Former hacker has had his fill of Colombia

BOGOTA, Colombia – This Andean highlands capital has twice felled famed hacker and security consultant Kevin Mitnick.

“I’m looking forward to getting on the first plane to the United States,” Mitnick said Wednesday from his hospital room.

Mitnick, 42, said he has been laid up for some three days with a nasty flu, with a fever reaching 104 degrees.

On a separate visit back in May, the author of “The Art of Intrusion” and “The Art of Deception” said, he had spent a day in the hospital for tests after experiencing chest pains and elevated blood pressure.

Bogota’s 8,700-foot elevation and a prescription drug Mitnick was taking were blamed for the May troubles, he said.

This time it was simply a nasty flu, which has prevented Mitnick from attending a big weekend hacker’s conference in New York City.

“I tried to get to the airport to get to the plane to New York and just couldn’t make it,” he said.

Mitnick, in Colombia on consulting work for a client he would not name, said doctors had treated him with antibiotics and morphine.

Mitnick spent more than five years in prison for antics that prosecutors said included stealing software and altering data, causing millions of dollars in damage to such companies as Motorola Inc., Novell Inc., Nokia Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc.

Boy, are “.eu” ever in trouble: Some 74,000 “.eu” domain names were frozen this week under suspicion that a syndicate had illegally stockpiled them to sell at a profit.

The European Registry of Internet Domain Names is suing the 400 companies that registered the names – most based in the United States – for breach of contract in the Belgian courts. EURid is accusing them of systematically acquiring domain names via three British firms that were acting as a front.

The launch of the “.eu” domain name in April saw a rush of registrations from European businesses and individuals, with nearly 2 million European Web addresses now active.

Internet service providers, Web-hosting firms and other companies can apply for a domain name on behalf of an existing client, but they may not buy and hold on to domain names for resale.

EURid spokesman Patrik Linden said the nonprofit Internet name authority received a few complaints and became suspicious about some registrations that could not prove that the holder was based within the European Union.

Web sites for the three British firms carry an identical disclaimer, saying they own a portfolio of domain names and seek to avoid registering names where third parties have conflicting prior rights. The Web sites do not list any address, phone number or e-mail.

Internet sites using one of the 74,000 domain names will still be open for traffic, Linden said, but the names can’t be sold and transferred to others. EURid will ask a Belgian court in October to return the names, which would then be open again for registration to eligible applicants.

AOL’s Case apologetic: AOL co-founder Steve Case has offered a qualified apology for his role in blueprinting the online company’s disastrous combination with Time Warner Inc.

“Yes, I’m sorry I did it,” Case said on PBS’s “The Charlie Rose Show” last Friday.

But Case also reiterated his belief that it was a good idea at the time.

“It has been a disappointment, but you know, it goes back to the question, ‘Was it a good idea?’” Case said, according to a transcript provided by the show. “I think it was a good idea. I’m disappointed and frustrated that it hasn’t developed in the way that that we all hoped at the time it could.”

Time Warner’s agreement to be bought by AOL at the height of the Internet bubble in early 2000 resulted in years of turmoil, including shareholder lawsuits, regulatory investigations into AOL’s accounting practices, a plunge in the company’s share price and a management purge. Since then, Time Warner has changed its name from AOL Time Warner Inc. to just Time Warner Inc.

AOL’s fortunes are on the upswing thanks to its recent strategy of shifting to an advertising-driven business instead of providing Internet access. But Time Warner stock prices are now hovering near its 52-week low as the company, and Time Warner is considering making even more of AOL’s services free to boost advertising.

Tweak your wiki: A California startup wants to help people grow more comfortable with online collaboration tools known as wikis by making shared pages resemble spreadsheets, photo albums and other software they already use.

Wiki tools, which let users to create, modify and even delete what others in a group have worked on, have generally mimicked basic Web pages or word-processing documents.

Calendar entries, for instance, might get converted into a list, without the calendar-like presentation or information on the duration of appointments, both of which are found in such calendaring applications as Microsoft Corp.’s Outlook.

Photographs, meanwhile, might appear as a list of attachments, with no thumbnails previewing the image before downloading.

A new version of JotSpot Inc.’s wiki service, released Monday, lets people select from a number of formats: spreadsheet, calendar, files and photo album, in addition to the standard Web page or word-processing document.

“The problem has been that they’ve been too nerdy,” said JotSpot chief executive Joe Kraus. “You can only do one kind of collaborating, what amounts to a (word-processing) document.”

To encourage wider wiki use, JotSpot aims to “bridge the gap between what they’ve already been doing and what they can do,” Kraus said. “People like to leverage habits they’ve already built up.”

Students face hacking charges: Two students each face up to a year in jail for a prank that involved hacking into a professor’s computer, giving grades to other students and sending pizza, magazine subscriptions and CDs to the professor’s home.

Lena Chen, 20, and Jennifer Ngan, 19, face misdemeanor charges of illegally accessing computers. The pair, both students of California State University, Northridge, are scheduled to be arraigned Aug. 21.

An investigation showed the professor’s network account had been accessed without her permission and grades were assigned to nearly 300 students, prosecutor Robert Fratianne said.

The professor’s campus e-mail was being forwarded to an account established by Chen and Ngan, investigators said.

Prosecutors also alleged Chen and Ngan used personal identifying information found on the university system to order food, magazine subscriptions and a shipment of blank CDs to the professor’s home. The professor was billed for the purchases but was not required to pay.

The school would not release the professor’s name.