial use of the intellectual property by SuicideGirls, more an incidental mention, it will certainly fall within fair use guidelines - much as an academic is allowed to reference a copyrighted work for the purposes of criticism.

Earlier this week, we wrote about how fake Rolex spam was surpassing fake Viagra spam. Rolex, obviously, has decided this isn't a good thing, and wants to go after the spammers. Unfortunately, it looks like the lawyers they've hired to do so are a bit clueless. They sent a cease-and-desist letter to a mailing list that received Rolex spam. It's not hard to see how this happened. The mailing list received some fake-Rolex-spam, which was then archived on the web, along with all the other messages on the mailing list. However, the lawyers apparently couldn't figure out the difference between someone sending the spam, and someone receiving the spam, and are threatening the owner of the domain that hosts the list with damages reaching $1,000,000 for diluting their trademark.

Surfers outside the US have been unable to visit the official re-election site of President George W Bush.

The blocking of browsers sited outside the US began in the early hours of Monday morning.

The blocking does not appear to be due to an attack by vandals or malicious hackers, but as a result of a policy decision by the Bush camp.

The international exclusion zone around georgewbush.com was spotted by net monitoring firm Netcraft which keeps an eye on traffic patterns across many different sites.

The site can still be seen using anonymous proxy services that are based in the US. Some web users in Canada also report that they can browse the site.

Mike Prettejohn, president of Netcraft, speculated that the blocking decision might have been taken to cut costs, and traffic, in the run-up to the election on 2 November.

The missive offers 4.6m email addresses on an "Unbelievable Secrets" CD for £29.95 along with bulk mail software that can send "30,000+ emails per hour".

Straun Robertson, an IT lawyer at solicitors Masons, said it was almost certain that the email addresses were not collected properly. This leaves both the seller and purchaser of the CD at risk from prosecution for offences against the Data Protection Act. Complaints would have to be made to the Information Commissioner.

It also reasonable to assume that the bulk mail package bundled with the CD would be used without the consent of those in the firing line. So users of the software are violating Privacy in Electronic Communications regulations, introduced across the European Union in recent months.

Cheques and postal orders should be sent to an address in west London. Two Register reporters checked out the address - it is a business services centre on bijou Marylebone High Street surrounded by designer shops and up-market restaurants. The boxes are available on a variety of contracts and a company worker assured us that the firm doesn't bother checking addresses given by box holders. After office hours a shutter comes down separating the boxes at the front of the store. Box-holders get a swipe card so they can open boxes outside normal working hours.