NSFW You know how it is: you’ve got a 30-inch cock but your wife’s box is only six inches. The only intelligent solution is to offer the box for sale on eBay, as this Wisconsin vendor attempted to do:

Naturally, eBay pulled the auction this morning, according to our correspondent Martin B. We suspect the following may have had something to do with it:

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Skype - which is “not a telephony replacement service and cannot be used for emergency dialings” - says it’s now fixed a problem that hit some of its UK users.

Punters complained that their SkypeIn service, which gives them their own regular phone number so non Skype users can call them, was floored for most of last week.

Despite reassurances the snags had been sorted out, a short service statement issued yesterday said: “Unfortunately there are again problems with UK numbers. The providers are working on it right now. Skype is apologising for the inconvenience.”

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The US Supreme Court will hear eBay’s appeal tomorrow against an injunction imposed in a patent dispute over the auction site’s fixed-price ‘Buy it Now’ service. eBay is challenging the same court practices that nearly shutdown the BlackBerry email service recently.

eBay has asked the Court to review the question of whether an injunction should always be imposed in cases where one party is found to infringe the patent of another.

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The German justice minister has defended changes to German law which will increase sentences for consumers caught downloading copyrighted material to two years. Anyone caught downloading songs or films for commercial purposes could get up to five years in prison.

The changes come into force on 1 January 2007. Justice minister Brigitte Zypries said consumers would still be allowed to make copies of legitimately bought DVDs, but she said people downloading copies of films before they were released in cinemas were clearly breaking the law.

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Marketing company 180solutions filed a lawsuit against desktop-security firm Zone Labs taking issue with a warning generated by the security firm’s personal firewall software, which labels 180solutions advertising client as spyware.

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The lawsuit–filed last month but only recently came to light - cites warnings generated by Zone Labs’ ZoneAlarm personal firewall product that warns of “dangerous behavior,” recommending that users remove 180solutions software from the computer system

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Emails purporting to prove that the recently deceased former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic was killed contain a malicious Trojan, called Dropper-FB. Milosevic, whose trial on charges of genocide was nearing its conclusion, was found dead in his cell in the Netherlands on Saturday.

Prospective marks are invited to open emails with subject line “Slobodan Milosevic was killed” and open a file which claims to offer an “image” purporting to prove the war crimes suspect was done in. If this attached file (actually an 16.5KB executable, compressed in the UPX format) is opened, a Trojan is downloaded onto Windows PCs. Online security firm BlackSpider estimates that more than 800,000 emails containing the new Trojan-downloader were sent to UK businesses before the first anti-virus software firm updated their software early this morning.

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Web browser bugs are routinely blamed for creating huge networks of compromised PCs and undermining the safety of ecommerce transactions. Now one woman says a “security bug” in Mozilla led to the break up of her engagement.

The anonymous woman shared a Windows PC with her former fiancé. Both had separate user logins on the same machine and both preferred Mozilla to Internet Explorer. All was apparently well until the woman opened up a list of sites whose password was never saved and unearthed evidence that her man was a frequent visitor of dating websites. The woman took this as evidence of infidelity and split up with the apparent love cheat. She then had the presence of mind to report the privacy flaw to the Mozilla Foundation.

“This privacy flaw has caused my fiancé and I to break-up after having dated for five years… Firefox should be respecting every single area of privacy per user on one system. It’s not doing that,” the woman writes.

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Hundreds of malicious websites are attempting to exploit the most critical of two flaws announced last week in Microsoft’s browser, convincing two companies to release workarounds late Monday to head off the threat.

Security firms Determina and eEye Digital Security each created a standalone patch to protect Windows systems that use Internet Explorer to browse the web. The vulnerability, the most critical of three announced in the last week, is reportedly being actively exploited by more than 200 malicious web sites.

“Obviously, these things (fixes) are experimental in nature but considering the options of being vulnerable or at least having a fighting chance - well, I think you get the point,” eEye chief hacking officer Marc Maiffret said in a statement announcing that company’s fix. “Again, this is just another mitigation option until Microsoft releases their patch, which last was scheduled for 11 April.”

