The BBC reports on changes in Nigeria that are meant to help fight 419 fraud:

Virtually anyone with an email account will be familiar with this crime, which involves sending emails or faxes to potential victims around the world, sucking them into a highly attractive but utterly false financial deal.

Back in Nigeria, the rewards are potentially highly lucrative – but now, owing to a crackdown and much-improved co-operation between police forces globally, it has become more risky for the perpetrators.

[…]

[I]nternet service providers who allow online fraudsters to operate will face criminal charges, while decades in jail await the scammers themselves – with little chance of early parole.

Still, with rich pickings still to exploit, Nigeria’s criminals will not give in easily.

In a striking example of the importance of data integrity, as well as personal integrity, Israeli pilots are reportedly either unable to trust the target information they are given or their targets are successfully using civilians to shield themselves from air attacks:

Yonatan Shapiro, a former Blackhawk helicopter pilot dismissed from reserve duty after signing a ‘refusenik’ letter in 2004, said he had spoken with Israeli F-16 pilots in recent days and learnt that some had aborted missions because of concerns about the reliability of intelligence information. According to Shapiro, some pilots justified aborting missions out of ‘common sense’ and in the context of the Israeli Defence Force’s moral code of conduct, which says every effort should be made to avoiding harming civilians.

Shapiro said: ‘Some pilots told me they have shot at the side of targets because they’re afraid people will be there, and they don’t trust any more those who give them the coordinates and targets.’

He added: ‘One pilot told me he was asked to hit a house on a hill, which was supposed to be a place from where Hizbollah was launching Katyusha missiles. But he was afraid civilians were in the house, so he shot next to the house …

‘Pilots are always being told they will be judged on results, but if the results are hundreds of dead civilians while Hizbollah is still able to fire all these rockets, then something is very wrong.’

It seems very probable that a guerilla strategy could be for rockets to be fired from and around houses (e.g. roof-tops) and to then shuttle civilians into the house immediately afterwards, moving the launchers to the next house. This not only keeps the target hard to find, but increases the likelihood of blowback to Israel from any Israeli defensive actions. Maybe that gives them too much credit and they just move the launchers around the civilians. Either way, I do not envy the pilot who has to question the integrity of mission intelligence in the split second before they launch a missle. Compare that with the Hizbullah militants firing rockets willy-nilly into a huge urban area like Haifa.

On the Internet there are many examples of guerilla tactics that the Hizbullah use, such as the “Smurf attack“. This is when someone (A) uses a fake return address of a large or powerful site (B) to overwhelm a target (C) with packets. If/when C tries to fight back, it ends up hitting B instead of A, which either makes C look like the agressor (shaky proof of A) or escalates into a fierce battle between C and B, with only a tiny fraction of effort from A. If A is smart enough to use return addresses D through Z as well as B the problem of intelligence is that much harder to resolve and the cost to C to respond can quickly become prohibitive. A good, albeit dated, background on this issue and proposals for how to address the fundamental issue of attacker identity can be found here.

Compare and contrast these two quotes in a news.com article.

First:

“People kind of forget that we have a lot of our own copyrights to protect and that copyright law is a big part of that protection,” said Alexander Macgillivray, a lawyer at Google. “We’re a search engine that exists and knows it exists only because of the tremendous impact of creators.”

Second:

Google’s attorneys responded by questioning whether Field’s stories should enjoy the highest degree of copyright protection. The stories are “minimally creative works,” represent “simply” Field’s “ramblings” and “are certainly not works that are deserving of any enhanced protection,” Google said. Its attorneys added that Field had “spent only three days” writing the stories.

Ramblings don’t deserve protection? Only three days? Is one condition enough (a philosophical treatise often rambles, but takes forever to write, while poems can be written quickly without a ramble) or do you need both? Where do folks come up with these rules?

To a large extent, Google was required to make that argument because of the way the litigation process works.

[…]

Google made the same argument in its ongoing lawsuit with Perfect 10, claiming the Web site’s high-quality nude images were not especially creative because its site “implies a factual nature of the photographs.”

Even some copyright scholars who are generally sympathetic to Google and the technology industry say that was a bit of a stretch.

And it looks like things are just getting started…

Digital rights advocate Electronic Frontier Foundation and technology lobby groups are siding with Google. The Motion Picture Association of America and the American Society of Media Photographers are filing friend-of-the-court briefs aligning themselves with Perfect 10. Oral arguments are expected early next year.

Biology letters has the scoop, from scientists who studied scars on snail shells:

Using the Plio–Pleistocene fossil record of crab predation on morphologically similar pairs of right- and left-handed snail species, we show here for the first time, contrary to traditional wisdom, that rare left-handed coiling promotes survival from attacks by right-handed crabs. This frequency-dependent result influences the balance of selection processes that maintain left-handedness at the species level and parallels some social interactions in human cultures, such as sports that involve dual contests between opponents of opposite handedness.

Perhaps that is supposed to say “duel contests”? This gives some perspective to the argument that using Mac OS X or Linux will increase system survivability on the Internet.