News stories collected by Wonko the Sane.
In reaction to the row over publication of some cartoons of Muhammed, the Vatican says that the right to freedom of expression does not imply the right to offend religious beliefs.
A bus firm is suing a group of French cleaning ladies, who now carpool where they used to use the firm's coach service, for "an act of unfair and parasitical competition". In addition to seeking a fine and confiscation of the ladies' cars, the firm wants compensation for its legal costs in having had the case dismissed in a lower court.
Voting almost precisely along party lines, the Arkansas House of Representatives rejected a motion affirming the separation of church and state. One of the legislators commented "The separation of church and state is not in our Constitution.".
In a training exercise for explosive-sniffing dogs, security personnel at Charles de Gaulle airport put 150 g of plastic explosive in a random passenger's bag. They then accidentally allowed the bag to be loaded onto a plane without having the explosive removed first. They were unable to determine which passenger was affected, or even which flight the bag was on.
Southern California's air traffic control system uses Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server. This OS reliably crashes after 2^32 milliseconds (49.7 days) uptime. The air traffic controllers had developed a procedure requiring the servers to be rebooted after 30 days, but a poorly-trained employee failed to do this.
The US Navy is issued a patent on a method for performing reconnaisance by the use of unmanned surface and air vehicles equipped with video cameras and reporting their results by radio. The `invention' overcomes the gap in reconnaisance ability due to the scarcity of reconnaisance satellites (that is, unmanned space vehicles equipped with video cameras and reporting results by radio).
Similarly to the US case two years ago, descendants of American slaves are planning to sue Lloyds of London, for insuring ships used in the slave trade. One of the plaintiffs says "I suffer from the injury of not knowing who I am, having no nationality or ethnic group".
The killing of eight Pakistani soldiers by their al-Qaeda-aligned enemy in a combat zone is described as "murder" and "the worst kind of terrorism".
Microsoft has released a "critical update" to remove "unacceptable symbols" from a symbol font. In addition to two versions of the swastika (both the form used by the Nazis and the older form without Nazi connotations), the Star of David is also removed from the font.
US President George W. Bush's rationale for war in Iraq is to be investigated by a commission. The commission will not report in the nine months before the next US presidential election, but four months later, when Bush will be largely unaffected by criticism. Not leaving anything to chance, Bush has also personally appointed the entire commission.
US Republican party activist Grover Norquist compares the estate tax's targeting of rich people to the Holocaust's targeting of Jews. Further comparisons involve the apartheid regime in South Africa and the communist regime of East Germany.
Verisign, who run the registry of .com and .net domains, add wildcard DNS entries for *.com and *.net. The wildcard address record points at a machine running the most broken SMTP implementation ever. More information is available at ICANN's information page.
Thirty US insurance companies have filed lawsuits against al-Qaeda and others for losses caused by the attacks on the World Trade Center and for punitive damages. The insurers are claiming $300bn; they say they have paid out $4bn in insurance claims resulting from the attacks.
Tony Blair and George Bush have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, for winning the war in Iraq. (Here is a transcript of a talk show discussing the nomination on Fox News, renowned for its "fair and balanced" reporting of the war. Also a similar story the previous year, before the war.)
(This is a private email rather than a published news report.) The Internet Council of Registrars, based in Switzerland, used to report timestamps in its WHOIS database in CET (Central European Time). When asked to switch to using UTC, they started labelling the times as UTC, but continued to actually use CET.
An American who made a joke about a "burning Bush" prophecy has been convicted of threatening to kill or harm the president and sentenced to 37 months imprisonment.
Several US companies are being sued, by the descendants of slaves, for having profited from the slave trade when it was legal (until 1865). These include an insurance company that insured the lives of slaves. The lawsuit seeks punitive as well as compensatory damages.
(Original story has disappeared, but the incident is mentioned in passing in this story about the Dutch euro changeover.) Rabobank, the Netherlands' biggest retail bank, executed 300000 standing orders for approximately 2.2 times their intended value, having interpreted guilder amounts as euro amounts.
Afghanistan's new government says it will still impose Sharia Islamic law but apply it less harshly than under the Taliban. Adulterers will be stoned to death with smaller stones.
Microsoft has chosen not to rely on an authentication concept in PGP known as "the Web of trust", in which a key deployed by a PGP user to encrypt documents gains validity if it is "signed" by other PGP users. "We don't ask anybody to sign our key. We have always relied (on) other, better ways of validating our key.", said Scott Culp.
The standard secrecy-and-integrity cryptographic protocol used for IEEE 802.11 network traffic turns out to have a number of flaws. Highlights include allowing replay attacks with arbitrary modification to messages, with a CRC used as a MAC.