The U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday lashed out at Internet telephony, saying the fast-growing technology could foster "drug trafficking, organized crime and terrorism."

Laura Parsky, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department, told a Senate panel that law enforcement bodies are deeply worried about their ability to wiretap conversations that use voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services.

Police been able to conduct Internet wiretaps for at least a decade, and the FBI's controversial Carnivore (also called DCS1000) system was designed to facilitate online surveillance. But Parsky said that discerning "what the specific (VoIP) protocols are and how law enforcement can extract just the specific information" are difficult problems that could be solved by Congress requiring all VoIP providers to build in backdoors for police surveillance.

Despite the best efforts of the film industry, a copy of the latest Wizard flick Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is circulating on the Internet.

The movie moguls took unusual steps to prevent the pirating of this film including giving ushers army style night vision sniper sites to pick out people filming in the darkened cinemas.

However it is clear that the industry's efforts were wasted, as an AVI copy has now appeared on several pirate sites seen by the INQ.

INQ sources in the pirate trade say that the print came from the US, It was probably made by someone who actually had access to a cinema projection booth and filmed it when there was no-one around.

Antivirus companies on Monday raced to decipher the workings of the first worm to target smart phones, while saying that the current incarnation of the program poses little threat.

The worm program, dubbed Cabir by Russian antivirus company Kaspersky, apparently uses the Bluetooth short-range wireless feature of smart phones that run the Symbian operating system to detect other Symbian phones, and then transfers itself to the new host as a package file. While able to replicate the spread of the virus in research settings, antivirus companies have not found any evidence that the program is infecting smart phones outside of those limited test cases.

After infecting a phone, the program creates an application package file containing the worm and passes it to another phone over an automatically established Bluetooth connection, according to antivirus companies. The phone that received the program installs the application, thus infecting itself.

The Washington Post is reporting that Comcast, the nation's largest broadband ISP, has started blocking port 25 to reduce Spam. Jeanne Russo said Comcast is not blocking port 25 for all its users because it does not want to remove the option for legitimate customers who process their own e-mail. So the company is monitoring traffic and picking out machines that look suspicious. By blocking port 25, they say they cut Spam by 20% last week." ZDnet has another article, with a nice statistic: Comcast generates 800 million email messages/day, but only about 100 million of those are sent through Comcast's SMTP servers.

The Universe began not with a bang but with a low moan, building into a roar that gave way to a deafening hiss. And those sounds gave birth to the first stars.

Cosmologists do not usually think in terms of sound, but this aural picture is a good way to think about the Universe's beginnings, says astronomer Mark Whittle of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Whittle has reconstructed the cosmic cacophony from data teased out over the past couple of years from the high-resolution mapping by NASA's WMAP spacecraft of the cosmic microwave background radiation, the afterglow of the hot early Universe.

For those worried that you cannot have sounds in space, that is true today, but it was not so in the Universe's infancy. For perhaps its first million years, the Universe was small and dense enough that sound waves could indeed travel through it - so efficiently, in fact, that they moved at about half the speed of light.

Digital radio broadcasts that bring CD-quality sound to the airwaves could lead to unfettered song copying if protections are not put in place, a recording-industry trade group warned on Friday.

RIAA officials said digital-radio players could soon allow listeners to record certain songs automatically when they are broadcast, allowing them to build a free library of music they otherwise might pay for and distribute it to millions of others over the Internet.

XM Satellite Radio Holdings and Sirius Satellite Radio, which broadcast digital signals by satellite, do not pose the same risk because those companies would be hurt by song copying and thus have an incentive to limit it, RIAA officials said.

Let's get the obvious out of the way first. This latest Vaio from Sony is, without a shadow of a doubt, the coolest notebook computer ever. It's that simple. This is the kind of product that just stops people in their tracks when they see it. Pull this out of your bag in an aiport departure lounge, and your fellow passengers will turn green with envy, and shamefully hide their own big and heavy notebooks under the nearest chair, writes Riyad Emeran.

At it's shallowest point the X505VP is only 1.1cm high when closed, while at the other end it's still a svelte 2.1cm high. But it's not just the height that's impressive, the full dimensions are 25.6 x 20.8 x 1.1-2.1cm and the weight is an unbelievable 822g. In reality, the Vaio X505VP is smaller and lighter than, well, than a notebook. And when I say notebook I mean a pad with pages of paper in it. I never thought it would be possible, but you can now carry a notebook computer around with you that is actually more convenient than a pad of paper and a pen. Of course the pad of paper won't run out of battery power, but you'd be hard pushed to pick up your emails with it.

An adware purveyor has apparently used two previously unknown security flaws in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser to install a toolbar on victims' computers that triggers pop-up ads, researchers said this week.

Microsoft learned of the issue when a security researcher posted an analysis of the problem to the Full Disclosure security mailing list Monday. The software giant has already contacted the FBI and is in the "early stages" of building the case, Toulouse said. The company is considering creating a patch quickly and releasing it as soon as possible, rather than waiting for its usual monthly update.

The flaws are apparently being used to install the I-Lookup search bar, an adware toolbar that is added to IE's other toolbars. The adware changes the Internet Explorer home page, connects to one of six advertising sites and frequently displays pop-ups--mainly pornographic ads, according to an adware advisory on antivirus company Symantec's Web site.

The number of music tracks available through file-sharing networks has fallen 27 per cent compared to the same period last year.

The IFPI claims the fall in numbers is due to the success of legal download sites like Napster and increasing public understanding of the legal position of file-sharing. The IFPI sues individual file sharers and has taken action against 200 people in Denmark, Germany and Italy. It is taking legal action against another 24 people in Denmark. It claims seven out of ten Europeans now know file-sharing is illegal.

Canadian researchers IT Innovations and Concepts point out that some users are blocking access to shared files because of fears of legal action. ITIC also ask how legal download sites, which they estimate as making up 0.1 per cent of illegal downloads, could absorb nearly a third of files. They estimate that the number of file sharers fell 3 per cent but that would not account for a 27 per cent fall in file numbers.

U.S. Patent No. 6,748,582, granted and assigned Tuesday to Microsoft, covers the use of a "task list" in a software development environment.

The patented technology essentially integrates certain comments left in the source code of an application under development with an accompanying checklist. Leave a "TODO" comment in the source code, and an authoring application automatically creates an item in the task list. Check an item off on the task list, and the corresponding source code comment is changed.

While the new patent is specific enough to software development that vacationers penning "what to pack" lists don't have to worry, it fits with Microsoft's ongoing efforts to enlarge its patent portfolio.