The International Olympic Committee is barring competitors, as well as coaches, support personnel and other officials, from writing firsthand accounts for news and other Web sites.

Participants in the games may respond to written questions from reporters or participate in online chat sessions -- akin to a face-to-face or telephone interview -- but they may not post journals or online diaries, blogs in Internet parlance, until the Games end August 29.

To protect lucrative broadcast contracts, athletes and other participants are also prohibited from posting any video, audio or still photos they take themselves, even after the games, unless they get permission ahead of time. (Photos taken by accredited journalists are allowed on the personal sites.)

The Olympic guidelines threaten to yank credentials from athletes who are in violation as well as to impose other sanctions or take legal action for any monetary damages.

Barely hours after home users started securing their PCs with a key update for Windows XP, security experts have found ways around it.

SP2 provides a single place for people to control anti-virus software, firewall and XP updates as well as blocking pop-up ads, some spyware and warning about the dangers of e-mail attachments.

But security expert Secunia has posted information about a bug in Internet Explorer that could, it says, let a malicious website "plant an arbitrary executable file in a user's start-up folder".

The vulnerabilities discovered have are not being exploited in the wild and have only been demonstrated as working in ideal circumstances.

However, Microsoft has produced a so-called hotfix for SP2 to help tackle a problem some people are having with programs that use particular net addresses.

Following the lead of a lower court decision last year, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said that peer-to-peer software developers could not be held liable for the copyright infringement of people using their software, as long as they had no direct ability to block the acts.

"The (record labels and movie studios) urge a re-examination of the law in the light of what they believe to be proper public policy," the court wrote. "Doubtless, taking that step would satisfy the copyright owners' immediate economic aims. However, it would also alter general copyright law in profound ways with unknown ultimate consequences outside the present context."

Step forward "Robert-Alan Lucht", who has been sending out invoices for use of @. That's right, and it's a pretty good deal, too - just ten bucks a year grants you electronic publishing rights for @ "Internet and E-Mail use". Remember, these rights are only conferred on users with a "valid account", so you'd better cough up before the IP Stasi kick in your front door. Full details of how to pay are at the bottom of Lucht's missive:

This is the international copyright holder for at or commercial at: @. You get it by pressing the keys: Alt Gr and Q. This is your 2004 license for Internet and E-Mail online communications. Yearly private use cost you 10 US-Dollar or Euro in licensing fees. Usage and electronic publishing rights for your @ in multiple contexts for Internet and E-Mail use are only granted by transfer with a valid account. With way more than 238 million users: "E-Mail & Internet" are the biggest online services. All rights reserved.

On August 9th, 2004, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) took a major step toward mandating the creation and implementation of new Internet Protocol standards to make all Internet communications less safe and less secure. What is even worse, the FCC's ruling will force ISP's and others to pay what may amount to billions of dollars to ensure that IP traffic remains insecure.

The ruling, if it becomes final, may require such ISPs to create and deploy new and expensive technologies that would ensure that communications carried over broadband were deliberately insecure and capable of being intercepted, retransmitted, read, and understood by law enforcement.

The FCC's ruling goes well beyond the extensive subpoena authority of the grand jury and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and even the USA-PATRIOT Act. By making ISPs the electronic equivalent of the phone company, and therefore subject to CALEA, the FCC opens the door to mandating that all future TCP/IP technologies -- possibly even encrypted ones -- be designed at the outset to be tapable. After all, it would do the cops no good to receive a mass of encrypted packets.

The FBI had an answer when ISPs and phone companies complained about the cost. The Bureau suggested that the cost be defrayed by increasing the rates you and I pay. So much for the government's E-rate program to make broadband more affordable.

Microsoft has issued a list of nearly 50 software applications and games that may encounter problems with its Windows XP Service Pack 2 update.

In a document published in the "Knowledge Base" section of the company's Web site, Microsoft details the various issues that people may face when they install the SP2 package, which was released to PC manufacturers earlier this month. A range of applications are listed in the Microsoft report, including several of the software maker's own products, along with antivirus tools, Web server software and a handful of games.

Among the most high-profile products listed on the Microsoft document are antivirus applications from Symantec, network management software made by Computer Associates International, and multimedia tools from Macromedia. Microsoft also acknowledges that several of its own products, including Visual Studio .Net, Operations Manager, SQL Server and Systems Management Server software, must be tweaked to work properly with SP2.

