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Privacy

Submission + - Mixed news on Wiretapping from 9th Circuit USCoA

Submitted by abb3w
abb3w writes: The bad news: the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has ruled that the Al-Haramain lawyers may not submit into evidence their recollections of the top secret document handed to them detailing the warrantless electronic scrutiny they received. "Once properly invoked and judicially blessed, the state secrets privilege is not a half-way proposition." The good news: they have declined to answer and directed the lower court to consider whether "FISA preempts the common law state secrets privilege" with respect to the underlying nature of the program itself... which also keeps alive hopes for the EFF and ACLU to make those responsible answer for their actions.

Coverage at CNET, the NYTimes, and elsewhere; PDF of ruling here.
Math

Submission + - Open Source Mathematical Software

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The American Mathematical society has an opinion piece about open source software vs propietary software used in mathematics. From the article : "Increasingly, proprietary software and the algorithms used are an essential part of mathematical proofs. To quote J. Neubüser, 'with this situation two of the most basic rules of conduct in mathematics are violated: In mathematics information is passed on free of charge and everything is laid open for checking.'"
Music

Submission + - Universal Offers Classical, Jazz Catalog DRM-Free (gramophone.co.uk) 3

Submitted by Mode_Locrian
Mode_Locrian writes: Gramophone Magazine reports that Universal Classics and Jazz will be making its entire catalogue available for sale in DRM-free form. While Universal stresses that this will be a trial run, it certainly looks like a step in the right direction. Now, if only they'd offer downloads in formats other than mp3...
Privacy

Submission + - LAPD Plans to "Map" Muslims

Submitted by eggoeater
eggoeater writes: AP and others are reporting about the backlash to a plan by the LAPD's counterterrorism bureau to "map" Muslims in and around LA.
From the article:

The LAPD's counterterrorism bureau plans to identify Muslim enclaves in order to determine which might be likely to become isolated and susceptible to "violent, ideologically based extremism," said Deputy Chief Michael P. Downing on Thursday.
"We want to know where the Pakistanis, Iranians and Chechens are so we can reach out to those communities," said Downing, who heads the counterterrorism bureau.
Understandably, the ACLU and many Muslim organizations are upset over this, but amazingly one organization, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, has offered to work with the LAPD on the project. I'm sure the federal government wouldn't dream of using this data in conjunction with other projects to track, er, I mean "map" Muslims.
Moon

Submission + - Japanese Lunar Probe Returns First HDTV Video (www.jaxa.jp) 3

Submitted by
Riding with Robots
Riding with Robots writes: "The Kaguya probe, now in lunar orbit, has sent down the first footage of the moon's surface from its onboard high-definition TV camera. The Kaguya mission, which consists of a main orbiter and two smaller satellites in a 100-km-high, polar orbit, is slated to officialy begin its science phase in December."
Privacy

Submission + - Scary New Book on Privacy (gwu.edu)

Submitted by
pasquafa
pasquafa writes: "Dan Solove earlier showed us why "I've Got Nothing to Hide" is a foolish reason to brush off privacy concerns. Now his book The Future of Reputation shows us that we've all got a lot to fear from new surveillance technologies. In past articles, Solove's done a great job advocating for individual rights against big data aggregators like Choicepoint, banks, and the government. His latest book breaks new ground because it focuses on a harder issue: how to deal with Web 2.0's swarm of privacy-invading individuals. When it comes to privacy, we may well be our own worst enemies. Against the tide of knee-jerk libertarianism, Solove demonstrates that there are some baseline norms that should govern the spread of personally identifiable information, gossip, and rumors. He even offers hope that the blogosphere can become a more fair, decent, and perhaps even public-minded place."
Operating Systems

Submission + - Final word on Linux improvements to OpenBSD's ar5k

Submitted by An anonymous reader
Communications

Submission + - St. Paul considers fiber optic network (twincities.com)

Submitted by
theorem4
theorem4 writes: "St. Paul city council is considering the idea to build a fiber optic network. While Minneapolis already has Wi-Fi, a fiber optic network would "turn St. Paul into America's most connected city." The two broadband providers, Qwest and Comcast, oppose the plan, using the $200 million price tag as their argument. "In general, we don't think it is appropriate for the government to use taxpayer dollars to offer or subsidize a service in competition with private-sector alternatives, and high-speed Internet service is a particularly competitive and robust market in most areas," Comcast spokeswoman Mary Beth Schubert said."
Databases

Submission + - Advanced PDF management?

