Every now and then you come across these news items that make just too much sense to be true. Earlier this year, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry threatened Norway's largest ISP, Telenor: block access to The Pirate Bay within 14 days, or face legal action. Telenor refused to comply - so it went to court. In what can only be seen as a major victory, the judge sided with Telenor.

Geeks.com, a popular shop for computer parts and mp3 players sent us over the second generation iPod Touch 8 GB for a review. Check in for more!

"The Moblin project steering committee today announces the project release of Moblin v2.1 for Intel Atom processor-based netbooks and nettops. This project release includes the broadest feature additions, customer requested improvements, and overall polish to date. With this community release you will see significant feature additions and improvements including enhanced browser functionality and plug-in support, UI enhancements, support for 3G data connections, Bluetooth device management, input method support for localized languages, integrated application installer for the Moblin Garage, performance and stability improvements, and additional overall help and documentation."

"There is a discussion at osnews.com about a simple question: "Should ZFS Have a fsck Tool?". The answer is simple: No. I could stop now, as this answer is pretty obvious when you work a while with ZFS, but i want to explain my position. And i want to ask a different question at the end."

"For weeks, the major governing institutions of the European Union have been locked in a battle over three-strikes laws, Internet disconnections, and the appropriate role of judges in the process. Just after midnight last night, the deadlock was broken and all parties agreed to a new 'Internet freedom provision' that reinforces the presumption of innocence, the right to privacy, and the right to judicial review under any Internet sanctions."

Click-to-Run is a new technology Microsoft are introducing to allow you to test out Office 2010 quickly and easily, by literally streaming the app to your computer from the Internet into a virtualised space.

As we all know, Mac OS X has support for what is called 'fat binaries'. These are binaries that can carry code for for instance multiple architectures - in the case of the Mac, PowerPC and x86. Ryan Gordon was working on an implementation of fat binaries for Linux - but due to the conduct of the Linux maintainers, Gordon has halted the effort.

We already had the news about Psystar's Rebel EFI possibly including open source code, but now we have another story which doesn't really seem to bode well for the small Florida clone maker. Gizmodo has a story on an interesting customer experience.

Computers are taking on ever more important roles in our daily lives. They used to be simple tools to get simple things done - work-related, mostly, maybe a few simple games, and that was it. However, over time, they have become the central hubs for all sorts of data - including precious data. For his Master of Fine Arts thesis project, Zach Gage illustrated just how important our computer data has become.

"Researchers say they've uncovered a flaw in the secure sockets layer protocol that allows attackers to inject text into encrypted traffic passing between two endpoints. The vulnerability in the transport layer security protocol allows man-in-the-middle attackers to surreptitiously introduce text at the beginning of an SSL session, said Marsh Ray, a security researcher who discovered the bug. A typical SSL transaction may be broken into multiple sessions, providing the attacker ample opportunity to sneak password resets and other commands into communications believed to be cryptographically authenticated. Practical attacks have been demonstrated against both the Apache and Microsoft IIS webservers communicating with a variety of client applications. A consortium of some of the world's biggest technology companies have been meeting since late September to hash out a new industry standard that will fix the flaw. A draft is expected to be submitted on Thursday to the Internet Engineering Task Force."

"I have been asked 'Why choose OpenVMS?' It is a question worth asking. While the precise answer depends upon the context, the overall answer is: 'OpenVMS provides a robust platform and framework for constructing and operating software.' The benefits of OpenVMS accrue throughout the system lifecycle; not merely during development. Testing, production, enhancement, and other phases of the system lifecycle all benefit. Costs and risks are reduced over the system lifetime."

When talking about the webOS, one of the main complaints is often that the operating system feels sluggish, especially considering the Pre has the same hardware as the iPhone 3GS. At a webOS Developer Event in London, Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer (the Mozilla guys who joined Palm) talked about why this is the case, and hinted that it will be fixed sooner rather than later. They also addressed The One Question: will Palm ever open source the webOS?

"Parallels' annual update to its eponymous virtual machine software is out today, looking a bit smarter, and promising to be even more seamless than before. A new Coherence mode sees Windows applications skinned with a Mac-like scheme. Dialogues look like Windows dialogues, and there's easier keyboard mapping - so your Windows app can use Apple-C/X/V to cut and paste, rather than Ctrl-C/X/V."

"Google makes its Google Wave Federation Protocol available to let would-be Wave providers build their own Wave servers and get them communicating with other Wave servers, similar to the way e-mail servers talk to one another. This federation would ideally pave the way to making Wave ubiquitous, making it more available for future users. But given the learning curve stumping early users of Wave, how many programmers will want to build their own Wave servers? That remains to be seen."