After his computer was stolen, Jose Caceres used a remote access program to log on every day and watch it being used. The laptop was stolen on Sept. 4, when he left it on top of his car while carrying other things into his home. "It was kind of frustrating because he was mostly using it to watch porn," Caceres said. "I couldn't get any information about him." Last week the thief messed up and registered on a web site with his name and address. Jose alerted the police, who arrested a suspect a few hours later. The moral of the story: never go to a porn site where you have to register.

An Anonymous reader writes "CNN is reporting 'A weathered sweat shirt, cash and a pilot license with Fossett's name were found Tuesday near Mammoth Lakes, police Chief Randy Schienle said.' The license did not have a photo. '"We're not certain that it belongs to Steve Fossett, but it certainly has his name on the ID," Schienle said.'"

toomuchtoomuchspam writes "According to Websense, Microsoft's CAPTCHA has been busted again. CAPTCHA was surely a logical move for different service providers to fight against spammers, but it seems to be melting down. 'Realizing the potential for massive abuse from spammers with anti-CAPTCHA capabilities, who could use the clean IP reputation to carry out various attacks over Email and Web space, Microsoft attempted to increase the complexity of their CAPTCHA system. The CAPTCHA system was revised in an attempt to both prevent automatic registrations from computer programs or automated bots, and preserve CAPTCHA's usability and reliability. As this attack shows, those efforts have failed,' says Websense security researcher Prasad. Could there be any better CAPTCHA? A better solution?"

SpaceAdmiral writes "The once-popular idea that the universe could be small and finite is making a comeback. Many researchers thought that a 'wraparound' universe would mean that distant objects would be seen multiple times in the sky, but new research suggests that a '3-torus' (or 'doughnut universe'), as well as other shapes, could fit our actual observations, particularly the WMAP data."

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "A TJX employee was fired for an online post mentioning that TJX hasn't beefed up security after the recent, massive data breach that saw 94 million credit card numbers copied by criminals and money from their accounts stolen. The employee mentioned that, at first, their usernames were the same as their passwords. After they required stronger passwords, some managers complained, so they 'compromised' by allowing blank passwords. The whistleblower said he discussed his concerns with management, but that it was like talking to a brick wall. In spite of the weak internal security, TJX now has a firm that scours the internet to find bad things posted about them, which is how they found the message and fired him for it. Too bad they don't appear to have hired anyone to beef up operational security or to convince people to use strong passwords."

nimble99 writes "I am a computer software engineer, focused mainly on the Windows platform — but most of my development time is spent in .NET. I would like to move my .NET development to Linux in the form of Mono, in an attempt at building a media-center type of device. All I require, is a base operating system with simple hardware support, Mono, and a window manager that (preferably) does nothing but act as a host for mono applications. Is this available? I dont know a lot about Linux, so I thought I would ask if there is already something like this available. Obviously a 'Mono Operating System' would be the cleanest solution, but a similar thing could be achieved with the barest minimum of Linux distros right?"