Liudvikas Bukys

The Story:
(Don’t try this at home!)
A spammer’s victim hacks the spammer and reveals more than you want to know about the spammer and her techniques.

Spammers crack through Windows. (Creating popups via the Windows Messenger service) ZDNet Oct 18 2002 6:51AM ET [Moreover – Computer security news]

The New York Times on Hypocrisy of US IP Policies [Slashdot]

MIT: Smart Tech Ideas Mean Biz. Wired News Oct 17 2002 5:53AM ET [Moreover – Tech latest]

New York Times – free registration required Court Ruling Limits Prosecutors’ Access to Patient Records.

New York State’s highest court ruled yesterday that prosecutors cannot demand hospital medical records in their efforts to seek criminal suspects who have been wounded, because doing so infringes on patient confidentiality.

The decision by the Court of Appeals affects only cases that involve a doctor’s medical judgment. Where information about a possible crime is apparent to anyone — for instance, when wounds are readily visible on a patient’s face, or when a packet of drugs falls from a patient’s sock — prosecutors may enforce a subpoena for records, the court noted in its unanimous decision.

The decision also does not affect established legal exceptions to patient confidentiality, like gunshot wounds, certain communicable diseases, potential child abuse and even potentially fatal stab wounds.

[ … ]

The Court of Appeals had reached an almost identical decision in 1983, ruling on a similar dispute between prosecutors and hospital officials in upstate New York.

[ … ]

The Manhattan prosecutors had sought a way around the 1983 ruling. In the subpoenas last year, they demanded patients’ names, addresses and other information, “except any and all information acquired by a physician, registered nurse or licensed practical nurse in attending said patient in a professional capacity and which was necessary to enable said doctor and/or nurse to act in that capacity.”

But the Court of Appeals rejected that distinction, saying the prosecutors were seeking people with a particular type of injury — in this case a stab wound.

“The inherently medical nature of this judgment is not obviated by attempting to qualify it in terms of what a layperson might plainly observe,” wrote Justice Albert M. Rosenblatt, in an opinion joined by the court’s other six judges.

While there are some exceptions to medical privacy, the opinion said, “Patients should not fear that merely by obtaining emergency medical care they may lose the confidentiality of their medical records and their physicians’ medical determinations.”

[Privacy Digest]

The Register USA – If I tell you that I’ll have to kill you: Red Hat fights the DMCA.

Red Hat has struck a small blow against the DMCA, by publishing a security patch which can only be explained fully to people who are not within US jurisdiction. The company’s position here seems to be not altogether voluntary – according to a spokesman “it is bizarre, and unfortunately something Red Hat cannot easily do much about,” but like it or not Red Hat has been recruited to the campaign to make the DMCA look ridiculous.

[Privacy Digest]

Electronic News:

Germans Rethink Wireless:

‘
Next month at the gargantuan Electronica show in Munich, Germany—where everything from light rail cars to fiber optic modules is shown in miles of exhibition space every fall—the Berlin company Nanotron Technologies will unveil the first transceiver silicon based on its multidimensional multiple access (MDMA) technology.

‘
What’s garnering gasps in the halls of communications engineering are the range and data rates—over 60 meters and more than 2Mbit/sec.—coupled with power consumption on the order of a keychain RFID tag. But the smile that follows those gasps comes from the chirping.

‘
“The essence of Nanotron’s technology is that they use the chirp technology,” says Heinz Arnold, a company spokesman. “It’s based on the principle in nature. It’s the way dolphins and bats communicate. By chirping, signals or symbols are coded in a very, very effective way because the energy distribution is very constant over time. This is exactly what you want over time, that you are not allowed to go over a certain low level of energy,” Arnold says.
‘

SlashDot developers:

TekMage writes “For those of you who have never had the pleasure of rolling your own Linux install from scratch, take a moment to check out Version 4.0 of
Linux From Scratch.
Definitely for the techies amonst us, there is (IMHO) truly no better way out there to get down and dirty with the inner workings of our favorite OS.”
LFS organizes its documentation into “books”; 4.0’s book is dated yesterday.

SlashDot:
NSF Grants for Decentralized Infrastructure Research:
The NSF has given a grant to the IRIS Project to research something called Distributed Hash Tables as a tool for creating networks that don’t have “centralized points of vulnerability”. The chief purpose seems to be to stop DoS attacks,

Roll Call:
Answering Mass E-mails Made Easier:
“Flooded with tens of thousands of pieces of mail a year, Congressional offices want to know one thing as soon as each letter is opened: Is it from a constituent?”