The Guardian has cracked the so-trumpeted secure British passports after 48 hours of work : "Three million Britons have been issued with the new hi-tech passport, designed to frustrate terrorists and fraudsters. So why did Steve Boggan and a friendly computer expert find it so easy to break the security codes?"

Andrew Davies (Making Waves), the Greenpeace Ocean press officer tells us an insider story about how Greenpeace's efforts to blockade Probo Koala, the tanker which poisoned thousands of people in Abidjan (killing 8), because Estonian government (the country where Greenpeace has tracked down the boat) became suspicious after an official request sent by Ivorian government to stop the Probo Koala on its behalf. The official email came from a Yahoo account:

"But something went wrong. The officials in Estonia dismissed the official request. The reason: it purported to come from a minister in the Ivory Coast government, but had arrived in an email from a Yahoo! account. But it's true, gentle reader: the entire government of the Ivory Coast conducts their online correspondence entirely via Yahoo accounts. (And that's progressive: other African governments use Hotmail!.) Helen had to scramble to bridge the communication gap back to the Ivory Coast to ask them to send a fax. Preferably one with lots of official seals and stamps."

The New Yorker has a story about an Linux-based organ used to replace the traditional organ of Trinity Church in lower Broadway:

Owen Burdick, Trinity's organist and director of music, thinks the church may have found something better: an all-digital organ, installed in 2003 as an "interim" solution, which has been a surprise hit. (It has standard consoles for playing, but no pipes; its software runs on the Linux operating system.) In July, Burdick demonstrated it at the American Guild of Organists convention in Chicago, where it received a standing ovation. "It can do a lot of things a pipe organ can't," Burdick says. Meloni isn't persuaded. "It's the best electronic organ I've ever heard," he said. "But Trinity deserves better."

The Russian newspaper's website Kommersant reports that a law reforming copyrights rules and extending them to Internet voted in 2004 went into force Friday September 1. After tough debates in France and UK about DRMs status and attempts to legalize filesharing, the new Russian law appears to be one of the most repressive. According to this law, Russian websites owners selling unlawfully music online are risking up to 5 years in jail:

Amendments to the law "About copyright and allied rights" were ratified in July 2004. However, they come into force on September 1, 2006. Basically, they make legal the concept of "notifying everyone" which brings the Internet under the jurisdiction of law. Thus, texts of books or mp3 music files published on the web have the same copyright protection as normal books or CDs, and come under article 146 of the Criminal Code of Russia ("Violation of copyright and allied rights) which allows a punishment of imprisonment for up to 5 years for pirates.

According to India enews, Wikipedia has known an increase of its number and articles in Indian languages:

During a visit to India, Wales [The wikipedia founder] noted that volunteer contributions to the Kannada Wikipedia had been growing 22 percent and Bengali 35 percent a month.

'These growth rates are fairly high. Of course, they're growing from a small base. But Kannada already has over 5,000 articles and is still growing. That's really exciting. Bengali too has a growth rate of 35 percent,' he said.

'It's not as bad as it was a year ago. We had almost nothing then. Now, languages like Bengali, Kannada, Marathi are in the 3,000-5,000 article range. Hindi, Assamese over 1,000. But Hindi, a very large language, has only 1,500 entries. That's a little surprising,' Wales told IANS.

The Guardian is commenting at length a blogger's debut: Iran president Ahmadinejad. According to the Guardian,

His political approach has become a byword for populism and yesterday President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad endowed it with a hi-tech dimension by launching his own weblog.

Available in four languages (it's a personal blog, ins't it ?), this blog spreads the usual Iranian pompous hatred of western, but with a typically western media.

I was born fifteen years after Iran was invaded by foreign forces- in August of 1940- and the time that another puppet, named mohammad Reza - the son of Reza Mirpange- was set as a monarch in Iran. Since the extinct shah -Mohammad Reza- was supposed to take and enter Iran into western civilization slavishly, so many schemes were implemented that Iran becomes another market for the western ceremonial goods without any progress in the scientific field. Our Islamic culture would not allow such an infestation, and this was an impediment in front of shah and his foreign masters' way.

It reminds me of the cover of a Jack Goody book accurately titled "Representations and contradictions".

Express India reports that volunteers are using Google Earth to help Indian Air Force rescue droppings above the monsoon-flooded city of Surat (Gujarat), using SMS to send droppings coordinates to army pilots:

Arvind Patel, a textile businessman with a digital studio and Pravin Patel, who deals in solar systems, got together and helped IAF target air-droppings to exact degrees of longitude and latitude. [...] "It was a great help,'' informed airport official Jignesh Dave. Municipal officer Jatin Desai, who is with the Disaster Management Cell, said he received exact co-ordinates from Pravin and Arvind on SMS which he forwarded to wing commanders of IAF. "It was a valuable help from the two. Generally, air-dropping aid is not well targeted, but this was a novel idea that clicked," said Desai. S K Agrawal, a Reliance official who came with his request for relief to be provided to people marooned in a building, was all praise for the system. "It was an excellent idea implemented well. I can pass on these co-ordinates to Reliance helicopters also,'' Agrawal said. Officials wondered if they could have struck upon this idea before, it would have helped many more people as carpet air-dropping of aid leads to lots of wastage. "

Meanwhile, Indian official are still considering Google Earth as a serious security threat...

Lasting News has a story about a UK parliamentary report on DRM issues. According to BBC News, the All Party Parliamentary Internet Group has expressed its concerns about the over protection caused by DRMs. This report is insisting on the need for information. Both consumers and DRM makers should informed of UK copyrights legal context.

According to this report, consumers should be aware about how they are able (or not) to switch from one gadget to another media player. The report also raises fresh concerns about copy protection software implemented by some DRM makers that could be sued under UK current laws.

According to the Washington Post, Blue Security, the company specialized in counter-spam guerilla, after some success lost at its own game. A Russia-based attack forced Blue Security servers down:

"When the company's founders first approached the broader anti-spam community and asked them what they thought of the idea, everyone said this was a terrible idea and that they would eventually cause a lot of collateral damage," Underwood said[he is chief of operations and security for Renesys Corp.]. "But it's also extremely unfortunate, because it shows how much the spammers are winning this battle."

Times of India has an interessant story about the 50 percent rate of failures in IT projects:

" Sagarika Gupta, a project manager in a leading IT company, was thrilled when she got a large software project. She had the best people in the team. And she was promised bonuses if the project went well. But unfortunately clients rejected it. Her boss assumed that she had not put best efforts in the project, although she knew she had. It was a failure - and worse, she had no assurance that she would do any better on the next project. If this scenario sounds familiar, you're not alone. Repeated studies have shown that the failure rate for IT projects is more than 50 per cent."

Most interesting, the article gives some clues not to fail in IT projects management.