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FBI, IRS Raid Home of Sen. Ted Stevens 539

Posted by kdawson from the longest-serving-republican dept.
A while back we discussed the corruption investigation aimed at Alaska Sen. Ted "series of tubes" Stevens. A number of readers sent us word that the home of Sen. Stevens was raided earlier today by agents of the FBI and the IRS. The focus of the raid was a remodeling project at Stevens's home and the involvement of VECO, an oil company.
The Internet

Wikipedia Infiltrated by Intelligence Agents? 428

Posted by Zonk from the super-seekrit-spy-stuff dept.
An anonymous reader writes "International Humanitarian Law professor Ludwig Braeckeleer thinks so. In an article published yesterday in the Korean newspaper OhMyNews, he reveals a discovery he made while researching a story on the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland. It turns out that a Wikipedia administrator named SlimVirgin is actually Linda Mack, a woman who as a young graduate in the 1980s was hired by investigative reporter Pierre Salinger of ABC News to help with the investigation. Salinger later came to believe that Mack was actually working for Britain's MI5 on a mission to investigate the bombing and to infiltrate and monitor the news agency. Shortly after her Wikipedia identity was uncovered, many of her edits to articles related to the bombing were permanently removed from the database in an attempt to conceal her identity. This discovery comes only months after another Wikipedia admin was caught lying about his credentials to the press. What can Wikipedia do about those who would use it for their own purposes?"
Worms

Mac Worm Author Gets Death Threats 244

Posted by kdawson from the stranger-and-stranger dept.
StonyandCher write(s) to spread news about the strange story of the reported Apple OS X worm, which is growing stranger by the day. The blog of the researcher who claimed to have created the malware reportedly received death threats. The blog was then hijacked, according to the researcher, who calls him/herself InfoSec Sellout. InfoSec blamed David Maynor for hacking the blog. For his part, Maynor apparently unmasked himself as "LMH" and InfoSec as Jon Ramsey. The post to the Fuzzing mailing list has not been independently confirmed.
Update: 07/19 13:48 GMT by KD : David Maynor wrote in and denies that he is LMH.
Music

Jobs to Labels- Lose the DRM & We'll Talk Price 459

Posted by CmdrTaco from the ten-bucks-a-gig dept.
eldavojohn writes "Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been talking smack about DRM and has recently issued a verbal offer to major music lables stating that if they are willing to lose the DRM, he'd be willing to raise his 99 cent price for those iTunes songs. These tracks (such as the recent EMI deal) would also have better sound quality & cost about 30 cents more."
Privacy

Submission + - Personal data exposed! Can legislation fix it?

Submitted by
rabblerouzer
rabblerouzer writes: "Millions have had their personal information stolen because of lax security and may not even know it because of the patchwork of state laws that fail to mandate timely notification of victims. Boston-based law firm Mintz Levin is seeking feedback on what you would like to see included in draft legislation. You have a stake in this; speak up."

Details of Next Gen Zune Surface 308

Posted by CmdrTaco from the better-luck-next-time dept.
KMG writes "Zune Scene has got a scoop about the next generation Microsoft Zune. There will be two new models; a flash memory based and a hard drive based. Zune with HDD will be thinner and have larger storage capacity while the flash based will feature Wi-fi, video playback. So will we see another try from Microsoft to beat Apple's iPod or it will be another vain attempt from the Redmond guys."
Businesses

Lenovo Tops Eco-Friendly Ranking 94

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the laptop-hugging dept.
gollum123 writes to tell us that according to a recent list compiled by Greenpeace, Lenovo has topped the list of "eco-friendly" companies scoring an 8 out of a possible 10 while Apple fell to the bottom of the list with only a 2.7. "Iza Kruszewska, Greenpeace international toxics campaigner, said the industry had made some positive steps in the last 12 months with firms starting to act rather than just issue statements of intent. Of the 14 companies profiled, said Ms Kruszewska, nine now score more than five out of 10."
Privacy

