Telecom bill would leave U.S. lagging behind rest of world

The new telecommunications bill before Sen. Ted Stevens' Senate Commerce Committee this week has been touted as reform of the cable-franchise laws. But it is much, much more. The bill is really a wholesale rewrite of the Telecommunications Act of 1934, the world's oldest existing telecom law. It is probably the most important piece of legislation the Congress will take up this session.

Verify that your virus scanner is working

The EICAR virus test is a harmless text file that is detected as a virus by most AV vendors. You can use it to verify that your local virus scanner is working (just copy the string into a plain text file), check to see if your email server scans for viruses (email yourself a copy), and test if scanners detect viruses...

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Scottish University Launches Computer Hacking Course | Portal IT news :: Hardware, Software, Games, Internet, Security alerts

A SCOTTISH university is launching Britain's first degree course in computer hacking. Students at the University of Abertay, Dundee, will be taught how to break into some of the world's most sophisticated security systems so that they can help advise companies on protecting their own networks.

Brooklyn man accused of facebook.com coed nudie pic scam

A 20 year old guy has been using the popular community website facebook.com to con and extort coeds around the country, forcing them to turn over nude pictures of themselves and give him online companionship.

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24 Hours to stop new copyright law

At issue is their plan to change copyright so that you're going to need separate licenses for "incidental" copies of digital music: copies in RAM, copies in browser caches, and so on.

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Girl pees on iPod nano, thinking it's a pregnancy test

After a night of partying a group of people decided to continue drinking at their house. A girl who believed that she was pregnant (she had vomited in the morning) entered the toilet and discovered a white strip which she thought to be a pregnancy test. She peed on it and came out to show it to the others to figure out the result. It turned out that it was in fact an iPod nano, not a pregnancy test. So what happened to the iPod? It stopped working. The owner tried to send it in for warranty repairs, only to be informed that "the warranty does not cover pee-related damage".