A woman has pleaded guilty to fleecing the QVC home-shopping networking of more than $412,000 by exploiting a gaping hole in its website that allowed her to receive merchandise without paying for them.

Quantina Moore-Perry ordered handbags, jewelry and electronics and then immediately canceled the transactions. The flaw allowed the North Carolina woman to take delivery of more than 1,800 items without being billed. Moore-Perry would then sell the booty on eBay, according to the Associated Press, which cited authorities.

Moore-Perry pleaded guilty to wire fraud and was released pending sentencing. She has forfeited the $412,000 proceeds from the scam.

An Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers committee is considering a sunset proposal at its meeting this week in Los Angeles that would effectively scrap the directory system on privacy grounds. Among those arguments is that a public-by-default Whois listing may run afoul of Canadian and European Union privacy laws.

Having this debate is not a bad idea. It’s about time that we rethought whether the Whois directory service–which has public contact information for domain name owners–should exist in its current form.

Trademark and copyright holders, and their lobbyists, are opposing this move. They argue that a public Whois database is necessary to help track down trademark infringements, copyright infringements, and “cybersquatting.”

Although Apple is selling its new Mac OS X Leopard operating system on its improved security, researchers at Heise Security have already found fault with its firewall. Unlike with Windows Vista, the Apple firewall is not enabled by default and must be enabled by the end user. Even if you had the firewall enabled in a previous version of the Mac OS X, after an upgrade to Leopard the firewall will again be set to “Allow all incoming connections.” It will be disabled.

According to Jürgen Schmidt, editor in chief at Heise Security, if you enable the Apple firewall and set it to “Block all incoming connections,” access from the Internet to certain internal system services will still be allowed. As an example, he said that his team was able to query the NetBIOS Naming Service over a Lan network even with full blocking enabled. The team was also unable to specifically enable UDP filtering within Leopard, which should block access to NetBIOS.

The Ministry of Defense confirmed that they are testing technology they claim makes tanks and troops invisible.

The highly secret trials were conducted by the Royal Engineers and scientists from specialist researchers QinetiQ, the former research arm of the MoD described the tests successful after they were able to make a vehicle seem to completely disappear.

“This technology is absolutely incredible. If I hadn’t been present I wouldn’t have believed it,” a soldier present at the trials said. “I looked across the fields and just saw grass and trees - but in reality I was staring down the barrel of a tank gun.”

According to the scientists, the breakthrough was made possible by using cameras and projectors to beam images captured from the surrounding landscape onto a specially-adapted tank coated with silicon to maximize their reflective qualities, resulting in the naked eye seeing only the view which is behind the tank.

The technology could reach the battlefield within five years, said Professor Sir John Pendry of Imperial College London, the world’s leading authority on the physics of invisibility.

Video chats using Skype, eBay Inc.’s popular Internet telephone service, are about to become sharper and more lifelike, at least for those who have high-end new computers and webcams.

Logitech International SA released driver software Tuesday for three webcams that allows them to connect Skype chatters at a resolution of 640 by 480 pixels, the same resolution as a DVD.

Frame rates of up to 30 pictures per second, the standard for TV broadcasts, are possible with the cameras. That’s up from around 15 frames per second in typical Web chats and should cut down on jerkiness and blurring of moving subjects, the companies said.

Getting the maximum image quality requires the latest, “beta” version of Skype’s software and computers with the latest dual-core processors on both ends. The processors are needed to compress the video signal to fit it on a standard broadband Internet connection, then decompress it on the other end.

The applicable cameras are the $99 Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 and QuickCam Pro for Notebooks, and the $129 QuickCam Orbit AF. The cameras came out this summer.

The United States is starting to look like a slowpoke on the Internet. Examples abound of countries that have faster and cheaper broadband connections, and more of their population connected to them.

What’s less clear is how badly the country that gave birth to the Internet is doing, and whether the government needs to step in and do something about it. The Bush administration has tried to foster broadband adoption with a hands-off approach. If that’s seen as a failure by the next administration, the policy may change.

In a move to get a clearer picture of where the U.S. stands, the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Tuesday approved legislation that would develop an annual inventory of existing broadband services - including the types, advertised speeds and actual number of subscribers - available to households and businesses across the nation.

