Apparently the news media and the US government don't think the "hacker war" is much to worry about.  After a week of intrusions all across the web, "major" Internet news sources have yet to run a lead article on the story. But all may not be what it seems.

In an exclusive interview, eXoNews talks to the webmaster of a US-based company providing government services to at number of major US cities. For security reasons, the name of the company and its webmaster will remain anonymous:

eXoNews: You were hacked this week?

Webmaster: Yes. Early in the week.

eXoNews: By Chinese hackers?

Webmaster: Supposedly. At least we thought they were Chinese, at first. The hack was signed with an email address with a .cn extension. That extension means China.

eXoNews: Would you say it was a serious hack?

Webmaster: It wasn't life threatening, but it was very thorough. They inserted a substitute page for every index and default page on one of our servers. We managed a very quick response because the server was being phased out and most of the sites on it weren't live anyway. We shifted the active sites to a backup server in a few minutes, but at least one of our government clients did report the hack - saw the message - so it wasn't quite quick enough. We had about 200 default pages on that server and the hack replaced most of them.

eXoNews: For our readers, the index and default pages are the first page you see when you hit a web site. And these substitute pages said what?

Webmaster: Well, I won't repeat the exact language. They basically had an anti-US government message in red against black, signed with the Chinese email address. It's strange though. Once we had time to do a little research we read that the hacker's handle was the same as the one who was claiming to have hacked hundreds of Chinese sites. It makes you wonder: who is hacking who?

eXoNews: Again for our readers, a "handle" is a signature. So your hack may not have been from China?

Webmaster: I suspect it came from outside China. Why would a Chinese hacker sign it with someone else's handle? It's pretty much a mystery, though.

eXoNews: Any conspiracy theories? Our readers all watch X-Files.

Webmaster: LOL! I hope they're watching The Lone Gunmen, too! Personally, I think its a convenient wave of hacks for the US, considering the current political back and forth between the Bush administration and China. It would be relatively easy to masquerade as a Chinese hacker if you were, say, operating with the budget of a covert US government agency.

eXoNews: So you suspect its all a propaganda thing? It's staged?

Webmaster: Let's just say Trust No One and leave it at that.

By Jill Serjeant

LOS ANGELES May 4, 2001 (Reuters) - Playboy founder Hugh Hefner has decided to invite the neighbors over more often to meet the bunnies in the hopes they will quit complaining.

Neighbors of the swinging 75-year-old have been complaining to authorities about the seemingly endless round of parties at Hefner's opulent 31-room Playboy Mansion, counting 22 big parties at the mansion over a three-month period last year.

They say the parties cause noise and traffic congestion and filed a complaint alleging that Hefner had turned his home into a money-making business.

Inspectors said this week they had found no evidence of zoning or building code violations at the opulent Tudor-style house where Hefner has lived with various playmates for 30 years.

"There is no definition under Los Angeles law on how many parties a person can have at his home, and we could find no evidence that they were renting out the mansion to others for parties and making a profit," Dave Keim, chief of building code enforcement, said on Thursday.

But Hefner's spokesman said the complaints had been taken to heart and that sound barriers and a shuttle bus system for guests should help to keep the peace.

"Hugh Hefner has lived there for a very long time. He wants to be a good citizen. He has also asked the local home-owner's association to use the mansion for their meetings," said Bill Farley, spokesman for Playboy Enterprises.

Describing the Playboy founder as a "very generous and frequent host", Farley said Hefner had friends over four or five nights a week, held a personal party about twice a month, held political and charity fund-raisers there as well as promotional Playboy events involving several hundred guests.

"There have been a couple of incidents when lots of cars have backed up but now we are bringing guests in on a shuttle from a nearby parking lot," said Farley.

"We have also put up a 'sound wall' to block the music and we have an employee monitoring the noise with decibel equipment.

"We feel we are pretty much in sync with our neighbors and hope to put this behind us," said Farley.

By Maggie Fox

ALEXANDRIA, Va. May 03, 2001 (Reuters) - It doesn't look like much of a map: lots and lots of open space representing virgin South American rain forest, a few rivers and a single village.

But to the Tirio Indians of southern Suriname, the map represents their past, present and future, putting on paper for the first time the names of rivers they have fished for millennia, mountains they have used to navigate and sacred places. They hope it will protect them from loggers and miners who ache to exploit the riches of the Amazon forests.

"Now the Indians can say, 'Our village is here and our sacred mountain is here and our hunting grounds are here,"' Mark Plotkin, head of the Amazon Conservation Team, which organized the mapping project, told Reuters in an interview.

"We are hoping this will create facts on the ground. It says, 'Here is where we live, here is where our resources are.' It is a pre-emptive statement."

