US Customs and Border Protection issued a notice in the Federal Register yesterday which detailed the agency’s massive database that keeps risk assessments on every traveler entering or leaving the country. Citizens who are concerned that their information is inaccurate are all but out of luck: the system “may not be accessed under the Privacy Act for the purpose of contesting the content of the record.”

Source: arstechnica

Seventeen members of an alleged international phishing and carding gang have been arrested in the US and Eastern Europe following an FBI investigation.

Eastern European fraudsters are alleged to have run a series of identity theft scams targeting customers of major financial institutions between August and October 2004. These fraudsters sold on the personal details of marks to their US accomplices, who plundered compromised bank accounts and traded in stolen credit card information.
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The arrests in Poland and the US came as part of an ongoing FBI investigation code-named Operation Cardkeeper. FBI investigators worked with local police in Poland and Romania to investigate the trade of stolen credit card information online, obtained through various phishing scams.

Source: The Register

A computer researcher has made public information that Apple Computer has encrypted at the binary level critical parts of its Mac OS X operating system.

These “Apple-protected binaries” can serve to protect the OS from being pirated and also to make it “nontrivial” to run Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware, said Amit Singh, a member of Google’s technical staff in Mountain View, Calif., and the author of “Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach.” Singh has also given lectures on Mac OS X to the National Security Agency and at Apple’s main campus in Cupertino, Calif.

According to Singh, the parts of Mac OS X that are protected include the Finder and Dock applications, as well as parts of Rosetta (Mac OS X’s application for running Power PC applications on an Intel-based Mac) and services that manage the user interface.

Source: eWeek

A judge in the northern city of Santander in Spain dismissed a case against an anonymous 48-year-old man who shared digital music on the net.

Judge Paz Aldecoa of No. 3 Penal Court ruled that under Spanish law a person who downloads music for personal use can not be punished or branded a criminal. He called it “a practised behaviour where the aim is not to gain wealth but to obtain private copies”.

The ruling sent shockwaves through the music industry as the decision allows Spain’s 16 million internet users to swap music without being punished. Spanish recording industry federation Promusicae says it will appeal against the decision.

Source: The Register

The company released the larger capacity nano in response to outstanding customer demand. This new 8GB model sells for $249 US. Apple will give $10 from the sale of each of these Special Edition nanos to the Global Fund to fight AIDS.

“Customer response to the iPod nano RED Special Edition has been off the charts,�? said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide iPod Product Marketing. “We’re thrilled to add a second model with 8GB of capacity, enough for 2,000 songs, so customers have yet another choice in supporting this important cause.�?

The first RED Special Edition iPod nano, which has 4GB of storage, is priced at $199. Both models come in a special red aluminum enclosure.

Source: Spymac

The U.S. government has shut down a Web site it set up in March containing documents captured during the Iraq war after arms experts and officials raised concerns it offered a guide to building a nuclear bomb, The New York Times reported on Thursday.

The newspaper said the Bush administration started the site under pressure from congressional Republicans who had hoped to use the Internet to find new evidence of the dangers posed by former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

In recent weeks, according to the Times, the site posted documents that weapons experts said contained detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Gulf War that one diplomat called “a cookbook” for building an atom bomb.

Source: Reuters

A man who was sexually abusing a young girl in his home was arrested after he transmitted images of the assault via the Internet to an undercover detective, police said Thursday.

The girl, a preschooler, was rescued two hours later in what Toronto police’s child exploitation unit said was its first case of observing a live assault.

“My first reaction was that I wanted to reach through the monitor and grab the child,” said Detective Paul Krawczyk, the undercover officer who witnessed the alleged assault Sunday.

He alerted police in St. Thomas, a city in southwestern Ontario where police believed the man lived, and they were able to track him down in two hours.

Source: AP