[Quote:]

Hicham Yezza, 30, was arrested last week after he downloaded an al-Qa’ida training manual at the University of Nottingham. He was detained and questioned for six days with a second man, Rizwaan Sabir, a student.

Both men were released on Friday after it emerged that Mr Yezza had printed the document, which was downloaded from a US government website where it was freely available, at Mr Sabir’s request. The university confirmed the document was being used for legitimate research purposes by Mr Sabir for his master’s degree.

Upon release, Mr Yezza was immediately rearrested, served with a deportation order and taken to Colnbrook Immigration Removal Centre. Mr Yezza, who comes from Algeria, had applied for leave to remain in the UK, where he has lived for the past 13 years. A hearing to decide his application was originally scheduled for July.

[Quote:]

“On Tuesday they read me a statement confirming it was an illegal document which shouldn’t be used for research purposes. To this day no one has ever clarified that point. They released me. I was shaking violently, I fell against the wall, then on the floor and I just cried.”

Remember, kids! Don’t research terrorism, just be afraid! We are at war with terrorism, we’ve always been at war with terrorism! Ignorance is Strength! Academic freedom is slavery!

[Quote:]

The Finnish Court Of Appeal (”Hovioikeus” in finnish) declared its final judgement yesterday in the so-called “CSS case”. The standard municipal court of Helsinki did find the defendants not guilty a year ago.

However, to everyone’s surprise, Helsinki Court of Appeal announced today that (quoting the official statement):

“… circumventing the [CSS] copy protection at least in a Linux system had required the installation of a circumvention program. The fact whether the program was installed with permission or not is irrelevant.”

In some Linux distributions, circumventing the protection, or watching DVD movies in laymen’s terms, is an out-of-the-box-feature. Unfortunately the Court of Appeal apparently thought that if a Linux distribution does not include such a media player, the download of some “shady” or “illegal” cracking software would be necessary in order to watch a copy protected DVD. It is true that some Linux distributions do not include the DVD decrypting component as default and require a media player such as VLC or mplayer to be installed. After all, Linux is a modular system after all and the need to install some extra components manually is common practice. But does that mean the media player software should be primarily advertised as circumvention devices for the CSS encryption? There used to be an exception in the Finnish law which allowed watching DVD’s for private use, but the clause is definitely more or less vague after a declaration of this kind.

Which means, for a linux user in Finland, it is now legal to download an unencrypted pirated version of the movie and watch it (but make sure to use a program that doesn’t upload), and it is illegal to buy a dvd and try to watch that.

I think they didn’t think their cunning plan through….

[Quote:]

An unwitting passenger arriving at Japan’s Narita airport has received 142g of cannabis after a customs test went awry, officials say.

A customs officer hid a package of the banned substance in a side pocket of a randomly chosen suitcase in order to test airport security.

Sniffer dogs failed to detect the cannabis and the officer could not remember which bag he had put it in.

Anyone finding the package has been asked to contact customs officials.

[..]

“I knew that using passengers’ bags is prohibited, but I did it because I wanted to improve the sniffer dog’s ability,” the officer was quoted as saying.

Imagine arriving with that suitcase in a place like Dubai.

[Quote:]

Not only had Himmler read Crusade Against the Grail; he’d virtually committed the thing to memory. For the first time in his life Rahn met someone even more obsessed with finding the Grail than he was. Indeed, so confident was Himmler of finding the Grail that he’d already prepared a castle - Wewelsburg in Westphalia - for its arrival. In the basement, surrounded by busts of prominent Nazis, was an empty plinth where the Grail would go.

[Quote:]

Jean-Pierre Bemba, formerly vice-president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, was in custody in Belgium Sunday after being arrested on a war crimes warrant from the International Criminal Court.

[Quote:]

Every time Sohaila Rezazadeh rings up a sale at her Exxon station on Chain Bridge Road in Oakton, her cash register sends the information to Exxon Mobil’s central computers. If she raises the price of gasoline a couple of pennies, chances are that Exxon will raise the wholesale price she pays by the same amount.

Through a password-protected Web portal, Exxon notifies Rezazadeh of wholesale price changes daily. That way the oil giant, which is earning about $3.3 billion a month, fine-tunes the pump prices at the franchise Rezazadeh has owned for 12 years.

Now, however, Rezazadeh says she cannot stay in business. Credit-card fees are eating her profit margins. Exxon, which owns the station land, last week handed Rezazadeh a new lease raising her rent about 30 percent over the next three years. She stuck a copy on the window of her station to show customers who are angry about soaring pump prices. Rezazadeh has told Exxon that she cannot make money with the rent that high. Her territory manager’s reply, she said, was simple: When you go, leave us the keys.

I suggest we give Exxon another tax break - surely that will help Rezazadeh.

[Quote:]

Hollywood has been granted another victory in its war against piracy, this time at the expense of two linking sites that the Motion Picture Association of America believes profited from enabling copyright infringement. Both ShowStash.net and Cinematube.net have been hit with multimillion dollar judgments recently for copyright infringement of various movies and TV shows.

Even though ShowStash and Cinematube didn’t host any of these files, both were found guilty of contributory copyright infringement, according to the judges’ opinions, because they searched for, identified, collected, and indexed links to illegal copies of movies and TV shows. Aside from monetary damages, both sites are now prohibited from engaging in further activity that would infringe upon the studios’ work.

Okay, class, now pay attention: which search results does Google link to that isn’t copyrighted material?

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This video shows a method by which a user can use a Linux distro called BackTrack to gain system access to Windows Vista without logging into Windows or knowing the username or password for any accounts. To accomplish this, the user renames cmd.exe to Utilman.exe — this is the program that brings up the Accessibility options for users without sight or with limited vision. The attack takes advantage of the fact that the Utility Manager can be invoked before the user logs into the system. The user gains System access, which is a level higher than Administrator.

Which just goes to prove, if you have physical access to a machine, usually it’s game over. Only full disk encryption with a boot password will help with this one.

something similar works with XP with C:\windows\system32\sethc.exe (StickyKeys).

[Quote:]

NASA’s Phoenix spacecraft landed in the northern polar region of Mars today to begin three months of examining a site chosen for its likelihood of having frozen water within reach of the lander’s robotic arm.

Radio signals received at 4:53:44 p.m. Pacific Time (7:53:44 p.m. Eastern Time) confirmed the Phoenix Mars Lander had survived its difficult final descent and touchdown 15 minutes earlier. The signals took that long to travel from Mars to Earth at the speed of light.

And the first images are available as well: