A bill that could allocate more than $1 billion over the next eight years to combat those who trade in child pornography has been unanimously approved by a Senate panel. "The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday voted to send an amended version of the Combating Child Exploitation Act, chiefly sponsored by Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), to the full slate of politicians for a vote. [...] An amendment adopted Thursday also adds new sections to the original bill that would rewrite existing child pornography laws. One section is designed to make it clear that live Webcam broadcasts of child abuse are illegal, which the bill's authors argue is an "open question." Another change is aimed at closing another perceived loophole, prohibiting digital alteration of an innocent image of a child so that sexually explicit activity is instead depicted."

Several readers sent in links on the earthquake that hit 10 hours ago near the Sichuan city of Chengdu in China. The Telegraph focuses on the citizen journalism that got word on the quake out on the Net instantly (the first report was via Twitter). Science magazine speculates that deaths from this event could exceed the 240,000 killed in the Tangshan quake in 1976, though the estimated death toll is below 10,000 at this writing. Hundreds of videos are up on YouTube, including this footage from a security camera — keep your eye on the goldfish.

boogi78 writes "Remember ASCII art? This is the Web 2.0 CSS version of ASCII art featuring Homer Simpson. Here is a CSS G.W. Bush. There's also an program that automatically converts jpegs into 'CSS images,' but it's a Windows executable. I found no sources for it, but I got it to work with WINE."

Anonymous Meoward writes "Today Hans Reiser was found guilty of first degree murder in Oakland, California. Quoting Wired: 'In a murder case with no body, no crime scene, no reliable eyewitness and virtually no physical evidence, the prosecution began the trial last November with a daunting task ahead... The turning point in the trial came when Reiser took the stand in his own defense March 3.' Whether he really did it or not, Hans basically just didn't know when to shut up."

mytrip brings us a news.com story about the FBI's efforts to make records of users' activities available to law enforcement for a much longer time. Several members of Congress also lent their support to the idea that such data retention should be mandatory for a period of up to 2 years. Quoting: "Based on the statements at Wednesday's hearing and previous calls for new laws in this area, the scope of a mandatory data retention law remains fuzzy. It could mean forcing companies to store data for two years about what Internet addresses are assigned to which customers (Comcast said in 2006 that it would be retaining those records for six months). Or it could be far more intrusive. It could mean keeping track of e-mail and instant messaging correspondents and what Web pages users visit. Some Democratic politicians have called for data retention laws to extend to domain name registries and Web hosting companies and even social networking sites."

Oleg.salenko points out a ComputerWorld story with some bad news for Russia's wireless users, which starts out "Business travelers to Russia might want to keep their laptops and iPhones well-concealed — not from muggers, necessarily, but from the country's recently formed regulatory super-agency, Rossvyazokhrankultura (short for the Russian Mass Media, Communications and Cultural Protection Service)... Rossvyazokhrankultura's interpretation of current law holds that users must register any electronics that use the frequency involved in Wi-Fi communications, said Vladimir Karpov, the deputy director of the agency's communications monitoring division, according to an English commentary provided by website The Other Russia."

An anonymous reader writes "The USENIX LEET workshop held earlier this week in San Francisco offered neat insights into the Storm botnet, including two papers showing the difficulty of accurately measuring the botnet's size, and one on the way it conducts its spamming campaigns (down to the template language used). There was a bunch of other cool work too, so check out the papers."

kaufmanmoore writes "The Commonwealth of Virginia has become the first state in the nation to require that students in all grade levels receive a form of internet safety lessons. The story is scant on details about the lessons, but describes one recently at a high school where the presenter showed a social-networking profile of a convicted sex offender posing as a 15 year-old girl. "

arogier writes "After numerous delays and an actual release reversal, the official release date for Vista service pack one has been set for Tuesday, March 18th on Windows Update and Microsoft Downloads. It will be released as an automatic update on April 18th. 'It's unclear so far how a February snafu will affect SP1's roll-out. Last month, after Microsoft pushed a pair of prerequisite patches to users, some reported that their machines refused to finish installing one of the fixes, then went into an endless series of reboots. Several days later, Microsoft pulled the update from automatic delivery, said it was working on a solution and promised it would "make the update available again shortly after we address the issue."' It would be a good time for those planning to adopt early to perform requisite backups and locate their restore media."

The US House has just approved a new bill that rejects the retroactive immunity to telecommunication businesses and denies most of the new powers for the US President to spy on citizens without a warrant. "As impressive as the House vote itself was, more impressive still was the floor debate which preceded it. I can't recall ever watching a debate on the floor of either House of Congress that I found even remotely impressive -- until today. One Democrat after the next -- of all stripes -- delivered impassioned, defiant speeches in defense of the rule of law, oversight on presidential eavesdropping, and safeguards on government spying. They swatted away the GOP's fear-mongering claims with the dismissive contempt such tactics deserve, rejecting the principle that has predominated political debate in this country since 9/11: that the threat of the Terrorists means we must live under the rule of an omnipotent President and a dismantled constitutional framework."

grassy_knoll asks, "So how fragile is the electrical grid, and just what technical problems could shut down five reactors?" "Five reactors at a nuclear power plant in Florida had gone down on Tuesday and two were now back online amid a massive power outage in the southern state, CNN reported. The report on the Turkey Point nuclear plant came as four million people had lost electricity in Miami and elsewhere in Florida, with traffic signals out and major delays on roads, authorities and media said."

lseltzer alerts us to a story in the Washington Post on the defense strategy in the Hans Reiser murder trial. "In the courtroom where Hans Reiser is on trial for murder, [the evidence] might appear to indicate guilty knowledge. But his attorneys cast it as evidence of an innocence peculiar to Hans, a computer programmer so immersed in the folds of his own intellect that he had no idea how complicit he was making himself appear. 'Being too intelligent can be a sort of curse,' defense counsel William Du Bois said. 'All this weird conduct can be explained by him, but he's the only one who can do it. People who are commonly known as computer geeks are so into the field.'"

holy_calamity writes "Academics researching how technology addiction affects businesses and employees say 'habit-forming' gadgets like Blackberries should be dispensed along with warnings about the effect they can have on your life. 'We don't want to be in a situation in a few years similar to that with fast food or tobacco today. We need to pay attention to how people react to potentially habit-forming technologies.'"

S point 2 writes "Google has announced that they have hired Codeweavers, maker of the popular Wine software to make Photoshop run better on Linux. 'Photoshop is one of those applications that desktop Linux users are constantly clamoring for, and we're happy to say they work pretty well now...We look forward to further improvements in this area.' It is unknown whether or not the entire Creative Suite will be funded for support, but for the time being it seems Photoshop-on-Linux development is getting a new priority under Google."

beuges writes "The Associated Press is reporting that Microsoft will make full versions of their development tools available to students. "The Redmond-based software maker said late Monday it will let students download Visual Studio Professional Edition, a software development environment; Expression Studio, which includes graphic design and Web site and hybrid Web-desktop programming tools; and XNA Game Studio 2.0, a video game development program. Gates said students will want to try Microsoft's tools because they're more powerful than the open-source combination of Linux-based operating systems, the Apache Web server, the MySQL database and the PHP scripting language used to make complex Web sites. But Gates said giving away Microsoft software isn't intended to turn students against open source software entirely. Rather, he hopes it will just add one more tool to their belt.""