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The Internet

China Hijacks Popular BitTorrent Sites 174

Posted by timothy from the state-is-still-not-your-friend dept.
frogger writes "China is not new to censoring the Internet, but up until now, BitTorrent sites have never been blocked. Recently, however, several reports came in from China indicating that popular BitTorrent sites such as Mininova, isoHunt and The Pirate Bay had been hijacked. The sites became inaccessible, instead redirecting to the leading Chinese search engine Baidu."
Software

Open Office Plans To Party Like It's Version 3.0 396

Posted by timothy from the undervalued dept.
penguin_dance writes "The Register reports that 'OpenOffice.org is throwing a launch party in Paris on 13 October' to celebrate eight years, and hopefully announce the release of version 3.0. Some notes: [OpenOffice.org 3.0] will support the OpenDocument Format 1.2 standard, and be able to open files created by MS Office 2007 and Office 2008 for Mac OS X." As maj_id10t notes, though the OO.o site does not yet carry an announcement, "Lifehacker has posted an entry stating the final release of OpenOffice 3.0 is available for download via their distribution mirrors."
Hardware Hacking

Huge Credit Fraud Ring Sends Europeans' Data To Pakistan 166

Posted by timothy from the we-keep-our-biggest-credit-thieves-in-d.c. dept.
marshotel excerpts from a story at the Wall Street Journal: "European law-enforcement officials uncovered a highly sophisticated credit-card fraud ring that funnels account data to Pakistan from hundreds of grocery-store card machines across Europe, according to U.S. intelligence officials and other people familiar with the case. Specialists say the theft technology is the most advanced they have seen, and a person close to British law enforcement said it has affected big retailers including a British unit of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Tesco Ltd."
Spam

Submission + - Major Warez Forums DDOSed by the RIAA/MPAA

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Several major warez forums have been under heavy DDOS attack by major anti-piracy organizations such as the MPAA and the RIAA. Attacks started early Tuesday night and affected:
www.warez-bb.org
www.projectw.org
www.forumw.org
ForumW was the least affected and able to stay up with little downtime, albeit slowly. Warez-BB was highly affected and went down for hours. ProjectW was also affected and goes down and up constantly. Warez-BB administrators report
"Unfortunately whichever low life that is trying to bring us down is still continuing their miserable attack. I can confirm that it is the same attack that has brought down ProjectW and slowed down ForumW, so far we've blocked over 4000 IP addresses which we believe is apart of the attack and there is still no signs of the attack stopping."
It is unknown when these attacks will stop.
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Hacker puts Flash Memory in 4G IPod

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: If you love hacks like we do here at the Lab, this last week has been a treat for you. Apple TV has been properly spread open and put on the slab with upgradeable hard drives and the like. Now it's its older brother's turn.

Not for the faint of heart or the sausage-fingered, Mark Hoekstra's flash memory mod for all generations of iPod takes out the spinning, battery draining hard drive and replaces it with Compact Flash. Sure, 16GB of solid state goodness isn't cheap, but what's money in the pursuit of glory?

Based on his previous iPod Mini flash-mod, this four day long marathon of a project involved hand soldering 88 connections, all of them in a tiny space. In true entrepreneur spirit, he's using this as a prototype to actually get the things to manufacture. No prices yet, but you can drop him an email if you're interested. Or just to say "Well done".

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/04/geek_techniq ue_.html
Microsoft

Submission + - NZ objects to Microsoft Open XML standard

Submitted by kumachan
kumachan writes: According to a Standards New Zealand spokesperson, the objection is that "the ISO [The International Organisation for Standardisation] has already developed a standard for XML open format [that is, Open Document] and the committee does not believe that there is a need for another standard, and that Microsoft's [standard] is in conflict with the existing one." http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/82AF97DEB BAFD057CC2572990006C14C
United States

Submission + - IRS Pressures eBay to Provide User Earnings Data

Submitted by
JeremyDuffy
JeremyDuffy writes: "Ars Technica has an article about the IRS wanting eBay to turn over information on its users' earnings. This pretty much sums up the issue:

With so many people making part or all of their living through eBay, the government wants its cut. This isn't an issue of any new taxes, but an attempt to collect the income tax that is already required. Because eBay does not report information about its sellers to the government, income reporting is left up to individuals, and the temptation not to list eBay revenue as income can be a strong one — and in some cases, it's not always clear when one has to do so.
And,

eBay isn't the only Internet business that has been feeling the heat in recent months. The government is also considering how to apply tax laws to virtual worlds and goods, and it faces some of the same problems that it does with eBay. While some sellers can make a good living out of hawking such items, few report the profits as taxable income, and Uncle Sam wants its cut.
To me this seems like one of those things you know is wrong, even if you can't articulate exactly why. Second Lifers, and Warcrafters beware."

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