contributed by no-one
The Inspector General of Intelligence and Security for Australia, Bill Blick, has told the BBC that Australia's Defense Signals Directorate (DSD) is indeed part of the global eavesdropping network known as Echelon. Both the US and Britain still deny the existence of this network.

BBC

contributed by Weld Pond
Because developers implemented the copy protection scheme of DVD disks improperly it was easily broken. One DVD content publisher failed to encrypt the decryption key on their disks. This allowed the Masters of Reverse Engineering (MoRE) from Norway, to 'guess' other publishers keys. They then developed the DeCSS utility that can copy a DVD movie.

Wired

contributed by DogCow
Cable and Wireless Optus/Microplex in Australia suffered what they called an "unauthorized intrusion" at 4:30am AEST Nov, 3rd. According to a press release on the matter, the intruders had "limited access to details of Optus and Microplex customers [but] did not include access to any customers' financial information". Tech support staff indicated that a username/password list was posted to a Usenet group.

Rumours suggest that the targeting of Optus may have been inspired by the upcoming Republic referendum in Australia, and it is unclear if the incident is related to the Cable and Wireless breach in October.

Australia Broadcasting Company
Optus Press Release

contributed by AlienPlaque
Intruders electronically broke into the Romanian Finance Ministry website, modifying and adding taxes, and changing the official exchange rate of the leu to 0.5 per dollar from 16,870 per dollar. One tax was created for 'stupidity' and some taxes where raised to 100%. The Finance Ministry is investigating "how this...was possible."

C|Net
The UK Register

contributed by Weld Pond
Alexander Vorobyov from the The Russian Interior Ministry has informed the TAS news Agency that a group or individual known as Kentavr had gained illegal satellite news feeds from the Reuters News Service. Russian officials have labeled this case as the most sophisticated intellectual property crime recently committed in Russia. (Information presented here was translated from Russian so there may be some inaccuracies.)

ITAR TAS

contributed by Weld Pond
Senior officials in the Taiwanese Defense Ministry are warning that electronic threats from China and other nations will increase dramatically over the next few years. They are asking that Taiwan create a special military cyber force to repel such attacks.

Associated Press

contributed by standard
The Gartner Group claims that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have logged more than 30,000 threats regarding viruses to be released at the start of the new millennium. (I guess the Y2K bug is no longer sensational enough.)

ZD Net

contributed by EvilWench
A survey by Broadcasters Network International has found that accidental deletions of data cause far more problems than viruses or system crashes.

CMP TechWeb

contributed by Lord of the Flies
xechelon.org's purpose is to inform people of Echelon's existence and provide them tools and information with which they can loudly object to and thwart this pervasive government surveillance network.

xechelon.org

contributed by AW
HNN has received an unconfirmed rumor that the host of Parse Hack/Phreak, Shamrock was fired for unknown reasons. Shamrock along with UglyPig will evidently no longer be hosting any Pseudo.com shows. This action comes not two weeks after the MTV special in which Shamrock manufactured a hoax for the 'documentary'. There was no episode of Parse last week and HNN has yet to receive official word from Psuedo.com. It will be interesting to see if this weeks scheduled episode will air. (That show needed a change of format anyway.)

Parsetv