BBC: “The UK is leading the world when it comes to high-tech
spying on its citizens, say civil liberty and privacy
groups.

The campaigners fear that if a bill that is getting its
second reading in the House of Lords on Thursday
becomes law, the police and security forces would gain
abilities to snoop on British citizens using the internet
that are “unprecedented in peacetime”.

The Register: “Some bright empiricist from Root-Core has discovered that anyone can log into their Hotmail account and then call messages
from any other Hotmail account by crafting a URL with the second account’s username and a valid message number.

Finding a valid message number is of course total guesswork, but they all follow a consistent format and always have the same
number of digits (i.e., a time stamp), so with the help of a little brute-force progie one can try numerous combinations in the
background rather than type them in.”

CNET: “Almost everyone has heard of the dot-com deadpool, but what about the dot-com
cesspool?

Two entrepreneurs have created a line of novelty toilet paper printed to look like ticker tape
spewing the stock prices of struggling dot-coms. Publicly traded companies such as Yahoo,
Amazon.com and BroadVision are among the stocks that landed on the company’s “roll of shame.”
All three have plummeted from their all-time highs.”

PRNewswire: “Lineo(R), Inc. today announced the
closing of a strategic investment round of $20 million, bringing the overall
investment total in Lineo to $57 million.”

Kernel List: “I’m off to Finland for a week+, and will not be reading email or checking
the newsgroups during that time. I’ve put up a 2.4.9 kernel on
ftp.kernel.org, and would suggest that people try it out and discuss it on
the mailing lists, but NOT email me. I’ll be interested to hear about
problems when I return, but I don’t have a big hankering to have thousands
of messages waiting for me.”

BBC: “The Super Bowl by many has come to be known as the
Snooper Bowl because officials used cameras and face
recognition technology to scan the crowds for known
criminals.

The use of the face-scanning cameras did not come out
until after the game and the public was outraged.

The industry stands by its technology but is now calling
for federal law in the US to govern its use.”

The Register: “Sony today launched two digital video cameras capable of transferring movies and
stills across a Bluetooth wireless link.

The two cameras, the DCR-PC120 and the DCR-IP7 – the former a regular DV
machine; the latter based on MPEG 2 – can send content direct to any computer with a
Bluetooth card, all without cables. It sounds appealing, but we wonder how long it will
take to transfer movies this way.”

Wired: “Linux advocates are pushing open source as a way to get more computer literacy into cash-strapped schools. In addition to saving dollars by not paying for Windows licenses, Linux runs on older desktops.”

LinuxSecurity: “codeRedKiller is a simple concept that truly can help conserve resources. It saves time and energy (bandwidth and cpu power, etc) by automatically identifying and dropping requests from CodeRed infected hosts. Its goals are to stop CodeRed requests to apache webservers and to do it without requiring more effort than a typical 404 error.”

CNET: “The war over DVD recording standards will escalate Monday when Hewlett-Packard unwraps the details on its first DVD drive for PCs that lets people repeatedly record on discs.

The DVD-writer dvd100i, which will cost $599 when it hits store shelves in September, will be the first commercially available drive based on the DVD+RW standard.”