CNET Radio's Brian Cooley is the guest host for today's show. First, Brian discusses privacy with John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and former lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Our next guest is CNET Reviews's John Morris, who tells us about the new Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 1. Plus: Details about Intel's new Banias processor, and the latest antivirus software release from McAfee

New York Times - free registration required Secretive Court to Give Senate Wiretap Ruling.

The nation's most secret appeals court has agreed to be a little less secret.

The court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, announced in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee that it would provide the panel with a copy of what is expected to be a signal ruling on the Justice Department's request for broad new wiretap powers.

Civil liberties groups protested this week when the three-judge court held a secret hearing on the request from the Justice Department, without inviting any response from the department's critics.

"As soon as we have an opinion completed, I will be sure to see that you get an unclassified copy," Judge Ralph B. Guy Jr. said in the letter on Wednesday to Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is the committee's chairman. "An unclassified copy of the hearing transcript will be sent at the same time."

The Associated Press via NJ.com: Advocates argue over how much privacy genetic information should get in future .

As scientists make daily advances with the human genetic code, Congress should act now to prevent Americans from facing genetic discrimination from employers and insurers, privacy advocates say.

Genetic research could make it possible to identify an individual's lifetime risk of cancer, heart attack and other diseases.

But that same information also could be used by employers for hiring, firing or promotions, or by insurance companies to determine how much to charge for their services or to deny coverage completely, privacy advocates said Thursday.

But health and insurance advocates say there is no proof that anyone would do this, and lawmakers would be moving far ahead of reality by banning the use of genetic information.

That statement is not quite true as you can see from an article referenced in our May 09,2002 issue.

Political News from Wired News (May 09,2002 from our archive)- Milestone Settlement in DNA Case.

Burlington Northern Santa Fe agreed Wednesday to pay $2.2 million to settle charges of illegally testing workers for genetic defects in the government's first case against workplace DNA discrimination.

While the company, one of the country's biggest railroads, denies it violated the law, the case was a milestone in the brave new world of medical privacy battles and DNA-based job discrimination.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, had charged Burlington Northern with genetically testing or seeking to test 36 employees -- mostly track workers who said they had job-related carpal tunnel syndrome -- without their knowledge as part of a comprehensive diagnostic exam.

The EEOC also charged that employees who refused to take the test faced possible discipline.

CNET NEWS.COM - Microsoft warns of thieving Word docs.

A security flaw in Microsoft's flagship word processing software could allow a document to hijack files from any Windows PC on which it's opened, the software giant said Thursday.

A would-be thief would have to take extraordinary care in setting up the scenario, however, including knowing the exact location and name of the desired file as well as persuading the victim to open, modify, save and then return the Word document to the sender.

The scheme works best under Word 97, but Word 2000 and 2002 could also be conscripted into service if the attacker can persuade a victim to print the document first, a Microsoft spokesperson said.

Culture News from Wired News - Warm Party for a Code Group.

Back in the early 1990s, a loose association of "cypherpunks" went head to head with the National Security Agency over encryption rights. Ten years later, the cypherpunks live on -- as suspicious and hostile as ever. And they're having a party.

Linux Journal On-Line - Paranoid Penguin: Stealthful Sniffing, Intrusion Detection and Logging.

In a column about syslog [see "syslog Configuration" in the December 2001 issue of LJ] I mentioned ``stealth logging''--by running your central log server without an IP address, you can hide your central log server from intruders. But log servers aren't the only type of system that can benefit from a little stealth. Network sniffers and network intrusion detection systems (NIDSes) probes can also function perfectly well without IP addresses, making them less vulnerable to network attacks than the systems they protect.

This month I demonstrate three ways to use the versatile and powerful Snort--as a stealth sniffer, a stealth NIDS probe and a stealth logger--on a network interface with no IP address. If you're already familiar with Snort, I hope you'll see how easily it can be used stealthfully. If you're new to Snort, this article may be a useful crash course for you. All Snort commands and configurations in this article work equally well on interfaces with and without IP addresses.

Slashdot | Using Snort Stealthily.

jukal writes "Linux Journal has an article on using Snort as stealth sniffer, a stealth NDIS probe and stealth loger -- on a network interface with no IP address. 'Snort is a versatile and powerful tool for sniffing, intrusion detection and packet logging. Configuring it to run stealthily in sniffing mode or NIDS mode is easy; incorporating it into a stealth-logging solution is only slightly less so'"