] Meet Robert Jackson. The 57-year-old Michigan man was hit
] Monday (2/24) with prostitution charges for organizing
] "CumFest 2003," a January sex party involving about 50
] men and three hookers. According to investigators,
] Jackson planned to film the fest--which took place in a
] suburban Marriott hotel--and sell a videotape of the
] event via a web site operated by one of the prostitutes.
] But, mid-orgy, Jackson's bash was crashed by Romulus
] cops, who learned of the gathering from the hotel's
] manager (who found out about "CumFest 2003" from a woman
] whose 17-year-old son had received an e-mail invitation
] to the event). Jackson, who faces a maximum of five years
] in jail on the felony charges, is no stranger to kinky
] scenes. He was nabbed in June 2001 for throwing a
] similar--though untitled--soiree in another Michigan
] hotel. (2 pages)

The Smoking Gun: Archive

] (AP) A telemarketing tool that penetrates home privacy
] defenses is upping the ante in a technology battle
] between sales callers and consumers seeking shelter from
] unsolicited calls.
]
]
] Castel Inc., a maker of automated dialing technology,
] boasts that its DirectQuest software is immune to the
] TeleZapper, a $40 gadget designed to thwart sales calls
] by faking the tones of a disconnected number.
]
]
] Beverly, Mass.-based Castel has been mailing brochures to
] telemarketers and other prospective customers touting the
] software, which also includes a feature that lets
] salesmen transmit any phone number or text message to
] residents' caller ID displays.
]
]
] That second component allows DirectQuest to dodge such
] phone company privacy services as SBC's Privacy Manager
] and Sprint's Privacy ID, both of which reject calls that
] don't provide caller ID information.

CBS News | Penetrating Home Privacy Protection | February 26, 2003 15:43:28

] Three weeks ago, in a stunning raid, Russian hackers
] seized control of the servers that support one of the
] Internet's largest online gaming operations, demanding a
] ransom. It was a real-life, high-tech version of the
] movie Ocean's Eleven. By the time the ransom was paid,
] one key server -- the one containing all operational data
] for 120 Internet gaming sites and a long list of
] consulting clients -- seemed to be stripped of its data.
]
]
]
] At stake were all the operational records of a gambling
] empire. "We didn't even have the names of customers,"
] says Juan Bonilla, executive vice-president of Grafix
] Softech F.A. of San Juan, Costa Rica. "We lost
] everything." To make matters worse, little, if any, of
] the data had been backed up off-site. Grafix Softech was
] losing an estimated US$75,000 a day in profits, and the
] incident left it open to lawsuits from customers whose
] businesses relied on Grafix Softech's services. What
] could have been a major disaster became a bump in the
] corporate road. In an amazing feat of ingenuity, CBL Data
] Recovery Technologies Inc. of Markham, Ont., managed to
] recover all the lost data. It was a close call, admits
] Bill Margeson, president of CBL

Russian hackers raid largest online gaming operation

] Weird week. Weird, weird week, passing from alert orange
] to heavenly white and back to the usual muddle of slush.
] People keep trying to "gauge public opinion" at this
] moment of crisis. Fortunately, though, in the past year
] in New York we've had on hand a machine that can tell you
] what the world is thinking%u2014that actually listens to
] the world, reads its mind, and tells you exactly what's
] up in there. The machine, a Jimmy Neutron assemblage of
] display monitors and loudspeakers and copper wire, is the
] brainchild of a Bell Labs statistician named Mark Hansen
] and a sound designer and artist named Ben Rubin, and for
] most of the past year you could find it in a loft on the
] Bowery, where you could drop in on it if you knew it was
] there. For the past couple of months, though, it has been
] on loan to the Whitney Museum of American Art, and in a
] rough week it was a pleasure to sit in the dark and
] listen

Chatter

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL
by
John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident
Co-Founder & Vice Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Berkman Fellow, Harvard Law School

I remember a time years ago when I was as convinced that Dick Cheney was obscenely wrong about something I am now. Subsequent events raised the possibility that he might not have been so wrong after all.

With this in mind, I've given some thought lately to how all this
might look to the Vice President (who is, I remain convinced, as much the real architect of American policy as he was while Gerald Ford's Chief of Staff or George the First's Secretary of Defense).

Sympathy for the Devil by John Perry Barlow

] LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico -- There are no armed guards to
] knock out. No sensors to deactivate. No surveillance
] cameras to cripple. To sneak into Los Alamos National
] Laboratory, the world's most important nuclear research
] facility, all you do is step over a few strands of
] rusted, calf-high barbed wire.

Very scary.

Wired News: Nuke Lab Can't Keep Snoops Out

] Witness to centuries of bloodshed, the ancient walls of
] Jerusalem's Old City saw only white Tuesday as
] Palestinians and Israelis traded snowballs instead of
] stones and bullets.

Yahoo! News - Snowballs Replace Bullets as Snow Hits Holy Land

] NEW YORK (AP) -- Two police officers suffered minor
] injuries and three people were arrested Monday when an
] MTV contest in Times Square got out of hand.
]
] People began shoving and pushing as a crowd of several
] thousand gathered in the morning outside MTV's studios at
] the corner of 44th Street and Broadway, police said. The
] crowd had gathered for an "American Idol"-style
] competition to find new rap stars, with the winner
] receiving a Def Jam recording contract.

CNN.com - Minor melee outside MTV - Feb. 24, 2003

] Thousands of Nike basketball shoes are drifting through
] the Pacific Ocean toward Alaska after spilling from a
] container ship off Northern California.

How sad!!! All that child labor, gone to waste. Now Nike's going to have to implement pay cuts in their factories to make up the loss.

Soggy shoes head for Alaska

] Nasa has revealed its first set of mission criteria for
] the Orbital Space Plane (OSP) - the series of space
] vehicle expected to replace the space shuttle from 2012

BBC NEWS | World | Americas | Nasa plans shuttle successor