Imagine if all it took to get inside widely-used Diebold electronic voting machines--perhaps with malicious intentions, such as installing tally-altering software on its memory card--was a photograph of the key to the system's physical lock.

Thanks to a little help from the e-voting outfit itself, it may actually be that simple, a security researcher from Princeton University suggested this week.

According to J. Alex Halderman, a computer science PhD student, a picture of the key published at Diebold's online store was a veritable blueprint for filing down ordinary hardware-store cabinet keys to an identical shape.

At the time, they said it would take only seconds to pick the lock guarding the machine's memory card--and beyond that, it could be opened with the same keys typically used with hotel minibars and jukeboxes. With less than one minute of physical access to a machine, a hacker could install corruptive software on the memory cards inside, the study reported.

A US Senate committee has rejected President Bush's plan to send extra troops to Iraq, passing the measure to a full Senate vote likely next week.

The Democratic-controlled Senate Foreign Relations Committee dismissed Mr Bush's policy as "not in the national interest" in a 12-9 vote.

The resolution opposes Mr Bush's plan to send 21,500 additional troops to Iraq, the majority of them to violence-hit Baghdad in an effort to improve security and end sectarian clashes.

"We better be damn sure we know what we're doing, all of us, before we put 22,000 more Americans into that grinder," said Senator Hagel, the only Republican to support the resolution.

The copy protection technology used by Blu-ray discs has been cracked by the same hacker who broke the DRM technology of rival HD DVD discs last month.

muslix64 used much the same plaintext attack in both cases. By reading a key held in memory by a player playing a HD-DVD disc he was able to decrypt the movie been played and render it as an MPEG2 file.

In this case, muslix64 didn't even need access to a Blu-ray player to nobble the DRM protection included on the title.

Blu-ray and HD DVD both allow for decryption keys to be updated in reaction to attacks, for example by making it impossible to play high-definition movies via playback software known to be weak or flawed. So muslix64 work has effectively sparked off a car-and-mouse game between hackers and the entertainment industry, where consumers are likely to face compatibility problems while footing the bill for the entertainment industry's insistence on pushing ultimately flawed DRM technology on an unwilling public.

Not long ago, there seemed hope that spam had passed its prime. Just last December, the Federal Trade Commission published an optimistic state-of-spam report, citing research indicating spam had leveled off or even dropped during the previous year.

Instead, it now appears spammers had simply gone back to the drawing board. There's more spam now than ever before.

There are 62 billion spam messages sent every day, IronPort says, up from 31 billion last year. Now, spam accounts for three of every four e-mails sent, according to another anti-spam firm, MessageLabs.

Image spam is a big part of the resurgence of unwanted e-mail. By using pictures instead of words in their messages, spammers are able to evade filters designed to detect traditional text-based ads.

Spotting spam before you open it is a plus -- sometimes spam messages contain small images that report back to the sender as soon as a message is opened, teaching the spammer that your e-mail address is valid. More spam is sure to follow.

It's official: record companies don't like you. After all that griping about signing up for the Zune music store -- and keep in mind that these record companies receive monies for selling songs here -- that resulted in Universal Music Group getting some sort of fat royalty check from Microsoft for Zune sales, not to mention whatever negotiations went on behind closed doors to come up with that ridiculously minimal "three days or three plays" sharing scheme, a couple of labels have once again gone out of their way to make life hard on you. It appears Sony Music and Universal Music Group are marking certain artists of theirs as "prohibited" for sharing, meaning that just because you've paid for a song, and even managed to find another Zune user on the planet Earth, doesn't mean you'll necessarily get to beam that JoJo track to another Zune via WiFi magics. In a non-scientific sampling of popular artists by Zunerama and Zune Thoughts, it looks like it's roughly 40-50 percent of artist that fall under this prohibited banner, and the worst news is that there's no warning that a song might be unsharable until you actually try to send it and fail. Oh well, maybe you can just hum a few bars or something -- just make sure the labels don't hear you!

Three thieves who allegedly stole 14 global positioning system devices didn't get away with their crime for long. The devices led police right to their home.

Town officials said the thieves didn't even know what they had: they thought the GPS devices were cell phones, which they planned to sell.

According to Suffolk County police, the GPS devices were stolen Monday night from the Town of Babylon Public Works garage in Lindenhurst. The town immediately tapped its GPS system, and it showed that one of the devices was inside a house. Police said that when they arrived there, Kurt Husfeldt, 46, had the device in his hands.

Police working with the RIAA have arrested a famous DJ for making rap mixes, which according to the recording industry makes him a pirate.

According to the New York Times, DJ Drama, AKA Tyree Simmons, is highly influential and his 'Gangsta Grillz' compilations have define this decade's Southern rap explosion.

Recording companies have turned a blind eye to mix tapes because they are valuable promotional tools. Rapper 50 Cent built his entire career on the careful use of mixtapes.

However no one seems to have told the RIAA, which seems to be acting independently of the record labels. In fact it is working against its own PR spinning that its fight against pirates is helping to protect artists' rights.

A small, non-toxic molecule may soon be available as an inexpensive treatment for many forms of cancer, including lung, breast and brain tumours, say University of Alberta researchers.

But there's a catch: the drug isn't patented, and pharmaceutical companies may not be interested in funding further research if the treatment won't make them a profit.

In findings that "astounded" the researchers, the molecule known as DCA was shown to shrink lung, breast and brain tumours in both animal and human tissue experiments.

After oral intake, it can reach areas in the body that other drugs cannot, making it possible to treat cancer of the brain, for example.

In addition, because DCA has been used in both healthy people and ailing patients with mitochondrial diseases, researchers know it is a relatively non-toxic molecule that can be immediately tested in patients with cancer.

But because it's not patented or owned by any drug firm, it would be an inexpensive drug to administer. And researchers may have a difficult time finding money for further research.

The following is a statement by Richard A. Viguerie, Chairman of GrassrootsFreedom.com, regarding legislation currently being considered by Congress to regulate grassroots communications:

In what sounds like a comedy sketch from Jon Stewart's Daily Show, but isn't, the U. S. Senate would impose criminal penalties, even jail time, on grassroots causes and citizens who criticize Congress.

Section 220 of S. 1, the lobbying reform bill currently before the Senate, would require grassroots causes, even bloggers, who communicate to 500 or more members of the public on policy matters, to register and report quarterly to Congress the same as the big K Street lobbyists. Section 220 would amend existing lobbying reporting law by creating the most expansive intrusion on First Amendment rights ever. For the first time in history, critics of Congress will need to register and report with Congress itself.

Unless Amendment 20 succeeds, the Senate will have criminalized the exercise of First Amendment rights. We'd be living under totalitarianism, not democracy.

Dozens of users have written in to inform us that ISOHunt, one of the Internet's largest BitTorrent trackers, has been taken offline by its ISP.

The MPAA and RIAA began a legal campaign against ISOHunt and other similar sites early last year. Many of the targeted sites immediately folded, but ISOHunt remained open -- and immensely popular. While the folks at ISOHunt claim the - - AA's were responsible for the takedown, there's been no independent confirmation that it wasn't just ISP incompetence or technical difficulty.

Update: Looks like they've settled on Cogent as their new provider, and are slowly getting back online.