Hacker holiday

London, April 25 (Reuters): Attacks on company and government Internet sites spike during school holidays when the main culprits ? schoolboys ? spend time in front of their computers rather than in the classroom.

There were almost 400,000 attacks on websites around the world last year, a surge of 36 per cent from 2003, said a report issued by Internet watchdog agency Zone-H to coincide with a London information security exhibition.

?A lot of 15- and 16-year-old guys are smart enough to have strong political opinions,? Roberto Preatoni, Zone-H founder, said today.

The main targets are US military websites, which are attacked by anti-Iraq war protesters, and large companies and governments, which attract anti-globalisation protesters.

Costly kiss

Stockholm (Reuters): A Swedish lesbian couple who were thrown out of a Stockholm restaurant in 2003 for kissing won an appeal on Monday against an earlier court ruling that cleared the restaurant owner of sexual discrimination. The court in Stockholm ordered restaurant owner Aziz Cakir to pay $7,100 in damages. Cakir asked Anna Fernstrom and Susanne Gustafsson to leave his restaurant after they kissed and said did not let anyone engage in such behaviour on his premises.