A Diebold insider is blowing the whistle on the company's continued lack of concern about security holes in its voting software. The insider wrote to Brad Friedman, a somewhat shrill political blogger, claiming the company is instructing technicians to keep quiet about the security flaws. This is despite the vulnerability being listed on the US-CERT website for the last year. A Diebold company rep admits the software can be remotely accessed via modem, but states, "it's up to a jurisdiction whether they wish to use it or not...I don't know of any jurisdiction that does that." The insider disputes that, claiming several counties in Maryland made use of the feature in 2004.

The power of texting turned a party in Sacramento into death for a teenager, and bullet laden injuries for others.

The Sacramento Bee reported that what had started as an innocent txt message to pals to celebrate a 16th birthday party turned into a gunfight at the not-so OK corral.

The Sacbee reported here that a message to 40 friends from a mobile phone turned into a battle where a 16-year old high school boy, Phillip Bailey, died, while four other children including one girl were hospitalised with gun wounds. The 40 recipients may have texted their pals, and so on ad infinitum.

Adults were trying to shut the party down when the gun shots started, said the Sacbee, quoting a local cop.

Christian Koch, 55, has angered animal rights people with his alternative fuel which is made from a secret recipe of garbage, mashed-up moggies, and other ingredients.

He said that his normal diesel-powered car has clocked 170,000 kilometres (106,000 miles) on pussy power without any major catastrophe.

His company "Alphakat GmbH", says his patented "KDV 500" machine can produce "bio-diesel" fuel at about 23 euro cents (30 cents) a litre.

It takes 20 dead cats added to the mix to produce enough fuel to fill up a 50-litre (11 gallon) tank. The engine really purrs apparently.

The Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA) has told seven P2P software companies to get with the programme - or face the consequences.

The organisation, infamous for the thousands of lawsuits it has issued against alleged file-sharers, said it has asked the firms to shut down their networks or implement RIAA-approved anti-piracy measures.

The verdict reversed judgements made at the District Court and Court of Appeal levels, which were founded on the precedent established in a landmark case brought in the 1980s by the movie industry against Sony. Back then, the Japanese giant prevailed, by showing its video recorders had plenty of uses beyond illegally copying movies. This time round, the P2Pers made the same claims, but the Supreme Court maintained that there were substantial differences between the two cases, so the Sony precedent does not apply.

The case now returns to the lower court, which must now re-consider the movie industry's complaint against Grokster and StreamCast in the light of the Supremes' decision.

Mailinator, the free, temporary email service gets a lot of spam (over a million emails a day). And with another cool application of Google maps, the site now shows a Spam Map indicating what sites are spamming mailinator in (nearly) real time. It's oddly addictive to poke around and see where the spam is actually coming from.

The Asia Times reports that programmers are very very important people indeed, which of course is a platitude.

According to its report, Sea Code has bought an ocean liner registered in the Bahamas, and will outsource coding services just on the brink of USA Maritime limits. Nothing illegal about that.

The highly outsourced programmers, or developers as we're supposed to call them now we're in the 21st Century, can view the United States with envy, offshore.

But with presumably endless supplies of free alcohol, none of them need to worry about the fractious H1-B visa, which has, rather mysteriously, become hard to obtain.

Founder and co-ordinator of Freenet, Ian Clarke says: "Our goal was to provide a system whereby people could share information over the internet without revealing their identity and without permitting any form of government censorship."

Freenet encourages anonymous uploading of any material. Some users of the English version believe it is so secure they have used it to confess to crimes they have committed, or to their interest in paedophilia.

The storage is dynamic, with files automatically moved between computers on the network or duplicated. This adds to the difficulty of determining who might be storing what.

Even if a user's computer is seized, it can be impossible for experts to determine what the owner was doing on Freenet.

"You are giving over part of your computer, it will be in encrypted form, you will not know what you are carrying, but some of it is going to be seriously unpleasant. Are you happy with that?"

A Dutchman who found two children in a strange car was stunned when they said their parents were inside his house, burgling him.

The 31-year-old man returned from work to find the car in the drive of his home in Pieterburen, near Groningen, reports Nu.nl.

Two children were sitting on the back seat so the man asked them where their father was and was told he was "robbing" the house.

The man rushed inside to find a man and a woman who immediately ran out and drove off with the children.

The man could not catch the burglars, who did not steal anything, but was able to describe the whole family to the police.

The experimental high speed internet project Internet2 has two new members today: a pair of acronyms guaranteed to have researchers rifling anxiously through their "Stuff" directories. Both the Recording Industry Ass. of America, the RIAA, and Hollywood lobby group the Motion Picture Ass. of America, the MPAA, have signed up to the project to explore high-bandwidth DRM.

Earlier this year, the RIAA sued 400 researchers on the network for copyright infringement. "We cannot let this high-speed network become a zone of lawlessness where the normal rules don't apply," RIAA president Cary Sherman said at the time.

"The MPAA views this partnership with Internet2 as an important opportunity for collaboration as we seek to link new delivery models with content protection," added MPAA prez Dan Glickman.

We'd all be pretty surprised if Microsoft came out and claimed that they were designing the Xbox 360 to be as hackable as possible, because it doesn't fit the company's image. Likewise, it would be a little silly to act shocked that the company is planning, in fact, to lock down the Xbox 360 in as many ways as possible. In fact, it's not too surprising given the fact that Microsoft is going to technologically lock out unlicensed accessories for the new console.

Chris Satchell from the Xbox Advanced Technology Group told the BBC that the console was designed from the ground-up to be a secure as possible.

The original Xbox was hacked silly, and more than one person bought the console just to have a cheap Linux box that could be used for any number of media functions. Microsoft, however, isn't interested in selling its console hardware below cost for the sake of hackers. Will the Xbox 360 be hacked? It's a question of interest: if enough people want to see it happen, it probably will.