Potter fans: Try these for a spell
Not yet reached your Harry Potter overload point? By now, dozens of sites exist for fans of the best-selling book series. Two of the best are Mugglenet.com and the-leaky- cauldron.org.
Because of mass excitement prompted by the launch of the movie “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” plus the release last week of the final novel in the series by J.K. Rowling, Web sites catering to Potter fans are buzzing.
In addition to the fan sites, Potter fans can find numerous sites that cater to writers who pen their own versions of stories involving the teen-age wizard and his classmates at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
“Harry Potter and the Secret Horcrux,” written by “Logical Raven” on the Web site www.harrypotterfanfiction.com, is already 27 chapters long, and the writing, according to some English reviewers, is “sharper than that of his mentor.”
FBI installs spyware to trace bomb threat
The FBI used a novel type of remotely installed spyware last month to investigate who was e-mailing bomb threats to a high school near Olympia. Federal agents obtained a court order on June 12 to send spyware called CIPAV to a MySpace account suspected of being used by the bomb threat hoaxster. Once implanted, the software was designed to report back to the FBI with the Internet Protocol address of the suspect’s computer, other information found on the PC and, notably, an ongoing log of the user’s outbound connections.
The suspect, a former Timberline High School student, was sentenced to 90 days in juvenile detention after pleading guilty to making bomb threats and other charges.
As reported at news site Wired.com, the Olympia case is the first documented of remote spyware practice by the FBI. The FBI did confirm in 2001 that it was working on a virus called Magic Lantern but hasn’t said much about it since.
Wrestling, gaming sites are gaining visitors
The top 10 Web sites that gained the most visitors from May to June this year were led by those for World Wrestling Entertainment and Hearst Digital Media, according to comScore, an industry traffic monitor.
Measuring a monthly change from May to June, comScore said the top fastest-growing U.S. sites were: World Wrestling Entertainment, up 117 percent; Hearst Digital, up 77 percent; and the Mozilla Organization, up 53 percent.