A British citizen, Gary McKinnon, has been accused of committing the “biggest military computer hack of all time” by the U.S. government and he is fighting extradition to the U.S. If he is convicted, he can face up to 70 years in jail. He is accused of gaining entry into 97 U.S government computers including machines belonging to NASA and the Department of Defense. They also claim that he accessed passwords and deleted critical files from the Earle U.S. naval weapons station which crashed 300 computers for a day. McKinnon, in his defense, says that he only deleted files once, accidentally, and that he gained unauthorized access to military systems just to look for evidence of UFO conspiracies.
I wonder if he found anything.

Starting today, anyone who wants to update their Windows operating system will have to go through a piracy check. The exception to this rule is the update of critical security patches. Even a pirated copy of Windows will get the security patches while other add-ons will require validation. In an attempt to convert the users of pirated copies, Microsoft will reward the ones coming out of the closet with two options. Those who send in their pirated CDs, show proof they paid for it and fill out a piracy report will get a free copy of WinXP and those who do not have the CDS but will fill out a piracy report will get WinXP at a discounted price. We might find a bigger drive to buy pirated CDs, which will be surrendered to Bill in exchange for a legal copy of Windows XP (which will be free).
And you thought you couldn’t get good ideas from this website.

MSN has now jumped onto the map bandwagon. Google Maps had got a lot of attention from their sites, Google Maps and Google Earth and it’s become tradition that Google releases a new technology and the rest follow. Anyways, MSN’s Virtual Earth is a map service and it has the usual features and also a ‘locate yourself’ feature. Using this feature, mobile users could pinpoint where they are. From there, they could easily find gas stations, restaurants, or whatever, provided that they are online. MSN Virtual Earth is in Beta stage right now and supports only the United States at this time.
Everyday, we are getting closer to ‘enemy of the state’. Now the terrorists can decide where they want to strike with better tools at their disposal. God help us.

Brazilian police have arrested 10 people accused of selling drugs online. These drug dealers were using Google’s international social networking website, Orkut. Orkut allows members to join and set up online communities to discuss everything from doughnuts to drugs (I guess). Several million Brazilians have become devotees of Orkut since Google launched the networking site in January 2004. They make up more than half of Orkut’s 7 million plus members. One can only join Orkut by invitation, so if someone needs a fix, ask me for an invite to Orkut.
Disclaimer: I signed up years back before the Brazilians got there.

John M Perry, the head of the payment processing firm that was hacked to expose 40 million credit card numbers, told congress that his company is facing imminent extinction because of its disclosure of the breach and the industry’s reaction to it. ‘As a result of coming forward, we are being driven out of business’, he also added that if his firm was forced to shut down, other companies will think twice before disclosing such attacks. First, if a company does not disclose an attack, not only will it be driven out of business but also face charges for not disclosing the attack. After this attack, a lot of processing companies will be monitored regularly so I don’t think any company could get away by just keeping silent about the fact that they have been hacked. Second, after an investigation was carried out by Visa, it was clear that CardSystems knowingly violated contractual requirements for how long credit card data were supposed to be stored and how they were secured. So what is John Perry trying to tell us? Is he trying to tell us that his company should be forgiven for their faults which exposed millions of consumers to possible fraud just because they told us about it?
Would you forgive them?

According to German ornithologists, birds have learnt to imitate the ring tones they hear. Richard Schneider of the NABU bird conservation centre near the university city of Tuebingen stated “The birds have an uncanny ability to mimic these ring tones. This has picked up in tandem with the boom in mobile phone ownership???. The best mimics are jackdaws, starlings and jays. The ornithologists also claim that the birds are merely adapting to the environment which includes these annoying ring tones. So if you hear a bird mimicking Turn me on (by Kevin Lytle), don’t panic, it’s just their new mating call.
Click here to see the story on the inquirer