In a motion hearing, ConnectU disputed Facebook’s allegations and asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Richard Seeborg to dismiss the countersuit. “Facebook makes untrue assertions,” said ConnectU attorney Scott Mosko, presumably in an attempt to frame the suit as a dissembling one, filed in retaliation over ConnectU’s lawsuit, which accuses Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg of lifting ConnectU’s source code and business plan when he worked for the company as a programmer.

For his part, Zuckerberg has maintained that Facebook’s code was developed independently. And it may well have been. Although perhaps not by Zuckerberg. According to Aaron J. Greenspan, one of Zuckerberg’s Harvard classmates, he (not Zuckerberg) created the college social network that inspired Facebook.

Months before anyone had even heard of Facebook, Greenspan established a similar service that he called houseSYSTEM. Among its features: “Face Book,” an online system for quickly locating other students.

Simple coincidence? Not by a long shot. “Remember the Web site you signed up for at Harvard two days before we met in January 2004 called houseSYSTEM–the one I made with the Universal Face Book that predated your site by four months?” Greenspan wrote in an open letter to Zuckerberg last year. “Well, I’ve relaunched it as CommonRoom, and just like its predecessor, it has all sorts of features that might seem familiar: birthday reminders, an event calendar, RSVPs, how you know someone, photo albums, courses posters. After all, when you saw all of those features in houseSYSTEM three years ago, you called them ‘too useful,’ but I stood by them as valuable. Fortunately, even though I shut down houseSYSTEM, I can still use those same features on Facebook– and I didn’t even have to write any more code!”

Actually, it does get bricked out. Sources at Apple tell Ars Technica that the activation limbo into which unlocked iPhones are sent is the company’s definition of “bricking”: “Current attempts to reactivate across the Web are failing and therefore [a hacked] iPhone cannot be used to do anything–no phone calls, no Safari, no iPod, nothing. An unlocked iPhone that runs firmware update 1.1.1 is unusable no matter what SIM is in it.”

UPDATE:The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) reports that Apple Stores around the country are restoring bricked iPhones. “We’re not sure whether they’re doing a low-level reflash or just swapping units out,” TUAW explains. “We have reports of at least four customers who walked in with iBricks and walked out with iPhones. It is unclear at this time whether these customers unlocked their iPhones or not–we’re also receiving reports of iBricks from people who never unlocked or modded their units.”

Doesn’t seem so ingenious now, though. Not when a “View All Friends” command might reveal People’s Liberation Army operatives. According to senior U.S. officials, the Chinese military hacked into a U.S. Defense Department network in June. The breach to systems serving the office of Defense Secretary Robert Gates forced the Pentagon to take the network offline for more than a week. “The PLA has demonstrated the ability to conduct attacks that disable our system? .?.?.? and the ability in a conflict situation to re-enter and disrupt on a very large scale,” a former official told the Financial Times. Another said there was “no doubt” that China was now monitoring email traffic on unclassified government networks.

Beijing denied the claims, which come as Chinese President Hu Jintao prepares to meet with President George Bush at the APEC summit in Sydney, Australia. “The Chinese government has consistently opposed and vigorously attacked according to the law all Internet-wrecking crimes, including hacking,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu. “Some people are making wild accusations against China … These are totally groundless and also reflect a Cold War mentality.”

Perhaps. But this isn’t the first time the PLA has faced allegations like these. It was only a week or so ago that Beijing was accused of breaking into the German government’s network.