NJ.com reports that “

[t]he Supreme Court of New Jersey became the first court in the nation yesterday to rule that people have an expectation of privacy when they are online, and law enforcement officials need a grand jury warrant to have access to their private information.  In state proceedings, the ruling will take precedence over what attorneys describe as weaker U.S. Supreme Court decisions that hold there is no right to privacy on the internet.”

Above the Top reveals that “that either the Chinese government or Chinese hackers (or both) [may] have had the benefit of undetectable back-doors into highly secure [U.S.] government and military computer networks for months, perhaps years. The cause: a high-number of counterfeit Cisco routers and switches installed in nearly all government networks that experienced upgrades and/or new units within the past 18 months.”  According to the blog, “the US government has been attempting to avoid these issues by only using higher-end Cisco partners/suppliers for the gear. However, the highly-competitive lowest-bid environment of government procurement has inspired several vendors to look for cheap alternatives for hardware… resulting in a catastrophic meltdown of security.”

According to CNetNews.com, a coalition of conservative Republican politicians tried to impress upon Democratic leaders late last week that “[t]his year, Congress must raise the cap on H-1B temporary work visas beloved by technology companies.  In a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) on Friday, 30 members of the U.S. House of Representatives Republican Study Committee called for a vote within the next few months to raise the quota. By law, that limit currently stands at 65,000, with an additional 20,000 allocated for foreigners with advanced degrees from U.S. institutions.”

The Sidney Morning Herald writes that “[t]he Australian Federal Police have busted an international piracy ring that produced and sold pirated music in a clandestine manufacture and export operation from Sydney.  The AFP seized thousands of pirated CDs and album covers and charged a 36-year-old Petersham man with copyright infringement. He was bailed and will appear before the Central Local Court on May 13.  The retailers were selling pirate compilations made by "Fresh off the Boat Entertainment", which included illegally reproduced songs by artists such as Justin Timberlake, UB40 and Gnarls Barkley.  Separately, Ray Johnson, the AFP’s manager of special operations, said although individual users of pirated music have yet to be prosecuted in Australia – police have largely focused on large commercial operations – that does not mean they are immune.”

Yahoo!News reports that, according to a report issued by China’s National Computer network Emergency Response technical Team (CNCERT), “China faces a serious threat from botnets, networks of computers infected with software that allows them to be controlled remotely for denial-of-service attacks and to send spam.  During 2007, 3.6 million Chinese computers were infected by software that allowed them to be controlled as part of a botnet, CNCERT said in a report published earlier this month. That report blamed lax computer security as a primary cause of the problem.  […]  CNCERT, which is under China’s Ministry of Information Industry, put the total number of bot-controlled computers worldwide during 2007 at 6.2 million.”