Submitted by chrysrobyn
chrysrobyn writes: I find myself in the situation where I must store hundreds or possibly thousands of pieces of paper for later review and classification. I can't spend the time now to properly organize them (that definition may even change later anyway), or even seperate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. I would like to feed it all to a sheet feeding scanner (I see them in Fry's for a few hundred dollars; some even come with free laser scanners), dump to PDF, then be able to reorder pages, drag pages to new PDF files, trash individual pages, etc. Duplicating a page would be a bonus. PDF is appealing because of the storage of the original sheet plus the OCR is generally good enough for searching.

Long story: My father in law passed away a few years ago, and he was the kind of guy who did everything on his own, at his own pace, and to nobody else's rules. Since his passing, my wife and I have wasted hundreds of hours (maybe more), trying to clean up and move on. Lawyers and a CPA have been involved, and without getting into the really long version, there is a whole lot we should really keep for our own purposes in the future (digital copies are okay, originals can be properly disposed of). Papers the professionals didn't require are vastly disorganized, occasionally sorted by year.
I don't do windows. Mac is preferred, but I personally have more experience with Linux. I've looked at DEVONthink, but it doesn't have the ability to trade pages between PDFs. I like Yep's tag feature, and can instantly come up with a dozen uses for that, but again, I can't organize an individual page somewhere. Adobe itself seems very intent on individual documents, not assisting with a database of them, or organizing between them.
Has the Slashdot audience seen anything like this?
Space

Submission + - French Threat to ID Secret US Satellites (beskerming.com)

Submitted by
SkiifGeek
SkiifGeek writes: "Space.com has reported that the French have identified numerous objects in orbit that do not appear in the ephemeris data reported by the US Space Surveillance Network. Since the US has claimed that if it doesn't appear in the ephemeris data, then it doesn't exist, and the French claim that at least some of the objects have solar arrays, it seems that the French have found secret US satellites.

While the French don't plan to release the information publicly, they are planning to use it as leverage to get the US to suppress reporting of sensitive French satellites in their published ephemeris.

The Graves surveillance radar (the French system) and a comparable German system may form the basis of a pan-European Space Surveillance network — another system that the Europeans don't want to rely on the US for."
Education

Submission + - Alex The Grey Parrot, Colleague of Irene Pepperber (scienceblogs.com)

Submitted by
grrlscientist
grrlscientist writes: "Yesterday, I received the devastating news that Alex the African Grey parrot, who was both a study subject and colleague to Irene Pepperberg, died unexpectedly at 31 years of age.

From the Story: Even though Alex was a research animal, he was much more than that. This species of parrot generally lives to be 50-60 years old, so Alex was only middle-aged when he died. According to some reports I have read, it is possible that Alex might have succumbed to Aspergillosis, a fungal infection of the lungs that he has battled in the past. However, the cause of death will not be known until after a necropsy has been completed tomorrow. A necropsy is an autopsy that is performed on an animal. Alex's veterinarian is returning from vacation to personally conduct this necrospy."
Security

Submission + - Terrorist websites down (cnn.com)

Submitted by
sufijazz
sufijazz writes: "CNN's Kelli Arena reports that "all of the sites that we usually turn to for videos like this are down — they've been down all day." She goes on to say "...who's doing that is a matter of much speculation...some experts thought that maybe it was the government because they knew that the tape was coming and so they interfered and hacked into those sites and put them down.""

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