The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the number of court-authorized phone taps in the U.S. rose by 19% in 2004.

Authorities made 1710 applications for taps, and 1710 applications were approved (that’s 100%). And that figure does not include terrorism-related taps, which reached a record 1,754 last year.

From the article:

“Between 1994 and 2004, the number of wiretap authorizations have increased 48 percent, according to the report.

In 2004, New York reported 347 wiretaps, California 180, New Jersey 144, and Florida 72 authorizations.

While judges authorized more wiretaps, the average length of time in which a wiretap could occur decreased in 2004 from 44 to 43 days.”

Yesterday’s Slashdot morsel entitled “MSN Search Engine Favors IIS” doesn’t really come as a surprise. Ivor Hewitt found that search results on the new MSN Search favour results from sites running on Microsoft’s IIS server.

His research shows as much as a 10% bias in results, using thousands of queries made up of random words, though he admits the bias may be down to MSN developers’ familiarity with coding applications that talk to IIS servers.

Have problem with inefficient fan cooling for hard drives? No? Well read on anyway. A Slashdot article appeared earlier in the week detailing a novel method of hard drive cooling for only 10¢ per drive (about 5p).

Instead of using case fans to blow air across the drives, the author uses a standard right-angle bracket to mount a standard 80mm fan to blow air straight at the underside of the drive, apparently achieving 10°-15° drops in temperature. Tricky in tight cases, but a handy trick nonetheless.

Yesterday I released my latest creation on the world – a set of PHP scripts that make viewing large sets of remote images on the web that bit easier. And for all you “Dad, the printer has run out of red ink again” porn addicts, this might just make your web experience that bit easier.

The BigglesZX Pr0n Aggregator is a pair of scripts, dubbed “Grabber” and “Grepper”. The “Grepper” part is the simpler half – feed it a web site address and it will attempt to extract all image links from the page it finds, and display the images to you. This is particularly useful for “open dir” sites – ones that allow the contents of directories to be listed. Feed the script the address of an open image dir, and behold the images displayed for your viewing pleasure.

The “Grabber” part is a little more complex. Say you come across an image with a URL like http://www.site.com/images/img1.jpg but the directory does not allow its contents to be listed. You know there are other images (helpfully numbered upwards to, say, 20) but you don’t want to go through the effort of typing each address to view them. Well, look no further!

Simply enter the directory address, (using our example) http://www.site.com/images/ in the URL box, a number range of 1 to 20 in the number range boxes, a prefix of img and a suffix of .jpg . Hit the button, and the images should be displayed for you, as if by magic.

Let me know how you get on. If you come across any errors, or have suggestions for improvements, let me know.

The New York Post is reporting that two NYPD officers from the Staten Island Task Force are being investigated for allegedly receiving illegal payoffs from the MPAA, following successful busts of sellers of pirated DVDs.

It is alleged that investigative agents of the MPAA, the film industry cartel responsible for the recent shutting down of several BitTorrent tracker sites, would tip off the NYPD about locations where pirated DVDs were being sold, and would then, once the raids had occurred, pay gratuities to the officers involved, amounting to some hundreds of dollars. The MPAA denies the allegations.

“We don’t give cash to police officers,” said Bill Shannon, an MPAA anti-piracy official.