July 24, 2000 Ex-broker convicted of bilking HP A former computer broker was found guilty of bilking computer giant Hewlett-Packard out of millions of dollars through the use of closely guarded software. A federal jury Friday convicted Richard Adamson, 35, of Newport Beach, of fraud and money laundering in connection with his use of a proprietary HP program called SS.Config. The jury found that Adamson secretly obtained SS.Config in March 1997 and used it to boost the performance of used HP servers. http://www.sjmercury.com/premium/local/docs/software23.htm - - - - - - - - - - - Teen hacked into local server from abroad AN INDONESIAN teenager hacked into a Singapore server while studying in Australia and used it as a proxy server, so he could disguise his identity while chatting over the Internet. But the 15-year-old was caught out when he came here to study and again hacked into the same server, which belongs to a research institute here. http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/singapore/sin3_0721.html - - - - - - - - - - - Congress isn't swallowing Carnivore Officials from the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice faced a skeptical -- and at times downright hostile -- House Judiciary Committee on Monday during an oversight hearing on the constitutional issues raised by the FBI's Carnivore electronic monitoring program. Both Republicans and Democrats raised repeated concerns about how the FBI's e-mail surveillance software operates. Committee members demanded to know why the FBI didn't inform Congress about it sooner and how the agency planned to keep Carnivore from eroding users' increasingly ill-protected online privacy. http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2606899,00.html Congress enters Internet wiretap debate U.S. lawmakers Monday raised concerns about a new FBI Internet wiretap system called Carnivore, as officials attempted to minimize fears it could be used for widespread surveillance of Americans' e-mail. The system allows U.S. law enforcement agencies to find and follow the e-mails of a criminal suspect among the flood of other data passing through an Internet service provider. http://www.mercurycenter.com/svtech/news/breaking/merc/docs/035173.htm New laws needed to protect Net privacy? Is the United States headed for another era of secret snooping, à la J. Edgar Hoover? That was the implication heard throughout four hours of testimony Monday before the House Judiciary Committee about the FBI surveillance computer system known as "Carnivore." http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2606917,00.html FBI’s Carnivore a picky eater For all the controversy over the FBI’s e-mail surveillance system, it turns out that Carnivore is a picky eater and not a devourer of data, according to bureau officials. The system was shown off at bureau headquarters in Washington, D.C., Friday, and bureau officials and others will testify about Carnivore today before the House Judiciary Committee’s Constitution Subcommittee. http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2000/0724/web-fbi-07-24-00.asp Other Carnivore stories: http://www.gcn.com/vol1_no1/daily-updates/2489-1.html http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0700/072500td.htm http://www.newsbytes.com/pubNews/00/152623.html http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/07/24/fbi.carnivore.reut/index.html New Net snooping tools FBI wants access to all forms of Internet traffic. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is developing a broad range of Internet surveillance technologies capable of monitoring any form of digital communication, including file transfers and Internet-based telephone calls. The FBI revealed its ambitious digital snooping development plans during a congressional hearing on "Carnivore," the bureau’s controversial Internet wiretapping program. http://www.msnbc.com/news/437190.asp - - - - - - - - - - - Denial-of-service threat gets IETF's attention Remember the denial-of-service attacks that brought Amazon.com, CNN.com, eBay and other popular Web sites to their knees in February? The Internet engineering community is developing technology that promises to minimize the damage these hacker attacks cause by quickly identifying the computer systems where they originate. http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2000/0724itrace.html - - - - - - - - - - - Man denies wrongdoing in DVD cracking case A man accused by the motion picture industry of trying to sabotage its efforts to prevent DVDs from being copied on computers says he is a journalist, not a computer expert, and provides a public service. "I've never taken a computer course or anything like that," Eric Corley told District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan during two days of testimony that concluded Friday in a civil trial in Manhattan. "I consider myself a journalist." http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-2333721.html - - - - - - - - - - - E-Surveillance Intrudes on Crime Electronic surveillance may eat away your privacy in the digital era, but you'll get used to it. You have no choice. Top lawyers told an Anglo-American law conference this week that governments had no other way to fight organized crime effectively in a digital age. "I am convinced that covert surveillance is likely to prove the only effective answer to increasingly sophisticated crime," said Lord Justice Murray Stuart-Smith, the former overseer of MI5 and MI6, Britain's security and intelligence agencies. http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21044-2000Jul21.html - - - - - - - - - - - Hunting Phantoms Millions of tax dollars are spent each year to combat cyberterrorism. But where are the perpetrators? On Feb. 4, 1999, FBI director Louis Freeh went before the