According to reports on Drudge and The Boston Herald, veteran news broadcaster Walter Cronkite believes the White House political advisor Karl Rove is behind the recent message from Osama Bin Laden threating more attacks on the USA if Bush and Cheney are re-elected.

In a CNN interview, Cronkite said he is “inclined to think that Karl Rove, the political manager at the White House, who is a very clever man, he probably set up bin Laden to this thing.”

According to Lovelacemedia the BBC has sought legal advice following news that a German television comedy has plagiarised the award-winning series, The Office.

As Brand Republic reports, Stromberg features a David Brent-type character working in an office environment, replete with goatee beard, who abuses his staff with tasteless jokes while being filmed for a fly-on-the-wall documentary.

You can see some clips of the programme at the official Stromberg site.

More: The Scotsman: Is this David Brent’s doppelgänger?.

I won’t be the only blog today to publish news that the legendary BBC radio DJ John Peel died today.

It’s all been said, and more, already: Peel was a legend of broadcasting, featuring in the original line-up of BBC Radio 1, and redefining the rules of traditional mainstream music broadcasting with his almost-miserable, buffed, northern tone.

He introduced acts ranging from Marc Bolan to David Bowie, and Joy Division to The Smiths.

He gave the music world The Peel Sessions, where respected bands recorded unique sets and helped generate the massive following Peel earned.

What’s more, at 65 years-of-age, he was still cooler and far more respected than most of the DJs a third of his age today.

Read Radio Five Live presenter Nicky Campbell’s assessment of his friend and colleague.

Dave Birch has a good idea, in this week’s Second Sight: a kiddie-porn website killer.

Using the concept of decentralised co-operation, his idea is based around a screen-saver which operates similarly to the famous Seti screensaver, but instead of searching for extra-terrestrial transmissions whilst your computer is inactive, this screensaver would search for child porn websites via a secure central server, and launch denial-of-service attacks on the site(s) that it finds, from multiple users.

The effect would be severely debilitating for owner-operators of child-porn websites; it would consume their bandwidth allocations and make their sites completely unavailable, possibly for good.

I’d happily sign up to something like this, but the only problem I can forsee would be in my PC accessing child porn sites, even if it was for a greater good.

Additionally, people who actively use child-porn websites could hide behind the screensaver, browsing illegal sites and claiming ignorance, but I’m sure all of these problems have been considered with the SETI screensaver, and other similar projects.

Paul Krugman on Greg Palast’s review of the vote counting procedures in Florida.

Flash animation video for Radiohead’s Creep. Well worth a watch.

Found on SoreEyes.

TV-B-Gone: a keyfob-based universal remote control off switch – not unlike the central locking fob for a car – except this one cycles through the frequency range of a nearby TV, and simply powers it off, much to the annoyance of anyone watching.

Found on Gizmodo.

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