Homeland Security to scan fingerprints of travellers exiting the US IT News, Australia
The US Department of Homeland Security is set to kickstart a controversial new pilot to scan the fingerprints of travellers departing the United States. From June, US Customs and Border Patrol will take a fingerprint scan of international travellers exiting the United States from Detroit, while the US Transport Security Administration will take fingerprint scans of international travellers exiting the United States from Atlanta. Biometric technology such as fingerprint scans has been used by US Customs and Border Patrol for several years to gain a biometric record of non-US citizens entering the United States. But under the Bush Administration, a plan was formulated to also scan outgoing passengers. Michael Hardin, a senior policy analyst with the US-Visit Program at the United States Department of Homeland Security told a Biometrics Institute conference today that the DHS will use the data from the trial to “inform us as to where to take [exit screening] next. “We are trying to ensure we know more about who came and who left,” he said. “We have a large population of illegal immigrants in the United States – we want to make sure the person getting on the plane really is the person the records show to be leaving.”

Britain leads world in police state survey The Register
Gold medals for snooping, spying and surveilling – A recent survey from internet security consultancy, Cryptohippie, suggests that the UK is setting the pace in at least one area – though being classified as the West`s most repressive regime when it comes to electronic surveillance might not be a title that this government is entirely happy to wear.

Facebook quietly settles trademark dispute Mercury News
A dispute over Facebook’s trademark that harkens to a rivalry between Harvard schoolmates Mark Zuckerberg and Aaron Greenspan has been quietly resolved — just one business day before Facebook trumpeted its $200 million investment from a Russian firm that valued all of Facebook at $10 billion. Greenspan’s Silicon Valley company, Think Computer, agreed to an undisclosed settlement, announced late in the afternoon on the Friday before Memorial Day, to resolve its claims against Facebook. Think agreed to abandon its April 2008 petition to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office calling for the cancellation of the trademark to the term “Facebook.” “I can’t talk about the settlement, but I can tell you everyone worked very hard on the press release,” Greenspan said. “I wish them the best of luck and I’m glad I don’t have to worry about them anymore. And I’m sure the feeling is mutual.”

Cuba criticizes Microsoft blocking Messenger Associated Press
Cuba criticized Microsoft on Friday for blocking its Messenger instant messaging service on the island and in other countries under U.S. sanctions, calling it yet another example of Washington’s “harsh” treatment of Havana. The technology giant recently announced it was disabling the program’s availability in Cuba, Syria, Iran, Sudan and North Korea to come into compliance with a U.S. ban on transfer of licensed software to embargoed countries. The move “is just the latest turn of the screw in the United States’ technological blockade against the island,” a technology writer said in an article published by state youth newspaper Juventud Rebelde.

Government official wants to bring Three Strikes to Germany P2P Blog
Germany’s Undersecretary of Culture Bernd Neumann wants to adopt a three strikes policy against file sharing similar to the one recently enacted in France. “We can’t say that this is out of the question,” Neumann told the audience of a media policy event of the German Christian-Democratic Union (CDU), according to heise.de.

Documents expose the influence of US lobbies on the EU WorkGroup on Open Source, 2009 WikiLeaks
This ZIP archive contains three files related to the influence of US copyright industry lobbies on EU WorkGroup on Open Source. Open Source is software that is free to use and modify. Large copyright holders such as the US-based MicroSoft Corporation exert pressure to prevent government adoption of free software. The three files complete the previous WikiLeaks release about the influence of US lobbies such as MicroSoft on the EU Open Source Software WorkGroup (see: How to Hijack an EU Open Source Strategy Paper and European Commission OSS Strategy Draft, Mar 2009). The files present draft versions of the group’s report, so it can be seen how the lobbies pressure change inside the very reports which are supposed to be a base for the European Commission legislation propositions.

Court upholds not guilty verdict in Samsung case Associated Press
South Korea’s Supreme Court on Friday upheld a lower court ruling that acquitted the former chairman of Samsung Electronics on breach of trust charges and threw out guilty verdicts in a related case. The top court said that ex-Samsung chief Lee Kun-hee was not guilty, reiterating a judgment made by the Seoul High Court last year. The charges had stemmed from long-standing allegations of dubious financial transactions in the larger Samsung Group conglomerate.

