Surveillance is daunting in the Net's dark alleys

FILE-SHARING SITE CLOSES:One of the Web's most popular file-sharing sites has shut down less than a week after Hollywood announced a flurry of lawsuits against operators of such Internet servers. A note posted on Suprnova.org, which facilitated sharing among users of the BitTorrent program, said that the site was "closing down for good." Last week, movie studios sued more than 100 operators of U.S. and European sites that host BitTorrent links but did not name the defendants. (AP)


GOOGLE GOOFS: A university computer scientist and two of his students have discovered a potentially serious security flaw in the desktop search tool for personal computers that was recently distributed by Google. The glitch, which could permit an attacker to secretly search the contents of a personal computer via the Internet, is what computer scientists call a "composition flaw" - a security weakness that emerges when separate components interact. (NYT)