A Maryland gaming software developer that has worked with major game publishers and U.S. government agencies has agreed to pay US$75,000 to settle a complaint by the Business Software Alliance that it was using unlicensed copies of Adobe and Microsoft products, the BSA announced Thursday.

It's "ironic" that BreakAway would be using unlicensed software when the gaming industry is a major victim of software piracy, said Jenny Blank, BSA's director of enforcement. "We also find it ironic that software developers are frequently software piraters," Blank said. "We have a very high percentage of software developers in our list of pirating companies. You would think that they would know better."

BreakAway didn't respond to an e-mail and a phone message seeking comment on the settlement. The company, founded in 1998, has developed games for giant publisher Electronic Arts, Firaxis Games and Sierra Entertainment.

BreakAway, based in Hunt Valley, Maryland, also has developed training games for a variety of organizations, including the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Department of Justice, the International Center On Nonviolent Conflict, the Institute for Defense Analysis, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., according to its Web site.

In January, BreakAway was selected as a team member in an $8.6 million research and development project focused on cybersecurity training at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Microsoft was also one of the team members.

A second company, Aetrex Worldwide, which sells orthotic footwear, has also settled a BSA complaint that it used unlicensed software, the trade group announced Wednesday. Aetrex agreed to pay $100,000 to settle the BSA accusations, the trade group said.

Aetrex didn't immediately respond to a request for comments on the settlement.

In both cases, BSA heard about the unlicensed use of software through confidential reports made on its Nopiracy.com Web site, Blank said. Many of the 2,500 reports BSA receives a year come from current or former employees of the companies reported, and the trade group has paid $274,000 in rewards for qualified tips since 2008.

In BreakAway's case, the company agreed to an audit of its computer systems after BSA received the report, Blank said. The company has agreed to remove the unlicensed software and implement stronger software asset management practices, she said.

The trade group provides tools for software licensing audits at BSA.org. "We want companies to get legal before we knock on the door," Blank said.

Many companies that get caught are simply careless, Blank added. "We get the real down-and-dirty pirates, too, the people who are clearly doing this knowingly and deliberately," she said. "[Most offenders] tend to fall in the middle of, 'I thought I was legal,' or 'I knew there might have been a problem, but I didn't get around to it yet' -- people who knew or should've known, but didn't act."

JERUSALEM – Israel has admitted that in the 1990s, its forensic pathologists harvested organs from dead bodies, including Palestinians, without permission of their families.
The issue emerged with publication of an interview with the then-head of Israel's Abu Kabir forensic institute, Dr. Jehuda Hiss. The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic, who released it because of a huge controversy last summer over an allegation by a Swedish newspaper that Israel was killing Palestinians in order to harvest their organs. Israel hotly denied the charge.
Parts of the interview were broadcast on Israel's Channel 2 TV over the weekend. In it, Hiss said, "We started to harvest corneas ... Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family."
The Channel 2 report said that in the 1990s, forensic specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.
In a response to the TV report, the Israeli military confirmed that the practice took place. "This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer," the military said in a statement quoted by Channel 2.
In the interview, Hiss described how his doctors would mask the removal of corneas from bodies. "We'd glue the eyelid shut," he said. "We wouldn't take corneas from families we knew would open the eyelids."
Many of the details in the interview first came to light in 2004, when Hiss was dismissed as head of the forensic institute because of irregularities over use of organs there. Israel's attorney general dropped criminal charges against him, and Hiss still works as chief pathologist at the institute. He had no comment on the TV report.
Complaints against the institute, where autopsies of dead bodies are performed, at the time of Hiss' dismissal came from relatives of Israeli soldiers and civilians as well as Palestinians. The bodies belonged to people who died from various causes, including diseases, accidents and Israeli-Palestinian violence, but there has been no evidence to back up the claim in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians for their organs. Angry Israeli officials called the report "anti-Semitic."
The academic, Nancy Sheppard-Hughes, a professor of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, said she decided to make the interview public in the wake of the Aftonbladet controversy, which raised diplomatic tensions between Israel and Sweden and prompted Sweden's foreign minister to call off a visit to the Jewish state.
Sheppard-Hughes said that while Palestinians were "by a long shot" not the only ones affected by the practice in the 1990s, she felt the interview must be made public now because "the symbolism, you know, of taking skin of the population considered to be the enemy, (is) something, just in terms of its symbolic weight, that has to be reconsidered."
While insisting that all organ harvesting was done with permission, Israel's Health Ministry told Channel 2, "The guidelines at that time were not clear." It added, "For the last 10 years, Abu Kabir has been working according to ethics and Jewish law."

A third type of repair shop is the service departments of car dealerships. These shops are the only ones authorized to perform warranty and recall repairs by the manufacturers and distributors, except in the European Union.

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ABU GHRAIB, Iraq – The merchant who buttonholed the top U.S. military officer at a street market on the outskirts of Baghdad wasn't worried about car bombs or infiltrators in suicide vests.
It was the parking.
There isn't enough of it and it's too far away, the man told Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
This ordinary complaint isn't the kind of thing Mullen usually hears. But U.S. officials take that kind of complaint as a good sign. People are only concerned about things such as parking when they can afford to be.
Security barriers and other measures have made parts of the busy market accessible only by foot and pushcart. Suicide bombers stuck the market last May, killing several and wounding the intended target, an Iraqi Army officer.
Further illustration of the improvement in overall security came later Saturday, when Mullen visited Anbar province, the former homebase for al-Qaida in Iraq.
The provincial governor bent Mullen's ear for 10 minutes about the difficulty of getting bank loans and asked Mullen to get the U.S. Navy or some other branch of the U.S. government involved to speed things
up.
Mullen, a Navy officer, politely explained that he doesn't control the banking sector.
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BASRA, Iraq (AP) — Adm. Mike Mullen visited troops in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of the annual holiday entertainment visit arranged by the USO. Entertainers this year include singer Billy Ray Cyrus and tennis player Anna Kournikova.
Taking questions from a group of enlisted soldiers at a base in Basra, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff joked that he might be a disappointing substitute to some of his audience.
"I've got Anna Kournikova down the street and you're here? What's up with that? Mullen quipped.
"How'd you get picked? Did you volunteer?" he asked. Some nodded.
But perhaps the soldiers didn't have much choice.
"Voluntold," might be more accurate, Mullen said with a smile.
___
FORWARD OPERATING BASE FRONTENAC, Afghanistan (AP) — Lt. Col. Jonathan Neumann's battalion has perhaps the highest casualty rate of the Afghanistan war — 21 dead and 40 wounded between August and November.

That period roughly coincides with the long deliberations in Washington over whether to expand the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, including in the dangerous Kandahar region where Neumann is based.

Neumann said the debate barely resonated with him or his men, thousands of miles away at what he called "the tip of the spear."

"We knew there was debate," but it "almost becomes white noise" when the business of the day is avoiding roadside bombs and finding Taliban weapons caches, Neumann said.

He does welcome the 30,000 reinforcements Obama eventually ordered.