A British journalist won a legal test case over the confidentiality of reporters' contacts Thursday, after judges ruled against a court order seeking all his notes for a biography of a former Islamist radical. Civil liberties campaigners had feared the so-called production order, obtained by the Greater Manchester Police under anti-terrorism laws, could undermine the future of UK journalism x0

Sweden has adopted legislation that will give military intelligence sweeping powers to eavesdrop on all crossborder e-mail and telephone communications. After heated debate and last-minute changes late Wednesday, lawmakers approved the bill, which has outraged some lawmakers and prompted protesters to hand out copies of George Orwell's novel 1984 outside Parliament. Lawmakers approved the bill in a 143-to-138 vote Wednesday. One lawmaker abstained. The bill will become law in January x0

Anyone who persists in illicit downloading of music or films will be barred from broadband access under a controversial new law that makes France a pioneer in combating internet piracy. Under a cross-industry agreement, ISPs must cut off access for up to a year for third-time offenders x0

Dell will charge customers up to $50 for factory-installed Windows XP on some PCs after Wednesday. Buyers of the low-priced Vostro line of desktops and notebooks will pay $20 to $50 more for Windows XP Professional installed as a downgrade from Windows Vista Business or Vista Ultimate than they would for Vista only x0

More than 1.6 million copies of Firefox 3 were downloaded from the Mozilla site in the first five hours. That eclipsed the downloads total for Firefox 2 on its first day. Mozilla said its open-source Firefox 3 browser has more than 15,000 improvements, including a smart location bar, malware protection, and faster performance x0

Scientists claim they have cured advanced skin cancer for the first time using the patient's own cells cloned outside the body. The 52-year-old man involved was free of melanoma two years after treatment x0

Online DVD retailer, EzyDVD, has salvaged an internet movie download service from the wreckage of failed start-up ReelTime Media. EzyDVD plans to use ReelTime's infrastructure to launch an online movie download service, EzyDownload in September after picking up the $5 million network for a few hundred thousand dollars last April x0

Four venture capital firms are betting internet startup LinkedIn is worth $US1 billion, highlighting the lofty hopes riding on online services that connect people with their friends, family and business associates. The 10-figure valuation is implied by a $US53 million investment being announced on Wednesday from Bain Capital Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners and Bessemer Venture Partner x0

We all know men hate to ask for directions. Apparently they loathe putting directions in computer code, too. Emma McGrattan, the senior vice-president of engineering for computer-database company Ingres-and one of Silicon Valley's highest-ranking female programmers-insists that men and women write code differently. Women are more considerate of those who will use the code later. They'll intersperse their code-those strings of instructions that result in nifty applications and programs-with helpful comments and directions, explaining why they wrote the lines the way they did and exactly how they did it. Men, on the other hand, have no such pretenses. Often, they try to obfuscate things in the code x0

Pressure is mounting on governments to resolve the internet address crisis amid fears the internet economy will stall as numbers run out in 2010-11. OECD telecommunications ministers, including Australia's Senator Stephen Conroy, are gathering in Seoul this week and have been warned that only 16 per cent of the currently used IP address space remains unallocated x0

eBay has unveiled plans to let outside software programs work inside the world's largest e-commerce site, joining a trend toward openness that fuelled the popularity of the social network website Facebook. At the online auction leader's annual conference for software developers in Chicago, eBay is laying out Project Echo, a plan to give independent developers a path to having their software featured within eBay's core site x0

Amazon, the online retailing giant with a fast-rising share of the consumer book market, has adopted the literary equivalent of a nuclear option for rebellious publishers who balk at its demands. In the latest in a series of disputes over the division of revenue from online sales, Amazon has disabled the buy now with 1 click icon on its British Web site for hundreds of books published by Hachette Livre UK x0

Symantec chief executive John Thompson has warned the Government against trying to regulate the internet by filtering content at ISP level. Mr Thompson said governments should think carefully about whether profit-driven companies should be regulators x0

A recent study on the music consumption habits of today's youth shows that most of them download music illegally. However, music is more popular than ever and 80 percent of the participants indicate that they would pay for a legal filesharing service, if only one was available x0

Using the HARPS instrument at the ESO La Silla Observatory, they have found a triple system of super-Earths around the star HD 40307. Looking at their entire sample studied with HARPS, the astronomers count a total of 45 candidate planets with a mass below 30 Earth masses and an orbital period shorter than 50 days. This implies that one solar-like star out of three harbours such planets x0

