Several reporters glimpsed Tonya Harding's Olympic email file by guessing that she had not changed the default password. Other reporters seem agreed that this is unethical, whether or not it violated Norwegian law. (Reading partially exposed papers on a desk may be ethical; opening a desk drawer is not.) Members of the alt.2600 hackers' list are even more incensed. One notes that his similar crime as a juvenile resulted in loss of his computer equipment, nine felony charges, legal fees, and 125 hours of community service. [John Kohlstrand ([email protected]), CARR-L, 2/28/94.]

A proposed bill will require all network providers to record any person's email and deliver it to federal law-enforcement authorities if agents can show that a person merits investigation. No court order would be needed. [BW, 3/14/94. EDUPAGE.] (This is pretty much the way it works now, for sysops willing to cooperate with the Feds. A court order would still be needed to break any Clipper encryption.)

Computer security expert Gene Spafford complains of CS professors who ask their students to break into Internet hosts to prove that they understand the protocols. [Scientific American, 3/94. EDUPAGE.]

Some jerk deleted the Info-Mac archive at sumex- aim.stanford.edu early this month. Moderators are rebuilding it from mirror sites. [Adam C. Engst ([email protected]), TidBITS, comp.sys.mac.digest, 3/8/94. Bill Park.] A break-in also took down the Caltech FTP archives for a time. [Lester Ingber ([email protected]), ASA_list, 3/10/94.]

The Centers for Disease Control was recently infected by the Chile Medeira computer virus. No data was lost, but the repair cost may be as high as $300K. [Bits & Bytes, 2/28/94.] (The world might be a better place if we didn't have to spend tax money this way.)

Jose Luis Baptista is a Canadian living on disability payments who likes to send fax complaints. His mass messages to a thousand government fax numbers and 600 email accounts have cost the Canadian government $3.5M just in fax paper. [Ken Campbell, Toronto Computes!, 3/94. Chris Hawley ([email protected]), CARR-L, 3/7/94.]

Abdelghani Attou, 26, has been arrested on fraud charges. He has been posing as a PhD candidate in CS at Stanford, using borrowed office space, auditing David Rumelhart's neural-network courses, attending research meetings, and even giving a talk. He falsely claimed to be a visitor from Oxford University, a doctor, and the son of a Swiss ambassador. It is alleged that he borrowed thousands of dollars from at least a dozen people, ran up $1,500 in phone bills, passed bad checks, skipped out on housing payments, skipped bail, and possibly other crimes. "Universities are fertile ground for those who feed off the gullible." [S.L. Wykes, SJM, 3/9/94.] (The woman friend who bailed him out put up $500 for a $5000 bond, and would have lost the full $5000 if Attou had not been caught.)