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zehnra writes "The U.S. Senate this afternoon passed the FISA Amendments Act, broadly expanding the president's warrantless surveillance authority and unconstitutionally granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that participated in the president's illegal domestic wiretapping program. The House of Representatives passed the same bill last month, and President Bush is expected to sign the legislation into law shortly." The New York Times has a story, as does the Associated Press (carried here by Yahoo!). Reader Guppy points out the roll call for the vote.

We previously read and discussed about the aging QuikSCAT weather satellite used to help predict tropical storms. It turns out that the panic is likely overblown and the loss of the satellite won't have any dramatic effects on forecasting at all. Some in the National Hurricane Center are now calling for Director Proenza's resignation over this and his overall handling of the center.
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=710&tstamp=200707

daeg writes "As any person in a small company can tell you, we have too many passwords and too many people know them because the defined job roles are very lax. The programmers know our shipping password because they've had to ship things before and the administrative assistants know our printer passwords, for instance. Are there any easy ways to manage these types of passwords securely? If an employee leaves, we have to change all of the passwords (particularly for the places that do not allow multiple delegate user accounts) and simultaneously tell everyone the new password, which is tedious and error prone, at best. What are some methods that have worked in your small companies?"

daeg writes "PHP 5.2.2 and 4.4.7 have been released with a plethora of security updates. Many of the security notifications come from the Month of PHP Bugs effort, and range from double freed memory to bugs in functions that allow attackers to enable register_globals, to memory corruption with unserialize(), to input validation flaws that allow e-mail header injections, with an unhealthy sprinkling of other bugs and flaws fixed. All administrators that run any version of PHP are encouraged to update immediately."

Thomas Charron writes "An update posted for Intervideo WinDVD 8 confirms that it's AACS key has been possibly revoked. WinDVD 8 is the software which had its device key compromised, allowing unfettered access to Blu-Ray and HD-DVD content, resulting in HD movies being made available via many torrent sites online. This is possibly the first known key revocation which has taken place, and little is known of the actual process used for key revocation. According to the release, 'Please be aware that failure to apply the update will result in AACS-protected HD DVD and BD playback being disabled,' which pretty much confirms that the key revocation has already taken place for all newly released Blu-Ray and HD-DVD discs."

jcatcw writes "Shawn Carpenter was awarded a $4.3 million award — more than twice the amount he sought and money he thinks he'll never see. Carpenter worked for Sandia National Labs as an intrusion detection analyst. He anayzed. He detected. He reported. He was fired — in Janurary 2005 after sharing his results with the FBI and the U.S. Army. Computerworld asked him what he hoped to achieve in that investigation. Answer: 'In late May of 2004, one of my investigations turned up a large cache of stolen sensitive documents hidden on a server in South Korea. In addition to U.S. military information, there were hundreds of pages of detailed schematics and project information marked 'Lockheed Martin Proprietary Information — Export Controlled' that were associated with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. ... It was a case of putting the interests of the corporation over those of the country.' Ira Winkler, author of Spies Among Us , said the verdict was 'incredibly justified. Frankly, I think people [at Sandia] should go to jail' for ignoring some of the security issues that Carpenter was trying to highlight with his investigation."

soulxtc writes "Unable to define memory as a 'recording medium,' Canada's Private Copyright Collective goes directly after portable music player devices, memory cards, and anything else that can be used to make private copies. The PCC submitted a proposal to the country's Copyright Board that suggests levies of $5 (Canadian) on devices with up to 1GB of memory, $25 for 1-10 GB, $50 for 10-30 GB, and $75 for over 30 GB. If approved, this propoal would increase the price of a 30-GB iPod by 26%. These collections are intended to compensate artists and labels for the losses they suffer when people 'illegally' copy or transfer music. The PCC is also seeking a new $2 to $10 tax on memory cards. The backbone of digital photography has become tangled up in the fight for making sure music companies get every nickel and dime they feel that they deserve."

