In this month's issue of Wired Magazine, there is an included CD featuring songs from The Beastie Boys, David Byrne, among others. The unique thing about the CD is that all of the tracks are released under Creative Commons Licences, making them legal to share.

The music labels, accustomed to bullying teenagers, appear to have pissed off the wrong man. New York attorney general Eliot "The Blitzer" Spitzer has served up subpoenas to the major labels, as he digs for information on their relationships with promoters who are thought to pay radio stations to play certain songs, according to a report in The New York Times.

The paper states that Universal Music Group, BMG, EMI Group and Warner Music Group have all been asked to turn over contracts and billing records that show their ties to these so-called song middlemen. This method of paying promoters goes around a federal statute most commonly known as the payola law that forbids bribing radio broadcasters.

Spitzer's investigation shouldn't be too troubling for the labels. It's thought that the payola practice has died down significantly from its glory days many years ago. In addition, the labels have faced a worse attack before when the federal government charged them with and made them pay up for large scale CD price-fixing operations.

Russia's lower house of parliament has ratified the Kyoto Protocol - the international treaty on climate change.

"The entry into force of Kyoto is the biggest step forward in environmental politics and law we have ever seen," said Jennifer Morgan, director of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) conservation group's climate change programme.

The US, world's biggest polluter, pulled out of the treaty in 2001.

"If they want to be responsible members of the world community, they must wake up to the threat of climate change, sign up to Kyoto, and take urgent action to cut their emissions," campaigner Catherine Pearce told the AFP news agency.

BBC science analyst Tracey Logan notes that many experts believe that Kyoto will be largely ineffective as the world's two biggest emitters, the US and China, will not cut their outputs.

CD shipments are surging this year, but not enough to erase previous years' declines in the music business, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

"We are rising out of a deep hole and still have a long way to go," RIAA Chief Executive Mitch Bainwol said. "Piracy, both online and on the street, continues to hit the music community hard, and thousands have lost their jobs because of it."

Some studies have said these networks have had little actual effect on sales, however. Record industry critics have noted that the economic recession, as well as growing competition for home entertainment budgets from DVDs and video games, likely helped contribute to the falling music sales.

Windows users said actions speak louder than words when it comes to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's promise that Microsoft will fix the various security vulnerabilities in his company's computing platform.

"Trust is not a word that I would use" in relation to Microsoft's promises on security, said Paula Dallabetta, director of product marking at CreekPath Systems Inc., a storage management software producer based in Longmont, Colo.

"People always joke that Microsoft has set the bottom bar in terms of security," she said. Dallabetta said she might begin to trust Microsoft "with the delivery of a product that actually works."

Fungus from a deep-sea sediment core that is hundreds of thousands of years old can grow when placed in culture, scientists have discovered.

Indian researchers say the fungi come from sediments that are between 180,000 and 430,000 years old.

At a depth of 160cm (corresponding to an age of 180,000 years ago) they found high densities of a type of spore-producing fungus known as Aspergillus sydowii.

Considerable densities of this fungus were also found at depths of 280-370cm, corresponding to an age between 180,000 and 430,000 years ago.

The oldest microorganisms found alive are thought to be bacteria isolated from 25-40-million-year-old bees trapped in amber.

Google's Desktop represents a privacy disaster just waiting to happen, a rival has warned. David Burns, Copernic CEO, says users should know that the giant ad broker intends to mix public and private queries in the future, leveraging its key moneyspinning product: contextual advertising.

"If you lined people and said, 'Stick your hand up if you want Google to know what pictures you have, and what MP3 files you have,' I don't think many would." Burns had offered these capabilities to partners before, but received some pushback.

Google Desktop Search allows users to opt out of sending the company back detailed usage data, but it isn't possible to firewall it completely.

In January, Eric Schmidt said the company's goal was to create a "Google that knows you". With the addition of personal information, it's just taken a giant step towards that goal.

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush ignored advice to throw out a flawed felon voter list before it went out to county election offices despite warnings from state officials, according to a report published Saturday.

A software program matched data on felons with voter registration rolls to create the list of 48,000 names. Secretary of State Glenda Hood junked the database in July after acknowledging that 2,500 ex-felons on the list had had their voting rights restored.

Most were Democrats, and many were black. Hispanics, who often vote Republican in Florida, were almost entirely absent from the list due to a technical error.

U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek, the Florida chairman of Democratic Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign, said the report shows the extent Bush will go to ensure his brother's re-election.

Some publishers, still clinging to the ad revenue from pop-ups, are exploiting a workaround in IE and other Web browsers to send pop-up ads despite blocking software. In one example, visitors to the Drudge Report Web site who use the Service Pack version of IE or Mozilla.org's Firefox browser with a pop-up blocker will nevertheless receive a pop-under ad if they click a link on the page.

Pop-ups have played a controversial role in the world of online advertising since the dot-com bust, when the ads started coming out in force. At the time, Net publishers of all stripes were starved for ad revenue and willing to let advertisers get in their visitors' faces. Consumers complained loudly, and publishers slightly acquiesced by introducing the less-intrusive pop-under, which springs up behind a Web page.

Falk eSolutions, which sells technology to deliver online ads, has said its software will deliver "the guaranteed pop." When its ad server detects pop-up blocking software on a person's machine, it will deliver what's called a floating ad, or rich-media ad, instead. Many publishers such as Ifilm and AtomShockwave are practicing this technique so as not to lose ad revenue.

Agents for Microsoft are investigating how its forthcoming Halo 2 game was pirated and distributed on the Internet nearly a month before it hit the shops.

In a communiqué from Vole HQ, in Redmond, Microsoft said it was investigating the leak, adding that it was "aggressively pursuing the source of this illegal act".

Halo 2 is due to go on sale worldwide in the second week of November, but at the start of this week, the game's makers Bungie Studios said work on the title was complete and the game was ready to go into production.

Halo 2's code was supposed to be protected so that there would be no way to distribute it. Vole is adamant that there was no way you would be able to run the hacked version of Halo 2 without illegally modifying your X-Box and you certainly would not be able to take the game online, which is one of the best parts about it, apparently.