Will probably buy today, but I have some questions...

[Viral]

How is modding handled? Do I have to pay extra or apply to get the modding CD?

In the full version of the game, is the world more "alive", meaning that the news has game world news and not just "so and so got haxxored!"?

[Babylon5]

The modding can be done by anyone with a Dev Disk, although a knowledge of C++ is neccesary. (But it can be picked up along the way).

Don't know about the news bit, but if you watch it closely you can see that a lot of the news is news of what you have done.

[JamesL]

The news is all related to the hacking content, essentially. This is in character, since it is served on the Uplink Internal Services machine.

The Dev CD contains modifiable source code for the game, and that is how mods are created.

[Darksun]

You can also create 'cosmetic' mods such as skins, custom gateways, LANs etc without the DevDisk