If there is any truth to the old saying that there is no honor among thieves then it is doubly true for thieves who transact with one another yet never actually meet face-to-face. Perhaps that explains the popularity of certain services in the underground cyber crime economy that make it easy for crooks to purchase stolen credit and bank accounts in bulk and check whether the accounts are legitimate and active.

From the many hours Security Fix spent skulking around some of the more active cyber crime communities online recently, I saw a site called sh0pp0rtal.net mentioned quite a bit. I managed to acquire an account on this exclusive service, and found some 78,628 individual MasterCard and Visa credit and debit accounts for sale at various prices there.

China has banned the use of its Olympic gold medalists' names as Internet addresses by anyone but the athletes themselves.

The move announced Tuesday came after companies registered the names of winning Chinese athletes at the 2004 Athens Olympics as Web addresses, prompting an outcry by sports fans.

"The move will better protect the interests of the Olympic gold medalists," said an official of the government's China Internet Network Information Center, quoted by the state Xinhua News Agency. It identified him only by the surname Hu.

The Chinese government controls the awarding of Web addresses using the ".cn" suffix but has no power over those assigned in other countries.

The General Administration of Sport gave the agency a list of Chinese Olympians ahead of the games and registered all possible domain names using their names, Xinhua said.

The federal government has been using its system of border checkpoints to greatly expand a database on travelers entering the country by collecting information on all U.S. citizens crossing by land, compiling data that will be stored for 15 years and may be used in criminal and intelligence investigations.

Officials say the Border Crossing Information system, disclosed last month by the Department of Homeland Security in a Federal Register notice, is part of a broader effort to guard against terrorist threats. It also reflects the growing number of government systems containing personal information on Americans that can be shared for a broad range of law enforcement and intelligence purposes, some of which are exempt from some Privacy Act protections.

While international air passenger data has long been captured this way, Customs and Border Protection agents only this year began to log the arrivals of all U.S. citizens across land borders, through which about three-quarters of border entries occur.

Sixty-six years ago in Block B of the old Bletchley Park, a discovery was made that saved thousands of lives. A young woman, doing the filing, noticed a lot of coded messages, all concerning fuel deliveries to a small village in northern Germany called Peenemünde.

She didn't think much of them at the time. But she reported the information upwards – and the Allies stumbled on the concealed factory site where the Germans were constructing the V1 and V2 flying bombs. An air strike later and the factory was destroyed. Proof, if ever it was needed, that a well-run filing system can help win a war.

Today moss, weeds and wild flowers have taken over in Block B, a place where the course of history was changed. Nature has reclaimed its ceiling and its floor, and unless something is done soon it will either collapse or be pulled down.

Bletchley Park is one of the world's greatest and most neglected wartime monuments. But large parts of it are being left to rot. The north wall of the main building, a 19th-century country house, is now covered in scaffolding, and part of the roof is missing. The Bletchley Park Trust scraped together £100,000 to repair a quarter of the roof. The rest of the building also needs attention, but the money is not there.

Disgruntled hackers targeted the Brazilian Olympic Committee's website to complain about the country's poor performance at the Beijing Games.

The hackers replaced regular content with criticisms of Brazilian athletes, the committee said.

"Brazil stinks in these Olympics" was one of the messages posted, according to the Universo On Line news service of the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper.

Brazil was in 39th place with one gold and five bronze medals yesterday.

The site was not operating for several hours, including during the Brazil-Argentina semifinal football match which Argentina won 3-0.

The third and last Inmarsat 4 mobile-broadband satellite was successfully placed into orbit Tuesday by an International Launch Services (ILS) Proton Breeze M rocket, ILS and Inmarsat announced.

The launch completed a decade-long, $1.5 billion investment by London-based Inmarsat and returned ILS to commercial service five months after a failure that forced a redesign of the Proton Breeze M upper stage.

The 13,139-pound (5,960-kg) Inmarsat 4 F3 satellite will be operated from 98 degrees west. Once its operations begin there, the two other Inmarsat 4 satellites will be moved to new orbital slots to optimize global broadband data services from the three-satellite system. Moving these two satellites will cause partial shutdowns of Inmarsat broadband services for a five-week period as the Inmarsat 4 F2 is moved from 53 degrees west to 25 degrees west, and then for a three-week period during the relocation of Inmarsat 4 F1 from 64 degrees east to 143.5 degrees east.

Operating three satellites in geostationary orbit will permit Inmarsat to offer broadband data and hand-held telephone access globally, except for the polar regions. The two previously launched Inmarsat 4 satellites, in orbit since March and November 2005, have provided services to 85 percent of the Earth's land mass but have left broad coverage gaps in the Pacific Ocean region.