Feds seek snooping powers

The Bush administration wants to update a snooping law to encompass new technologies, even as a Department of Justice report shows the FBI is using data mining on a dizzying array of US citizens' non-terrorist activities, reports eWeek.

"Today, cellular phones are the size of credit cards, you would be hard-pressed to find a computer with memory less than 512MB and our greatest threats are independent transnational terrorists and terror networks," complained Michael McConnell, director of national intelligence, in a May 2007 column published by the Washington Post.

McConnell and others in the Bush administration want to overhaul FISA, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The looming royalty crunch on Internet radio that would have begun on 15 July was narrowly averted last week by a temporary reprieve from SoundExchange, says Ars Technica. Now it appears a lasting compromise is possible, but such a deal will likely mean mandatory digital rights management (DRM) for Internet radio.

The original decision by the Copyright Royalty Board would have tripled royalties over the next three years. This is an increase that many Web-casters said would put them out of business.

Political positioning or not, SoundExchange did not want 15 July to be a date that lived on in infamy, so it offered a temporary reprieve and outlined the terms for a new compromise.

Synchronica, an international provider of mobile-synchronisation and device-management solutions, has announced that Mobile Gateway 3.0 supports over-the-air synchronisation between Microsoft Exchange and the iPhone, reports PC World.

The move means mobile operators and service providers will be able to offer mobile synchronisation, using Exchange, to business users and prosumers.

iPhone users will be able to safely access corporate e-mails without causing IT managers to open the firewall or install additional software.

Oracle will release 46 patches tomorrow for products including its Oracle Database 10g, Application Server and E-Business Suite, says IT World.

Oracle Database will get 20 fixes, two of which are for patch vulnerabilities that could allow remote execution of code on the network without authentication. The most serious of the database vulnerabilities is ranked "medium" in severity, according to the Common Vulnerability Scoring System, used to rank the severity of security flaws.

The E-Business Suite will get 14 patches, also for vulnerabilities that could be exploited over a network without a username and password. Three of the four patches for Oracle's Application Server fix problems that could also be exploited remotely.