A 19-year-old Washington state man is due in court on Monday to face accusations he hacked into emergency 911 systems and faked a call that a sent SWAT team to the home of a sleeping family 750 miles away.

Police allege Randall Ellis of Mukilteo, Washington, illegally accessed a phone system in Orange County, California and placed a bogus emergency call that appeared to come from a residence he picked at random. The caller reported as a teenaged drug user who had been shot in the shoulder and that attackers were going to shoot and kill his sister.

A panel of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has rejected most of Amazon.com’s 1-Click online purchasing system patent claims because of evidence that another patent predated this one.

In its decision, dated September 26, the three-judge panel reversed an earlier decision approving the patent claims and remanded it back to the patent examiner.

Amazon’s 1-Click system allows account holders to make a purchase with a single mouse click. The patent was granted in 1998, and Amazon went to court the following year to block Barnes & Noble from using a similar one-click checkout system. The case was later settled out of court.

The patent was re-examined after New Zealand actor Peter Calveley challenged it last year. He writes in his blog: “Amazon has the opportunity to respond to the Patent Office’s rejection, but third-party requests for re-examination, like the one I filed, result in having the subject patent either modified or completely revoked about two-thirds of the time.”

Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace, on stage with his boss of two years, News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, finally announced to the world at the Web 2.0 Summit tonight that MySpace will have an open platform “within a couple of months.”

After the platform opens to developers, it will open to a subset of users, about two million, to see if the “sandbox” that keeps that platform safe is reliable.

Before we all get MySpace apps, we’ll get a catalog of widgets that we can add to your pages. Widgets aren’t apps, though.

Of course, there are platforms and there are platforms. It wasn’t clear at all how much of the MySpace social database will be exposed to developers, nor what data MySpace will let developers export to non-MySpace pages.

Fasthosts, “the UK’s number 1 web host”, has fired off emergency emails telling customers to change all their passwords after police were called in to investigate a major data breach.

The Gloucester-based firm contacted The Reg this morning with a statement. It said: “As the breach could relate to Fasthosts customer data… Fasthosts has subsequently reviewed and updated its security and worked with external security experts to ensure that all data held by Fasthosts is secure.

“As a precautionary measure, Fasthosts has asked its customers to update their passwords. This includes their control panel, email, FTP, and database passwords, all of which can be changed via the customer control panel. Fasthosts has now implemented customer password encryption to further protect customer data.”

Skype users, Beware a new Trojan that uses subtle social engineering tricks to try to steal your login credentials

The malware, which calls itself ‘Skype Defender’, poses as a security plug-in. Infected users are prompted to log-into their Skype accounts. Cleverly the Trojan displays what looks like a Skype login screen, the internet telephony company warns.

If a user enters his Skype username and password, the Trojan displays a message saying that the name and password are unrecognized.

Behind the scenes, this information - as well as all usernames and passwords saved in Internet Explorer - is sent to a hacker-controlled website. By compromising user Skype accounts, hackers gain access to SkypeOut credits, which might be resold, and a possible means to access the PayPal accounts used to pay for those credits.

A computer screen that also acts as a two-handed touch interface and a crude infrared camera has been developed by researchers at Microsoft’s labs in the UK.

Users can operate the display with both hands, in a similar manner to the display in the film Minority Report. But this screen can also recognise particular hand gestures as well as objects placed within a centimetre of its surface.

“It can sense much more than fingers, and is essentially a low resolution scanner and camera,” says lead researcher Shahram Izadi. The screen can even communicate wirelessly with other devices nearby using the same infrared technology it uses to see.

The technology – dubbed ThinSight – was developed by adding an extra layer of electronics behind a normal laptop screen. This adds a couple of centimetres to the overall thickness, but completely transforms its abilities

Ubuntu, the most popular linux distribution is finally out with a new shiny version Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). The home page of Ubuntu.com is not updated yet but the release page is live and images of the Linux operation system are available for download.

For pepole who want to find out more on the new version, you can find reviews and screenshots on the beta version of Ubuntu 7.10 on the net . Here is one and another one

After more than a decade on the air, Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” has its own online home.

The new Web site, DailyShow.com, will go live at noon EST Thursday, presenting nearly the entire video archive of the show for the past nine years.

The site contains more than 16,000 video clips spanning headlines, correspondent pieces and such regular segments as Lewis Black’s “Back in Black” or Stephen Colbert’s “This Week in God.” For now, the archives start in early 1999, covering the Jon Stewart-era. The earlier version of the program, which started in 1996 with host Craig Kilborn, could be available by early 2008.

Uninterrupted episodes will not be available, though full shows can, for the most part, be pieced together from the clips.

Adobe Systems Inc. is working to deliver all of its software via the Web as a service rather than a packaged product, but the transition to earn money from subscriptions or advertising could take a decade.

Adobe, a leading maker of graphic and Web design software, earns most of its money through the sales of packaged software that runs locally on a computer’s hard drive but it has started offering some of its applications online as service.

Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Adobe Chief Executive Bruce Chizen said running software on the desktop is still optimal for most of its customers, but that will change over time.

“The desktop is a powerful, powerful machine in which to run applications. Broadband, as quick as it gets, is still going to have some limitations in the short term,” said Chizen in a question-and-answer session on stage at the conference.

Chizen answered a question about whether a complete shift to Web delivery would take five or 10 years and he indicated it would be closer to a decade.

The Library of Congress and UNESCO will cooperate to develop a digital library of works from around the world, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization said on Wednesday.

“The World Digital Library initiative will digitize unique and rare materials from libraries and other cultural institutions around the world and make them available free of charge on the Internet,” Paris-based UNESCO said in a statement.

It said material would include manuscripts, maps, books, musical scores, sound recordings, films, prints and photographs.

The project, backed by Internet giant Google, was launched by the Library of Congress in 2005, with the aim of digitizing records of the great cultures of the world.

Google Inc aims to apply Web search technology to a general set of health information problems and remains committed to the market despite slow initial progress, an executive said on Wednesday.

“We do have a broad interest in this area,” Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of Search Products & User Experience, told Internet industry leaders at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. “It will start with search.”

Mayer said engineers stumbled onto Google’s potential role in the field by noticing the number of searches users perform with its Web search services for hard-to-diagnose health problems, often simply by typing symptoms into a Web browser.

“Google is not a doctor, but people come to us with a lot of health information searches,” Mayer told the audience of several hundred executives, financiers and writers. “There is a big user information need, which we should ultimately fill.”