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The English High Court has ordered 10 ISPs, including BT, Tiscali and Telewest, to reveal the identities of 150 file-swappers accused by the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) of illegally uploading software to networks such as Kazaa.

The ISPs have 14 days to comply. Once FAST receives the data (customer names and addresses) it will decide whether to sue for damages or bring private prosecutions that could result in prison sentences of up to two years and/or unlimited fines.

A 12 month investigation by FAST into the covert sharing of software by PC users highlighted 150 suspected “uploaders” – people who put copyrighted software on to internet file-sharing networks, including Kazaa, and offered them to others without permission from the copyright owners.

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A member of the Oakland, California “Nut Case” gang who allegedly indulged in an orgy of murder, attempted murder, robbery and kidnapping could face the death penalty if the jury at his trial finds him guilty on commission of a robbery and multiple murder raps.

Demarcus Ralls is the first Nut Case to stand trial for a six-week crime spree in late 2002 and early 2003 which “terrorized Oakland residents”, ktvu.com

The Nut Cases - some of whom sport Planters’ “Mr. Peanut” logo tattoos - were so dubbed because they apparently indulged in crime for fun. Ralls alone racked up four murder charges, two counts of attempted murder, 17 counts of robbery, one count of kidnapping and “various enhancement clauses”.

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The wide-ranging coalition that objects to a tax on sending email has a new, and unexpected opponent. One that mere earthlings dare engage at their peril.

Esther thinks paying to send email is a great idea.

Why?

Well, as she explained in the Times on Friday, it unleashes the goodness of market forces. And the doubleplus emergent goodness of Darwinian evolution!

But aren’t computer communications system supposed to just work? And why do we, the users, have to pay for the broken protocols? (Even the inventor of the SMTP protocol that’s used to send the world’s email messages says we need to rip these up and start again.)

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A former parliamentary candidate for the UK Independence Party has been awarded £10,000 in damages after winning a defamation case.

Michael Keith Smith had sued over postings in an internet chat room. According to reports, Smith, who put himself forward for the Portsmouth North seat at the last election, was a participant in a discussion on the Iraq war, held on a discussion board run by Yahoo!.

Another participant, Tracy Williams, had taken objection to his anti-war comments and, using an alias, had posted a series of defamatory remarks about Mr Smith.

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Skype, the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) provider bought last year by eBay, has been named in a RICO case brought by StreamCast.

According to documents filed with the central court of California, StreamCast Networks is suing Kazaa, Skype, Sharman Networks, and assorted other companies and individuals, claiming they have broken the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations Act.

StreamCast developed the Morpheus peer-to-peer network and is accusing Skype, and others, of using its file sharing technology.

Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, named in the suit, co-founded Kazaa before setting up Skype.

Australia has cracked down on junk mail with an industry code for tackling spam.

Under the new code, internet service providers (ISPs) will bear some of the responsibility for helping fight spam. Service providers must offer spam-filtering options to their subscribers and advise them on how to best deal with and report the nuisance mail. ISPs will also be compelled to impose “reasonable” limits on subscribers’ sending email.

More than 680 ISPs will be affected in Australia; global email operators like MSN Hotmail and Yahoo! will also be hit by the legislation.

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The MPAA has filed (PDF) seven more lawsuits in their ongoing efforts to “thwart illegal file swapping on major pirate networks.” The targets are various high-traffic web sites that facilitate piracy using services like BitTorrent, eDonkey, and USENET. The MPAA hopes that shutting down these web sites will make it more difficult for the “pirate networks” to accumulate and distribute copyrighted material.

Popular sites Torrentspy and Isohunt are among those listed in the press release as piracy perpetrators presently under scrutiny. According to the MPAA, these sites provide illegal access to tens of thousands of copyrighted works, and facilitate millions of illegal downloads.

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