Department officials say they will send "ripples" through an industry that has proliferated on the Internet and grown into an estimated $10 billion-a-year colossus profiting Fortune 500 corporations such as Comcast, which offers hard-core movies on a pay-per-view channel.

It is unclear, though, just how the American public and major corporations that make money from pornography will accept the perspective of the Justice Department and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

In a speech in 2002, Ashcroft made it clear that the Justice Department intends to try. He said pornography "invades our homes persistently though the mail, phone, VCR, cable TV and the Internet," and has "strewn its victims from coast to coast."

Ashcroft, a religious man who does not drink alcohol or caffeine, smoke, gamble or dance, and has fought unrelenting criticism that he has trod roughshod on civil liberties in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, is taking on the porn industry at a time when many experts say Americans are wary about government intrusion into their lives.

The Bush administration is eager to shore up its conservative base with this issue. Ashcroft held private meetings with conservative groups a year and a half ago to assure them that anti-porn efforts are a priority.

PlayFair is an integrated utility that removes the DRM from AAC music files protected by Apple's FairPlay encryption. Information is limited, but the source code is on SourceForge.net and it appears to actually remove the encryption itself and not simply hijack the QuickTime audio stream as earlier methods did. The cracking operation can only be done on songs the user has already has valid licenses for and requires either an iPod or a windows computer for key recovery.

Rafe Needleman is debating whether or not he likes the so-called "embedded" text advertising from Vibrant Media's IntelliTxt. It isn't all that new, but the concept is gaining sites that will use it. In fact, InfoSync, which is the link in the post beneath this one has used a similar advertising method for a while now. Basically, it underlines certain words within the text of the page, and if you mouse over the word, it pops up a little advertisement. Rafe points out that, as a writer, he doesn't necessarily like his text to be riddled with advertising that way. However, my complaint is from the standpoint of a reader. I don't know if I'm different that most surfers, but I tend to use my mouse cursor as a sort of "pointer" to help me keep track of what I'm reading. When I read sites that have this kind of advertising, it becomes very difficult to read, because just as I get somewhere, a pop-up blocks what I'm reading. It's quite annoying. At the same time, it also makes it much more difficult to pick out actual links. Yet another bad idea that tries to make online advertising intrusive rather than fitting it into what users are looking for. Trust me, the last thing I want to do is to be interrupted in the middle of a sentence I'm reading.

Federal Heritage Minister Helene Scherrer yesterday promised to plug the hole in Canadian law allowing people to legally download songs off the Internet without paying. Scherrer's announcement won loud applause from an audience of Canadian music industry types at yesterday's Juno Awards opening ceremony at City Hall, which also featured a staged "surprise" appearance from Prime Minister Paul Martin.

"As minister of Canadian Heritage, I will, as quickly as possible, make changes to our copyright law," said Scherrer yesterday.

Justice Konrad von Finckenstein ruled that the Canadian Recording Industry Association didn't prove file-sharing constituted copyright violation - and artists and producers have no legal right to sue those who swap files without paying.

The court decision inspired panic in the Canadian music industry; industry spokesmen were predicting the collapse of copyright control would cause severe financial hardship for people making their living from music.

A US requirement for visitors to be fingerprinted and photographed is being expanded to include citizens from America's closest allies.

The move will affect visitors from 27 countries - including the UK, Japan and Australia - whose nationals are able to visit the US without a visa.

The US-Visit (US Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology) security system is meant to identify travellers who have violated immigration controls, have criminal records or belong to groups listed as terrorist organisations by the US.

Citizens from the 27 countries will still be allowed to visit the US without a visa, although they will now have to be fingerprinted and photographed before they enter.

Asked whether the data on visitors would be kept, Mr Hutchinson said it would - in part to "facilitate travel" for frequent visitors to the US.

Canadian record labels had asked the court for authorization to identify 29 alleged file swappers in that country, in preparation for suing them for copyright infringement, much as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has sued more than 1500 people in America.

But the judge denied that request. In a far-ranging decision, the court further found that both downloading music and putting it in a shared folder available to other people online appeared to be legal in Canada.

In his ruling Wednesday, Judge Konrad von Finckenstein rejected that request on several grounds. In part, he said the recording industry had not presented evidence linking the alleged file swapping to the ISP subscribers that was strong enough to warrant breaking through critical privacy protections.

In that recent case, the Supreme Court ruled that libraries were not "authorizing" copyright infringement simply by putting photocopy machines near books. The libraries were justified in assuming that their customers were using the copiers in a legal manner, the high court ruled.

A US BIO battery company has managed to find $400,000 seed finance for its idea of powering a high tech battery on beer and vodka.

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch a university student looked no further than the bottom of his glass to develop a cell phone or laptop computer fuel cell using vodka, beer or any other ethanol-based substance.

St. Louis University student Nick Aker and an assistant chemistry professor Shelley Minteer developed the biofuel cell in class. Akers said that once the biofuel cell is charged, it could run a cell phone for a week or a laptop all day before needing another drink.

BioGenerator President and Chief Executive Pat Snider who has stumped up $400,000 seed finance said he expects a swift half return on the investment. "This is not going to be something that is going to take 10 years," he said.

A study of file-sharing's effects on music sales says online music trading appears to have had little part in the recent slide in CD sales.

"We find that file sharing has only had a limited effect on record sales," the study's authors wrote. "While downloads occur on a vast scale, most users are likely individuals who would not have bought the album even in the absence of file sharing."

Even in the most pessimistic version of their model, they found that it would take about 5,000 downloads to displace sales of just one physical CD, the authors wrote. Despite the huge scale of downloading worldwide, that would be only a tiny contribution to the overall slide in album sales over the past several years, they said.

The Recording Industry Association of America was quick to dismiss the results as inconsistent with earlier findings.

Hardware costs will fall sharply within a decade to the point where widespread computing with speech and handwriting won't be limited by expensive technology, Bill Gates said Monday.

"Ten years out, in terms of actual hardware costs you can almost think of hardware as being free -- I'm not saying it will be absolutely free -- but in terms of the power of the servers, the power of the network will not be a limiting factor," Microsoft's chairman said.

The world's largest software maker is betting that advances in hardware and computing will make it possible for computers to interact with people using speech and that computers which can recognize handwriting will become as ubiquitous as Microsoft's Windows operating system, which runs on more than 90 percent of the world's personal computers.

Gates also said advances in programming will allow software developers to create applications in less time by using visual representations of the inner workings of software rather than writing lines of programing code.

Clicking on a link for a file transfer protocol site belonging to voting machine maker Diebold Election Systems, Harris found about 40,000 unprotected computer files. They included source code for Diebold's AccuVote touch-screen voting machine, program files for its Global Election Management System tabulation software, a Texas voter-registration list with voters' names and addresses, and what appeared to be live vote data from 57 precincts in a 2002 California primary election.

Harris discovered that she could enter the vote database using Microsoft Access -- a standard program often bundled with Microsoft Office -- and change votes without leaving a trace. Diebold hadn't password-protected the file or secured the audit log, so anyone with access to the tabulation program during an election -- Diebold employees, election staff or even hackers if the county server were connected to a phone line -- could change votes and alter the log to erase the evidence.

In addition to glitches, there are concerns about the people behind the machines. A few voting company employees have been implicated in bribery or kickback schemes involving election officials. And there are concerns about the partisan loyalties of voting executives -- Diebold's chief executive, for example, is a top fund-raiser for President Bush.