Bin Laden Believed Voice on Net Audio; A Demand To "Clean Up This Internet Effluent"; and Other Trash, Brash, and Flash Cybertalk

If you ask the CIA, the voice on an Internet audio message offering gold in exchange for top U.S. military and civilian officials' heads on a plate was indeed the voice of Osama bin Laden. "After conducting technical analysis of the audio recording that surfaced on the Internet [Thursday], " said a CIA official who spoke on condition of anonymity to Agence France Presse, "our assessment at CIA is it is likely the voice of Osama bin Laden." Posted on a Website believed to be a frequent haunt of Islamic extremists, the message also offered 10,000 grams of gold to anyone who whacks United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan or UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi...

MessageLabs's chief technology officer Mark Sunner thinks the Internet's cup runneth over with effluent - as in, malware, viruses, worms, and other creatures. "We've definitely noted an increase in overall traffic," he tells ZDNet News. "I think the biggest trend we're seeing now is the increasing sophistication of the techniques used specifically in viruses. The sophistication is very much geared around subverting the flaws within traditional antivirus protection. Rather than obfuscating the viral code as in the past, virus writers are now changing the encoding techniques."

Sunner also says there's a social engineering factor in play, "where virus writers are introducing a human element by putting malicious code in password-protected Zip-files and finding some route to encourage the user to then unlock the virus once it reaches the desktop."...

The effluent also includes phishing scams, and the phish have been biting in the billions at least - dollars, that is. "Phishing attacks are not new," says law enforcement news site out-law.com, "but are increasing at an alarming rate." Come to think of it, Sunner's own MessageLabs itself says that last August they intercepted a mere fourteen phish, but come January they'd landed 290,016 on their lines...

Some people think cigarette sales are effluent in their own right - especially in cyberspace. Just ask the New Jersey state Senate Health, Human Services, and Senior Citizens Committee. They've just endorsed a bill that would bar Internet or mail-order cigarette sales to New Jersey residents. Saying they want to close the loophole letting minors buy the butts, the law if passed and signed would mean up to six months in the joint for first offenses and up to eighteen months for subsequent convictions, with fines reaching $10,000. Depending on where, you can get a lot to dislike with a Marlboro these days...

You get even more to dislike (and we speak politely) when it comes to child porn. Especially in Redondo Beach, California, where a reserve police officer has been arrested for the first time in the 30-year history of this beachside community's reserve police program - and the charge is child porn possession, not to mention witness intimidation and destruction of evidence. "The public is morally outraged by this, but we are ten times more morally outraged by this when one of our own is involved in something like this," said Redondo Beach police sergeant Phil Keenan after the arrest of Randy Vincent Jones. "When something like this happens, it brings dishonor on the whole department - and a sense of betrayal."...

Imagine the sense of betrayal in one Australian household, then, when a man is thrown in the clink for over 100,000 child porn pictures - including and especially pictures of him sexually assaulting his own daughter while she slept. And it might not even have been known, according to the Australian news media, if he hadn't boxed up his collection of child porn and given it to a neighbor after a member of his family fell under police watch over a stolen car. Only the neighbor tipped off the police. The father has pleaded guilty to several charges involving sexual assault, indecent assault, and child porn...

Enough, then, about that for the weekend. Let's find something pleasant. And we can, especially if you have a thing for archaeology: There's a company who specializes in dinosaur digging and plans to use the Internet to give us all a look as it unearths what's believed to be a 65-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus Rex, from a private property in Montana. The Black Hills Institute of Geological Research thinks this one might be mostly intact, having previously found the 80-percent complete Sue (reposing now at a Chicago museum) and the 70-percent complete Stan. I just hate when they find a T-Rex with a few screws loose, don't you?...

It isn't fair to accuse Intel of having some screws loose, but you might begin to wonder whether they couldn't stand the heat. Consider: They said May 7 that they're scrapping two new computer chips in order to high-tail out to market a more efficient chip technology a year sooner than planned. The cancelled chips: the fourth-generation Pentium 4 and a new Xeon for low-end servers. Coming in: chips for desktops and notebooks which combine two microprocessors onto a single piece of silicon - and analysts say the move was because Intel needed to cut back on the heat the chips generate, its speed method requiring expensive and noisy cooling systems for computers...

Apple Computer, meanwhile, would like one and all to cool it for now about talk suggesting a hike in online music prices. Spokeswoman Natalia Sequeira told Reuters iTunes Music Store has a multiyear deal with record labels that keeps the popular pay-to-play download site prices at 99 cents a song. This followed a New York Post report that music fans might be looking at price hikes after recent contract talks between Apple and the music labels. The iTunes store has sold over 70 million songs since last April - less than their hoped-for million but more than other legal download sites. To put it in perspective, track back to 1964: in that year, the Beatles alone sold over 100 million copies of their records around the world.