US govt lifts lid on alleged leak

The US state department has told the BBC it believes an alleged whistle-blower obtained secret diplomatic data despite being at a field base in Iraq.

Serviceman Bradley Manning, 22, faces two charges related to the illegal transfer and transmission of classified information from a US military network.

The US said he was suspected of downloading from SIPR Net.

The alleged "12th man" in the Russian spy ring broken up by the FBI earlier this month was a software tester at Microsoft's Redmond headquarters, reveals The Register.

Alexey Karetnikov, 23, was deported without court proceedings yesterday after admitting he was in the US in violation of immigration law, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

He had entered the country in October, the Washington Post reports. Microsoft confirmed he had worked for about nine months as a software tester, but offered no more details.

Peter Jenner, Pink Floyd manager and emeritus president of the International Music Managers' Forum, claims that when it comes to copyright in the UK, “the law is broken”, says Computing.co.uk.

He suggested copyright law must be rebuilt from scratch, particularly in today's digital world where we “cannot control the right to copy”.

Jenner was speaking at the Westminster eForum's seminar, aimed at discussing proposals to tackle illegal file-sharing, as Ofcom consults on the next steps for implementing the Digital Economy Act.

Mozilla has disabled and added to a block list a Firefox add-on that stole log-in information when users visited Web sites, writes CNet.

The software, called Mozilla Sniffer, had been downloaded about 1 800 times in the approximately five weeks it was available on addons.mozilla.org, Mozilla reported in a blog post on Tuesday.

The block list will prompt the add-on to be uninstalled for computers running the program. Users who installed it should change their passwords.