The map, being unveiled on May 4 at a mapping conference at the Library of Congress in Washington, covers about 16,000 square miles of southern Suriname, a small country nestled in the northeast shoulder of South America. It represents a large chunk of the lushly forested country, itself only 63,000 square miles in size, an area inhabited by about 2,000 indigenous Tirio people.

"The Indians say, 'We want title to our land,"' Plotkin said. "What could be more ridiculous, because they have been living there 15,000 years?"

But Plotkin's group, and the Tirio, realize that maps are the only way to stake a legal claim in the 21st century.

"The Indians themselves some time ago had produced a map of their own, but that map did not have any credibility with the government," said Neville Gunther, who headed the mapping project for the Amazon Conservation Team.

"There was no involvement whatsoever of the government. They don't attach any meaning to it."

Anthropologist Mac Chapin of the Center for the Support of Native Lands, which carried out the $100,000 project, said the Tirio maps were also too primitive.

"They stick with sketch maps and don't combine that information with cartographically accurate maps," he said. "They are useful for some purposes but the maps our team made are better because they contain all the cultural information in a format which is credible for legal and political work. You get maps that the government people will accept."

Plotkin, who has worked with Amazonian shamans for years to try to preserve some of their botanical and medical knowledge, put together a plan with Chapin, who was himself plotting ways to help indigenous people verify their land claims.

The best way to get the approval of the government, they decided, was to work with it. So they enlisted cartographers from the government of Suriname.

EXISTING MAPS SHOWED EMPTY FOREST

The cartographers had aerial images of the former Dutch colony. "You can see some features on aerial images but aerial images cannot provide you with the name," Gunther said. "The existing maps were just empty."

Chapin said there was no way to tell that vast areas that looked empty on maps were actually used by the hunter-gatherer Tirio. "Sometimes you see a little dot that says village, but people don't live in dots, they live in territories, and we had to document the territories of these people."

And for simple-living hunter-gatherers, it takes a lot of territory just to live. "When people look at a map and see a dot that says 'Kwamalasamutu,' they might say, 'Give them 3 kilometers around that dot,"' Gunther said.

But people who live off the animals they can find and shoot, the fruit they can gather and the little bit of cassava they grow for a staple need a great deal of land. The Tirio now have guns and do not have to rely on traditional methods such as poison darts, but guns make noise and noise spooks animals. They have to go pretty far to hunt now."

Kwamalasamutu is the main Tirio village -- the only true village marked on the map -- but the people go off to camps dispersed over a large area, the anthropologists said.

So how to fill in all those gaps in the government satellite maps? The two nonprofit groups put together an unusual alliance of city folk and forest dwellers who left the Stone Age just a generation ago.

"We had to get young guys in blue jeans to sit next to the old guys, the shamans, and ask, 'What is our name for this stream?"' Plotkin said.

Chapin's team arranged workshops where government cartographers conferred with Tirio to name every river, stream, mountain and swamp they could. "What we are doing is transferring what is in a person's head onto paper," he said.

"They gathered all the information on land use, subsistence patterns, where people hunt, where they fish, where they farm, where they gather. You end up with maps that contain all sorts of cultural information."

This in turn can be used to fight off developers, miners and foresters who claim the land is not used.

"Now they (the Tirio) can apply for title to the lands," said Plotkin, whose group's Internet Web Site at http://www.amazonteam.org describes the project.

MAPS FIGHTING MAPS

"The government is on the verge of giving out a bunch of concessions for timbering," Chapin said. "One of the ways that a lot of these timber concessions come in is you have a map which shows nothing and they say it is all empty -- there are no people out there. We show there are people by using a map."

Gunther added, "Brazilian gold miners were entering the area and the Tirio didn't have anything to say, 'Hey you are trespassing now."'

Chapin's group has done similar work in Honduras, Panama and Bolivia and in Cameroon in Africa and plan to do more projects elsewhere in Suriname, in Guatemala and in Brazil.

The hope is not only to preserve Indians' legal rights but to help save the rain forest and its huge diversity of delicate wildlife. Many researchers believe rain forest plants may contain unique medical properties, which is one motivation behind the Amazon Conservation Team's shaman project.

"Indians protect the forest and the forest protects the Indians," Plotkin said. "This is not going to save the Amazon per se. But why not, where you have Indians, where you have forest, why not try to head off the problem?"

And, he said, others could benefit if the map serves to help the Tirio protect their forest. For example, mining produces toxic metals that can get into the water supply.

"Every river in the western half of the country originates in this area," Plotkin said. "They are all drinking downstream of these guys. So you protect the headwaters."

EDINBURGH April 24, 2001 (Reuters) - Veteran monster hunter Jan Sundberg landed himself in hot water with a white witch on Tuesday as he began an underwater attempt to catch the most famous and elusive resident of Scotland's Loch Ness.

