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.