Privacy Quickies

Finnish law was amended last Wednesday, adding a two-year sentence for the catch-all crime "Causing danger to data processing systems." Is keeping sample virus code intended for anti-virus authors on your FTP site a violation?

A Michigan hospital may be only the first of many: a digital dictation system used by doctors for private medical notes has been cracked. 2600 magazine published a sample audio file, which got people's attention. Yahoo and ZDNet's CyberCrime have good coverage.

And, the Defense Department is very proud of its Defense Computer Forensics Lab. They fit broken disks together, read deleted files, "trace hackers across the internet," and use some doohickey called a "Beowulf cluster" to analyze captured computers. Can someone tell me why the FBI gets a lab in this building which was deliberately located near the National Security Agency? Isn't there some conflict of interest?