If FBI agents showed up at your data center bearing a warrant, would you be able to provide them prompt access to customer data? How long would it take?

CIT Hosting, also known as FooNet, markets itself as "the leader in the IRC and DDoS protection business for the last 5 years." The company posted a web page informing customers that its data center was shut down, and instructing customers to contact the FBI if they needed access to their files.

"The FBI executed a search warrant issued by the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio regarding the IRC network that we host," the company said in its statement.

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a live chat system that allows users to create private discussion rooms. While IRC has a lengthy history of legitimate use, it is also a medium for discreet communication between hackers. CIT said the FBI was "investigating whether someone hosted on our network hacked and attacked someone else."

"After several hours of attempting to track down, inspect and audit the terabytes of data that we host, the FBI determined that it was more efficient (from their point of view) to remove all of our servers and transport them to the FBI local laboratories for inspection," the statement continued.

The seizure isn't standard procedure, and there's no way to know exactly what prompted it. CIT's account suggests the FBI may have lost patience with the process. The IRC-focused nature of CIT's business may also have been a factor.

Envy News has picked up on a meowing sound that is a characteristic feature of the Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 hard drive.

According to Hitachi, the meowing sound is the result of a relatively new feature which verifies the performance and reliability of the drive. But up to this time, the drive manufacturer has not been able to suppress the noise.

There is a thread on this issue, and one drive owner has provided a sound link of the meowing. The noise apparently repeats itself about once every ten minutes, or six times every hour. One drive owner finds the sound "totally horrible", and has asked for a fix from Hitachi to remove it. Others are clearly intolerant of it.

"All of our 7K250 drives, as well as any future product releases will have this feature. At this time, there is no way to disable it. Anti-vibration materials will not eliminate the noise, but it may help to minimize actually hearing the noise."

The Defense Sciences Office of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is looking for a few good proposals to exploit soldiers in ways Rommel and Tojo could only have dreamed of.

"The vision for the Metabolic Dominance Program is to develop novel strategies that exploit and control the mechanisms of energy production, metabolism, and utilization during short periods of deployment requiring unprecedented levels of physical demand. The ultimate goal is to enable superior physical and physiological performance by controlling energy metabolism on demand," DARPA explains.

Rather, DARPA is interested in forcing soldiers' bodies to metabolize their own fat reserves, eliminating the need for food. It would like to overclock muscle mitochondria, increasing output beyond levels that the skeleton can withstand. It would like to suppress the painful signs of fatigue, so that soldiers can be pushed beyond the limits of human endurance without realizing it, at least until something breaks.

Music, software, video-game and DVD packages shortly will carry the famous FBI stamp and warnings about piracy, in a move to hammer home the message that stealing copyright materials is a serious crime, industry officials said Thursday.

"It is our hope that when consumers see the new FBI warning on the music they purchase, both physically and online, they will take the time to learn the dos and don'ts of copying and uploading to the Internet," said Brad Buckles, vice president of antipiracy at the Recording Industry Association of America. "These are serious crimes with serious consequences -- including federal prosecution -- if the wrong choices are made about copying or uploading music without permission."

"Once again the recording industry is putting its effort into scare tactics rather than market solutions," said Jason Schultz, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "The last thing music fans want is another stern warning from the recording industry."

The extremely popular firewall, ZoneAlarm, has been dealt a nasty blow with a "highly critical" security hole that allows system access to remote users - i.e. the worst possible situation. The hole affects the most recent version of ZoneAlarm - version 4 - and users with the software's update facility turned on were this morning warned to upgrade and asked to download a run a 4.8MB patching file. The vulnerability itself is an unchecked buffer in the fundamental e-mail protocol SMTP. ZoneAlarm's creators Zone Labs warned that sufficiently exploited, "a skilled attacker could cause the firewall to stop processing traffic, execute arbitrary code, or elevate malicious code’s privileges".

Unfortunately ZoneLabs is taking this 'golden opportunity' to extort subscription fees out of the end users. Yes... you need to have a "current annual update and support subscription" when you visit ZoneAlarm's download page for this updated version.

