Gary Mc Kinnon, accused of breaking into several computers in various government agencies in the US, is at the centre of an extradition storm after he broke into the US Military and NASA computer systems but reported in an interview that the charges against him in the US have been manufactured to ease his extradition there.  If extradicted to the US he could face a secret military trial with no right of appeal, but that he could even be sent to detention camp Guantanamo Bay.

"For it to be extraditable under their computer laws in America you have to have caused $5,000 worth of damage and lo and behold they say that every computer I was on I caused exactly $5,000 worth of damage so it is patently a falsely structured argument," Gary McKinnon told OUT-LAW, a specialized portal dealing with legal issues.

McKinnon argues that he should be tried, but that it should be in the UK, where the offence was committed. He says that he was working with very basic hacking tools from a simple internet connection,

Traffickers, mafia and pirates always existed. But today they are stronger that ever. Fed from the same forces that have driven the globalization, the ability of modern organized gangsterism has grown to excess, concurring to world-wide level operations and to connect all remote angles of the planet, with the speed of Internet or of private jets. Never before crime could employ such financial ability, fruit of an economic organization that moves the ten percent of the total amount of goods in circulation, ten times more than how much was performed a decade ago.
And never, finally, it has been much more pervasive, richer and more influent, at a social, economical and political level.

How this could happen?
Why the international piracy, weapons trafficking, human smuggling, money laundering and music bootlegging, human organs and drug trafficking, and last but not least, copyright infringements, have grown in such a spectacular way therefore?

Two days ago we dealt with censorship around the world  and we concentrated our analysis on those countries that, according to a report by OpenNet Initiative, turned out to be particularly harsh when applying Internet filtering programs.

Specifically, as stated by official –but also unofficial- sources, Iran seems to be the highest-ranking country for suppression of cyber-dissidents, thanks to one of the most technologically sophisticated censorship systems in the world..

That’s why we couldn’t do without being surprised when we read about the Iranian President Ahmadinejad who has opened his own blog .
But even more surprised should have been all the Iranian government dissenters who  tried –unsuccessfully- to spread out political communications via the Internet.

Yesterday the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre, the UK’s first dedicated organisation focused on tackling child sex abuse, announced a partnership with Microsoft to introduce inside Messenger and its replacement, a tab "report abuse" aimed at giving kids a way to immediatelly report any sign of suspicious behaviour. 

This will link users in the UKdirectly to online police services to report instances of inappropriate contact of a sexual nature they have encountered whilst chatting in this virtual environment. 

"Microsoft’s partnership with the CEOP Centre", the website reports, "has brought about a new ‘safer-by-design’ element to the UK’s most popular instant messenger product."

Internet filtering is an habit that China, Vietnam, and many others countries all around the world have in common. 

This is, more or less, the main conclusion of a report into online censorship by the OpenNet Initiative, a group of researchers from Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and Toronto universities.
The report, published last week, says that governments are using increasingly sophisticated filtering techniques to block access to those web sites that are considered as “illegal”.

May it be a matter of culture, or may it be due to the  habit to  the lack of space: the reason is still blurry, but over 4 million Koreans have subscribed to a service that can determine and track a cellular owner’s location.

The companies promoting these services offer a wide range of possibilities to meet each user’s exigency: starting from the “$3-a-month-service” that will send a SMS with your coordinates to friends and family periodically while you’re travelling, to  the “29-cents-a-day-service” that will send a SMS in case a person isn’t at a specified place at  a certain time, and allows the tracker to see the person’s movement over the previous 5 hours.