A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday (15 June) that DirecTV cannot sue individuals for merely possessing technology useful for illegally intercepting the company's satellite signal, in the first significant legal victory for critics of DirecTV's aggressive anti-piracy campaign.

It was five years ago today...Who can forget those heady pre-millennium days when - faced with computer meltdown followed by global apocalypse and nuclear winter - millions of panic-striken, hysterical people began to stockpile sugar, flour and toilet paper "in preparation for the Y2K menace"?

UK games publishing giant Eidos this morning scaled back its 2004 earnings forecast as it admitted that it had put back the release of its upcoming Vietnam War game, Shellshock: 'Nam 67, to September.

Sprint is culling 1,100 jobs in response to being squeezed by the "highly competitive" long distance market.

Revenues from mobile voice calls have topped out, and data will drive all revenue growth in the sector to 2008, says the Yankee Group.

Five major UK newspapers are all looking to hop onto the digital music download bandwagon this year.

ExclusiveUK high street music retailer HMV has begun to sell Apple's iPod portable music player via its website.

DVD duplication software maker 321 Studios has admitted that it is considering going bankrupt in order to fend off lawsuits from the music, movie and games industries.

Fujitsu Software's head of application integration middleware, Robert Sepanloo, is targeting $100m revenue from the business in Europe and the US by 2006. It may be one of the best examples of stealth marketing the industry has seen, as despite Fujitsu Software being relatively unknown in Europe and the US, it has annual sales of $2bn and over 4,000 engineers worldwide.

Spam King Scott Richter's plans to launch a global clothing line under the "Spam King" and "SK" brands have come apart at the seams.

The UK's two telecoms trade unions have resolutely rejected any suggestion that BT should be broken up.

The city council of Munich yesterday decided to go ahead with its planned migration from proprietary to open source applications. Although financial and technical problems have dogged Project LiMux, Munich's Rathaus (City Hall) will now migrate 16,000 desktop PCs to the Linux operating system.

Aftershocks from the falling-out between RISC OS 4 owner Castle Technology and the operating system's developer and provider, RISCOS, are shaking other players in the Acorn ecosystem.

It may not be daring as the attempted heist of the Millennium Star diamond from the Millennium Dome - an audacious Sweeney-style blag involving JCB, speedboat and nail gun - but at least the wags who lifted two PCs from Asia Securitex 2004 in Hong Kong appear to have got away with it.

The much-hyped tablet PC has enjoyed only limited success so far due to high prices and IT managers who are not willing to take a risk on the devices. That's according to a new report from In-Stat/MDR, which said that tablet PCs have only found homes in certain vertical markets such as healthcare, real estate and insurance. In other sectors, the devices have not sold well, the report indicated.

A UK National Audit Office report has concluded that the Home Office contrived to grant more than 7,000 visas incorrectly, overruling Visa Agency staff who thought the applications should have been rejected. The visas represented more than 90 per cent of applications made locally in Bulgaria and Romania, and the issue puts the Home Office's obsession with immigration, biometric control and data gathering into a certain perspective.

A gang of thieves has stolen NHS computers containing eight years of confidential patient data from the pathology department of the Royal Shewsbury Hospital in Shropshire.

It hasn't escaped our notice that spam tsunamists are in the habit of finishing their missives with random collections of (often highly esoteric) words as part of their ongoing battle against the spam filter.

UpdatedWe gather that things do not run as smoothly as they should down at BBC Bristol.

Further confirmation has emerged that Intel will phase out its Mobile Pentium 4 processor during Q1 2005.

The Royal Courts of Justice and six other courts around the UK have been kitted out with wireless Internet "hotspots" as part of measures to help modernise the legal system.

Intel and wireless equipment maker Proxim today said they would collaborate on the development of WiMAX kit for both ends of the broadband wireless link.

The US House of Representatives has voted for a year-long extension to the deadline for countries to introduce biometric passports for their citizens. This is a year less than Colin Powell asked for, and many countries (including the UK) will be unable to meet it.

Showing a longing for its dot-com hysteria heritage, Napster has decided to give away MP3 players to people willing to sign up for a year-subscription to its service. Napster managed to coax Rio into lending its name and music players to what can only be seen as a desperate proposal for increasing online music sales. Now subscribers can pay $119.40 for a year's worth of Napster and get the Rio Chiba Sport MP3 player at no extra charge. For an extra $80, consumers can upgrade to the Rio Nitrus player, which has 1.5GB of memory as opposed to the stunning 128MB (What! - Ed) Chiba Sport.