GuerillaRadio writes "The BBC is reporting that China could soon overtake the US to have the world's largest number of internet users, according to a state-controlled think-tank.
"We believe it will take two years at most for China to overtake the US," an official at the China Internet Network Information Center told state media. China had 137m internet users by the end of 2006, an increase of 23% from the year before, the centre reported. This figure means that more than 10% of the population is now online."

An anonymous reader writes "After 10 months of development Docvert 3.0 was released today. This open source web service converts DOC files to Oasis OpenDocument 1.0, and then to HTML, RSS, or any XML format. Try the ODF demo or download the source and install it on your own box. Version 3.0 comes with an MS Word Plugin, FTP/WebDAV upload, and an in-browser document editor."

An anonymous reader writes to mention that sources inside Sun Microsystems claim that OpenSolaris may see the GPLv3 added to its list of licenses soon. From the article: "While Sun officials would not confirm the plan to dual-license OpenSolaris under the CDDL and GPLv3, Tom Goguen, vice president of Solaris software at Sun, told eWEEK that other open-source technologies will play a big role in Solaris going forward. 'Take the GNU Userland, which is an interesting piece of technology that Sun is looking at closely, and we may do something similar with, say, a container flavor,' he said. 'You can also expect to see a renewed focus on the needs of developers and system administrators with Solaris going forward, while individual pieces of the next version will also likely be increasingly delivered first as components or technologies targeted at vertical markets,' he said."

rijit writes " It appears very likely that taxation of online games assets is inevitable. Quote: 'That's because game publishers may well in the not too distant future have to send the forms — which individuals receive when earning nonemployee income from companies or institutions — to virtual world players engaging in transactions for valuable items like Ultima Online castles, EverQuest weapons or Second Life currency, even when those players don't convert the assets into cash.' "

dptalia writes "Israel is looking to create a small robot, no larger than a hornet to follow, film, and kill terrorists. It's just one of a series of weapons the country is considering as an alternative to conventional technologies. Other ideas floating around include gloves that would give its user 'bionic strength', and ultra-miniaturized sensors to detect explosives on suicide bombers." From the article: "The research integrates nanotechnology into Israel's security department and will find creative solutions to problems the army has been unable to address, Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres told Yedioth Ahronoth. 'The war in Lebanon proved that we need smaller weaponry. It's illogical to send a plane worth $100 million against a suicidal terrorist. So we are building futuristic weapons,' Peres said."

Jeff writes "The New York Times is reporting that the feds have shut down the 'Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal' due to concerns from weapons experts that the 'papers give detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs.' One diplomat is quoted as saying, 'If you had this, it would short-circuit a lot of things.' Indexes to older (less sensitive) documents (and some html from pdfs) are still cached at Google today. Rep. Pete Hoekstra pushed for the public release of the archive to help determine 'whether Saddam Hussein destroyed Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or hid or transferred them'. Critics have said the archive was created to perpetuate misinformation about WMDs."

Gamasutra is reporting on reporting, with financial information from some of the large gaming companies becoming available this week. Nintendo, who had already previously raised projections, saw their profits up 72% over last year. This dramatic increase was credited largely to the DS, with 10.9 million units sold in the first six months of this year alone. Sony, on the other hand, dropped profits by 94% over this time last year. The company attributes this largely to the battery recall and PS3 start-up costs. From the article: "The company's games division reported a ¥43.5 billion ($366.6m) loss, from a ¥8.2 million ($69,000) profit in 2005, thanks to research and development, manufacturing and marketing costs related to the launch of the PlayStation 3. Sales and operating revenue were down by 20.5 percent to ¥170.3 billion ($1.43bn). A decrease in hardware sales worldwide was attributed to a drop in price for the PlayStation 2 and PSP. Software sales also decreased overall, although individual PSP sales were up on the previous year. Combined profit from the PS2 and PSP business was described as 'relatively unchanged'."