contributed by Ryan and Zorro
The death sentence, imposed as punishment for Hao Jingwen last year, was upheld by The Yangzhou Intermediate People's Court in eastern Jiangsu province. Jingwen, together with his brother Hao Jinglong, electronically broke into the system of a state run bank that one of them worked at and transferred somewhere between $31,000 and $87,000US (reports vary) into an account they opened under false names. The elder of the two brothers, Hao Jinglong, received life in prison instead of the death penalty for assisting the police in their investigation.

Reuters - via Yahoo
Associated Press - via Yahoo

contributed by Nicola_Hibberd and no0ne
The W32.Mypics worm has four payloads. It emails itself to fifty people in your address book, changes the web browsers home page to a porn site and then attempts to reformat the local hard drive. Also on Jan 1, 2000 the worm attempts to overwrite the the checksum data in the host computer's CMOS. Symantic, the discoverer of the worm says that this is the fifth such virus it has found with a payload that triggers at the start of the new year. This worm appears to only infect people running email clients from Microsoft.

ZDNet UK
Newsbytes - via CNNfn
Reuters - via Yahoo

contributed by blueghost, knobdicker, and Alien Plaque
The Electronics Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has filed suit against the National Security Agency (NSA) in federal court in an attempt to gain more information about the agency's spy network dubbed Echelon, and to what extent the agency has been spying on American citizens. The NSA has 30 days to respond to the court filing. (I applaud EPIC for going after the NSA, however the courts have been very favorable to the NSA in past cases, so I personally doubt that much will come of this, but it's definitely worth a shot.)

Electronic Privacy Information center
Federal Computer Week
ZDNet

contributed by Alien Plague
George Russell James, 26, of Laramie, Wyoming has been charged with one felony count of crime against computer users. James is accused of several unauthorized entries into Trib.com which is run by the Casper Star-Tribune. According to the Trib.com staff, the entries are said to have caused slowed online response time over a couple of days and disrupted the provider's news and information Web site. (From the information posted in this article it would seem that they don't have a very strong case against this guy. Unfortunately he will probably plead guilty instead of fighting these accusations.)

The Billings Gazette

contributed by Weld Pond
The Department of Defense has made available over 100,000 documents on categories ranging from nuclear technology to explosives to communications security. There also seems to be a good chunk of information on TEMPEST. It is unknown how long this site will remain publicly available. Grab it while you can.

Defense Automation and Production Service

contributed by biggranger
The National Security Agency is funding the upgrade of the San Diego Supercomputer Center from a Tera MTA-8 system to a MTA-16 system made by Tera Computer Company. The MTA-16 is based on a multithreaded architecture and retails for between 7 and 10 million dollars.

Tera Computer Company

contributed by Evil Wench
The next meeting of the Computer System Security and Privacy Advisory Board of the National Institute of Standards and Technology will be open to the public. The meeting will be held from December 7, thru December 9, 1999. The meeting will be held in Lecture Room B of the NIST Administration Building in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

Computer System Security and Privacy Advisory Board
Federal Register: December 2, 1999 - via Crytome