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[DAY] Trinexx: I saw the most awesome Windows error today: “A malicious program has attempted to shut down Windows. As a precaution, Windows was shut down.”

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Federal agents do not need a search warrant to monitor a suspect’s computer use and determine the e-mail addresses and Web pages the suspect is contacting, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

In a drug case from San Diego County, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco likened computer surveillance to the “pen register” devices that officers use to pinpoint the phone numbers a suspect dials, without listening to the phone calls themselves.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the use of pen registers in 1979, saying callers have no right to conceal from the government the numbers they communicate electronically to the phone companies that carry their calls.

Federal law requires court approval for a pen register. But because it is not considered a search, authorities do not need a search warrant, which would require them to show that the surveillance is likely to produce evidence of a crime.

They also do not need a wiretap order, which would require them to show that less intrusive methods of surveillance have failed or would be futile.

In Friday’s ruling, the court said computer users should know that they lose privacy protections with e-mail and Web site addresses when they are communicated to the company whose equipment carries the messages.

Consider yourself informed. Feel safer yet?

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The average member of the Muslim Brotherhood isn’t a rabble-rouser, either — he’s a doctor, pharmacist, teacher or lawyer. He wears Western trousers and shirts, not the ankle-long dishdashah garment traditionally worn by Arab men. He’s middle class — and he’s filled with rage. Rage over what he sees as the close cooperation between his government and the hopelessly corrupted West. Kept from pursuing his political aims, he is often a functionary amonst his contemporaries in Arab professional associations for doctors, engineers and attorneys.

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The most striking result of the ARG poll about the Libby commutation was not just the large number of Republicans ticked off by the president’s abuse of his pardon power. It’s the intensity of the Independent opposition. On reflection, I don’t think it’s that surprising. Independents tend not to think of themselves as protected by group loyalty or a partisan establishment, so they tend to be very skeptical of one side’s capacity to rig the justice system for its own members. Independents get mad at many aspects of the partisan game – from pork to deficits. And the most striking data to come from the polls these days is how many Independents are leaning toward the Democrats. Look at how it might tip even Virginia.  I think it’s less a function of some ideological shift as a shrewd attempt to use one side to police the excesses of the other. If you care about abuse of power, you’ll be anti-GOP right now. That may change. But not for a while.

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Who built the first programmable robot? It’s almost impossible to tell, and most people would put good money on Leonardo da Vinci. But now Noel Sharkey, a computer scientist at the University of Sheffield, UK, has traced the technology way back to ancient Alexandria.

In about 60 AD, a Greek engineer called Hero constructed a three-wheeled cart that could carry a group of automata to the front of a stage where they would perform for an audience. Power came from a falling weight that pulled on string wrapped round the cart’s drive axle, and Sharkey reckons this string-based control mechanism is exactly equivalent to a modern programming language. He describes it in this week’s issue of New Scientist magazine.

I bet it has great support for string manipulation.

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Antipiracy agency MediaDefender strongly denies recent claims that it set up an entrapment scheme in order to catch so-called pirates downloading illegal movies and software.

Earlier this week, the Motion Picture Association of America and antipiracy agency MediaDefender were allegedly caught red-handed when Internet sleuths traced a “fake” BitTorrent site back to the two groups. But MediaDefender told Ars Technica that the story has been blown far out of proportion and was started by sites like The Pirate Bay and TorrentFreak in order to slam MediaDefender’s organization and software.

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MediaDefender’s Randy Saaf told Ars Technica that while the company does own the domain to MiiVi, the story itself was completely made up. “MediaDefender was working on an internal project that involved video and didn’t realize that people would be trying to go to it and so we didn’t password-protect the site,” Saaf said. “It was just an oversight from that perspective. This was not an entrapment site, and we were not working with the MPAA on it. In fact, the MPAA didn’t even know about it.”

If this is true, why did MediaDefender immediately remove all contact information from the whois registry for the domain? Saaf said that after everything hit the fan, the company decided to take everything on the site down because it was afraid of a hacker attack or “people sending us spam.” Yes, spam.

The MPAA’s Elizabeth Kaltman also chimed in to say that they had no involvement with MiiVi: “The MediaDefender story is false. We have no relationship with that company at all,” she told Ars.

So if MediaDefender has no relation to the MPAA, and it was an “internal” website, but with lots of copyrighted content, why isn’t the MPAA suing?

I smell a lot of bovine excrement. Both the MPAA and MediaDefender are lying weasels. Not surprsing, really.