contributed by harvest
Citing the need for "free information flow," President Clinton has vetoed the Classified Leaks Bill, a Constitution-and-credulity-stretching stinker of a law that would have extended criminal charges to anyone who leaked classified information without "authorization." Currently penalties exist only for those who disclose classified national defense data. Journalists such as Bill Safire of the New York Times called the bill the American answer to the UK's notorious Official Secrets Act.

New York Times
Salon
The White House
William Safire

contributed by weld pond
A Dutch hacker claimed that he was able to obtain access to Microsoft's web servers by exploiting an old Internet Information Server (IIS) vulnerability. The company confirmed that at least one server was affected. A patch for the "Web Server Folder Traversal" bug had been released by Microsoft in August, but had not yet been applied to all of its own web servers.

PC World
InfoWorld

contributed by andrew jaquith
Last Friday the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was attacked and defaced by a group calling itself the Pakistan Hackerz Club. In addition to the defacement, nearly 700 credit card numbers stored on the site were stolen and posted. In a related story, the group Gforce Pakistan attacked three other Israeli sites Friday. The press, ever eager to coin a new phrase, has used the word "hactivism" to describe the growing phenomenon of defacement in the name of a cause. We prefer the older alternative: vandalism.

CNET
AP via Washington Post
Reuters via ZDNet

contributed by andrew jaquith
The CEO of California-based Executive Software is seething on the heels of the German government's demand that the portion of Windows 2000 that contains Executive's disk defragmenter be removed. Microsoft complied, releasing an automated software patch that uninstalls the feature. In 1998, the German government ruled that Scientology is a cult, not a religion, and therefore falls outside the country's free speech laws. Hmm... if Microsoft can write code to surgically extract the defragmenter so easily, how about the browser?

Reuters via Yahoo
Original Reuters story
US German Embassy

contributed by andrew jaquith
For years, scientists have been investigating the suitability of quantum mechanics to cryptography by exploiting idiosyncrasies at the sub-molecular level. The idea is that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle -- which specifies that it is impossible to know a particle's position and its momentum simultaneously -- ought to be a splendid underpinning for an unbreakable symmetric cryptosystem. The first proof-of-concept applications have started to trickle out of the labs, with expected practical implementations coming in the next few years. The devil, of course, is in the details.

Physics Today
Slashdot