First Sept. 11 Suspect Jailed; Hollywood Seeks Informers to Fight Asian Piracy; Microsoft Files Anti-Spam Lawsuit

First Sept. 11 Suspect Jailed

Mounir al-Motassadek, the first man to stand trial over the Sept. 11 attacks, was found guilty in Germany of being an accessory to the murder of more than 3,000 people in the attacks on New York and Washington. The 28-year-old Moroccan has been sentenced to 15 years, the maximum under German law for accessory to murder. Acording to the BBC News, Motassadek was found to have played a substantial logistical role in the preparation of the attacks, managing the bank account of one of the hijackers. Prosecutors said that served as a financing pot for an al-Qaeda cell in Hamburg, and was used to pay for flying lessons in the United States. In a separate article examining the Hamburg cell, the BBC reports that Motassadek shared a flat with suspected chief hijacker Mohamed Atta, the wealthy Egyptian who is believed to have built up the Hamburg cell and provided its spiritual backbone. He even signed Atta’s will. German investigators say there are still close to 100 dangerous Islamic extremists in the countrys second-largest city. Hamburg is home to about 200,000 Muslims, and the radicals blend in easily with the ordinary Muslim population. The BBC says police say even now they do not have the resources to track all of the militants. Hollywood Seeks Informers to Fight Asian PiracyWashington Post today, Asia-Pacific anti-piracy head for the Motion Picture Association, Michael Ellis, says his organization has put aside $150,000 to reward informers whose tips lead to successful police raids on illegal DVD factories. MPA represents Hollywood’s biggest studios such as Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox and Walt Disney. Ellis told Reuters that despite 63 successful raids on illegal optical disc factories in Asia last year, illegal DVDs still flooded Asian markets, representing 44 percent to 90 percent of total DVD sales in Taiwian, India, Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia. MPA estimates that pirated DVDs cost Hollywood $646 million in Asia in 2002.

According to a Reuters story in the

Microsoft Files Anti-Spam LawsuitThe Register today.. The suit, filed in the federal court for the northern district of California in San Jose, doesn’t name defendants, but allows the plaintiff the power to issue subpoenas as part of the investigative phase of the trial. A story on CNET News.com lasts night details that defendants are accused of using a “dictionary attack”—in which a computer program goes through every entry in a dictionary to guess passwords—to discover active Hotmail accounts; in this case, guessing millions of random e-mail addresses. Microsoft filed the suit the same week it called on legislators to pass laws forbidding the practice of spam-address harvesting.

Microsoft has targeted spammers with a lawsuit aimed at bulk mailers who harvest e-mail addresses of Hotmail subscribers in order to bombard them with junk, according to a story in