Law and Order

A FORMER Microsoft worker has pleaded guilty to participating in a software sales scheme that cost the company of more than $US32 million ($41 million).

Finn W. Contini, 36, of Redmond, pleaded guilty in the US Federal Court to one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and four counts of money laundering. Contini admitted ordering 2,700 pieces of software worth $US7 million through an internal Microsoft program, then sold it for a personal profit of $US2.3 million.

Federal prosecutors are calling for the author of a variant of the infamous Blaster worm to be jailed for 37 months - ahead of a sentencing hearing due later this week. Jeffrey Lee Parson pleaded guilty last August to releasing a modified version of the Blaster worm.

Under a plea agreement signed last year, Parson will be imprisoned in a federal jail for between for between 18 and 37 months. Parson risked a possible sentence of up to ten years for "intentionally causing damage to a protected computer" if the case had gone to trial and he had been convicted.

A UK man has been jailed for six months after a sick email hoax informed families searching for relatives missing in the midst of the tsunami crisis that their loved ones were dead.

Christopher Pierson harvested the email addresses from a Sky News website and sent 35 separate emails with the gruesome and unfounded news, purporting to be from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Pierson's emails stated: "The UK government regretted to inform the victim that the missing person they were inquiring about was confirmed dead."

A company reported to an ISP for sending bulk spam is replying by suing the individual who made the allegation.

The sued party, Jay Stuler, reported New Hampshire-based Atriks, otherwise known as Distributed Mail, to his ISP after receiving unsolicited bulk e-mail over a period from April 2003 onward. According to court papers, Atriks then lost its account with its ISPs, Lightship Telecom, Spectra Access, and North Atlantic Internet, resulting in the legal action against Stuler.

A judge overseeing the legal fight between the SCO Group and IBM over Linux and Unix on Tuesday ordered Big Blue to show all versions of its two Unix products, AIX and Dynix. Although U.S. Magistrate Judge Brooke Wells denied SCO's request for access to IBM's actual code repositories, Wells said that SCO would be allowed "unfettered access" to those repositories if IBM fails to produce the Unix versions and changes by March 18. In addition, Wells ordered IBM to provide all notes and design documents from 3,000 of the 7,200 people who made changes to AIX and Dynix.

Two men have been convicted for piracy over peer-to-peer networks in the first case of its kind in the US. The pair, William Trowbridge from New York and Michael Chicoine of Texas, were running central hubs in a piracy community running over the Direct Connection P2P system. They had admitted infringing copyright by illegally sharing music, films and software.

A teenager who is being sued by Apple for publishing a true story on his web-site www.thinksecret.com has found himself a free lawyer to defend him from the Apple briefs.

Nicholas Ciarelli, 19, said he couldn't afford to defend himself against the multi-million dollar maker of music gear after Apple sued him for writing a story that was not an authorised press release. They also wanted him to tell them who it was in their company that gave him the information that it was about to release a cheap version of its Apple Mac.

Texan authorities launched federal suit yesterday against a University of Texas student alleged to have run one of the world's largest spam operations.

An expatriate Brit who helped mastermind the US's biggest credit card fraud has been sentenced in New York to 14 years imprisonment.

A French security researcher who published exploit codes that could take advantage of bugs in an antivirus application could be imprisoned for violation of copyright laws. In 2001, French security researcher Guillaume Tena found a number of vulnerabilities in the Viguard antivirus software published by Tegam. Tena, who at the time was known by his pseudonym Guillermito, published his research online in March 2002.