Linden Labs, the creator and owner of the online game Second Life, have announced that they have turned to the FBI to investigate attacks carried out against the virtual world. The attacks were characterized as "Denial of Service" attacks, but they were unlike any kind of DoS attacks that network admins normally think about.

These attacks were carried out entirely in-game, using the same scripting tools available to anyone else in the Second Life world. Some virtual parties were bombed with pixellated explosives, while others were teleported randomly around the world. The attacks allegedly culminated in a "grid crash," which effectively denied game access to other players. This last attack was the event that prompted the call to the FBI.

Early on in the history of the game, player Randy Farmer made an invisible repeating auto-cannon that fired a hundred rounds per minute and teleported people away, just to illustrate what could be done with the scripting tools available.

Symantec has stopped selling a password auditing tool to customers outside the US and Canada, citing US Government export regulations.

Symantec's restrictions recall the dark days of the crypto wars when users outside the US were not entitled to buy products featuring strong ciphers. These rules, relaxed by the Clinton administration and following a long running campaign by cryptography experts and net activists, are once again rearing their head.

Beyond confirming that "the statement you have received from your reader is correct", Symantec declined to field questions on the rationale for its policy and whether it applies to other products. Any US government policy to impose export regulations on security technologies would be futile since, to cite only one reason, many security firms are based outside the US and therefore unaffected by such regulations.

The French Parliament voted last night to allow free sharing of music and movies on the Internet, setting up a conflict with both the French government and with media companies.

If the amendment survives, France would be the first country to legalize so called peer-to-peer downloading, said Jean-Baptiste Soufron, legal counsel to the Association of Audionautes, a French group that defends people accused of improperly sharing music files.

The amendment, which is attached to a bill on intellectual property rights, states that "authors cannot forbid the reproduction of works that are made on any format from an online communications service when they are intended to be used privately" and not for commercial use.

Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.

Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.

Already there are plans to extend the database by increasing the storage period to five years and by linking thousands of additional cameras so that details of up to 100 million number plates can be fed each day into the central databank.

"This development forms the basis of a 24/7 vehicle movement database that will revolutionise arrest, intelligence and crime investigation opportunities on a national basis," it says.

Mr Whiteley said MI5 will also use the database. "Clearly there are values for this in counter-terrorism," he said.

ZDNet is reporting that the FTC announced in a recent report to Congress [PDF Warning] that the Can-Spam act is 'effective in providing protection for consumers.' The report boasts that the substantive provisions of the Act have mandated adoption of a number of commercial email "best practices" that many legitimate online marketers are now following. Second, the Act has provided law enforcement agencies and ISPs with an additional tool to use when bringing suit against spammers. The more than 50 cases brought to date by the FTC, the Department of Justice, state Attorneys General, and ISPs demonstrate CAN-SPAM's enforcement efficacy.

For a year now, there have been many rumors why SuprNova.org was taken offline. Some have said that it was because of legal issues, some said it was because I sold out to eXeem project, or because I became a millionaire and did not want to bother with the site anymore, and the rumors go on.

On November 2004, I received a call from my ISP saying that all of my servers had been raided by the police. I received nothing from the police before or after the raid, nobody told me what was going on.

About a month later, after SuprNova.org had been taken offline, there was a door bell at 6:30 in the morning, saying it's the police. Actually I was not expecting anything anymore, since SuprNova.org had been taken offline long before that. They showed me a court order to search my place and they did so. They took as far as I remember, two of my computers and lots of documents.

But anyway, I went to the post and picked up the document. It was from the prosecutor, saying by the law blah blah and blah blah the denunciation against Andrej Preston has been dropped. And I received all the CD's and computers that they took from me. This happened on 18th October 2005.

A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's tome on Communism called "The Little Red Book."

The professors said the student was told by the agents that the book is on a "watch list," and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered them to investigate the student further.

"Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring inter-library loans, because that's what triggered the visit, as I understand it."

Dr. Williams said in his research, he regularly contacts people in Afghanistan, Chechnya and other Muslim hot spots, and suspects that some of his calls are monitored.

"My instinct is that there is a lot more monitoring than we think," he said.

A computerized analysis of 800 films demonstrated a significant level of accuracy in gauging their financial success. The software predicted the right revenue category for the film 37 percent of the time. Seventy-five percent of the time, the film ranked within one category of its actual performance.

Professor Ramesh Sharda, an information systems specialist at Oklahoma State University, has developed a computer program to help Hollywood predict the potential success -- or failure -- of a film.

Sharda selected seven criteria on which to predict a movie's potential viability in the marketplace. Those include its rating by censors (e.g. G, PG, R), strength of the cast, genre, competition from other films at the time of release, special effects, whether it is a sequel, and the number of theaters in which it will show.

Long before the Sony rootkit DRM there was Starforce copy protection, which installs stealth drivers and is generally despised by most PC gamers because of the headaches it causes. While it doesn't stop piracy, it does slow it down: Starforce protected games frequently show up on Torrent trackers months after publication, or sometimes not at all (at least not as major group releases). Sensing the public backlash against DRM, the makers of Starforce have issued a challenge: if our software breaks your CD/DVD drive, you get $1,000 - maybe.

Reading the contest rules however, you'll note that you have to travel to Moscow on your dime and prove to them their software screwed up your CD drive. If you're able to jump through a long list of hoops, you'll get $1,000 and will be reimbursed for your trip. If not, you get posted to their website as a "loser". Of course all of this completely ignores the multitude of other problems this software has caused on user systems since introduction.

Hackers have taken the first step towards breaking the anti-piracy system on Microsoft's Xbox 360 game console.

Information about the work of Team PI Coder was posted to a Dutch piracy site along with the raw data from the games. There was also links to a small program the group produced that helps to extract the data.

The crackers have not managed to get the data off game disks, instead they have dug out the version of the game that the Xbox 360 creates when gamers start playing.

The crackers said they were releasing the raw data to help other hacking groups start the task of working out how the Xbox 360 tries to stop piracy.

"So the first task is done," wrote Team PI in the information files. "We hope this encourages all hackers, coders and crackers out there to take up the challenge."