contributed by Dave Sjerven
When a computerized grading system failed to report the proper grades for a cell biology class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology officials immediately concluded that it must have been the work of electronic intruders. After a thorough investigation MIT discovered that in fact the changed grades were due to a spreadsheet sorting error. (The simplest answer is usually the correct one.)

MIT
ComputerWorld
Boston Herald
Boston Globe (It was on the front page of the Globe yesterday, today it made it to B3)

contributed by Evil Wench
The New York State Senate on Wednesday unveiled a package of new legislation to protect the privacy of consumers, drivers, and patients that would place new restrictions on credit agencies, schools, telemarketers, hospitals, pharmacies, and other organizations that gather and use personal information. "Our recommendations were guided by a belief that individuals have a basic right to know who is collecting personal information, how it is being used and whether that information is shared or sold without their knowledge or approval," said Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno. (Damn. Makes me want to move to New York just so I can vote for this guy.)

Reuters - via TechWeb

contributed by William Knowles
"Law enforcement couldn't hack their way out of a wet paper bag. They're people who get paid to do nothing. They never actually catch anybody," said Curador to an Internet News reporter. Curador has made a practice of breaking into e-commerce sites, grabbing their customer database and then posting the numbers online. So far he claims to have gotten into eight systems and has posted thousands of valid numbers to his web site. His previous web sites at e-crackerce.com and free-creditcard.com, which themselves where registered with fraudulent cards, have been shut down. Curador has said that he will publicize his newest site with a banner on the Microsoft Banner Network. Curador's first cyber break in occurred back in January.

Internet News

contributed by Evil Wench
Using the example of the recent distributed denial of service attacks, law enforcement representatives have been asking Congress for a national court order. Currently law enforcement must seek a separate court order in each state they track a single piece of data to get to its source.

TechWeb

contributed by Anonymous
Raj Reddy, co-chairman of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee said while testifying before Congress that "Rather than leaving the Internet vulnerable because a few persons or organizations are careless or reckless, we should develop an information infrastructure that is not dependent on voluntary compliance with security practices and policies." (Voluntary compliance? Yeah, that gives me the warm fuzzies.)

Federal Computer Week

contributed by Evil Wench
In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Technology, Terrorism and Government, US Secret Service Special Agent Gregory Regan explained that organized Chinese fraud rings in the US and overseas are more and more likely to break into electronic databases to compromise credit and identity details. In 1999 there were 1,147 cases of identity theft resulting in 644 convictions.

The UK Register

contributed by Turtlex
A report released by a working group led by Attorney General Janet Reno has said that Internet businesses need to cooperate with law enforcement to fight online crime. The 60-page report recommended more resources and training for law enforcement, urged greater promotion of cyber ethics and concluded that the existing laws should be adequate to protect against most online crimes.

Reuters - Yahoo
USA Today

contributed by knobdicker
Symantec is pressing the ISP that hosts the Peacefire anti-censorware organization to remove content linking to a decrypted list of the thousands of sites blocked by I-Gear, Symantec's Internet-filtering software. Symantec claims that posting the decrypting software and site information is a EULA violation, which raises legal issues about software reverse engineering similar to the MPAA lawsuit over DVD DeCSS. (Symantec should be thankful for all the free testing instead of trying to quash what they see as bad press.)

Wired
Peacefire

contributed by Space Rogue
Yesterday HNN linked to a story in the San Francisco Chronicle that blamed AT+T for sending subscribers cell phone numbers along with web requests when users surfed with their phones. We received an email, apparently from an AT+T technician, refuting that article. He said "Our (AT+T) web-accessible phones do not use the cellular network at all to surf the web. Our phones use CDPD--an IP-based protocol having nothing to do with cellular. Each IP is a real Internet routable IP that is assigned the same as any CDPD modem--orthogonal to the cellular phone provisioning. Many current PocketNet phones don't even have voice service (data only) so they can't even send a MIN!"