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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Prosecutors looking to throw the book at accused computer hackers have come across a legal defense expected to become even more widespread in an era of hijacked PCs and laptops that threatens to blur the lines of personal responsibility: the computer did it. In one case that was being watched as a bellwether by computer security experts, Aaron Caffrey, 19, was acquitted earlier this month in the United Kingdom on charges of hacking into the computer system of the Houston Pilots, an independent contractor for the Port of Houston, in September 2001. Caffrey had been charged...

I have a few questions concerning IP addresses, and am fairly ignorant in these areas. I understand that I have a dynamic IP address through Bellsouth.net. Dynamic means that it changes daily. I have noticed that the first two numbers of the address never change, and that they have something to do with my geographic location. A certain website, which I will leave unamed has banned my IP address, and tells me when I try to register that the IP is banned. How can they ban my IP when it changes every day? Are they just banning the first two...

Cyber women test what's real By Jo Twist BBC News Online technology reporter Software cyberbabes, created by powerful computers, sophisticated modelling packages and active imaginations are getting extremely human-like. Rene Morel's 3D model has a very human face Virtual cyberbabes are used in advertising campaigns, hit shoot-em-up games, and the pop industry, from Lara Croft to virtual pop idols, T-Babe and Diki or DK-96. Some of the best 3D models around are currently on show at an exhibition which has just opened in London called Perfectly Real: Women in Bits and Bytes. But they raise questions about what people...

Can anyone tell me how to delete or bypass a forgotten bios password which blocks my CPU from booting.

My motherboard gave up the ghost. I purchased a Compaq E-machine, (due to cash flow issues from being underemployed!)The hard drive on the old Compaq was okay so the Comp USA tech installed it in the new machine and made it non-bootable. I know that's a "cheap" way to back up a system but the crash was unexpected!I'm trying to bring the system back to where it was before trying anything new. I was able to import the contact list into Outlook Express from my Yahoo e-mail account. Now I would like to find my received messages, (there's well over...

Alert Alert The conservative website NewsMax www.newsmax.com places spybots on any visitor to it URL site. I just installed my spybot software 10 days ago. As I travels to my favorite watering holes, suprise visiting newsmax website alarm bells indicated targetnet spybot was trying to load. Every time I visited newsmax over the last 10 days newsmax tried to load the spybot targetnet during load up of newsmax URL. If you are enraged by this spying let newsmax know.

Virtual hurricanes have appeared in computer models of the Earth's climate for the first time. The swirling storms are visible in the first results from the Earth Simulator in Yokohama, Japan - the world's fastest supercomputer. The results, being presented at a workshop in Cambridge, UK, on Wednesday, are "really quite staggering" says Julia Slingo, Director of the Centre for Global Atmospheric Modelling at the University of Reading, UK. Whereas most climate models divide the Earth into blocks measuring hundreds of kilometres across, the powerful Earth Simulator can run models with cells as small as 10 kilometres. This means that...

Artificial Development To Build Biggest Spiking Neural Network The first CCortex cluster Palo Alto - Sep 16, 2003 Artificial Development, Inc. today announced that it has completed assembly of the first functional portion of a prototype of Ccortex, a 20-billion neuron emulation of the human cortex, which it will use to build a next-generation artificial intelligence system. Artificial Development will initiate testing of Ccortex in October. The cluster being assembled at AD.com Data Center is a high-performance, parallel supercomputer, composed of 500 nodes and one thousand processors, 1.5 terabytes of RAM, and 80 terabytes of storage. The low-cost software/hardware system...

Who Killed Apple Computer? This essay has received some attention on the web, giving it an audience beyond those for whom it was written. So I think a little introduction is in order. This was written for former Apple employees, and in particular for those who worked at Apple during the same time as me, when the company grew, reached an apex in revenue, and then almost died. It's an effort to draw some lessons from that experience. It is not, despite some things you may have seen on the web, a critique of the current incarnation of Apple. But...

Gateway will cut at least 1,300 jobs as it tries to streamline its manufacturing, delivery and service operations, an effort first announced last week. On Tuesday, the Poway, Calif., company notified about 850 customer service and technical support employees that it would be eliminating their positions in a reorganization of its manufacturing system. The 850 job cuts are in addition to 450 layoffs announced last week, when Gateway made public a plan to close its PC manufacturing plant in Hampton, Va., and to outsource some PC manufacturing. The additional layoffs involve 200 customer service employees in Kansas City, Kan.,...