In what legal experts described as a novel strategy, Scimeca is citing federal racketeering laws like the one that jailed mob boss John Gotti to countersue record labels that accused her in December of sharing some 1,400 copyrighted songs over the Internet.

Labels are using "scare tactics (that) amount to extortion" in efforts to extract settlements, Scimeca alleges in legal papers sent to the U.S. District Court in Newark.

"They're banding together to extort money, telling people they're guilty and they will have to pay big bucks to defend their cases if they don't pony up now. It is fundamentally not fair," Scimeca's lawyer, Bart Lombardo, said yesterday. The Cranford attorney said he occasionally downloads songs for personal use and sees nothing wrong with that.

"It strikes me as a very innovative use of the law. Very innovative," said Gregory Mark, a law professor at the Rutgers School of Law-Newark.

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp (NTT) announced on Feb 12 that it has developed a prototype of a new high-capacity memory storage device, designed with a multi-layered waveguide structure and based on thin-film holography.

The company has produced a 100-layer postage stamp-sized media prototype with a 1GB memory capacity constructed from plastic material, and a small prototype drive for reading data.

Information is pre-recorded as follows: first, digital data is encoded into a 2D image, then the 2D image is translated into a hologram by CGH (Computer Generated Hologram) technology. Finally, the hologram is recorded as a sub-micron concave-convex pattern in each waveguide layer of the media. For data retrieval, a laser beam is focused at the end of a waveguide layer, then the light propagates in the waveguide and is scattered by the concave-convex pattern. The scattered light generates the 2D image on the plane parallel to the waveguide. This 2D image is captured by an image sensor and decoded into the original digital data.

Belgian police arrested a 19-year-old female technology student who gained international notoriety for creating computer viruses, local news media reported Saturday. The woman, identified only by her nickname "Gigabyte," was charged with computer data sabotage under legislation introduced in 2000 to deal with cyber-crime, the daily La Libre Belgique reported. If convicted, she faces up to three years in prison and fines of up to euro100,000 (US$127,000).

Her youth and gender helped gain Gigabyte notoriety in the male-dominated world of computer hackers. In a 2002 interview carried on the Web site www.techtv.com, Gigabyte defended her work, saying she herself never spread the viruses she created and published on her Web site. "When people make guns, can you blame them when somebody else kills with them?" she was quoted asking. "I only write them. I don't release them." According to TechTV, Gigabyte began writing programs when she was just 6-years-old, created her first computer worm at 14 and before turning 18 became only the second person to write a virus in C-sharp, the language of Microsoft's .Net platform.

Dan Geer lost his job, but gained his audience. The very idea that got the computer security expert fired has sparked serious debate in information technology. The idea, borrowed from biology, is that Microsoft has nurtured a software "monoculture" that threatens global computer security.

After he argued in a paper published last fall that the monoculture amplifies online threats, Geer was fired by security firm @stake, which has had Microsoft as a major client.

In biology, species with little genetic variation -- or "monocultures" -- are the most vulnerable to catastrophic epidemics. Species that share a single fatal flaw could be wiped out by a virus that can exploit that flaw. Genetic diversity increases the chances that at least some of the species will survive every attack.

When choosing a Valentine's Day gift for a wife or girlfriend, you can't go wrong with diamonds. If you really want to impress your favorite lady this Valentine's Day, get her the galaxy's largest diamond. But you'd better carry a deep wallet, because this 10 billion trillion trillion carat monster has a cost that's literally astronomical!

The newly discovered cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallized carbon 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus. (A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, or about 6 trillion miles.) It is 2,500 miles across and weighs 5 million trillion trillion pounds, which translates to approximately 10 billion trillion trillion carats, or a one followed by 34 zeros.

The huge cosmic gem (technically known as BPM 37093) is actually a crystallized white dwarf. A white dwarf is the hot core of a star, left over after the star uses up its nuclear fuel and dies. It is made mostly of carbon and is coated by a thin layer of hydrogen and helium gases.