The Swede has sparked fury among animal lovers and witches alike with plans for Operation 'Clean Sweep', a trawl of the lake which he hopes will net Nessie, the legendary Loch Ness monster.

But Kevin Carlyon, high priest of the British White Witches, is determined to put a stop to the hunt by casting a protective spell over the loch and any monsters lurking peacefully beneath the waves.

Sundberg, who is adamant the work of his Global Underwater Research Team is legitimate scientific research, is unimpressed by the interference and plans a distinctly unscientific solution.

"It's all a lot of mumbo jumbo, so we haven't bothered with this guy," he said. "If he shows his face down here again, we'll throw him into the lake. I think he needs to be cooled off a bit."

The legend of a monster in the dark waters of Britain's largest lake dates back to 565 AD when St. Columba, the holy man who brought Christianity to Scotland, spotted a fearsome lake-dwelling beastie.

By MARIO FOX
Associated Press Writer

CHICAGO May 2, 2001 (AP) — Rep. Luis Gutierrez says he and others protesting naval bombing exercises in Puerto Rico were handcuffed for 24 hours and held in a former dog kennel where they slept on the concrete floor as roaches and lizards crawled around them.

The Illinois Democrat called the treatment by the Navy security officers on the island of Vieques "very inhumane.''

"Everyone was mistreated,'' he told reporters at a rally in Chicago on Tuesday, a few hours after being freed from a federal jail in Puerto Rico. "We would never want our armed forces to be treated that way.''

Navy officials denied the accusations.

Gutierrez is among opponents demanding that the Navy abandon its training ground after a bombing accident killed a civilian security guard on the range two years ago.

Decades of live bombing have stunted development and tourism, severely damaged the environment and caused health problems, critics claim. The Navy says Vieques is essential to prepare U.S. forces for combat.

The Navy resumed bombing on Vieques last week, after a Pentagon order in March to temporarily suspend the exercises to give negotiators a chance to pursue a permanent solution to the dispute.

The latest bombing exercises drew bitter demonstrations, and Gutierrez was among at least 180 protesters detained since Thursday for intruding on the Navy training ground on Vieques. Gutierrez was arrested on a misdemeanor trespassing charge.

"It's a misdemeanor. It's like a traffic ticket in Chicago, and I was held for three days,'' he said.

Gutierrez said Navy security officers ordered the handcuffed detainees to kneel on the rocky ground outside. He said he hesitated because he wanted to clear the rocks, but a sailor intervened.

"He kicked my feet from under me, put me face-down, put his knee on my back, and just said 'stay there,''' Gutierrez said in San Juan before flying back to Chicago. Then, he said, sailors "lifted me and threw me a few feet.''

The group spent the night on the floor of a "holding pen'' — a place smelling of urine that islanders told him had been used for guard dogs. He said there was no roof to protect them, which included an 81-year-old man, against the rain and chilly night air.

"They were being punitive. They were trying to dehumanize us,'' he said at the rally.

Navy officials disputed Gutierrez's account, saying he was treated fairly and that the concrete building where he was held for one night has never been used as a kennel.

The detainees were treated "with dignity and respect,'' Navy Lt. Carlos Pinero said, calling Gutierrez's account "absolutely false.''

The Navy said three sailors were hit by rocks during the protests. U.S. marshals said 16 of them were hit by rocks, ball bearings and nails that were hurled by protesters.

Gutierrez was held on the island for a full day by the Navy, then was transferred to San Juan and handed off to the U.S. Marshals service. He said protesters were treated well under the watch of marshals.

After posting the required $900 of the $3,000 bail, Gutierrez boarded a flight to Chicago.

The five-term congressman who spent his high school days in Puerto Rico and later taught English there, said he hoped to return to Vieques with other members of Congress around May 18.

"It's time for the people there to be allowed to live in peace,'' he said,

The Navy owns two-thirds of Vieques and its bombing range covers 900 acres — under 3 percent of the island. It used live bombs until two went astray in a 1999 practice and killed a civilian guard on the bombing range.

The Navy has used its Vieques range for six decades and says it is the only place its Atlantic fleet can conduct air, land and sea training simultaneously with live munitions. It denies claims that the exercises cause health problems.

———

On the Net:

Gutierrez: http://www.house.gov/gutierrez

U.S. Navy: http://www.navyvieques.navy.mil

Vieques residents' site: http://www.vieques-island.com/board/navy/study.html

NEW YORK May 4, 2001 (AP) - A retrospective initially intended to feature every Bugs Bunny cartoon will fall just short of complete, as Cartoon Network executives have decided not to air a dozen of the animated shorts deemed too racially charged.

