Air pollution and cramped housing conditions in Athens, Greece, are creating a new breed of mosquitoes which are bigger, faster, and can smell humans from farther away. The super insects have color vision and detect humans from 25-30 meters, which is about 50% farther than the ordinary mosquitoe. Beating their wing 500 times a second provides them with extra speed, and the larger bodies (by 0.3ug) presumably allow larger bloodsucking capacity.

Computer experts from the University of Cambridge claim not only to have breached the Great Firewall of China, but have found a way to use the firewall to launch denial-of-service attacks against specific Internet Protocol addresses in the country.

The Cambridge research group tested the firewall by firing data packets containing the word "Falun" at it, a reference to the Falun Gong religious group, which is banned in China.

"The machines in China allow data packets in and out, but send a burst of resets to shut connections if they spot particular keywords," explained Richard Clayton of the University of Cambridge computer laboratory. "If you drop all the reset packets at both ends of the connection, which is relatively trivial to do, the Web page is transferred just fine."

The IDS uses a stateless server, which examines each data packet both going in and out of the firewall individually, unrelated to any previous request. By forging the source address of a packet containing a "sensitive" keyword, people could trigger the firewall to block access between source and destination addresses for up to an hour at a time.

Even though this technique would block communication between only two particular points on the Internet, the researchers calculated that a lone attacker using a single dial-up connection could still generate a "reasonably effective" denial-of-service attack.

A US senator who is one the ringleaders against 'net neutrality' provisions in recent US telecom laws has claimed that he had to do so because the Internet was too slow when he downloaded it.

Senator Ted Stevens who is a Republican from Alaska in a committee transcipt printed by Wired, here, complained that the Internet was sent to him by his staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday, but it took days for him to get it.

"We aren't earning anything by going on that internet. Now I'm not saying you have to or you want to discriminate against those people," he said cryptically.

Stevens seemed to be getting hot under the collar by this point and said some even more technological things including.

"We have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that? Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can't afford getting delayed by other people."

The U.S. National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in court papers filed in New York federal court.

The suit alleges that the three carriers, the NSA and President George W. Bush violated the Telecommunications Act of 1934 and the U.S. Constitution, and seeks money damages.

"The Bush Administration asserted this became necessary after 9/11," plaintiff's lawyer Carl Mayer said in a telephone interview. "This undermines that assertion."

The lawsuit is related to an alleged NSA program to record and store data on calls placed by subscribers. More than 30 suits have been filed over claims that the carriers, the three biggest U.S. telephone companies, violated the privacy rights of their customers by cooperating with the NSA in an effort to track alleged terrorists.

For six months a website called eon8 (probably down) has carried a countdown to July 1, along with vague and mysterious codes. In addition, strange code-bearing posts associated with the site were made in various webforums, and the site carried a map of the world marked by spots of "deployment". All of this, along with some apparent recorded visits by US military and intelligence computers, led many people to believe this was an imminent terrorist operation or a massive virus to be unleashed on the web-surfing public. Turns out, it was just an experiment by a 23-year-old guy named Chris from Florida who wanted to see how people would react to an absence of information, and he was disappointed that people expected the worst -- even going to so far as to attempt to hack his webserver and make phone calls to anyone with any perceived tangential connection to the site or its host. A mirror of the site in its current state is available with an explanation added by the site owner after the countdown expired.

The concept of forcing companies to record information about their users' Internet activities to aid in future criminal prosecutions took another twist this week.

"How much would it cost your company to preserve those IP addresses?" DeGette asked at a hearing on Wednesday that included representatives from Facebook, Xanga and Fox Interactive Media, the parent company of MySpace. "You're going to store the data indefinitely?"

Michael Angus, executive vice president of Fox Interactive Media, said he agrees with the idea of data retention for MySpace. "As a media company, Fox is very committed to data retention," Angus said. "It helps us police piracy."

In those meetings, Justice Department representatives went beyond the argument that data retention was necessary to protect children--and claimed it would aid in terrorism investigations as well.

"There is more you can do," DeGette said. "You can do algorithms that will go beyond just the date of birth that they register, to start to weed out some of the underage users."

We all know about Microsoft's WGA initiative that started last July. Most of us were troubled to learn that the WGA has been 'phoning home' to Microsoft at every boot. Well, get ready, because eventually Microsoft may be turning off copies of Windows without WGA installed. According to a Microsoft technician, 'in the fall, having the latest WGA will become mandatory and if its not installed, Windows will give a 30 day warning and when the 30 days is up and WGA isn't installed, Windows will stop working, so you might as well install WGA now.'

A North Carolina public school district went to court to get Google to remove Social Security numbers and test scores for more than 600 students after the information was exposed on the Web, according to article in the Winston-Salem Journal online.

Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch, got more information from the school district's chief technology officer, Judith Ray, who said that Google somehow bypassed the login information. "We acted so aggressively with Google because, until the media got involved, we could not get beyond an operator at Google," she said.

"Our crawler does not have the ability to enter passwords. The fact that the information was in our index indicates that the documents were not password protected at the time when we crawled the site," Google said in a statement on Monday.

Games publisher Take-Two Interactive Software, said it received grand jury subpoenas requesting more information about its infamous Grand theft Auto Hot Coffee scenes.

The company said it has been requested to reveal just how much its officers and directors really knew about "the creation, inclusion and programming of hidden scenes" in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

The New York DA also asked for information relating to the submission of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas to the Entertainment Software Rating Board for a rating, and the company's disclosures regarding the hot coffee 'mod'.

Athletics Director Laing Kennedy recently told student-athletes they have until Aug. 1 to remove their Facebook profiles, citing a need to protect both their identities and the university's image.

If student-athletes don't remove their profiles by the deadline, they risk losing their scholarships, he said. Coaches and athletics counselors will monitor the site for violators.

Student-athletes are representatives of the university, Kennedy said, and anything embarrassing on a student's profile can be embarrassing for the university as well.

By posting their addresses, class schedules and what bars they go to, they put themselves at risk, he said.