Controversial director Michael Moore has said film studio Disney is refusing to release his new documentary, which heavily criticises President Bush.

But Disney has "officially decided to prohibit" Miramax from distributing the film, the director said on his website.

Fahrenheit 911 links Mr Bush with powerful families in Saudi Arabia, including that of Osama Bin Laden, and attacks his actions before and after 11 September.

Disney bought Miramax 10 years ago but retained the rights to block films it deemed against its interests, such as adult-rated films.

"But there's nothing they can do about it now because it's done, it's awesome, and if I have anything to say about it, you'll see it this summer - because, after all, it is a free country."

But Zenia Mucha, a Disney spokesman, said: "We advised both [Moore's] agent and Miramax in May of 2003 that the film would not be distributed. That decision stands."

President George W Bush has denounced the mistreatment of Iraqi inmates by US soldiers as "abhorrent".

He rejected comparisons of the US treatment of detainees in Abu Ghraib prison to the practices under the Saddam Hussein regime, when the jail became notorious for the torture carried out there.

President Bush was not asked to apologise, nor did he offer an apology during either 10-minute interview.

US military officials say there have been 25 deaths of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan since December 2002, two of which have been classified as murder.

Major General Geoffrey Miller, the new US military chief of prisons in Iraq, said some interrogation techniques used on Iraqi inmates would be halted and others toned down as a result of the scandal.

A web-proxy service set up by the US government's International Broadcasting Bureau to enable websurfers in Iran to evade censorship is itself massively censoring what they can see.

"This simply looks at the domain name", says Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard Law School, a coauthor of the report, and filters out any that contain words on a banned list.

One banned word is "ass", which blocks some pornography sites but also blocks the sites "usembassy.state.gov" and "www.grass-roots.org", says the report. Other words include "breast", "bush", "gay", "hot", "my", "old", "pic", "soft", "teen", "trans" and "tv". "They might as well filter every fifth website," says Zittrain.

Lance Cottrell of Anonymizer estimates that dropping the filter entirely would around double the amount of traffic from Iran, increasing costs. "The reason it was put in wasn't a prudish impulse but directly to manage costs," he says.

But Zittrain is unconvinced by these arguments. "It should be a service that grants access as if one were sitting in the US," he says. "That's giving them a taste of America."

Last month we wrote about how the music industry was, inexplicably, looking to (a) raise prices on digital downloads and (b) force people to buy a bad song to get a good song. They clearly have no clue that they're basically killing the one, very minor, success they've had in the world of digital downloads. Now, even folks in mainstream magazines like Newsweek are screaming about how the labels just don't get it. Steven Levy takes a look at a number of downloadable albums that cost more than their CDs, while giving the user less (one of the CDs comes with a DVD as well). He also can't believe that the industry hasn't pushed to make downloadable songs play on a variety of devices, as that would encourage more people to buy. However, the folks who run the labels don't get it. They only look at digital downloads and see piracy. They are blind to the idea that it might be an opportunity, and thus they have no real reason to come up with reasons to encourage it. Of course, all this really does is push end-users to seek less than legal alternatives.

A new type of MP3 format being released in the next few months of 2004 will benefit audio enthusiasts with superb digital surround sound 5.1 playback, but will disturb the peer-to-peer file traders. Current MP3 files only use two channels, the "Super MP3", as I call it, will support four channel audio from a down-mixed 5.1 surround sound source.

Fraunhofer Institute, originator of the MP3, will add the Dubbed Light Weight Digital Rights Management (LWDRM) code to all new MP3 files. If the owner who originally purchased the rights to that MP3 file publishes it online in a shared environment, the file will display the original owners digital signature, thus allowing the individuals to be immediately identified.

This new trackable, un-sharable "Super MP3" may be an attempt by the Fraunhofer Institute to make amends with the disgruntled music industry.

A year ago, a group of spammers anonymously teamed up with a lawyer to sue a bunch of anti-spam groups. After those anti-spam groups fought back, the spammers eventually dropped their case. However, now we've got a similar situation. Scott Richter, the well known spammer behind OptInRealBig, is now suing IronPort, the folks who bought SpamCop last year. He's asking for $1 million in damages, saying that SpamCop has damaged his reputation. Has he given any thought to the idea that sending spam may have damaged his reputation? Among the many charges filed against SpamCop, Richter included Negligent Interference with Prospective Economic Advantage, Unfair Competition and Interference with Contractual Relationship.

According to Merijn Bellekom, who has been tracking CWS and its many variants -- more than two dozen since CWS first appeared last summer -- CWS is "the most complex, invisible and devious hijacker" ever programmed.

CWS-infected computers are often plagued with a constant barrage of pornography pop-up ads. A hundred or more bookmarks, some for extremely hard-core pornography websites, are often added by CWS to Internet Explorer's Favorites folder.

Almost all versions of CWS significantly slow the performance of infected computers, and some can cause the system to freeze, crash or randomly reboot. CWS also collects and transfers personal information from the infected PC. A few versions of CWS can add websites to Internet Explorer's "trusted sites" zone, which allows those websites to install new programs on the infected PC without the computer owner's knowledge or permission. Several CWS variants are capable of automatically self-updating their programming code.

A few versions of CWS block a user's access to more than two dozen websites that offer advice on how to detect and delete spyware. Some CWS versions also disable firewall programs.

Yesterday, Apple released iTunes 4.5, which deliberately broke the 4.2 authentication scheme, which had been successfully reverse-engineered. However, crazney has been at it again, and within 24 hours of downloading iTunes 4.5, has broken the new scheme, and added more features to this library along the way. If you want to incorporate iTMS support in your program, give libopendaap a go!

Following a recent speech at MIT on Movies in the Digital Age (streaming audio available), MPAA front man Jack Valenti sat down for a revealing interview with The Tech, MIT's student newspaper. In this entertaining read, Keith J. Winstein grills Valenti on fair use and the right to play DVDs under GNU/Linux. My favorite part is when Winstein shows a dumbfounded Valenti a six-line DVD descrambler he's designed, to which Valenti responds with language inappropriate for the Slashdot homepage. Throughout the interview, Valenti demonstrates his ignorance and misunderstanding of fair use.

Security experts are getting increasingly cross that Microsoft is not patching up holes in its software quick enough.

A spokesVole rushed to defend its patchy patch operation. He said that it was due to the large number of versions of software, the number of languages involved and the number of applications which had to remain unaffected by the patching.

But the Herald quoted Bulgarian security researcher Georgi Guninski as saying that excuse was 'very lame' and claimed that showed Microsoft is not really up to the job.

Other security researchers pointed out those languages sit on top of the GUI and have little to do with how Windows works at the 'patched' level of the operating system.

It was like a car manufacturer saying it cannot fix a problem with the tyres because the vehicle comes in lots of different colours, said one expert.