U.S. Wants Canadians to Carry Biometric Passports; East Coast Residents Eye Hurricane Isabel; Crackdown May Send Music Traders Into Software Underground; MSN E-Mail Spoofer Pleads Guilty to Wire Fraud

U.S. Wants Canadians to Carry Biometric Passports

According to a Canadian Press story posted on Canada.com today, U.S. Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge will meet with Canadian Deputy Prime Minister John Manley next month to discuss the issue of documentation requirements for Canadians entering the United States. After Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. Congress called for foreign visitors arriving in the United States by air and sea to be tracked by a new system that verifies their identities through fingerprints, or newer technologies such as iris scans or digital photos, by 2005. Canada had asked for an exemption to the legislation, but the Bush administration refused to grant Canadians an exemption. Such a change would be a stark difference from today, when Canadians coming through U.S. border points are often asked a few questions and waved through without being asked to produce documentation.East Coast Residents Eye Hurricane IsabelThe Washington Post today. Models predict the storm will weaken during the next four days but will hit the East Coast somewhere between North Carolina and New Jersey with 130 mph winds late Wednesday into early Thursday. The U.S. State Department issued a travel warning advising tourists to avoid the Bahamas. The National Hurricane Center reports that dangerous surf conditions will affect the southeastern United States for the next several days. In Washington, D.C., emergency officials were working on acquiring additional sandbags, and planned to meet with other department and critical services leaders Monday.

Hurricane Isabel weakened slightly early today but still packed powerful Category 4 winds as it swept across the Atlantic Ocean on a course that could slam it into the mid-Atlantic Coast later this week, according to a story in

Crackdown May Send Music Traders Into Software UndergroundThe New York Times today, The developers of the new systems say there is nothing illegal about writing software that helps people keep secrets. United States courts have held that file-sharing software may not be banned if it has both legitimate and illegal uses. None of the new methods offer perfect anonymity, yet many of them are likely to make the recording industry work harder to find file traders. The RIAA has said that it is unconcerned about the increasing anonymity of file sharing, the Times reports. The stated purpose of its lawsuits is not to catch every hard core music pirate, but to show millions of casual file sharers that what they are doing is illegal.

In the wake of 261 lawsuits the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has filed, hundreds of software developers are racing to create new systems, or modify existing ones, to let people continue to swap music—hidden from the prying eyes of the RIAA or any other investigators. According to a story in

MSN E-Mail Spoofer Pleads Guilty to Wire Fraud reports today that Matthew Thomas Guevara, 21, of Chicago, faces a jail sentence of up to five years and a fine of $250,000 for conning MSN customers into revealing their credit card details. Guevara set up e-mail accounts on Hotmail and a website called MSNbilling.com on Yahoo!. He then sent out e-mails purporting to be from MSN, asking customers to verify their account details. These were then forwarded to the Hotmail addresses. Guevara and another unnamed individual used the credit card info to make purchases. According to Microsoft, approximately 180 people were compromised by the fraud

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