No Passport For Britons Refusing Mass Surveillance 790

Posted by kdawson from the and-you-thought-Sweden-was-bad dept.
UpnAtom writes "People who refuse to give up their bank records, tax records & details of any benefits they've claimed, and the records of their car movements for the last year, or refuse to submit to an interrogation on whether they are the same person that this mountain of data belongs to — will be denied passports from March 26th. The Blair government has already admitted that this and other data will be cross-linked so that the Home Office and other officials can spy on the everyday lives of innocent Britons. Britons were already the most spied upon nation in Western Europe — more so even than Sweden. Data-mining through this unprecedented level of mass-surveillance allows any future British government to leapfrog even countries like China and North Korea."
Music

Submission + - Canadian Music Industry Says Its Never Sued Anyone

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Lies from the recording industry probably doesn't count as news, but this whopper from the Canadian Recording Industry Association is striking for how deluded the industry has become. More than two years after it filed suit against 29 alleged file sharers, CRIA President Graham Henderson told an industry conference that "we've never sued anyone."
Media

Submission + - Why the RIAA is Bad - In a Nutshell

Submitted by
JeremyDuffy
JeremyDuffy writes: "This is probably the best summary of who the RIAA is and what they stand for that I've ever heard:

The RIAA is like the Prohibitionists of old. In their view, the law cannot allow for something completely reasonable such as legal circumvention because it could be abused. Millions of people are thereby punished. Yet this is not how a civil society typically functions. Life is full of potentially dangerous products, services, and ideas. It's up to individuals to take responsibility for their actions, because we all know that catering to the lowest common denominator does not give birth to a free society, let alone an intelligent one. Yet the RIAA will stop at nothing to make sure that you and I never have the chance to make such decisions for ourselves.
By "legal circumvention", he refers to the the practice of circumventing Data Rights Management (DRM) for legal purposes such as making personal backup copies, educational uses, and other Fair Use practices. The RIAA is against it because they know that all it takes is one user with a DRM-free copy to post a song online for it to be shared everywhere in the world."
United States

USPTO Peer Review Process To Begin Soon 116

Posted by Zonk from the it's-like-every-einstein's-dream-come-true dept.
An anonymous reader writes "As we've discussed several times before on Slashdot, the US patent office is looking to employ a Wiki-like process for reviewing patents. It's nowhere near as open as Wikipedia, but there are still numerous comparisons drawn to the well-known project in this Washington Post story. Patent office officials site the huge workload their case officers must deal with in order to handle the modern cycle of product development. Last year some 332,000 applications were handled by only 4,000 employees. 'The tremendous workload has often left examiners with little time to conduct thorough reviews, according to sympathetic critics. Under the pilot project, some companies submitting patent applications will agree to have them reviewed via the Internet. The list of volunteers already contains some of the most prominent names in computing, including Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle, as well as IBM, though other applicants are welcome.'"
Google

Submission + - Google Searching

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "It appears that Google has taken steps to make smaller blogs harder to search. First, when you do a general search, it does not include a 'More results from X' (in other words, a site search) option unless the site is large enough. This is different to how it used to be because my blog used to get this function, which was great for searching for stuff within it quickly. Next, you can try to do a specific 'site search' on your blog. Then what Google does is it finds the post, but the associated link directs you back to the front page of the blog. I don't know why it would do this except to suppress the contribution from obscure voices???"
Privacy

The Pentagon Wants a 'TiVo' to Watch You 256

Posted by Zonk from the i-think-the-shulmans-are-particularly-funny-this-week dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Danger Room, a Wired blog, today cites a study of future electronic snooping technologies from Reuters, written by the Pentagon's Defense Science Board. More than anything, it seems these outside advisers want a surveillance system that would put Big Brother to shame, and they're looking at the commercial sector to provide it. 'The ability to record terabyte and larger databases will provide an omnipresent knowledge of the present and the past that can be used to rewind battle space observations in TiVo-like fashion and to run recorded time backwards to help identify and locate even low-level enemy forces. For example, after a car bomb detonates, one would have the ability to play high-resolution data backward in time to follows the vehicle back to the source, and then use that knowledge to focus collection and gain additional information by organizing and searching through archived data.'"
Spam

Submission + - Free Email Sercives Cashing in on Spam?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I dont't know if you noticed, but whenever the traffic on a free email account on sites like hotmail or yahoo decreases, the level of spam delivered to the inbox increases. Is there a profit-motive there? Or pure coincidence? Going from about 1 spam-mail to about 6 in am month could make you wonder.

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