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Censorship

Submission + - Censordyne - net censoring gets toothpaste (smh.com.au)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Toothpaste is the latest weapon mobilised to fight against the Australian Federal Government's plan to censor the internet.

Online activist group GetUp, which has already run ads slamming the internet filtering policy, today launched a new campaign — Censordyne — a parody ad playing on the Sensodyne brand of toothpaste.

Censordyne promises to offer "unproven, ineffective relief from internet nasties", protection "against fast internet" and a "fresh multimillion-dollar flavour". There is also a video on YouTube that the government attempted to have taken down.
Software

Submission + - MyCyberTwin's AI Technology Put to the Test (davidchess.com) 2

Submitted by paleshadows
paleshadows writes: In response to slashdot's report from yesterday regarding the recent AI achievements of MyCyberTwin dot com, long-time blogger David Chase of IBM-research decided to put the technology to the test. This rather amusing blog post attempts to verify the following not-less-than-amazing proclamations listed in the MyCyberTwin website:

  • "Make software clones of your staff. Free the humans for valuable work.
  • MyCyberTwin staff increase customer satisfaction, look after your customers, and improve sales.
  • CyberTwin staff are intelligent and always friendly. Every aspect of the conversations with your clients can be analyzed. You will have complete control over what they say, and you can train them to meet specific business objectives.
  • Best of all, CyberTwins are slave labour. They can talk to thousands of clients a second, 24 hours a day. They perform better than humans, for a much lower cost. They can live on your website in a chat environment, or talk out loud.
  • Up until now, clients were only able to talk to you by:
    1. Talking to a real human staff member, on the phone, in a store, or in live chat on your website.
    2. Self service. The client wandering around a website by themselves, or crawling through a rigid IVR system, trying to figure out what they want.

    CyberTwin virtual staff offer the quality of live human support, at a fraction of the cost."

After conversing with some clones, Chess concludes that while all of the above

"sounds pretty revolutionary, there's one problem, sadly, and that is that they are lying. And I don't mean "exaggerating a bit in the way that press releases and website often do", I mean "giving false information intentionally; conveying a false image or impression", to paraphrase Wiktionary."
Enlightenment

Submission + - 123456789 happens today 1

Submitted by
mcgrew
mcgrew writes: "The Chicago Tribune is pointing out that shortly after noon today, the time and date will be 12:34:56 7/8/9. The Trib points out that this happens only once or twice per century, although it actually happens twice on the day it happens in.

serious Cubs fans know the first night game at Wrigley Field was played on 8/8/88 — which just happens to be four sideways infinity symbols.

I imagine you can make any day "special" like this if you try hard enough."

Censorship

Submission + - The "Amazon Rank" Google-Bombing Campaign (smartbitchestrashybooks.com)

Submitted by paleshadows
paleshadows writes: The girls that run the smartbitchestrashybooks blog were rather enraged by Amazon's new policy to cull "adult" books from their search system. They have therefore decided to retaliate by introducing the term "Amazon Rank" to the lexicon (as underscoring Amazon's shortminded censorship and inconsistent policing of what ought to be accessible to the book-buying public), and by requesting their readers to create a link to http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/amazonrank with "Amazon Rank" as the anchor text, with the explicit goal of turning their definition of the term to be the top most ranking in search engines. (A practice known as Google bombing.) Remarkably, the campaign seems to indeed be successful: the new definition is currently number one in google results.

Example of usage: "I tried to do a report on Lady Chatterly's Lover for English Lit, but my teacher amazon ranked me and I got an F on grounds that it was obscene."

Alternate usage: "My girlfriend wanted to preserve her virginity, and I was happy to respect that, then she amazon ranked and decided anal sex was okay"
Google

Submission + - The Environmental Impact of Google Searches (timesonline.co.uk)

Submitted by paleshadows
paleshadows writes: The timesonline reports that researchers claim that each query submitted to Google has a quantifiable impact. Specifically, two queries performed through a desktop computer generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a cup of tea. From the article: "While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 [whereas] boiling a kettle generates about 15g [...] Google is secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. It also refuses to divulge the locations of its data centers. However, with more than 200m Internet searches estimated daily, the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the Internet is provoking concern. A recent report [argues that] the global IT industry generate[s] as much greenhouse gas as the world's airlines — about 2% of global CO2 emissions." The article also points to the www.co2stats.com website, which was set up by said researchers in an effort to help individuals and organizations in making their website green, energy-efficient, and carbon neutral.
Security

Researchers Hack Intel's VPro 105

Posted by kdawson from the joy-of-breaking-the-unbreakable dept.
snydeq writes "Security researchers from Invisible Things Lab have created software that can 'compromise the integrity' of software loaded using Intel's vPro Trusted Execution Technology, which is supposed to help protect software from being seen or tampered with by other programs on the machine. The researchers say they have created a two-stage attack, with the first stage exploiting a bug in Intel's system software. The second stage relies on a design flaw in the TXT technology itself (PDF). The researchers plan to give more details on their work at the Black Hat DC security conference next month."
Media

Submission + - Dr. Dobb's Journal going web-only (wordpress.com)

Submitted by paleshadows
paleshadows writes: The first issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal (DDJ) was published in January 1976. A few days ago, Herb Sutter (the chair of the ISO C++ committee and a long-time DDJ columnist) announced through his latest blog post that, "as of January 2009, Dr. Dobb's Journal is permanently suspending print publication and going web-only." This follows an earlier announcement that PC magazine is to become digital-only too. (As of February 2009.) To those of us who enjoy reading such stuff away from the computer these are bad news, as there seems to be no other major technical programmer's magazine left standing.

Comment why not use a standard C library function instead? (Score 1) 465

by paleshadows (#26324919) Attached to: The Exact Cause of the Zune Meltdown
There's a standard library function that performs the required functionality, see: http://linux.die.net/man/3/localtime . I think there's only one (good) excuse to do time-related calculations directly "by hand" rather than through a standard library function: It is only justified if the standard library is unavailable. But since this library, as its name suggests, is in fact _standard_ (in Windows and Unix variants alike), such situations are not that frequent...
Government

Linux As a Model For a New Government? 509

Posted by Soulskill from the i'm-X,-and-i-release-this-message-under-the-GPL dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The hedge fund investor who prided himself on achieving 1000% returns, Andrew Lahde, wrote a goodbye letter to mark his departure from the financial world. In it, he suggests people think about building a new government model, and his suggestion is to have someone like George Soros fund a new government that brings together the best and brightest minds in a manner where they're not tempted by bribery. In doing so, he refers to how Linux grows and competes with Microsoft. An open source government. How would such a system work, and could it succeed? How long before it became corrupt? Would it need a benevolent dictator (Linus vs. Soros)?"
Privacy

Submission + - Inferring personality from email addresses (pressebox.de)

Submitted by paleshadows
paleshadows writes: Three researchers from the University of Leipzig published an interesting paper titled "How extraverted is honey.bunny77@hotmail.de? Inferring personality from e-mail addresses" [pdf]. From the abstract:

"Email addresses represent the thinnest slice of information that people receive from one another. Using 599 e-mail addresses of young adults, their self-reported personality scores and the personality judgments of 100 independent observers, it was shown that personality impressions based solely on e-mail addresses were consensually shared by observers. Moreover, these impressions contained some degree of validity. This was true for neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and narcissism but not for extraversion."

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