If you've been watching the news at all lately, you've seen Apple's twist on the Pixar film Chicken Little: the sky is falling, at least in France. Why? Because the lower house of the French parliament passed a law (which still must be approved by the upper house) that says you can't sell digital online music that can only be played on one kind of player.

In other words, if you buy a song from iTunes, and you're French, you will be able play it on Windows Media Player. Any Digital Rights Management software that is included will have to contain software that will make it interoperable with any player. It's obviously good news for consumers, and not so good for Apple and Motorola, which currently have the only players for iTunes music.

Apple calls it "state-sponsored piracy" because the law allows people to circumvent DRM software if that is necessary to guarantee "interoperability" -- and most software that does that is illegal in most of the world. But the French say that consumers shouldn't be locked into one type of player to listen to their favorite music, and their surveys suggest that people will pay more if they know they can listen on whichever device they want.

If there's one thing we learned in our Intro to Economics class a long time ago, it's that limiting supply will cause prices to go up, so it's perfectly sensible that Apple would want to keep iTunes for its own players. A few analysts say that the whole issue is much ado about nothing, suggesting that Apple will just pull out of France (maybe the International Olympic Committee knew something, because it selected London over Paris for the 2008 Olympics, and the law would go into effect in 2007) since by some estimates, France doesn't account for more than two per cent of Apple's sales of iPods and iTunes.

One of the other things we learned was that if there's a monopoly (or what appears to be a monopoly), then someone will try to break it, and that's certainly true in Europe, where both Microsoft and now Apple are seen as the Big Bad Beasts. In this case, the folks who want to loosen the Apple stranglehold will have some big guns of their own: the people who deliver the downloads and, of course, the folks in Redmond, who want to increase their own market share.

The battle for the hearts, minds, and ears of the world's music lovers is just beginning... and no doubt watching with interest: the motion picture industry.

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense. - Tom Clancy

Anyone who has ever sold anything to the government knows that the government doesn't buy generic -- and going with name brand merchandise certainly applies to the Feds. But nobody thought much about that when IBM sold its PC division to Lenovo last year, including both IBM and the State Department, which recently bought another 15,000 of the same computers they've been using all along, except that these don't have Big Blue's label on them.

The former CEO of Qwest Telecommunications, currently awaiting trial for insider stock trading, filed suit against Qwest because he wasn't included in the settlement of a shareholder lawsuit that was the result of a restatement of revenue that caused the price of Qwest's stock to fall from $64 to $2. The suit says that neither Joseph Nacchio, the CEO, nor Robert Woodruff, the CFO, were considered in the $400 million settlement between the company and its shareholders.

The city manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma, threatened to call the FBI because he was convinced that Linux maker CentOS had hacked the city's website.

There is some evidence that it's not a good idea to share your laptop with your significant other.

Don't these people talk to each other? A few weeks back, there was this huge flap about Sony's digital rights management software that messed with your computer. Why was the DRM software there in the first place? Because music companies don't want you making copies of their CDs and giving them to your friends. So we have to wonder at the news that Sony's gaming division is not only coming out with a new PlayStation console, but that it will also create a PlayStation Network for online gaming that will include the ability to download games -- embracing the very technology that Sony's music division has been fighting tooth and nail.

And while we're on the subject of games, the World of Warcraft game -- the number of players worldwide is a number close to that of some European countries -- is at the center of a lawsuit filed by a man who has written an unofficial guide to the game and was selling it on eBay. The game's manufacturer, Blizzard Entertainment, complained to eBay that the guide violated its copyrights; the author protested, and when Blizzard didn't respond, eBay reinstated the book. Blizzard complained again, and now it is being sued.

There was a time, not that long ago, when I used to call my husband a bot. He's not, of course (okay, maybe sometimes he is), but I meant it in a nice way.

The reason I bring it up is because a couple of weeks ago, we were visiting some friends, and someone asked what a bot is. Simply put, a bot is a little piece of programming that automatically does something. Some are pretty simple; I saw one at a website that turned dirty language into a bunch of asterisks, which is actually fairly common. If you're not a Premium Services member at Experts Exchange, then bots are what make the ads show up on the pages.

Bots are what makes Google (and all the other search engines) work. Think about it. Google used to post how many web pages it searched. Now, why bother. But Google doesn't actually go out and search the Internet each time you click the I Feel Lucky button. It actually searches through its own very large index of pages, and it has that index because of the Googlebot that goes out and does all the work for it.

But there are a lot of bots that aren't so nice. They can arrive on your computer through an email or from a website, and get downloaded without your knowing it. At that point, they can do all kinds of things, from sending out spam to searching your computer for personal information like credit card numbers. So always make sure that your antivirus software is up to date, because the AV companies generally find out about the latest bots pretty quickly. Most bots nowadays are used to create "zombie" networks that are then used to spam, but they're also being used to attack websites of big companies, trying to extort money out of them.

Not quite on the subject, but have you ever wondered what a map of virus outbreaks would look like? F-Secure has made one. I just don't know why there's so much activity going on outside of Los Banos, California.