Chinese police have shut down what they called the country’s biggest hacker training Web site and arrested three people linked to the site, local media said Saturday.

Police in the central province of Hubei began probing Black Hawk Safety Net after finding some of its members used malicious programs provided by the site to commit cybercrimes, according to newspapers including the People’s Daily, the official paper of the Communist Party.

The three arrests are the first made under revisions to China’s criminal law last year that banned the design and distribution of hacking tools, the reports said. Those revisions, which marked China’s first law protecting the public from cyber data theft, were one of several measures China unveiled against cybercrime in the last year, a time when reports of arrests for crimes like malware attacks have also become more common in the country.

Black Hawk Safety Net and similar increasingly popular Web sites in China offer chat forums and hacking training tools like videos to members, some of whom pay fees for extra services. Black Hawk collected 7 million yuan (US$1 million) in user fees paid by a portion of its 180,000 members, the reports said. The Web site did not return a call requesting comment.

Google threw global attention on hacking in China last month, when it cited cyberattacks from China as one reason it may stop censoring search results on its China-based search engine, even if that means leaving the country altogether. China has denied any government role in the attacks and said the country’s laws ban hacking crimes.

The crew aboard space shuttle Endeavour includes an accomplished musician whose latest exploits are with the cello and steel guitar, an engineer who helped launch shuttles and a second-generation space program worker.

A brief look at the five men and one woman en route to the International Space Station:

Commander George Zamka is personally delivering some special rocks to the International Space Station: four chips from the moon and a stone from the top of Mount Everest.

The fragments of moon rock were gathered by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in 1969, and carried up Mount Everest by a former shuttle astronaut last spring. Zamka accepted the rocks last month and said he would make sure they got into the new space station compartments flying up on Endeavour. They will serve, he said, “as a reminder to all of the astronauts who are up there, what human beings can do and what our challenges are.”

This is Zamka’s second spaceflight in his 12 years as an astronaut.

The 47-year-old Marine colonel grew up in New York, Rochester Hills, Mich., and Medellin, Colombia, his mother’s hometown. He recalls watching planes fly over his Medellin school on final approach to the airport. It was “a great enticement” for pursuing an aviation career. His Colombian pilot uncle also was an influence.

Zamka went on to become a fighter pilot. He and wife Elisa have a 15-year-old girl and 8-year-old boy.

Pilot Terry Virts’ childhood revolved around the space program.

He grew up in Columbia, Md., not far from Goddard Space Flight Center, where his parents worked. Mom was a secretary, and dad was a technician for NASA’s Landsat satellites.

Virts, 42, said his first book as a child was about the Apollo moon landings and his bedroom was adorned with rocket and airplane posters. He’d occasionally accompany his father to the satellite control room at Goddard in the 1970s.