Associated Press claims that media industry has been quietly avoiding Microsoft and trying to keep the movie and music industries to their own. However, these days there's little chance of doing business without Microsoft and the movie studios are afraid of digital piracy more than they're afraid of Microsoft. The biggest fear? Microsoft will use its desktop PC monopoly to charge Hollywood outrageous fees and basically own the movie industry. Microsoft refutes the accusations, saying that it's only interested in selling more copies of Windows and applications for its platform, and providing movie content would promote the platform. Also noteworthy that among the four video-on-demand services that New York Times reviewed recently two that got the journalistic acclaim (StarzTicket and CinemaNow) are run by technology companies - Real Networks and Microsoft.

Have you ever dream of 100 terabyte of data per 3.5-inch disk? New patented innovation nanotechnology from Michael E. Thomas, president of Colossal Storage Corporation, makes it real.

The expected cost of the Atomic Holographic DVR disc drive will be from $570 to $750 with the replacement discs for $45.

One 10 terabyte to 100 terabyte 3.5 in FEdisk would be EQUAL to a 10,000 to 100,000 Gigabyte disk drive. That's greater 1,000 times any State of the Art hard disk technology with 100 Gigabytes on one disk. 2 EXABYTES of NEW data is generated every year world wide, and growing.

"In 1974 I was making 5 Megabyte disk packs - the biggest at that time in the world. At the same time, IBM, Burroughs, Honeywell, and other Computer professionals said no one would ever need that much storage," says Michael. "In 1989 Bill Gates (the Chairman of Microsoft) said that the personal computer would never need more than 256 Kbytes of cache memory and 40 megabytes of hard drive storage. Today's PC has on average 64 megabytes of cache and 20 to 60 gigabyte hard drives. The need for new storage technology is evident to only to those having backgrounds in data storage."

The concept of an atomic or molecular switch by "Photon/Laser Induced Electric Field Poling" existed. By using UV photons of lesser quantum energy it was possible to use diffraction and interference from the binary states of the molecule.

A Linux developer -- he prefers to remain anonymous -- has told NewsForge he was recently contacted by Microsoft and invited to a job interview. He accepted, and during the interview he asked the obvious question: Why was Microsoft interested in hiring someone with strong Linux skills? The reply was that Microsoft is working on an emulator that will allow Windows users to run Unix.

Considering that Microsoft already has an emulator that will do just that, it's not crystal clear exactly what the monopoly has in mind for Linux on its desktop and/or server products. Microsoft purchased its Virtual PC product from Connectix early last year.

Just prior to the first release of a Microsoft version of Virtual PC last November, Microsoft announced what apparently was a slightly different approach. eWeek's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reported being told that "the new version will no longer offer official support for BSD Unix, Linux, NetWare, or Solaris on Intel."

Why is Microsoft interviewing Linux developers? Are they needed to work on the Virtual PC product, or on Longhorn? I called Microsoft public relations -- actually, it was Waggoner Edstrom's Rapid Response Team, which handles MS public relations -- and put the developer's question to them.

The first response I received said "After speaking with my colleagues, I can confirm that Microsoft has no plans to port to Linux at this time." Since that was an answer to a question I hadn't asked, I asked again. The second response was unequivocal: "Unfortunately, we do not have further comment on your question."

Norwegian programmer Jon Lech Johansen has decrypted and published the key that Apple's wireless hi-fi bridge, Airport Express, uses to protect music streams. He's also released the source code to a small Windows command-line tool he calls JustePort. In essence his crack opens the door for other applications to broadcast music to your hi-fi over a home WLAN network using Express, rather than just iTunes 4.6. For users on Linux machines, or with WMA or OGG format files, this could be a boon, as iTunes supports neither format out of the box.

JusteForte is the third in a series of endeavors by the Mac-using Norwegian to enjoy Apple's services. Johansen has stressed that the tools simply restore rights that Apple and the recording industry giants removed when they devised iTunes Music Store. He has consistently warned citizens against accepting DRM music, as it obliges the user to enter into a contract in which the terms may change at any time.

Johansen co-authored the DeCSS program which circumvented the DVD encryption scheme. He was acquitted after two trials in Norway earlier this year.