Earlier this week, Terry Childs, 43, gave the disputed password to the system to Mayor Gavin Newsom in a jailhouse meeting arranged by his lawyer, The San Francisco Chronicle reported the mayor then gave the password to a team from Cisco Systems which had been working to open up the city's FiberWAN network.
However, the password did not work initially, prompting the mayor to call Childs for clarification. The Chronicle said Childs then gave the mayor missing protocols to go with the password and the city regained control of its system.
Bond More Than for Murder
Childs has been charged with causing a loss of more than $200,000 and four counts of felony computer tampering. His bond was set at about five times the amount usually set for murder suspects after $11,000 in cash was found on him when he was arrested July 13, leading the district attorney to fear he planned to flee.
Prosecutor Conrad del Rosario told Superior Court Judge Lucy Kelly McCabe that Childs, a five-year veteran of the city's Technology Department, had put key program data in temporary memory files. They would have evaporated when the network was shut down during maintenance or a power failure. Experts were able to transfer the data to permanent files before a shutdown scheduled for last Saturday.
"He had a malicious intent to destroy the entire network," del Rosario said, noting that Childs did not give the mayor the password until after the scheduled shutdown. The prosecutor further noted that other systems Childs had access to are still not functioning properly.
He said the sheriff's department and the parks and...
The rumors began about a week ago when images on Web sites suggested Google was testing voting methods.
Some reports say Google could complete the acquisition of Digg within two weeks, and Microsoft is said to be waiting in the wings if Google doesn't seal the deal. Digg has a three-year deal with Microsoft that would likely end if the search giant absorbs the popular news site.
"This rumor has been around for a couple of months. But this is the most concrete version of the rumor," said Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. "Digg seems to be trying to create some sort of bidding for the company in order to get the highest return."
Digg Evolution
Digg describes itself as a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg claims to surface the best content as determined by user votes. Digg doesn't employ editors, but relies on its community to determine the most worthy headlines.
Diggers can push news, videos, images and podcasts. Once content is submitted, other people see it and vote on what they like best. Submissions that receive the most diggs are promoted to the site's front page for millions of visitors to read. There is also a social-networking aspect as users launch conversations around stories.
"Digg is trying to evolve from a social news site into a 'recommendation engine' which uses the power of the community to promote certain kinds of results higher or to use that crowd wisdom to identify what are the best or most relevant...
The ACLU challenged the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) as unconstitutional on behalf of a broad coalition of writers, artists and health educators who use the Internet to communicate constitutionally protected speech.
"For years, the government has been trying to thwart freedom of speech on the Internet, and for years the courts have been finding the attempts unconstitutional," said Chris Hansen, senior staff attorney with the ACLU First Amendment Working Group. "The government has no more right to censor the Internet than it does books and magazines."
The History of COPA
Previously, a federal district court and a federal appeals court found that the online censorship law violates the First and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution. The Supreme Court upheld that decision, effectively banning enforcement of the law in June 2004, sending the case back to the district court to determine whether there had been any changes in technology that would affect the constitutionality of the statute.
Specifically, the court looked for technological changes, such as whether commercially available blocking software was still as effective as the banned law might be in blocking material deemed "harmful to minors." In March 2007, a district judge once again struck down COPA; the government again appealed, and on Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit upheld the ban.
The ACLU's clients in the case include Salon Media Group, which runs the online magazine Salon.com; the Sexual Health Network, which operates sexualhealth.com; and Aaron Peckham, who owns UrbanDictionary.com. COPA would have imposed harsh criminal sanctions, including penalties of up to $50,000 per day and up to six months...
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