Third-party applications for the iPhone won’t be released until early next year, but there’s an easy-to-install new jailbreaking application out this week if you can’t wait.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog, source of much of the details behind The Great iPhone Hack 2007, brings news of the release of the AppSnapp installer, which bypasses Apple’s OS X 1.1.1 update in order to let iPhone and iPod Touch users put third-party applications on their devices. This appears to be one of the simplest jailbreak applications yet released for the 1.1.1 update; the others involved lots of complicated steps or additional scripts to open up the iPhone.

Yahoo is launching a new version of its popular Yahoo Messenger on Tuesday that lets you forward phone calls and instant messages and watch videos and view photos with friends, among other enhancements. But probably the most popular thing will be the new emoticons.

Yahoo Messenger 9.0 has a redesigned interface with new “skin” background designs and new emoticons for expressions like “thumbs up,” “thumbs down,” and “rock on,” (yes, the little yellow face ball is holding up its second and fourth fingers in the rock-star pose).

Beyond the surface, some of the changes are even more impressive. For instance, it’s easier to call, text or IM contacts by simply hovering over the contact name and clicking. You can also click an arrow to the left of the contact and see a larger version of their avatar, contact them, start an e-mail session, and edit their information. And you can send a text message to someone’s phone using your computer keyboard. These communications features were here before but were just not as apparent or easy as they are now.

You can also forward offline IMs to a mobile device and forward incoming phone calls to a phone number.

Security researchers studying the latest Internet crime trends have discovered a new Eastern European website that uses a large botnet to infect vulnerable PCs. The operators of the botnet and website charge clients for each successful PC infection.

The site is likely based out of Russia, according to the security researcher’s sources who asked to remain anonymous because of their underground intelligence work. While the front-end website, called loads.cc, doesn’t appear to contain or deliver malware, readers are strongly urged to avoid visiting the site in case malware is present and because the site likely logs the IP addresses of its visitors. (The “.cc” Internet domain is assigned to the Australian territories of the Cocos and Keeling Islands.)

The sources discovered the site while performing forensics on some servers known to host malware. They say that, when last checked, loads.cc was still in operation.

Google may have lost the bidding war to invest in Facebook, but it is preparing its own major assault on the social networking scene. It goes by the codename “Maka-Maka” inside the Googleplex (or, perhaps, “Makamaka”).

Maka-Maka encompasses Google’s grand plan to build a social layer across all of its applications. Some details about Maka-Maka have already leaked out, particularly how Google plans to use the feed engine that powers Google Reader (known internally as Reactor) to create “activity streams” for other applications akin to Facebook’s news and mini feeds. But Maka-Maka goes well beyond that.

Maka-Maka will be unveiled in stages. The first peek will come in early November. As we reported previously, Google is planning to “out open” Facebook with a new set of APIs that developers can use to build apps for its social network Orkut, iGoogle, and eventually other applications as well.

I know no one’s going to be terribly shocked by this, but I thought I’d point it out just in case you missed it. Engadget HD, after another stroll through AVS Forum’s message boards, is reporting on how Circuit City, Wal-Mart, and Amazon have lowered the price of Toshiba’s HD-A2 HD DVD player to $198 (Amazon’s deal includes free shipping).

This kind of price drop on standalone HD-DVD players has been widely expected and we think you may see $180 by Black Friday.

Google Inc. is close to unveiling its long-planned strategy to shake up the wireless market, people familiar with the matter say. The Web giant’s ambitious goal: to make applications and services as accessible on cellphones as they are on the Internet.

In a move likely to kick off an intense debate about the future shape of the cellphone industry, Google wants to make it easier for cellphone customers to get a variety of extra services on their phones — from maps to social-networking features to video-sharing. To get its way, however, the search giant will have to overcome resistance from wireless carriers and deal with potentially thorny security and privacy issues.

Google is trying to loosen the grip wireless carriers have over the software and services consumers can access on cellphones. Carriers have considerable clout, especially in the U.S., where they control distribution of phones to consumers through their retail stores.

Within the next two weeks, Google is expected to announce advanced software and services that would allow handset makers to bring Google-powered phones to market by the middle of next year, people familiar with the situation say.