So there I was....diggin' into my new laptop....and noticing all the little annoying nuances that have populated my home and download directories...when I came across a couple plugin_trace files. I narrowed these down to Java creations possibly generated by browser errors (primarily netscape). So I google'd "java plugin trace and came across the following discussion which can be found here http://answers.google.com/answers/main?cmd=threadview&id=226851 . The one post that struck me as odd was this one, however: (snip) The above re-assuring comments are incorrect. I too found these files appearing on my hard drive and they are indeed generated by Sun Java, however...

Help! Is it possible to print a Windows Directory in Windows 2000 Professional without using the command prompt?

Imagine I were to give you a computer and turn you loose on the internet. You could read text, see pictures, watch movies and animations, play music and enjoy interactive games. You can save these things to view them later, and share them with your friends. You can print them, burn them on CDs, edit them and modify them and create new things from pieces of old things. Most of it is free, too. You can publish things, and remain anonymous if you wish. You can indulge your curiosity in embarrassing ways and visit porn sites, pictures-of-dead-bodies sites, radical revolutionary...

Dave Murphy, you would think, should know better. He is an information technology consultant - someone who counsels the rest of us on how to protect our computer, by making it difficult for someone to decipher passwords, for instance. Yet he keeps his four-digit bank card number in his wallet, and his various passwords are stored on a handheld computer that is always with him. At least, he says, the password database is encrypted and the note in his wallet is written in Chinese digits in Korean script. "Without my little crib sheet, I can't remember all that stuff," said...

The brazen airport computer theft that has Australia's anti-terror fighters up in arms By Philip Cornford September 5, 2003 On the night of Wednesday, August 27, two men dressed as computer technicians and carrying tool bags entered the cargo processing and intelligence centre at Sydney International Airport. The men, described as being of Pakistani-Indian-Arabic appearance, took a lift to the third floor of the Charles Ulm building in Link Road, next to the customs handling depot and the Qantas Jet Base. They presented themselves to the security desk as technicians sent by Electronic Data Systems, the outsourced customs computer services...

While I.B.M. officials deny it, evidence is being offered by stricken employees that unusually large numbers of men and women who worked for the giant computer corporation over the past few decades have been dying prematurely. I.B.M. employees, and relatives of employees who have died, are claiming in a series of very bitter lawsuits that I.B.M. workers have contracted cancer and other serious illnesses from chemicals they were exposed to in semiconductor and disk-drive manufacturing, laboratory work and other very basic industrial operations. Dr. Richard Clapp, a respected epidemiologist from Boston University who was hired by a group of 40...

Sorry for the vanity, but my old computer, which was being brought in for repairs, was stolen out of my car the other day, and with it I lost all of my FR threads I had saved since this past March. Hugely irritating. I've tried, but have been unable to get back to view threads since last March. Is it possible? I'm not talking about plugging in words and going backwards; I'd like to start around March 1 and go forward day by day, viewing old threads (yes, I do have a life - it'll take a few months to...

The research and activism arm of BlackBox Voting.com   CONTENTSIntroductionPart 1 - Can the votes be changed?Part 2 - Can the password be bypassed?Part 3 ? Can the audit log be altered? ************* Introduction According to election industry officials, electronic voting systems are absolutely secure, because they are protected by passwords and tamperproof audit logs. But the passwords can easily be bypassed, and in fact the audit logs can be altered. Worse, the votes can be changed without anyone knowing, even the County Election Supervisor who runs the election system. The computer programs that tell electronic voting machines how...

Former Tech student pleads to porn charge A former Texas Tech student pleaded guilty Monday in federal court to downloading child pornography from the Internet. David Russell Brigham, 23, of Abilene faces a maximum sentence of 15 years when U.S. District Judge Sam Cummings sentences him in several weeks. A Lubbock federal grand jury indicted Brigham in March on 13 charges of transporting and receiving child pornography. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, Brigham admitted that in November 2000 he downloaded an image of a young girl engaging in sexual intercourse with an adult man. The additional charges will be...

he computer program that helped NASA mistakenly decide that the shuttle Columbia had not been deeply harmed by a piece of falling foam would have predicted serious damage if used properly, said the retired Boeing engineer who developed the program. The engineer, Allen J. Richardson, said the program, known as Crater, was never intended to be used in a mission to predict damage, as it was in Columbia's fatal flight. Members of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, which is expected to release its final report on the disaster tomorrow, have disparaged Crater as a flawed tool. But Mr. Richardson said...