] 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

] A Russian space capsule now docked at the international
] space station will be used to bring the space station
] crew back to Earth now that the U.S. shuttle fleet is
] grounded, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said today.

HoustonChronicle.com - Russian craft to bring space station crew home

] Islamist Website: An Imminent Terrorist Attack (Possibly
] by Al-Qa'ida) Within "About Ten Days" (Apparently in the
] U.S.)

This site contains the English-translated text of a message that was posted on the Arabic-language www.alfjr.com site a couple days ago. It may just be general ranting, or then again, it may not. It's unusual for MEMRI to post something like this, so I found it worth noting.

MEMRI: Terrorist Attack Within 10 Days?

] Welcome to the World's LARGEST Consumer
] Advocacy Site for Gas Prices!

Welcome to Gaspricewatch.com - Find the lowest gas prices in your neighborhood.

] Hazardous materials from these junked computers and
] discarded gadgets are polluting the environment in these
] developing countries and causing great health hazards to
] those who live there, environmentalists say.

Make sure you look through the pictorial.

Recyclers Pledge to Cut E-Waste

What John Holmes and Joey Cinelli can look forward to someday...

Over the boards ... with Red Wings Zamboni driver Al Sobotka

By Leander Kahney

quoted:
===
Now, a university student from Israel has written a piece of software that goes a step further. Ofer Springer has created a "virtual gramophone" that plays LPs using an ordinary flatbed scanner.

Springer's Digital Needle uses a high-resolution image of an LP captured by a flatbed scanner. (Because 12-inch LPs are bigger than the image glass on most scanners, Springer first takes four pictures and stitches them together into a single image.)

Then, like a needle on a record player, his software follows the image of the groove as it spirals around the record, generating sounds based on the wavelike patterns of the groove.

The results are barely recognizable as the original music, but strangely affecting. Springer has posted samples on the project's Web page.

Wired News: Press 'Scan' to Play Old Albums?