It's not just Adobe that has implemented the blocking of currency note scanning, it appears.

A reader tells the INQUIRER that, curious about the restriction on copying banknotes, he attempted to scan in a £5 note using a TWAIN source and Paint Shop Pro version 8.

This suggests that many of the most recent updates to software have implemented a voluntary restriction on scanning money.

Hip-hop musician Sir Mix-A-Lot has made his new CD Daddy's Home available for download using Weed technology. Weed is a relatively new file sharing system based principles of shareware and referrals. You download the DRM WMA weed file and can listen to it 3 times on any computer before deciding to purchase it or not. If you do purchase it (at a price set by the artist), you will receive referral fees (20%, 10%, 5%) for the next 3 generations of people that purchase your copy. The artist always receives 50% of the price. Certainly an interesting approach to distributing music in a world of p2p and iTunes.

Though no guns were brandished, the bust from a distance looked like classic LAPD, DEA or FBI work, right down to the black "raid" vests the unit members wore. The fact that their yellow stenciled lettering read "RIAA" instead of something from an official law-enforcement agency was lost on 55-year-old parking-lot attendant Ceasar Borrayo.

"They said they were police from the recording industry or something, and next time they’d take me away in handcuffs," he said through an interpreter. Borrayo says he has no way of knowing if the records, with titles like Como Te Extraño Vol. IV — Musica de los 70’s y 80’s, are illegal, but he thought better of arguing the point.

But if an anti-piracy team crossed the line between looking like cops and implying or telling vendors that they are cops, the Los Angeles Police Department would take a pretty dim view, said LAPD spokesman Jason Lee.

"But it doesn’t really matter what your status is. If that person feels he was wrongly interrogated or under the false pretense that these people were cops, they should contact their local police station as a victim. We’ll sort it all out."

Two detailed reports have thrown serious doubt on whether Iraq had any nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, or even the means to make them, at the time when the US cited this as its major reason for going to war.

The first report was released on Thursday by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think-tank in Washington DC. It cites intelligence information and material uncovered by weapons inspectors to conclude that while Iraq still wanted such weapons, it did not have any, or any means to produce them, in 2002. The one exception was continuing illicit work on long-range missiles.

The second report, in the Washington Post, cites new documentary evidence and testimony from Iraqi scientists showing the same thing. However, this evidence also indicates that Saddam Hussein decided not to prove Iraq's lack of weapons of mass destruction to inspectors, as the UN demanded.

A mother's enquiry about buying Microsoft Flight Simulator for her ten-year-old son prompted a night-time visit to her home from a state trooper.

Julie Olearcek, a USAF Reserve pilot made the enquiry at a Staples store in Massachusetts, home to an earlier bout of hysteria, during the Salem witch trials.

So alarmed was the Staples clerk at the prospect of the ten year old learning to fly, that he informed the police, the Greenfield Recorder reports. The authorities moved into action, leaving nothing to chance. A few days later, Olearcek was alarmed to discover a state trooper flashing a torch into to her home through a sliding glass door at 8:30 pm on a rainy night.

A visitor to the Adobe Photoshop-for-Windows Forum (registration required to post, can log in as guest) has described a curious 'feature' with Photoshop 8 (also known as 'CS'). Seems this latest version of Adobe's flagship product has the built-in ability to detect that an image is of American currency. Something has been built into Photoshop's core coding that can detect something in images of currency and will prevent the user from opening the file. Apparently it will also do this with Euro notes; info on other currency is pending. According to other online reports, the latest version of Paint Shop Pro has similar restrictions, also known about since late last year.

On its face, that expression is neither offensive nor disturbing. "Hey!" is an informal way to say hello. It indicates kindness, simple courtesy and an economy of words.

But a 13-year-old boy at Richland Middle School in Richland Hills was suspended for three days in December because he sent that simple message to every computer in the school using an archaic form of instant messaging. The software was created years ago in the old disk operating system used in earlier versions of personal computers.

Beverly Sweeney, a computer teacher and campus computer liaison with the district, entered Carl's computer class and quickly figured out where the message originated and who sent it.

Carl did not send out a dirty word. Carl received no warning. No written policy prohibits what he did. Missing three days of school for something so minor is overkill.

"Hacking into a system should be highest on the list of tampering violations. I believe the other students are now aware that the district takes this seriously and will not tolerate such misuse of our equipment."

We've written before about how civil liberties groups are suing the attorney general for a law that forces ISPs to block access to sites they decide have child pornography on them. Today, the case began, and a fairly compelling argument was made. The problem with this case is that people hear "child porn" and immediately decide that anything that stops it is good. Stopping child porn obviously is a good and noble goal - but this law doesn't do that and has a ridiculous amount of collateral damage. What the law should be, is that if a site is discovered with child porn, the site itself should be taken offline and those responsible should be tried for breaking the law. Instead, what this law does is force ISPs in Pennsylvania to block access to those sites. In other words, the sites remain online - but people using certain ISPs are blocked from accessing those sites. In cases where the site is on a shared server, every other site on that server are also blocked - even if they have nothing to do with the child porn.

Microsoft has begun the new year with a Linux knocking publicity campaign under the slogan "Get the Facts." A series of advertisements is due to run for six months in major IT publications, and will direct readers to the company's landing page for the campaign.

There you will find a long list of what we presume are expensively produced case studies, and a substantially shorter list of "independent analyses" which "prove" a variety of things (e.g. Windows cheaper than Websphere, .NET cheaper than J2EE/Linux), but which have already been widely circulated, and frequently fairly widely doubted.

And really, Microsoft's problem is not that people think Linux is cheaper than Windows (apart from them being well aware that Linux is free and Windows isn't, that is), but that Microsoft's customers are in general pretty convinced that Windows is more expensive than it should be.

As expected, spammers don't seem too impressed with the US Can Spam Act, which was enforced on January 1. Nor have they changed their tactics.

However, Spamhaus plans to fight back. Yesterday, it released its Exploits Block List (XBL), a real-time DNS-based database of IP addresses of illegal 3rd party exploits, including open proxies, worms/viruses with built-in spam engines, and other types of trojan-horse exploits utilized by spammers. This list is designed to sit alongside the Spamhaus Block List (SBL), which blocks incoming spam from direct spam sources. The combination of SBL and XBL enables ISPs to safely reject a high volume of incoming spam outright, Spamhaus says.