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THE US has made a muppet of its hi-tech border defences along the Arizonian border with Mexico.

Border patrols in Tucson were meant to be patched into a sci-fi panoply of surveillance tools from their car-mounted laptop computers.

Instead, Mexican bandits, cotton picking job hopefuls, fugitive axe murderers and kiddy fiddlers were left free to fiesta! under the eye of an impotent big brother.

Battleplans are meant to be displayed on car mounted laptops in border patrol cars. The information is meant also to be linked with police and other government computer systems. Flying robot drones are to add to the mix.

But border patrollers didn't even have their laptops secured properly. So when they bounced over the rugged Arizona terrain in pursuit of banditos, the computers flapped about and got broken.

The radars didn't work in the rain. The cameras were meant to pick out an economic refugee at 10km, but could only stretch to half of that. Residents along the border have been reluctant to give up their private land for the sake of the defences.

The US Department of Homeland Security has been forced to rethink its plans for an omniscient border patrol and contractor Boeing, which worked on the now defunct pilot, has been commissioned to draw up another set of blue prints for the Imperial defences.

Boeing managed in two years to implement a series of automated watch towers with cameras, radar, and other unspecified sensor equipment, but the system was useless because none of the components could be connected, the US Government Accountability Office, Congress's watchdog, reported with a more diplomatic use of language.

The project was rushed, the costs had been under-estimated and the users hadn't been consulted. The command centre system, which was mean to give border patrollers a realtime view of the landscape and anything that moved in it, wasn't any good.

Officials of the Secure Border Initiative, as the programme is ironically known, said that the Boeing pilot, Project-28, was only a test run anyway. The GAO said it would be delayed and cost more than the DHS had specified.

Miscreants have created a strain of malware capable of removing rootkits from compromised PCs, only to install almost undetectable backdoor code of its own.

The Pandex Trojan stops previously installed rootkits from working by removing their hooks into system calls. Pandex then installs its own rootkit component, detected by Trend Micro as Pushu-AC.

Rootkits are a type of malware that hide their presence on infected PCs, making them more dangerous than typical viruses. By operating below the level of traditional malware scanning tools, rootkits are able to carry out covert functions, for example keystroke-logging, without detection.

Virus writers have competed for control of vulnerable PCs several times in the past. For example, in 2005 separate groups of hackers released a barrage of worms in a battle to seize control of Windows PCs vulnerable to the then infamous Windows Plug-and-Play (PnP) vulnerability.

The Bozori worm was programmed to remove infections by earlier versions of the Zotob worm and other malware, so it could take control of a compromised computer for itself. A family of IRC bots that exploit the same Microsoft Plug and Play vulnerability likewise tried to remove competing PnP bots.

In early 2004, variants of the Netsky worm designed to remove Bagle and MyDoom infections from compromised PCs were released into the wild amid an ongoing war of words between rival VXers.

More recently, a turf war erupted between the creators of the Storm worm and rival gangs.

The Pandex Trojan updates this dishonourable tradition with code that replaces stealthier malware infections.