Senate Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on the Departments of Commerce, Justice and State, and testified that since the 1993 World Trade Center bombing "no significant act of foreign-directed terrorism has occurred on American soil. http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,16974,00.html - - - - - - - - - - - FTC says Toysmart violated child Net privacy law A failed dot-com that is majority-controlled by Disney has become the first online company charged with violating new federal laws protecting children's privacy online. The Federal Trade Commission said today that Toysmart.com violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA) by collecting personal information from children without their parents' consent. The FTC also announced today that it reached an agreement with Toysmart about earlier charges that the company was trying to sell confidential customer information. http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-2313384.html - - - - - - - - - - - Adult Web Sites Settle FTC Charges Of Fraudulent Billing The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced today it had obtained a settlement against operators of several "free" online porn vendors which allegedly billed visitors after claiming that requested credit card information was for age verification purposes only. According to documents released today, the FTC alleged that Xpics Publishing Inc. and a number of its online subsidiaries requested credit card information from visitors to verify their ages before allowing them to participate in a "free 30-day or 90-day trial period. In many cases, however, consumers who visited the sites were billed within just hours of providing the information. http://www.newsbytes.com/pubNews/00/152590.html http://www.msnbc.com/news/436139.asp - - - - - - - - - - - Firms can sue over RIP leaks Companies will have the right to sue under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Bill if government agencies leak confidential information through negligence. The measure was one of several secured during the final reading of the bill in the Lords last week. It will now be passed back to the Commons, where ministers have agreed not to reverse either of the defeats suffered earlier this month. http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/2000/29/ns-16819.html - - - - - - - - - - - Time Warner slams Napster as ``hijacker'' of music In an informal prelude to a court battle set for later this week, the president of media conglomerate Time Warner Inc. on Monday compared digital song-swapping software company Napster to a ``hijacker'' of intellectual property. At the same time, Time Warner president Dick Parsons acknowledged that the music industry had been too slow to offer songs for distribution over the Internet. http://www.mercurycenter.com/svtech/news/breaking/merc/docs/042927.htm - - - - - - - - - - - Spying or Security? Market Booms in E-Surveillance Software. Think twice before you send raunchy letters from the office. Your boss’s computer may be searching for dirty words. If your boss isn’t reading your e-mail, your company’s computers might be doing it for him. The market for e-mail monitoring software, which lets companies search for harassing letters or leaks of trade secrets, will explode by 14 times over the next four years, to $952 million, a new study from International Data Corp. of Framingham, Mass., says. http://abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/DailyNews/contentsecurity000721.html - - - - - - - - - - - Anti-Fraud That's Anti-Consumer When Kendall Dawson heard about PayPal, a wildly popular new service that lets surfers send money via email, he thought it would be a great way to pay for items on eBay, so he signed up. Or rather, tried to sign up. But each time he typed his credit card number into PayPal's website, it returned a message saying the card couldn't be confirmed and to contact the credit card company. A check with the card company showed no problem with the card. http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,37642,00.html - - - - - - - - - - - Yahoo! pleads its case over Nazi auctions Yahoo! puts its case to the high court in Paris following attempts from anti-racist groups to have its American auction site blocked to French users. The case brought by the Union of Jewish Students and the International League Against Racism claims that Yahoo!'s auction site is an offence to the collective memory of France because of the large collection of Nazi memorabilia available -- 1163 items at last count. French law prevents the sale of objects with racist overtones. http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2606851,00.html - - - - - - - - - - - Anti-hacker system has bug: expert A leading computer security system widely used by government and business around the world to guard against hackers may itself be vulnerable to attack, according to a software expert. FireWall-1, made by Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. of Tel Aviv, Israel, is one of the world's top-selling computer security systems. Launched in 1993, the product is designed to act as a fence around networks and Web sites, controlling access and protecting against intrusion by unauthorized visitors, such as hackers. http://www.nationalpost.com/financialpost/story.html?f=/stories/20000724/351993.html *********************************************************** The source material may be copyrighted and all rights are retained by the original author/publisher. The information is provided to you for non-profit research and educational purposes. Reproduction of this text is encouraged; however copies may not be sold, and NewsBits (www.newsbits.net) should be cited as the source of the information. Copyright 2000, NewsBits.net, Campbell, CA.