An Indian chess player has been banned for 10 years for cheating after he was caught using his mobile phone’s wireless device to win games, chess officials said on Wednesday.

The player, Umakant Sharma, had logged rating points at a rapid pace in the last 18 months and also qualified for the national championship, arousing the suspicion of officials and bemusing rivals.

Sharma was finally caught at a recent tournament when officials discovered that he had stitched a Bluetooth device in a cloth cap which he always pulled over his ears.

He communicated to his accomplices outside the hall, who then used a computer to relay moves to him, Indian chess federation secretary D.V. Sundar said on Wednesday.

MySpace devotee Kary Rogers was expecting to see a gut-busting video when a friend from the popular online hangout messaged him a link.

First, though, he was directed to a page where he was supposed to re-enter his password.

Rogers realized that someone was trying to steal his information, and he didn’t take the bait.

At best, he would be spammed with junk e-mails; worse, the cyber thief might steal his real-life identity.

“I immediately went back and changed my password,” said Rogers, 29, a network analyst for Mississippi State University in Starkville, Mississippi.

MySpace bills itself as a “place for friends.”

Increasingly, it is also a place for unfriendly attacks from digital miscreants on the prowl.

They lure users to sexually explicit sites, clog mailboxes with spam messages, and exploit users’ trust when speaking to “friends” to obtain passwords that could lead to identity theft.

Harvey Bumpus doesn’t like to eat alone.

But his wife died more than a year ago and his family is scattered across the country. Most nights, he heats up a simple meal of oatmeal or hot dogs and eats alone.

“I don’t have much choice,” said the 82-year-old retired correctional officer who looks forward to Christmas as one of the few days each year when he gathers with his family.

But when the planes, trains and automobiles that brought everyone together take his family away — he, like millions of other elderly people, will be alone again.

Now, the technology consulting company Accenture is developing a system called “The Virtual Family Dinner” that would allow families to get together — virtually — as often as they’d like.

The concept is simple. An elderly woman in, say, California, makes herself dinner. When she gets ready to sit down and eat, the system detects it and alerts her son in Chicago. The son then goes to his kitchen, where a small camera and microphone capture what he is doing. Speakers and a screen — as big as a television or as small as a picture frame — allow him to hear and see his mother, who has a similar setup.

“We are trying to really bring back the kind of family interactions we used to take for granted,” said Dadong Wan, a senior researcher in Accenture Ltd.’s Chicago labs.

Providing Web links to copyright-protected music is enough to make a site legally liable, an Australian court ruled in a case that created legal uncertainty for search engines around the world.

The full bench of the Federal Court, the country’s second-highest court, has upheld a lower court ruling that Stephen Cooper, the operator of the Web site in question, as well as Comcen, the Internet service provider that hosted it, were guilty under Australian copyright law.

They were accused of authorizing copyright infringement because they provided a search engine whose results linked to songs available for illegal download, even though the Web site did not store the music files directly.

Cooper had argued that his Web site performed a function comparable to search engines such as Google Inc., which is based in Mountain View, Calif.

But Judge Catherine Branson wrote in Monday’s ruling that “Cooper’s assumption that Google’s activities in Australia do not result in infringements … is untested.”

A company that helps advertisers connect with bloggers willing to write about their products for payment will now require disclosures amid criticism and a regulatory threat.

Before this week, advertisers were barred by PayPerPost Inc. from telling bloggers they can’t disclose the sponsorship, but bloggers were able to decide on their own whether or not to do so. Under the new policy, bloggers must disclose that they are accepting payment, either in the write-up or in a general disclosure policy on the blogger’s Web journal.

“Ever since we launched, there’s been a lot of controversy about disclosure,” said Ted Murphy, PayPerPost’s chief executive.

Besides other bloggers questioning the ethics of receiving payments without disclosure, the Federal Trade Commission said in a Dec. 7 staff opinion that failure to disclose could, in some cases, violate consumer-protection laws on deception. The FTC did not single out PayPerPost or say whether it would launch any investigation.

David Sifry, founder of the blog search site Technorati, praised PayPerPost’s move.