It asks you for your name and email address, then will send you an invitation when the beta ends. Unless you mistook "email address" for "bank details", that hardly qualifies as phishing in my book.

And we should tag all airtravel news related to the USA with American Airlines, and of course any space stories with NASA. I mean, after all, they're all launched by SOMEONE's national space agency...

last.fm is an English company, with its servers located in London. Complying to such a request for user data would be illegal under UK data protection laws, as best as I can tell.

Not saying that proves much either way, but for what it's worth I've always found last.fm fairly open and engaged with its users. I rather doubt they would knowingly give away user's data, especially given its illegality.

I read this when it went up on The Register, 5 days ago. Can people please check the timestamp before submitting/approving stories? The normal 2 or 3 days old news is just about passable, but 5 days is getting silly.

In Battlefield 2142 they put ingame adverts in, but they actually didn't detract from the game - they were simply on billboards in urban settings, and made the place seem MORE real that adverts for "Generic Corporation". However, it needs to be done very carefully to avoid ruining the game's atmosphere, and I do agree that ingame adverts should be recognised in an appropriate discount on the game itself.