Wisconsin libraries have received more than 105,000 CDs as part of a national settlement with the recording industry to settle a price-fixing lawsuit, but few are choices most listeners would opt for.

The selections are raising a few eyebrows and unlikely to get a lot of use. Among the several hundred CDs given to the Charles M. White Public Library were many duplicates, including 29 copies of Handel's Italian Cantatas and 21 copies of Mozart's Le Nozze Di Figaro.

Among the 592 CDs shipped to the Marshfield Public Library, there are 22 copies of Ricky Martin's "Sound Loaded," 20 copies of Samantha Mumba's "Gotta Tell You," 16 copies of "The Three Tenors in Concert," 12 copies of Georg Philipp Telemann's "String Concertos/Musica Antiqua Ksln-Goebel," and 12 copies of Mandy Moore's self-titled album.

Milwaukee Public Library received 1,235 copies of Whitney Houston's 1991 recording of "The Star-Spangled Banner," 188 copies of Michael Bolton's "Timeless," 375 of "Entertainment Weekly: The Greatest Hits 1971," and 104 copies of Will Smith's "Willennium," and nearly everything in between.

If intelligent life exists elsewhere in our galaxy, advances in computer processing power and radio telescope technology will ensure we detect their transmissions within two decades. That is the bold prediction from a leading light at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in Mountain View, California.

Shostak, whose calculations will be published in a forthcoming edition of the space science journal Acta Astronautica, first estimated the number of alien civilisations in our galaxy that might currently be broadcasting radio signals.

Shostak admits that there are myriad uncertainties surrounding his prediction, but he defends the basis on which he made it. ."I have made this prediction using the assumptions adopted by the SETI research community itself."

The chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary said Thursday that a ban on file-trading networks is urgently required but agreed to work with tech companies concerned that devices like Apple Computer's iPod would be imperiled.

Hatch added, however, that he welcomed comments from critics. "If you help us, we just might get it right," he said. "If you don't, we're going to do it. Something has to be done. There's no way to solve these problems so everyone's totally pleased."

The Induce Act "would chill innovation and drive investment in technology" overseas, said the letter, signed by CNET Networks, eBay, Google, Intel, MCI, TiVo, Verizon Communications, Sun Microsystems and Yahoo.

Critics say the bill would effectively outlaw peer-to-peer networks and prohibit the development of new technologies, including devices like the iPod. The Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act was introduced last month by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), head of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The legislation would hold a company liable that "intentionally induces" a person to infringe copyright.

It's the biggest threat to technology in 20 years, said Jeff Joseph, a spokesman for the Consumer Electronics Association. The organization's president will testify before the committee.

The judiciary committee will also hear testimony from Register of Copyrights Marybeth Peters and the heads of the Business Software Alliance and the Recording Industry Association of America. A representative from the IEEE-USA's intellectual-property committee and the director of NetCoalition will also testify.

"This bill really creates a huge risk that people won't bring new products to market because they will be afraid to be sued out of existence," said Mike Godwin, legal director of Public Knowledge, which is opposed to the bill and is submitting written testimony to the committee.

An Israeli technology company that makes popular software for downloading music over the Internet agreed Tuesday to pay $4.1 million to the recording industry for copyright infringement, a significant victory for music labels.

Bridgemar Services Ltd., formerly known as iMesh.com Ltd., agreed under a court-approved settlement to change its Internet service later this year to prevent consumers from illegally distributing music or downloading songs. The iMesh software has been downloaded more than 76 million times.

The settlement, reached in U.S. District Court in New York, represents one of the rare efforts by the recording industry to successfully sue technology companies producing software that allows Internet users to exchange pirated songs and other files, rather than suing Internet users individually.

"The constructive approach of iMesh stands in stark contrast to other file-sharing businesses who thumb their noses at Congress, continue to offload liability onto users and dupe America's kids into breaking the law," RIAA chief Mitch Bainwol said.

A row brewing on Google's Orkut communities about an invasion of Brazilians.

According to Reuters, the social networking site is apparently getting a little too full of people speaking Portuguese, which is what human beings speak in Brazil.

When a Canadian posted a message asking whether her community site on body piercing should be exclusive to people who speak English, the Brazilians dubbed her a xenophobe.

Some whinge that when the average Orkut user goes to look at community listings they will see a list populated with pretty much all Portuguese communities. He finds this frustrating since he thinks Orkut is not a Brazilian service.

In fact this is not quite true. According to Orkut, Brazilians dominate its membership roster and outnumber Americans. The site says it has more than 769,000 members, making it one of the largest on the Internet. About 23.5 per cent of the users are from the United States, while another 41.2 per cent are Brazilians. Americans are in a minority.

Increasingly, Web publishers, and in particular newspaper sites, are demanding that readers give up some of their personal information -- like e-mail addresses, gender and salaries -- in exchange for free access to their articles. The publishers say they need this information to make money from advertising.

BugMeNot.com is a site that generates login names and passwords for registration sites. The site is a boon to those who want to keep online anonymity or stamp out spam. According to the site's homepage, 14,000 websites have been "liberated" from registration bondage, and it's clear many people are doing whatever they can to avoid really logging in.

There's also Mailinator for those who want to register but don't want to use their real e-mail address. And there's spamgourmet for "eating" unwanted e-mails. There's also The New York Times link generator put together by an Illinois teen computer programmer, Aaron Swartz.

It's easy to dismiss Nigerian 419 advance fee fraudsters as a bunch of chancers who prey on the gullible and the greedy and occasionally get lucky. After all, a fool and his money are soon parted, and the victims of these scams have brought financial misfortune on themselves, isn't that right?

This is a rather sinister twist on 419, where instead of just duping the greedy and stupid, this actually will terrify some new web users, like my grandparents. Imagine this was within the first 100 emails you had ever seen...

Microsoft will pay upstart Linux seller Lindows $20 million to settle a long-running trademark dispute, according to a regulatory document filed Monday.

In exchange for the payment, Lindows--which recently renamed most of its products "Linspire" to work around European trademark suits--will give up the Lindows name and assign related Web domains to Microsoft, according to the registration statement Lindows filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Tom Burt, vice president and deputy general counsel for Microsoft, said in the statement that agreement meets Microsoft's goals for protecting the Windows name. "We are pleased that Lindows will now compete in the marketplace with a name distinctly its own," he said.

Time for another thorny legal question concerning this wonderful thing we know as hypertext and the web. Apparently, there's some video out there of well-known actress Cameron Diaz that she doesn't want people seeing (something involving stuff she did when she was young and would rather the world didn't know about).

However, the injunction went one step further, claiming, that the ruling applied to "all others having knowledge or notice of this order." So, along comes Nick Denton's set of bloggers, where the folks at Fleshbot, Defamer and Gawker all had a field day with the fact that this video existed, and proceeded to link to a site that sold the video, as well as posting a screen shot from the video. This quickly resulted in a fairly nasty cease and desist letter from Ms. Diaz' lawyers -- even though they did not host or sell the video themselves.

Like Barbara Streisand before her, it looks like Ms. Diaz is getting a quick lesson in how the internet works: if you try to ban something or take it down, it's very likely that it will only get much, much more attention.