It would appear that the folks at Sequoia, one of the big three e-voting firms out there, is somewhat unaware of this aspect of Felten's past. In the past few years, Felten has been one of a few top computer science experts who have been picking apart the problems with e-voting machines.

Felten has become one of the go-to guys when various governments are reviewing e-voting machines, so it should come as no surprise that election officials in New Jersey (where Felten lives and works) would be interested in having him run some tests on a Sequoia e-voting machine.

Sequoia has, instead, sent a threatening email to Felten, saying that election officials who sent a machine to Felten would be breaking the state's terms of service with Sequoia.

Parents of two four-year-old boys in New York are suing officials after their sons were allegedly handcuffed for refusing to take a nap.

Then, a school safety officer allegedly entered the room, cuffed the boys' wrists - and told them they would never see their parents again.

Mr Agulnick said the families were seeking damages, adding: "Failure to comply with nap time is hardly an offence that warrants being handcuffed, or threatened, for that matter."

Computer security analyst Babak Pasdar says that a major mobile telecommunications carrier has a built-in backdoor that provides an undisclosed third-party with unfettered access to its internal technical infrastructure, including the ability to eavesdrop on all calls through its network.

Pasdar was instructed not to migrate the traffic for one particular DS-3, which was referred to as the "Quantico Circuit" by consultants who worked closely with the carrier (the FBI Academy is based in Quantico, Virginia).

When Pasdar insisted that the Quantico Circuit should at least have the minimum level of security access logging if not access control, the consultants called the company's Director of Security, who threatened Pasdar, telling him that he would be replaced if he didn't forget about the circuit and continue with the migration.

Wired's Threat Level blog connected the pieces and points us to the 2006 wiretapping lawsuit against the telcos, which alleges that Verizon "has engaged and maintained and still does maintain a high speed data transmission line from its wireless call center to a remote location in Quantico, Virginia, the site of a U.S. government intelligence and military base."

This is particularly disturbing if the recipient of the Quantico Circuit is the FBI, because the agency has a long history of intelligence abuses and has been found to have a serious lack of meaningful internal oversight.

P2P outfits Napster, Kazaa and Bolt.com all had to cough up millions to Universal Music, Warner Music and EMI to compensate artists for the illegal downloading of their music. But now managers claim that they've hardly seen a penny filter down to the artists, who are getting so frustrated that they have considered filing a few lawsuits themselves.

Record label sources responded to the accusations by saying that the big corporate bosses were still determining how best to divide the cash. In a process that could take a very long while to settle, the mathematically minded music industry boffins have decided to calculate how much every single specific artist is owed, with regard to the level of copyright infringement suffered by each.

Be careful who you frag. Having eliminated all terrorism in the real world, the U.S. intelligence community is working to develop software that will detect violent extremists infiltrating World of Warcraft and other massive multiplayer games, according to a data-mining report from the Director of National Intelligence.

The cultural and behavioral norms of virtual worlds and gaming are generally unstudied. Therefore, Reynard will seek to identify the emerging social, behavioral and cultural norms in virtual worlds and gaming environments. The project would then apply the lessons learned to determine the feasibility of automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world.

The transparency group WikiLeaks.org currently seems to be under heavy fire. The main WikiLeaks.org DNS entry is unavailable, reportedly due to a restraining order relating to a series of articles and documents released by WikiLeaks about off-shore trust structures in the Cayman Islands.

WikiLeaks alternate names remained available until Saturday, when there seems to have been a heavy DDoS attack and a fire at the ISP. The documents in question are still available on other WikiLeaks sites, such as wikileaks.be, and are also mirrored on Cryptome.

A gunman has opened fire on students at a university near Chicago in the United States, wounding at least 15 people.

The shooting took place at Northern Illinois University, in De Kalb, 65 miles (100 km) west of Chicago.

Several people have been taken to hospital with serious head wounds. University officials say police confirm that the gunman killed himself.

Last Friday, a woman shot dead two fellow students before killing herself e at Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge. In Memphis, Tennessee, a 17-year-old is accused of shooting and critically wounding a student on Monday, and a 15-year-old was shot at a junior high school in California on Tuesday.

Just as our courts on continually pointing out that anonymity is protected free speech, it appears that the federal government is trying to do away with anonymity entirely.

Now, the government's Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity has come out with a fear mongering report trying to suggest that online anonymity in 3D worlds leads to terrorism. It highlights things like Second Life as a breeding ground for terrorism.

In fact, the report buries a quote from an anonymous (ha!) intelligence official admitting that there's no evidence whatsoever that any such activity is happening at all.

A 23-year-old student journalist in Afghanistan has been sentenced to death for downloading and distributing a report that is critical of the oppressive treatment of women in some Islamic societies.

Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, who is a journalism student at Balkh University and a writer for Jahan-e Naw, was sentenced last October after downloading a report from a Farsi website that criticized Islamic fundamentalists who misrepresent statements in the Koran to justify the oppression of women.

Other journalists have been warned that they would be arrested if they protested in support of Kambaksh.

According to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), the number of "vishing" complaints received by the center is increasing at what it calls "an alarming rate." Vishing and phishing are related, and both rely on e-mail as a means of delivering bait, but the two use different hooks in order to snag user data.

Vishing starts with an e-mail, like phishing, but requests that end-users contact a particular institution by phone in order to resolve an issue or re-secure personal data. People who call the provided number will be asked to provide the same types of data phishers attempt to procure.

As always, the best defense against phishing or vishing is a little common sense. If your bank or other financial institution with which you are affiliated contacts you requesting personal data, hang up (or call them) using only the number provided on the back of your card or official statement.