Bono Internet policing idea draws fire

Bono, frontman of rock band U2, has warned the film industry not to make the same mistakes with file-sharing that have dogged the music industry, says the BBC.

Writing for the New York Times, Bono claimed Internet service providers were "reverse Robin Hoods", benefiting from the music industry's lost profits.

He hinted that China's efforts prove that tracking Internet content is possible.

Security experts are warning Web site administrators to be more alert to the dangers of cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks after it was revealed the Spanish EU presidency site and the official site of the Iranian president have been hacked, writes Computing.co.uk.

Hackers yesterday took advantage of XSS vulnerabilities to compromise the site of the Spanish presidency of the EU, posting a picture of Spanish prime minister lookalike Mr Bean on the site.

Although there appears to have been no malicious intent, the dangers of XSS attacks should not be underestimated, says Rik Ferguson, senior security advisor at Trend Micro.

A delayed Y2K bug has bitten hard at some 30 million holders of German debit and credit cards, making it impossible for them to use automatic teller machines and point-of-sale terminals since New Year's Day, states The Register.

Multiple news agencies said the outage stemmed from card chips that couldn't recognise the year 2010.

The DSGV, an association representing German banks, said engineers were working diligently to fix the problem, but a full resolution might not come until Monday.

Hubble astronomers have unveiled a panoramic view of the universe's youngest galaxies, offering the earliest look yet at the puny predecessors to our own Milky Way, reports USA Today.

Galaxies are the islands of stars filling the cosmos. Large ones such as our own Milky Way galaxy span more than 100 000 light-years (nearly 600 000 trillion miles) and contain hundreds of billions of stars.

The few faint earliest galaxies that emerge from the survey of about 7 500 galaxies are much smaller and filled with young, massive stars. They shine from only 600 million to 800 million years after the Big Bang, which took place about 13.7 billion years ago.