A Swedish security professional that posted the usernames and passwords for 100 e-mail accounts belonging to various nations' embassies and political parties revealed on Monday that he exploited the improper usage of the Tor network -- a distributed system of computers that anonymizes the source of network traffic -- to collect the information.

In total, Egerstad collected the e-mail credentials of more than 1,500 government workers, corporate employees and private individuals using the Tor network, he said. Because the technique is already known, Egerstad decided that fully disclosing the list of e-mail accounts and passwords for 100 of the government accounts was the best way to bring more attention to the issue.

Following the posting of the information to his Web site, a few countries did respond. India, Iran and Uzbekistan were friendly and supported the manner in which he disclosed the issue, he said. China filed a criminal complaint over the posting, while U.S. authorities complained to his Texas Web provider and had his original Web site taken down, Egerstad said.

He pointed to exit nodes run by hacking groups as potential ways of getting information for identity fraud, while massive nodes located in Washington D.C. and at the Space Research Institute in Russia are possible intelligence gathering tools for the U.S. and Russian governments, respectively.

A McDonald's worker was arrested and spent a night in jail after serving a salty burger to a police officer.

Police Officer Wendell Adams said the burger he ate from a McDonald's in Union City, Georgia, made him vomit.

Ms Bull says she was mixing hamburger meat when too much salt and pepper accidentally spilled into the bowl. A co-worker tried to remove the seasoning.

"If it was too salty, why did he not just take one bite and throw it away?" she asked.

Police sent samples of the burger to the state crime lab for tests.

We've had a report that the popular scambaiting site 419Eater and the anti-scam site Scamwarners are the latest anti-spam sites to fall victim to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Both sites are down at this time.

There's good reason to believe that the Zhelatin (Storm Worm) gang have been behind a number of other DDoS attacks this year, including an attack against anti-spam sites and download sites operated by a rival spam gang.

Other attacks have targeted blacklists, anti-malware and -spyware sites, and general 'umbrella' sites like Spamhaus. (Although Spamhaus is probably under attack 365 days a year, so it may be hard to distinguish an attack from background noise). The current attack, with its focus on anti-scam sites, seems to fit that pattern.

The Associated Press is reporting that microchip implants have induced cancer in laboratory animals and dogs. A series of research articles spanning more than a decade found that mice and rats injected with glass-encapsulated RFID transponders developed malignant, fast-growing, lethal cancers in up to 1% to 10% of cases. The tumors originated in the tissue surrounding the microchips and often grew to completely surround the devices.

The Storm worm botnet has grown so massive and far-reaching that it easily overpowers the world's top supercomputers.

"In terms of power, the botnet utterly blows the supercomputers away," said Matt Sergeant, chief anti-spam technologist with MessageLabs, in an interview. "If you add up all 500 of the top supercomputers, it blows them all away with just 2 million of its machines. It's very frightening that criminals have access to that much computing power, but there's not much we can do about it."

Sergeant said researchers at MessageLabs see about 2 million different computers in the botnet sending out spam on any given day, and he adds that he estimates the botnet generally is operating at about 10 percent of capacity.

"We've seen spikes where the owner is experimenting with something and those spikes are usually five to 10 times what we normally see," he said, noting he suspects the botnet could be as large as 50 million computers. "That means they can turn on the taps whenever they want to."

The botnet actually is attacking computers that are trying to weed it out. It's set up to launch a distributed denial-of-service attack against any computer that is scanning a network for vulnerabilities or malware.

Within the last few weeks, there have been a number of reports by Comcast customers claiming that their BitTorrent downloads and uploads have been capped--or worse, blocked. TorrentFreak recently reported that Comcast, a major U.S. cable company, is using an application from Sandvine to throttle such connections.

BitTorrent traffic accounts for upwards of 25 percent of U.S. Internet traffic, and the techniques used by Comcast are essentially the same as those used by the Great Firewall of China.

Assuming that the SYN packet goes through, the three-way handshake is allowed to happen, then the two hosts will be able to begin communicating.

According to TorrentFreak, Comcast is not doing this. They are instead sending a reset (or RST) packet to the Comcast customer, pretending to be from the host at the end of the BitTorrent connection. It is extremely important to note that when Comcast creates and sends this packet, it does not identify itself as the the source of packet, but instead impersonates one of the parties involved in the BitTorrent connection. This is where things get rather shady.

Many states make it illegal for an individual to impersonate another individual. New York, a state notorious for its aggressive pro-consumer office of the Attorney General, makes it a crime for someone to "[impersonate] another and [do] an act in such assumed character with intent to obtain a benefit or to injure or defraud another."

China's military successfully hacked into the Pentagon's computer network, it was reported reported Tuesday, although the Chinese government dismissed the accusation as groundless.

While the Pentagon declined to say who was behind the hacking, which led to the shutdown of a computer system serving the office of Defence Secretary Robert Gates, officials told the paper it was China's People's Liberation Army.

"Against the background of good momentum towards the improvement of Sino-US military ties, some people are making groundless accusations that the Chinese military is attacking the networks of the US defence department," Jiang told journalists when asked about the Financial Times report.

The Bush administration is signaling that it plans to turn once again to a favorite legal tool known as the "state secrets" privilege to try to shut down a lawsuit brought against a Belgium banking cooperative that secretly supplied millions of private financial records to the U.S. government, court documents show.

The "state secrets" privilege, allowing the government to shut down public litigation on national security grounds, was once a rarely used tool. But the Bush administration has turned to it dozens of times in terrorism-related cases in seeking to end public discussion of everything from an FBI whistle-blower's claims to the abduction of a German terrorism suspect.

Bush administration officials have defended the banking data program as an important tool in its war on terror, but European regulators and privacy advocates were quick to denounce the program as improper and possibly illegal, and the pressure forced Swift and U.S. officials earlier this year to agree to tighter restrictions on how the data could be used.

German government plods are asking to be allowed to email Trojan horse spyware to terrorist suspects in order to surrepticiously monitor their Internet use and inspect their computer hard drives remotely, the Associated Press reports.

The spyware would be hidden in emails appearing to have been sent from other, seemingly innocuous government agencies such as the Finance Ministry or Youth Services Office.

Do German gumshoes believe that real terrorists won't have capable antivirus and antispyware software installed? One can imagine they'll probably be immune anyway, because they're likely already running OS/X, BSD or Linux.

The web, located in Lake Tawakoni State Park near Wills Point, Texas, has encased several mature oak trees and even blocks out the sun in some places, The New York Times said Friday.

Scientists say the web may be a combined effort of social cobweb spiders or it may be an example of ballooning, in which lightweight spiders throw out silk filaments to ride the air currents.

State biologist Mike Quinn said a large number of crickets and webworms in the area after this summer's record-breaking rains may have also contributed to the web.