Report: Turkish hackers breached U.S. Army servers CNet News
Hackers based in Turkey penetrated two U.S. Army Web servers and redirected traffic from those Web sites to other pages, including one with anti-American and anti-Israeli messages, according to a report in InformationWeek. The hackers, who go by the group name “m0sted,” breached a server at the Army’s McAlester Ammunition Plant in Oklahoma on January 26 and a server at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Transatlantic Center in Winchester, Va., on September 19, 2007, the report said. Investigators believe an SQL injection attack was used to exploit a vulnerability in Microsoft’s SQL Server database in order to gain access to the servers. It is unclear whether any sensitive information was accessed, according to the report.

South Dakota college sues porn site over name Associated Press
National American University, which has campuses in several states, is suing a pornography site, claiming trademark violations and cyber piracy for its use of Naughty American University and the acronym NAU. Dlorah Inc. filed the civil complaint in federal court in Rapid City, where the company is based, against La Touraine Inc., a corporation registered in Nevada with a San Diego business address. The lawsuit seeks to prevent the use of the school’s trademark and also asks a jury to award financial damages. Dlorah has operated under the National American University and NAU names since 1997 and offers associate, bachelor’s and master’s degree programs on 16 campuses in South Dakota, Colorado, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, New Mexico and Texas. It also has distance learning courses over the Internet. NAU has spent millions of dollars promoting its trademark names through advertising on various mediums, the lawsuit states.

Microsoft Update Quietly Installs Firefox Extension Washington Post
A routine security update for a Microsoft Windows component installed on tens of millions of computers has quietly installed an extra add-on for an untold number of users surfing the Web with Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser. Big deal, you say? I can just uninstall the add-on via Firefox’s handy Add-ons interface, right? Not so fast. The trouble is, Microsoft has disabled the “uninstall” button on the extension. What’s more, Microsoft tells us that the only way to get rid of this thing is to modify the Windows registry, an exercise that — if done imprecisely — can cause Windows systems to fail to boot up. [Additional: Firefox users flip out over sneak MS add-on, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/01/ms_firefox_extension_row/]

Microsoft, Asus launch anti-Linuxbook campaign The Register
Microsoft and Asus have teamed up to present a new advertising smarm-storm intended to extol the virtues of Windows on netbooks – and smear Linux. …Why? Well, as the site proudly proclaims, Windows is trusted, familiar, and compatible. And, by implication, Linux isn’t.

Do your MEP [EU Election] candidates care about digital rights? Open Rights Group
The Open Rights Group is publicising the positions of MEPs on several key digital rights issues that Europe will be legislating on. These include copyright, data retention, personal data and the open internet. Around half of the candidates from the Lib Dems, Greens, SNP / Plaid Cymru and UKIP have responded, but very few from the Conservative and Labour parties.

[Canadian] High-speed Net expensive, slow: Report The Star
In recent months, much of the discussion about high-speed Internet service in Canada has focused on two key issues net neutrality and the need to bring broadband access to the remaining underserved areas in rural Canada. Both of these issues are now squarely on the public agenda, with the CRTC conducting hearings on net neutrality next month and the government committing millions toward rural broadband initiatives in this year’s budget. Missing is a third, fast-growing concern, however. According to a new OECD report, Canada has one of the slowest and most expensive consumer broadband networks in the developed world. The OECD report, widely viewed as the leading benchmark on broadband networks in the world, compared Canada with 29 other countries on a range of metrics. These included broadband availability, pricing, speed, and bandwidth caps… When price and speed are combined, Canada sinks toward the very bottom of the OECD rankings.

TRV$DJAM Charges Nothing But A Tweet For New Mixtape TechCrunch
Here`s a cool way for music artists to reward their biggest fans and get some Viral Marketing® in return: drummer Travis Barker and turntablist DJ-AM (aka Adam Goldstein) are offering their just-released second mixtape, Fix Your Face Vol. 2 – Coachella `09?, up for free download in exchange for a mere Twitter message.

Australian Firms Blocked from Sending SMS Spam Cellular-News
The Australian telecoms regulator, ACMA has won an intermediate (interlocutory) court order against three companies that it accuses of sending SMS spams. The ACMA alleges, among other things, that Mobilegate, Winning Bid and International Machinery Parts (now deregistered) sent or caused unsolicited SMS messages to be sent to Australian mobile telephone numbers via premium rate telephone shortcodes.

Marc – p2pnet

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May, 2009