A backdoor in MySpace's architecture allows anyone who's interested to see the photographs of some users with private profiles -- including those under 16 -- despite assurances from MySpace that those pictures can only be seen by people on a user's friends list. Info about the backdoor has been circulating on message boards for months.

The flaw exposes MySpace users who set their profiles to "private" -- the default setting for users under 16 -- even though MySpace's account settings page tells users, "Only the people you select will be able to view your full profile and photos."

Beginning in October, commercial websites began springing up to perform the MySpace hack automatically, while earning a buck through online advertising. The sites all allow you to retrieve photos from private profiles merely by typing in the Friend ID of a targeted user.

A decade after the government said that AT&T and other service providers don't have to police their networks for pirated content, the telecommunications giant is voluntarily looking for ways to play traffic cop.

For the past several months, AT&T executives have said the company is testing technology to filter traffic on its network to look for copyrighted material that is being illegally distributed.

AT&T's plans would turn the nation's largest telephone company into a kind of network cop, a role that some say could turn dangerous for the company. For one, filtering packets to determine whether they contain copyrighted material raises privacy concerns.

AT&T argues that it must get involved in stopping the flow of pirated content because much of this content is shared using peer-to-peer protocols, which eats up valuable network bandwidth, slowing network connections for many of its customers.

On Jan. 15, the Palo Alto, Calif., company announced that it would acquire Thinstall, a privately held company that specializes in application virtualization technology for PCs. The deal is expected to close by the end of the first quarter of this year.

"The addition of Thinstall to our desktop virtualization portfolio will help us to better deliver cost-effective and more flexible tools for quickly and securely provisioning desktops," said Jeff Jennings, vice president of desktop products and solutions at VMware, in a statement.

Thinstall, which is based in San Francisco, has about 600 customers in both the enterprise space and within government. Lambert believes that VMware will re-brand the Thinstall product line by the second half of this year, but that it will keep the company's partnership with LANDesk and BMC in place.

All too often, we're seeing the DMCA abused by people who aren't using it to takedown copyright infringing materials, but to shut down sites they don't like. The latest example involves some filmmakers and a movie review site. The review certainly was not particularly positive, leading to a rather random series of complaints and threats against its author.

It's difficult to see how a review of a movie can infringe on the copyrights of that movie unless it was showing the movie itself (which does not appear to be the case). It's worth pointing out that a DMCA takedown notice is only supposed to be for copyright infringing material, so including charges of libel and defamation in the takedown seem rather unnecessary. Even more amusingly, though, the takedown notice includes a bunch of random charges that aren't actually illegal, such as: "linking to other websites without any authorization to do so."

Under mounting pressure from law enforcement and parents, MySpace agreed Monday to take steps to protect youngsters from online sexual predators and bullies, including searching for ways to better verify users' ages.

But Monday's announcement was short on specifics about how improvements would be carried out.

"Age verification requires that you have a database of kids and if you do, that database is available to hackers and anyone who can get into it."

MySpace said it was combing through sex offender registries to identify predators, who would then be kicked off the site. But sex offenders are unlikely to open an account under their real names, as are underage children.

"When people go on MySpace they lie about their age. Everyone lies about their age," the sixth-grader said. "You just put an age and a date and you just put it on there."

MySpace said it is in the process of creating a database where parents can submit children's e-mail addresses to prevent their children from setting up profiles.

University of Minnesota researchers have created a beating heart in the laboratory. By using a process called whole organ decellularization, scientists from the University of Minnesota Center for Cardiovascular Repair grew functioning heart tissue by taking dead rat and pig hearts and reseeding them with a mixture of live cells.

Decellularization is the process of removing all of the cells from an organ – in this case an animal cadaver heart – leaving only the extracellular matrix, the framework between the cells, intact.

After successfully removing all of the cells from both rat and pig hearts, researchers injected them with a mixture of progenitor cells that came from neonatal or newborn rat hearts and placed the structure in a sterile setting in the lab to grow.

Four days after seeding the decellularized heart scaffolds with the heart cells, contractions were observed. Eight days later, the hearts were pumping.

The Swedish Courts of Appeal questions whether banning citizens from the Internet would indeed reduce online file sharing. Despite several other countries having already taken similar action, none have had good results to show for it.

Decriminalizing all non-commercial file sharing and forcing the market to adapt is not just the best solution. It's the only solution, unless we want an ever more extensive control of what citizens do on the Internet.

The simple truth is that almost all communication channels on the Internet can be used to distribute copyrighted information. If you can use a service to send a message you can most likely use the same service to send an mp3-song. Those who want to prevent people from exchanging of copyrighted material must control all electronic communication between citizens.

In the late 1970s, the copyright industry wanted to prevent people from recording TV-shows with then-new Video Cassette Recorders. In 1998 the recording industry tried to get mp3 players banned.

Sony BMG made history Thursday by becoming the fourth and final major label to allow its music to be sold without digital rights management, issuing a announcement that Amazon.com's MP3 store would start carrying music from the label by the end of this month.

This day has been a long time coming. After consumers are able to buy music that plays on a wide variety of equipment, analysts expect the market for digital music and associated devices to expand.

Representatives for both Sony BMG and Amazon confirmed that the files will in fact contain watermarks. However, privacy advocates needn't be alarmed -- the reps also told me that the only information to be included in the watermarks is where they were purchased. In other words, if you mistakenly share the files over the internet, they will not be traceable to you, only to Amazon.

If you visit a lot of bars and restaurants, you've likely crossed paths with drivers license scanners — machines that supposedly verify that your license is valid. In actuality, many of these scanners are designed to record your license information in addition to verifying them, and those that authenticate against a remote database are creating a record of when and where you buy alcohol.

Collecting our driver's license information is one thing, but collecting data about our personal drinking habits is not only a violation of, according to the ACLU representative quoted in the article, privacy and civil liberties, but this 'drinking record' could also create problems for people in civil and criminal lawsuits as proof of alcohol purchases in DUI cases or evidence of alcoholism in divorce lawsuits.

Numerous reports confirm that Network Solutions, the well-known domain registry company, is automatically registering domain names when individuals search for a potential name using its site's search tools.

In a follow-up story at DomainNameNews, a reporter confirmed that after using the popular whois tool on the Network Solution site to search for a domain name, they then found that the site had been registered to a private registrant, but that the domain name was still available from Network Solutions.

eWEEK was also able to determine that simply searching for a domain name with Network Solutions' Whois utility was sufficient for Network Solutions to automatically register the name.

Other individuals have started automated scripts to flood Network Solutions with bogus domain name searches in an impromptu DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack. Others are protesting Network Solutions new policy to ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the oversight organization for top-level domain name providers. At this time, ICANN has not replied to requests for its stand on Network Solutions' policies.