Hijacked!
Three men have been charged by the feds for a 2008 stunt that replaced cable giant Comcast’s homepage with a message to other hackers – costing the company an over $128,000. Prosecutors named Christopher Allen Lewis, 19 and James Robert Black Jr and Michael Paul Lebel, 28, as the suspected hackers. “The hackers got control of the domain with two phone calls, and an e-mail sent to the company’s domain registrar, Network Solutions, from a hacked Comcast e-mail account. That gave them entry to the Network Solutions control panel for Comcast’s 200 domains. In an [anonymous] interview the day after the attack, [the hackers] told Threat Level that they didn’t initially set out to redirect the site’s traffic. Instead, they merely changed the contact information for the Comcast.net domain to Defiant’s e-mail address; for the street address, they used the ‘Dildo Room’ at ‘69 Dick Tard Lane.’”
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Wedding Ban
“The geniuses who wrote Texas’ gay marriage ban may have accidentally banned all marriage in the state, according to one Houston lawyer. Subsection B of the ban, a constitutional amendment ratified in 2005, states, ‘This state…may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.’ The intent was to prevent even civil unions for gay couples—but it doesn’t actually specify the ‘gay’ part. The wording essentially ‘eliminates marriage in Texas,’ Barbara Ann Radnofsky, the Democratic candidate for state attorney general tells the McClatchy Papers. ‘You do not have to have a fancy law degree to read this and understand what it plainly says.’ Conservatives scoffed at Radnofsky’s tactics. ‘It’s a silly argument,’ said the head of an organization that helped draft the amendment. A lawsuit based on it would have ‘about one chance in a trillion’ of succeeding.”
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No Oprah
The sun will set on the Oprah Winfrey Show – on of America’s most popular TV shows – in September 2011 after two decades on the airwaves. “Billionaire Ms Winfrey, 55, one of the most influential women in the US, has hosted the show since 1986. A spokesman for the star's Harpo production company would not say why Winfrey had decided to quit, but said she would discuss it on Friday's show. Winfrey is expected to focus instead on the launch of her own TV channel. She already runs a satellite radio station, Oprah Radio, with presenters including Dr Maya Angelou and sex therapist Dr Laura Berman. The Oprah Winfrey Show, currently syndicated in 145 countries, has transformed the star into a cultural phenomenon. The show's open atmosphere and frank conversation redefined the talk show genre and made Winfrey the wealthiest black woman in the world.”
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Distinct Extinct
“The last breaths of mammoths and mastodons some 13,000 years ago have garnered plenty of research and just as much debate. But what happened when they disappeared? A new study, based partly on dung fungus, provides some answers to both questions. The upshot: The landscape changed dramatically. ‘As soon as herbivores drop off the landscape, we see different plant communities,’ said lead researcher Jacquelyn Gill of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, adding the result was an ‘ecosystem upheaval.’ Gill and her colleagues found that once emptied of a diversity of large animals equalling or surpassing that of Africa's Serengeti, the landscape completely changed. Trees once kept in check by the mammoth gang popped up and so did wildfires sparked by the woody debris.”
Epileptic Dancer
The British arts council has given an epileptic dancer £14,000 towards a 24 hour performance which she hopes will induce a seizure on stage. Rita Marcolo has stopped taking medicine to regulated her condition and her dance performance is billed as a study of the “conceptual and physical interfaces between dance, movement and epilepsy”. “Epilepsy charities said that the event turned a much misunderstood condition into a freak show and warned of the potentially severe dangers of coming off epilepsy drugs. Marcalo said that she wanted to raise awareness of epilepsy as ‘an invisible disability’ and would use next month’s adults-only show at Bradford Playhouse to explore ‘my other identity as a disabled person’.”
Cosmetic Use
“Police say a gang in the Peruvian jungle has been killing people and draining fat from the corpses to sell on the black market for use in cosmetics, although medical experts say they doubt a major market for fat exists. Three suspects confessed to killing five people, but the gang may have been involved in dozens more, said Col. Jorge Mejia, chief of Peru's anti-kidnapping police. He said one suspect claimed the gang wasn't the only one doing such killings. Mejia said two of the suspects were arrested carrying bottles of liquid human fat and told police it was worth $60,000 a gallon. The fat was sold to intermediaries in Peru's capital, Lima, and police suspect it was then sold to cosmetic companies in Europe, Mejia said Thursday, but he could not confirm any sales.”
Curing Blindness
“People suffering from a form of incurable blindness could soon become the first patients in the world to benefit from a new and controversial transplant operation using stem cells derived from spare human embryos left over from IVF treatment. Scientists working for an American biotechnology company yesterday applied for a licence to carry out a clinical trial on patients in the US suffering from a type of macular degeneration, which causes gradual loss of vision. They expect the transplant operations to begin early in the new year. The development is highly controversial because many ‘pro-life’ groups are opposed to using human embryos in any kind of medical research but scientists believe that the benefits could revolutionise the treatment of many incurable disorders ranging from Parkinson's to heart disease.”
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Snitch Catching
“It was a bizarre, magical request that apparently even cash-strapped Harvard University couldn’t refuse. The university, which recently cut hundreds of jobs and such perks as hot breakfast at dining halls in the wake of a 30 percent drop in its endowment, has given $600 to undergraduates Stacy Rush and Alana Biden, niece of U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden, to start a Quidditch team. ‘It’s a combination of dodge ball, soccer and track,’ Rush said about the once-fictitious game, introduced to the world through J.K. Rowling’s ‘Harry Potter’ novels. ‘And then there’s the fantasy aspect,’ Rush continued about the sport whose players wear capes. ‘At its core, it is a wizard sport.’ The first real-life Quidditch team debuted at Middlebury College in 2005. Today, Harvard is among 200 schools with club-level teams.”
Under Influence
Senator John Kerry’s daughter was arrested yesterday in Las Angeles on suspicion of driving while under the influence. Police told Fox News that 36-year-old film producer Alexandra Forbes Kerry was released on $5,000 bail after tests showed a blood-alcohol reading of 0.06. She was still under the legal limit in California, which is 0.08, but drivers can still be prosecuted for dangerous driving if any alcohol is found in their system. It has been alleged that Kerry was pulled over at 12.40am after violating a traffic law.
Torture and Neglect?
Detainees transferred by Canadians to Afghan prisons are “likely to have been tortured by Afghan officials” a former senior Canadian diplomat has claimed. At a House of Commons committee yesterday Richard Colvin adversely compared Canada’s treatment of prisoners with that of the British and the Dutch. He said Canada transferred 20 times as many prisoners as the Dutch and that unlike Britain and Holland, Canada did not monitor their conditions properly and took days, weeks or months to notify the Red Cross. He also claims this activity was masked by "walls of secrecy" and poor record keeping. "As I learned more about our detainee practices, I came to a conclusion they were contrary to Canada's values, contrary to Canada's interests, contrary to Canada's official policies and also contrary to international law. That is, they were un-Canadian, counterproductive and probably illegal,” Colvin said. "According to our information, the likelihood is that all the Afghans we handed over were tortured. For interrogators in Kandahar, it was a standard operating procedure.”