Space tourism gears up

Space Adventures, the company that brokered eight private flights to the International Space Station aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft, is working with Boeing to introduce wealthy space tourists and other non-NASA fliers aboard a capsule under development by the US aerospace giant, writes News.com.com.

The Boeing CST-100 capsule, being designed to launch atop Lockheed Martin Atlas 5 rockets, Boeing's Delta 4, or the SpaceX Falcon 9, is intended to carry NASA and European Space Agency astronauts to and from the International Space Station under a NASA initiative to encourage development of private-sector spacecraft.

Under a separate memorandum of understanding between Boeing and Space Adventures, excess capacity - seats not needed by NASA or its space station partners - will be marketed to wealthy individuals, private companies, non-NASA federal agencies, and other governments that might need access to space.

A failed three-year police investigation of a file-sharing Web site, run in co-operation with the music industry, cost taxpayers at least £29 000, and probably much more, reveals The Register.

Figures released by Cleveland Police detail some costs of Operation Ark Royal, a raid on invitation-only BitTorrent site OiNK.cd.

The probe began with a high-profile dawn raid in 2007 and ended this January with the failed prosecution of Alan Ellis, the Middlesbrough man who ran OiNK.cd, on charges of conspiracy to defraud. He was acquitted by a Middlesbrough jury, to the anger of the BPI and IFPI.

According to UK Defence Secretary Liam Fox, the government has included cyber security in the Strategic Defence and Security Review, due this autumn, reports Computing.co.uk.

However, he made it clear the costs will have to be shared across government and not fall on the military budget alone.

Fox said the issue has already had considerable consideration as a cross-government problem, under the aegis of the National Security Council.

The Linux kernel has been purged of a bug that gave root access to untrusted users - again, says The Register.

The vulnerability in a component of the operating system that translates values from 64 bits to 32 bits (and vice versa) was fixed once before - in 2007, with the release of version 2.6.22.7. But several months later, developers inadvertently rolled back the change, once again leaving the OS open to attacks that allow unprivileged users to gain full root access.

The bug was originally discovered by the late hacker Wojciech "cliph" Purczynski. But Ben Hawkes, the researcher who discovered the kernel regression bug, said that he grew suspicious when he recently began tinkering under the hood of the open source OS and saw signs the flaw was still active.