The owner of a snake sanctuary has died after apparently being bitten by one of his own animals.

Luke Yeomans, 47, had been due to open the King Cobra Sanctuary in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, this weekend.

Police confirmed they were called to a property in Brookhill Leys Road, near Eastwood, where Mr Yeomans had suffered a suspected heart attack.

Officers confirmed the snake had been contained and there was no danger to the public.

Depleted habitat
It was also confirmed the victim was pronounced dead at the scene.

The RSPCA, Health and Safety Executive and Broxtowe Borough Council have been informed of the incident.

Nottinghamshire Police said an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death was under way.

In an interview with the BBC earlier this year, Mr Yeomans said he started the sanctuary in 2008, in reaction to the depletion of the snake's natural habitat in the forests of south-east Asia and India.

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Al-Qaeda activists trying to download bomb-making instructions from its online magazine, Inspire, were on Friday greeted with a garbled recipe for cupcakes

Al-Qaeda activists trying to download bomb-making instructions from its online magazine, Inspire, were on Friday greeted with a garbled recipe for cupcakes after British intelligence agencies reportedly hacked into the site.

According to media reports, the hacking was carried out by the MI6 and the GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) agency to disrupt al-Qaeda's bid to recruit potential “lone wolf” agents.

“When [al-Qaeda] followers tried to download the 67-page colour magazine, instead of instructions about how to ‘Make a bomb in the Kitchen of your Mom' by ‘The AQ Chef' they were greeted with garbled computer code. The code, which had been inserted into the original magazine by the British intelligence hackers, was actually a web page of recipes for ‘The Best Cupcakes in America' published by the Ellen DeGeneres chat show,” The Daily Telegraph reported.

Declaring that “the little cupcake is big again,” the new webpage offered recipe for the Mojito Cupcake “made of white rum cake and draped in vanilla buttercream,” and the Rocky Road Cupcake describing them as “satisfying” and reviving “memories of childhood.”

The original page had instructions for making a lethal pipe bomb using sugar, match heads and a miniature lightbulb attached to a timer.

Articles removed

The hackers also removed articles by Osama bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri and a piece called “What to expect in Jihad,” said the newspaper.

When the magazine, said to be produced by the radical Yemeni preacher Anwar al-Awlaki and his associates, was launched, U.S. government officials said: “The packaging of this magazine may be slick, but the contents are as vile as the authors.”

British security sources were reported as saying that intelligence agencies would continue to target terrorists' online outlets.

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Skype, the free Internet calling service, crashed last week and would not allow certain users to make calls or even log into their accounts.

Enterprise managers may have questions about hosted services in the wake of Skype's problems, and they need to think about whether to use consumer services for business tasks.

Users of both the free Skype service and the company's paid offerings were affected by the outage, which poses a challenge for Microsoft.

Skype representatives acknowledged the problem with a May 26 post on the Skype Twitter feed. "Some of you may have problems signing in to Skype and making calls. We're investigating and hope to have more details to share soon," the company wrote.

Service was restored rather quickly and the problem was attributed to a software client glitch. A Skype blog post provided instructions to resolve the problem just a few hours after the problem was reported. However, Skype's relatively quick resolution to the problem did not assuage all customers, especially those who use Skype's paid services for VoIP and video conferencing.

"I travel frequently and have come to rely on Skype to stay in contact with clients, business associates, and many others while on the road," said Ted Hunter, CEO of Champion Networks, a Portland, Maine-based technology consulting firm. "Even an outage of just a few hours can be unacceptable, especially if I have conferences scheduled during that period of time."



Skype's outage comes just a couple weeks after the company made headlines by being the target of an $8.5 billion acquisition bid by Microsoft. Once the deal closes later this year, Skype will become its own division at Microsoft under the direction of its CEO Tony Bates. Microsoft plans to integrate Skype into its Kinect motion-gaming peripheral, Windows Phone 7, and other platforms.

There was no word from Skype on how many users experienced the problem, but the company said it was likely a "small number."

Nevertheless, a failure such as Skype's could have a lasting impact on the adoption of hosted services. "As we create more and more reliance on cloud-based applications, storage, and overall basic business functions," said Darrel Bowman, CEO of mynetworkcompany.com, an IT services company, "we as IT service providers need to vet our cloud partners more thoroughly to ensure they actually have the redundancy we need and expect if their cloud offering is going to be successful for us and our clients in the long-term."

Bowman is echoing a key point that many will agree with--for a hosted service to be successful, it has to be reliable, especially as far as business use is concerned. Reliability is something Microsoft will need to be sure to provide, if the company hopes to bring Skype under its bandoleer of business services.

The repercussions of the failure go a little deeper for Microsoft, which is trying to promote its Lync platform as a next-generation unified communications platform. With Lync, Microsoft aims to incorporate several communications platforms into a unified offering, combining email, VoIP, video conferencing, POTs, IM, and other technologies into a singularly managed entity. Arguably, Skype would become an ingredient of Lync.

However, the Skype outage has created some doubts about its viability for business use, as well as a component of Lync. Evan Leonard, president of Chips Technology Group, a Microsoft Lync Partner, said via email "The problems over at Skype continues to show it is a consumer-based solution, where outages are more acceptable than a business-class solution. Lync, on the other hand, is built for business and can be deployed in a hosted and client location configuration, with failover capabilities to ensure connectivity. I would recommend that businesses chose a business-class solution and not rely on Skype for any critical business functions."

Bowman said Microsoft needs to take some steps to turn Skype into a business service. "For Microsoft to successfully integrate Skype into its business offerings, the company will have put in place some sort of guarantees that reliability is part of the equation, giving users the five 9s of up time that has come to be expected with today's business-level products," he said.

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The second year of the Cyber Security Challenge has been launched, appealing to computer hackers to put their skills to good use and protect the UK's networks.

The second year of the Cyber Security Challenge has been launched, appealing to computer hackers to put their skills to good use and protect the UK's networks. 

A series of online games and competitions putting candidates to the test will run over 12 months and people up for the challenge can now register.

Three skills sets will be tested in secure network design, informed defence and investigating cyber crime.

Designed to inspire enthusiastic people with IT skills to consider a career in the cyber security industry, the competition will help spot future talent.

Winners will be offered training opportunities to equip them with skills in cyber security, as well as cash to fund training courses.

Last year's competition was won by Dan Summers, a postman from Wakefield, who was given £6,000 worth of career rewards.

The event was hugely successful and attracted more entrants than the organisers expected, with over 4,000 amateur hackers taking part.

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