Kid Cracks Porn Filter

It goes without saying that it's a good thing to protect our children from pornography and other unsavory elements available on the Internet. So who could blame the Australian government for a project that would provide a so-called porn filter to parents?

The problem was that the software, released in August of this year, cost US$84 million -- and that a 16-year-old Melbourne boy, Tom Wood by name, cracked the filter in about 30 minutes. Young Tom's assessment: "It's a horrible waste of money."

A federal official responded by saying that the government knew all along that some kid would come along and crack the scheme and that "the vendor is investigating the matter as a priority."

Sony Hacks Its Customers' PCs

Cynics will tell you that the recording industry is paranoid and slow to enter the digital age. The industry insists it is merely trying to ensure its artists are fairly compensated.

But Sony BMG came down squarely on the side of paranoia in 2005 when, in the name of copy protection, it placed invasive rootkit software on an estimated 15 million music CDs by more than 100 artists. When a CD owner put one of these CDs in a PC drive, the software was automatically installed on the computer without the user's knowledge. Perhaps this system provided copy protection, but it also opened the user's computer to various types of spyware, malware and other nuisances.

A number of users and states sued the bejabbers out of Sony, which paid out big bucks to settle the matter. Apparently Sony wasn't too embarrassed, though -- it recently pulled the same stunt again, this time placing rootkits on USB drives it was selling.

Tech Reporter Reveals Too Much

Many of us have had nightmares about being out in public without our clothes on. So you can only feel for somebody when that really happens, as it did in a virtual sort of way to TechTV reporter Cat Schwartz in 2003.

The gist of the story is that Schwartz had a photographer take provocative pictures of her. The pictures were taken while she was topless, but she cropped the images to be more modest and posted them online.

The problem was that she didn't realize how Photoshop, or possibly the camera itself, included the original image as a viewable preview of the cropped image. Not surprisingly, this mistake spread around the Web rapidly, giving Cat Schwartz an additional 15 minutes of fame, or at least of mortification.