Could this portend a new technique in labor disputes? A Wall Street database engineer was so outraged when a trading company refused him a raise that he launched a spam-bomb denial-of-service attack against the company's computers. Abdelkader Smires was arrested at his Queens home Tuesday and could face up to five years in prison. The attacks against Internet Trading Technologies in Manhattan started March 9 and continued for three days in what's being called the first cyberattack of its kind against a Wall Street company. ITT processes trading electronically for members of the NASDAQ stock listing. Smires has confessed to some of the spam bombing. ITT had reportedly offered Smires a $70,000 raise, $50,000 in stock options, and a one-year contract the day before the spam bombing began. He first refused to cooperate without a better deal, then launched the attacks from a Queens College computer. He's being held without bail pending a March 17 hearing.
WASHINGTON - A librarian in Oregon conducted a nationwide survey and found over 2,000 complaints about porn in public libraries, including 472 reports of children accessing porn on library computers. David Burt of Lake Oswego, Oregon, runs Filtering Facts, a pro-filtering software group, and says the American Library Association refuses to admit the problem even exists, but ALA spokeswoman Judith Krug says his findings are questionable. "We have almost no evidence of any influx of even a small number of concerns about accessing pornography on the Internet by anyone," she tells the Washington Times. Family Research Council spokeswoman Janet Parshall, however, says America's libraries are "increasingly becoming dirty bookstores and peepshows open to children and funded by taxpayers." The Burt report, which the FRC is distributing, claims adults access porn on library computers "regularly," expose children to porn, and have harassed staff, while most problems with library porn "go unreported."
WASHINGTON - Two Capitol Hill lawmakers want a federal privacy commission to decide what - if any - new regulations should apply to American companies, cyberspace and otherwise. Arkansas Republican Asa Hutchinson and Jim Moran introduced a bill March 15 to create a 17-member panel having 18 months to review current privacy laws and make recommendations on additional legislation - similar in concept to the current committee reviewing whether to tax the Internet. Americans "are alarmed at the accessibility of their medical records, they are worried over how their financial information is being used, and they want to know what they can get on the Internet without strangers downloading personal information about them," says Hutchinson. However, the panel would not review government invasions of privacy, like Echelon or the FBI's push for more wiretapping powers. And some free-market advocates, like Fred Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, say the idea is risky, as "the messiness and mistakes being made in current information markets" may prompt some to "rush in with a political rule. It pre-empts the evolution of a free society."
--- Compiled By Humphrey Pennyworth
