British scientists are developing a robot that will generate its own power by eating flies.

The idea is to produce electricity by catching flies and digesting them in special fuel cells that will break down sugar in the insects' skeletons and release electrons that will drive an electric current.

Chris Melhuish and his team, who are developing the robot, have to manually feed the flies to EcoBot II because they are still designing some type of pump to suck the insects into it.

Hence the downside of the fully autonomous robot: it will have to use sewage or excrement to attract the flies and is bound to smell appalling.

The bill specifies up to five years' jail for anyone making over a thousand copyrighted works available for download. That's if the infringer is profiting from the action: ordinary P2P users would face up to three years simply for making their collections available.

The committee asks Congress to discourage the P2P networks from deploying the "guns don't kill people" defence.

"Publicly available peer-to-peer file-sharing services can and should adopt reasonable business practices and use technology in the marketplace to address the existing risks posed to consumers by their services and facilitate the legitimate use of peer-to-peer file sharing technology and software."

The bill also makes it illegal to use a video recorder in a cinema to capture a movie.

The chairman of the House Committee which nodded through the measure, Rep James Sensenbrenner (R.-Wis), was paid $18,000 by the Recording Industry Ass. of America to make a trip to Taiwan and Thailand in January 2003, a breach of the House ethics rules, say critics.

US firm Savvis was allegedly earning up to $2 million a month from 148 of the world's worst spammers, a former employee had claimed.

Along with C&W US's 3,000 business customers, Savvis inherited 95 major spammers who make their money by sending out millions of unsolicited e-mails a day with the standard mix of Viagra and porn offers.

As rumours about Savvis and the spammers grew on the internet, executives discussed different ways of keeping the customers and whether they could hide them by changing their names or their computer IP addresses.

Mr Terranson went to Steve Linford, who runs the Spamhaus block list from a small house boat on the River Thames near London.

In three long conversations with Savvis executives last Friday, Mr Linford persuaded them to ditch its spamming clients after threatening to block all Savvis e-mails, making it very difficult for them to communicate with the outside world.

Mr McCormick promised that within the next 10 days all spammers will be taken off their network.

A Florida man is facing 33 months in prison after pleading guilty to conspiring to distribute a controlled substance.

Vineet Chhabra ran a series of websites offering Viagra, diet pills and other controlled drugs. Customers had to fill in online questionaires or complete a telephone interview but did not need to see a doctor or submit a prescription, as required under US law. His sister Sabina Faruqui also pleaded guilty and faces one-year probation. Five others, including a doctor and a pharmacist have already pleaded guilty. In total, 11 have been charged as a result of the three-year investigation.

Chhabra will be back in court for sentencing on 3 December. Prosecutors claim he has made $125m from running the sites - money he may have to forfeit or pay in fines. According to wire reports, he may also lose 15 luxury vehicles, including six Mercs, 72 pieces of jewelery, the contents of 60 bank accounts scattered around the world and property, including a $2m office building in Weston, Florida.

The chinese government is bringing in even tougher penalties against internet porn peddlers.

Those caught for 'serious offenses' could now face life imprisonment while less serious cases could result in compulsory surveillance, detainment, taking into custody by the police.

Just in case you were wondering what the Chinese would consider a 'serious' case. Xinhua kindly points out that any pornographic Web site that had been clicked on more than 250,000 times would be considered a "very severe" case that could warrant a life sentence for its owners.

Looks like Microsoft has yet again patented plainly obvious technologies that have existed for years and years. No, I'm not talking about their patent of the sudo command. This time Microsoft has been granted a patent for nothing less than using your keyboard to navigate a web page!

Patent 6,785,865 - "Discoverability and navigation of hyperlinks via tabs." From the abstract, "A user may discover and navigate among hyperlinks through the use of a keyboard. For example, a user may press a tab key to discover and navigate to a first hyperlink that is part of a hypertext document. The first hyperlink is, in response, given focus and a focus shape is drawn around the text or graphics for the hot region of the hyperlink. If the user again presses the tab key, the next hyperlink is given focus and a focus shape..."

Spammers have adopted a new standard for email authentication much faster than legitimate emailers, according to a study from security appliance firm CipherTrust published this week

More spam than legitimate email is currently sent using Sender Policy Framework, a recently introduced email authentication protocol. According to CipherTrust's research, 34 per cent more spam is passing SPF checks than legitimate email because spammers are actively registering their SPF records.

As long as spammers comply with the protocol by not spoofing the sender address, their messages will not be stopped by SPF, which CipherTrust has supported since February 2004. CipherTrust's research among users of its own IronMail message security appliance this summer found that a spam message is three times more likely to pass an SPF check than it is to fail it.

Microsoft's Sender ID solution to spam looks intriguing, and until recently, it seemed destined to become an Internet standard. In brief, Sender ID is designed to ensure that e-mail originates from the Internet domain it claims to come from.

Indeed, if the framework is looking less appealing right now, it's only because some say that Microsoft's licensing terms are incompatible with Open Source. Today the Apache Software Foundation has rejected Sender ID, arguing that while the license is royalty free, it is incompatible with Open Source, and thus the foundational properties of the Internet.

The current Microsoft Royalty-Free Sender ID Patent License Agreement terms are a barrier to any ASF project which wants to implement Sender ID. We believe the current license is generally incompatible with open source, contrary to the practice of open Internet standards, and specifically incompatible with the Apache License 2.0. Therefore, we will not implement or deploy Sender ID under the current license terms.

Additionally, Microsoft claims to have patents relating to Sender ID, but those patents have not been disclosed—something which makes many people rather nervous.

According to pressure group Blackbox Voting, here, by entering a two digit code on the Diebold central tabulator a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes, this web site alleges.

The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, it's claimed.

There are more than a 1,000 Diebolds in place, and they count up to two million votes at a time. According to Blackbox not a single location in the US has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks.

The meeting was behind closed doors it seems. According to Black Box the undersecretary of state, Mark Kyle, left early, and one voting panel member, John Mott Smith, appeared to sleep through the entire thing.

The machine's manufacturer are aware of the claims. In fact they tried to slap a cease and desist order on the group in 2003 when it first approached them. However, despite the group offering to show the company how to fix the problem it has ignored them.

U.S. agents have raided the homes of five people who allegedly traded hundreds of thousands of songs, movies and other copyrighted material over the Internet, Attorney General John Ashcroft says.

Until now, the Justice Department has only pursued elite groups of hackers who steal and distribute movies, music and software before their official release dates.

Targeted in the raids were people operating "hubs" in a file-sharing network based on Direct Connect software.

In order to join the network, members had to promise to provide between one and 100 gigabytes of material to trade, or up to 250,000 songs, Ashcroft said.

Each of the five hubs contained 40 petabytes of data, the equivalent of 60,000 movies or 10.5 million songs, Ashcroft said.