In one episode, the wisecracking, carrot-chomping Bugs is featured parodying a black-faced Al Jolson; in another he calls an oafish, bucktoothed Eskimo a "big baboon"; and in yet another he distracts a black rabbit hunter by rattling a pair of dice.

These and other racially charged cartoons were supposed to be included in the retrospective slated for next month on AOL Time Warner Inc.'s Cartoon Network, until executives changed course last week, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

Initially the network planned to air the cartoons late at night with prominent disclaimers, explaining that the cartoons were representative of their time and should be viewed as historical records.

That idea was nixed after Warner Bros., which owns the rabbit, expressed its worry that the episodes might impact the company's extensive merchandising ventures.

The Cartoon Network holds licensing agreement with Warner Bros. for the entire library of Bugs Bunny cartoons.

Warner Bros. began pulling the cartoons lampooning blacks in the late 1960s, sensitized by the civil-rights movement, animation expert Jerry Beck told the Journal. Cartoons featuring stereotyped American Indians were taken out of circulation about five years ago.

The instruments, looking deep into the universe, were able to detect minute ripples and distortions in energy patterns within the cosmic microwave background, a faint glow left over from the immense heat of the Big Bang.

Readings from the Degree Angular Scale Interferometer at the Center for Astrophysical Research in Antarctica show tiny distortions in the distribution of matter and variations in temperature just moments after the Big Bang.

A concept, called the inflation theory, holds that these irregularities, enlarging over time, led to the formation of all the big structures in the universe — galaxies, stars and planets.

The new findings, said John Carlstrom, an astronomy professor at the University of Chicago and head of the DASI team, lend strong support to the inflation theory.

"It's always been theoretically compelling,'' said Carlstrom. "Now it's on very solid experimental ground.''

Carlstrom and his team presented the research Sunday at the spring meeting of the American Physical Society.

The DASI experiment could detect ripples of temperature differences at a time when the universe was about 400,000 years old. The universe is thought to be about 14 billion years old. The inflation theory predicts that the temperature differences would show up as three peaks that become progressively fainter with time. Carlstrom said DASI detected two peaks and suggestions of a third.

Researchers believe the data also support the idea that ordinary matter, of which planets, stars and even people are made, accounts for only about 4.5 percent of the universe's total mass. The rest of the energy in the universe is attributed to cold dark matter, which cannot be easily detected, and to a force called "dark energy,'' which is thought to be causing galaxies to separate at a faster and faster rate.

Other experimenters, using instruments boosted up to 120,000 feet by balloons detected variations to within 100 millionths of a degree in the cosmic microwave background radiation temperature.

The data, from a project called Balloon Observations of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics, were gathered in 1998. The data provide more detail for cosmic microwave background temperature data first obtained by a satellite in 1991.

Data from the experiments support the notion that the universe is flat and not curved, an idea that would affect the path taken by light streaking across time and space.

May 2, 2001 (ENVIRONMENT NEWS SERVICE) — A Russian prospecting vessel is reported to have just collected data on oil and gas reserves in Antarctica, a global nature reserve where minerals exploitation is forbidden. The polar geological prospecting ship Akademik Aleksandr Karpinskiy was working in the Cosmonauts Sea region of eastern Antarctica, according to a Russian Public TV report monitored by the BBC.

“According to preliminary data, the information collected will make it possible to predict the presence of oil and gas reserves in the region,” the report said.

It quoted Valeriy Masulov, head of a geological prospecting institute, as saying the area, near Japan’s Syowa Base, had been subject to a two year research program, which ended with the vessel’s return to St Petersburg late last month.

“The Sea of Cosmonauts is one of the peripheral seas where we expect the presence of a thick sedimentary mantle, well, and therefore good prospects for predicting oil and gas bearing strata,” Masulov is quoted as saying.

The April 28 report came two months after another television report on February 13, in which Russian Center TV described Russia’s presence on the sixth continent as a matter of economic expediency.

That report quoted Russian Antarctic Expeditions head Valeriy Lukin as warning, “It is possible that only countries possessing the right technology and equipment will receive the opportunity to develop the natural resources of the Antarctic.”

It also claimed that deposits of diamonds in the Antarctic had turned out to be as big as those in South Africa and Yakutia, in Russia’s Far East. But Russia’s expeditions were said to lack resources to buy new vehicles.

The Antarctic is one of the last pristine environments left on Earth. Much of its scientific value derives directly from the lack of locally generated pollution, and more than 40 nations have joined together in an agreement to preserve this situation.

Under the Madrid Protocol to the Antarctic Treaty, which came into force in December 1997, minerals exploitation of any kind in Antarctica is banned, and the ban cannot be revisited for 50 years.

Article 7 of the protocol reads, “Any activity relating to mineral resources, other than scientific research, shall be prohibited.”