The key to coaxing cells to regenerate might be to make things a little rough for them. Thomas Webster, a bioengineer at Brown University, has been developing implantable materials with nanoscale textures to mimic the roughness of living tissues. Now, his team has found that cartilage cells can adhere to and grow more densely on a surface covered with carbon nanotubes, particularly when they are also exposed to electrical stimulation. Webster believes that surfaces incorporating carbon nanotubes, which are not only textured but are also electrically conductive, could be a promising strategy for designing cartilage implants x0

Most of the attention to the recent Google/Yahoo partnership has focused on the two companies' search advertising plans, but the deal has implications for instant messaging, too. Yahoo and Google have agreed to enable interoperability between their respective instant messaging services. So far, exactly what that means is anyone's guess. But the IM market could certainly benefit from a little more interoperability. Despite the fact that IM use is on the rise among home users and businesses alike, each separate IM network remains a walled garden, independent of all the others. Getting them to work together — similar to how e-mail works — would benefit everyone x0

Silicon Valley is experimenting with bacteria that have been genetically altered to provide renewable petroleum. For fermentation to take place you need raw material, or feedstock, as it is known in the biofuels industry. Anything will do as long as it can be broken down into sugars, with the byproduct ideally burnt to produce electricity to run the plant. The company is not interested in using corn as feedstock, given the much-publicised problems created by using food crops for fuel, such as the tortilla inflation that recently caused food riots in Mexico City. Instead, different types of agricultural waste will be used according to whatever makes sense for the local climate and economy: wheat straw in California, for example, or woodchips in the South x0

Jamming the right two pieces of plastic together creates a thin but strongly conducting channel along the junction that acts like a metal, say Dutch researchers. The discovery could lead to a whole new way of making electronics from non-metallic materials, and even new superconductors x0

Google is now offering searchers a way around one of the worst aspects of the web — Flash intro movies. All those web sites still living in 1998 when Flash intro movies were, uh, still a really bad idea, even then, now have a skip intro link beside their Google search result link — via webmonkey x0

Online auctioneer eBay says it will challenge the Australian competition watchdog's ruling to block a plan to force its users onto a PayPal-only payments system. In a statement issued this afternoon, eBay said it was disappointed with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission decision x0

Australian prisons are planning to block the use of mobile phones by inmates after the federal Government yesterday agreed to help remove a legislative ban on jamming devices x0

At the request of theatrical film makers, the FCC on Friday quietly launched a proceeding on whether to let video program distributors remotely block consumers from recording recently released movies on their DVRs. The technology that does this is called Selectable Output Control, but the FCC restricts its use. The MPAA wants a waiver on that restriction in the case of high-definition movies broadcast prior to their release as DVDs x0

Most USB 2.0 flash drives look the same, but that doesn't mean they perform the same. Differences in the type of memory and, to a lesser extent, the type of I/O controllers used by USB drives can make one device perform two or three times faster and last (theoretically, at least) 10 times longer than another, even if both sport the USB 2.0 logo. Unfortunately for the average user, there are no accepted industry standards or certifications to judge what's inside a USB 2.0 flash drive on a store shelf. Without checking reviews or running benchmarks, the only rule of thumb is that the more expensive drives (and those which post performance numbers on the packaging) will tend to be the fastest and, perhaps, last the longest x0

An appeals court has overturned a lower court ruling and has now said that mod chips do not violate copyright laws. The case involved a mod chip seller, who imported mod chips for the XBox from Hong Kong and would sell the chips or mod the Xbox's himself. He was charged with copyright infringement and found guilty by a lower court. The appeals court has dismissed all charges, however — via Slashdot x0

A hacker who hijacked hundreds of PCs to create a botnet has been sentenced to 41 months in jail by a US court. Robert Matthew Bentley of Panama City, Florida also faces $65,000 (£33,000) in fines and will be under supervision for three years on his release. The hijacked PCs were used to attack other computers and install programs that plagued users with pop-up adverts. He was caught following an investigation by the Metropolitan Police's Computer Crime Unit x0

Canada, one of the shining lights in the copyright and intellectual property world, has a shadow approaching that may dim that for all. The name of that shadow? Bill c-61, which was formally introduced by Industry minister Jim Prentice an hour or two ago. One of the highlights is the abolition of court's flexibility in statutory damages, fixing it at CA$500 x0

An advanced satellite that will improve greatly the ability of UK military forces to communicate around the globe has been launched into space. The Skynet 5C platform rode into orbit atop an Ariane 5 rocket from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana. It joins the 5A and 5B satellites lofted successfully last year and which are already handling secure traffic for UK forces in Iraq and Afghanistan x0