contributed by Space Rogue
As reported yesterday by HNN the DVD industry has filed suit in Santa Clara Superior court against numerous people (many to be named later) for posting or even linking to DeCSS. DeCSS is software that can unlock the encryption scheme for DVD disks which can then be used to view your movies on your computer it could also be used to illegally copy DVDs.

Wired
ZD Net
Washington Post
HNN's copy of the legal complaint
DeCSS Defense Site
DVD Copy Control Association

The legal angle of the DVD Industry's case will hinge on exactly how the DeCSS software was created and whether it was truly reverse engineered and if there was intent to cause harm to the industry.

Wired

The hearing has been scheduled for December 29, 1999, at the Superior Court of the State of California, County of Santa Clara to determine if a temporary restraining order should be granted against the named defendants.

PZ Communications

contributed by Evil Wench
The National Infrastructure Protection Center has said that they have no evidence pointing to a wide scale cyber attack and so far no serious virus threats have been discovered. NIPC has said that it does not expect large-scale U.S. infrastructure disruptions.

NY Times - Registration required. Just give 'em a fake address.

contributed by Code Kid
The Pentagon and the federal personnel agency will be taking the Air Forces lead and will be shutting down some of their public web sites over the new year thereby denying US citizens of their right to access public information. Fearing a massive 'hacker attack' the agencies have decided it is better to shut down the sites than repair any possible damage later. (If your web site is vulnerable today it will be vulnerable tomorrow. This tells me that you are not confident enough in your own web sites ability to fend off attack but you expect the American public to remain calm during the Y2K rollover.)

Associated Press
Reuters - via Yahoo

contributed by evenprime
As the latest Chaos Computer Club Congress goes into full swing during its second day Wired reporter Steve Kettmann issues his report. (I'm gonna hafta get over there one of these years.)

Wired
Chaos Computer Club

contributed by Space Rogue
A hole in the TCP/IP protocol stack on MacOS 9 could leave users systems open to launching a distributed attack without the users knowledge. MacOS 9's networking software, Open Transport, will automatically respond to certain data packets by triggering numerous machines an attacker could overwhelm a target site creating a denial of service attack. Apple released a patch within hours of notification. (And during the holidays as well, yeah Apple.)

ZD Net
C|Net
Open Transport Tuner 1.0

contributed by grant
A white paper from 2600 Australia has been released that covers the need for and reasoning behind physical security of both the console and storage devices of a particular computer and some distilled advice from the misc@openbsd.org mailing list on ways in which the OpenBSD console might be secured from unpassworded physical access.

2600 Australia

contributed by Space Rogue
While we disagree with all the doomsday predications regarding the new year it is a perfect excuse to take a vacata^H^H^H^H.....to prepare the bunker for the comming appocolypse. ;-) So as we vacation in the Caribea^H^H^H^H.... head to the underground fallout shelter in the north country you will probably not see any updates to HNN. Assuming civilization and this web server survive into the new millenium your regularly scheduled news will return on Monday Januray 3rd.

In the meantime if you missed it be sure to check out our picks for the top news stories of 1999.

HNN's 1999 Year In Review