54846363
submission
vikingpower writes:
Isabel Allende's The House of The Spirits. Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man.
What do all these titles have in common with each other ? Exactly, they are banned somewhere, on some school, in the USA. . Yes, in 2013. A project named The Kids' Right to Read ( by the National Coalition Against Censorship ) investigated three times the average number of incidents, adding to an overall rise in cases for the entire year, according to KRRP coordinator Acacia O'Connor. To date, KRRP has confronted 49 incidents in 29 states this year, a 53% increase in activity from 2012. During the second half of 2013, the project battled 31 new incidents, compared to only 14 in the same period last year.
"It has been a sprint since the beginning of the school year," O'Connor said. "We would settle one issue and wake up the next morning to find out another book was on the chopping block."
The NCAC also offers a Book Censorship Toolkit on its website. If such a toolkit is needed at all, does this indicate that intellectual freedom and free speech are ( slowly ) eroding in the USA ?
54448817
submission
vikingpower writes:
But of course: Visual J++! And of course: "When you have finished modifying and debugging your application, you can http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa265470(v=vs.60).aspx it to into an .exe or .cab file and deploy it to the Web." [ literal text, the link appears exactly as it appears on the MSDN site ]
How could we ever forget this ? And how can this still be online ?
53673589
submission
vikingpower writes:
In the ever-longer wake of the NSA scandal, much-respected Dutch newspaper NRC today reveals, in English, as mandated by the gravity of the occasion, that the Dutch secret service, the AIVD, hacks internet forums. And yes, that is gross misconduct against Dutch law. The service, whose headquarters are in Zoetermeer, did not yet comment upon the divulgation of the document from Edward Snowden's collection. Incensed Dutch parliamentaries are calling for an enquiry.
53403515
submission
vikingpower writes:
The Justice Department has all but concluded it will not bring charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing classified documents because government lawyers said they could not do so without also prosecuting U.S. news organizations and journalists, according to U.S. officials. Read the rest of the article in today's online edition of the WP.
50250581
submission
vikingpower writes:
Robotics engineer Taylor Alexander needed to lift a nuclear cooling tower off its foundation using 19 high-strength steel cables, and the Android app that was supposed to accomplish it, for which he’d just paid a developer $20,000, was essentially worthless. Undaunted and on deadline—the tower needed a new foundation, and delays meant millions of dollars in losses—he re-wrote the app himself. That’s when he discovered just how hard it is to connect to sensors via the standard long-distance industrial wireless protocol, known as Zigbee.
It took him months of hacking just to create a system that could send him a single number—which represented the strain on each of the cables—from the sensors he was using. Surely, he thought, there must be a better way. And that’s when he realized that the solution to his problem would also unlock the potential of what’s known as the “internet of things” (the idea that every object we own, no matter how mundane, is connected to the internet and can be monitored and manipulated via the internet, whether it’s a toaster, a light bulb or your car).
The result is an in-the-works project called Flutter.
49736107
submission
vikingpower writes:
Pamela Jones tells us Groklaw is going down. Forever."The owner of Lavabit tells us that he's stopped using email and if we knew what he knew, we'd stop too.
There is no way to do Groklaw without email. Therein lies the conundrum. ( ... ) I can't continue. There is now no shield from forced exposure. ( ... ) So this is the last Groklaw article. I won't turn on comments."
49588305
submission
vikingpower writes:
Here is a full executive summary of a classified internal NSA report on breaches of NSA privacy rules and legal restrictions.The report covers the period from January through March 2012 and includes comparative data for the full preceding year. Its author is director of oversight and compliance for the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, but the scope of the report is narrower. Incidents are counted only if they took place within “NSA-Washington,” a term encompassing the Ft. Meade headquarters and nearby facilities. The NSA declined to provide comparable figures for its operations as a whole. A senior intelligence official said only that if all offices and directorates were included, the number of violations would “not double.” A main article in today's Washington Post covers the scoop. US District Judge Reggie B. Walton, leader of the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and interviewed in a related article, says " ( ... ) the court lacks the tools to independently verify how often the government’s surveillance breaks the court’s rules that aim to protect Americans’ privacy. Without taking drastic steps, it also cannot check the veracity of the government’s assertions that the violations its staff members report are unintentional mistakes ( ... ) "
49505781
submission
vikingpower writes:
Fairfax Financial Holdings, Ltd. may be considering a complete take-over of Blackberry, says the Globe and Mail in a recent article. As soon as the article appeared online, Blackberry stock climbed a rough 12%.
49455037
submission
vikingpower writes:
Today, Blackberry ( fomerly Research In Motion or RIM ) announced, in corporate-speak, basically that the company is for sale. In 5 years time, Blackberry stock market capitalisation plunged from $ 84 billion to less than $ 5 billion. The fact that Blackberry is basically going up for sale is further supported by unconfirmed rumours that Prem Watsa, who is on majority stock holder Fairfax Financial's board of directors, is stepping down from the Blackberry board.
49266599
submission
vikingpower writes:
Today, at 14h Western European Time, Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University ( the Netherlands ) will present a world first: he will cook and serve a burger made from Cultured Beef in front of an invited audience in London. The event will include a brief explanation of the science behind the burger. You can witch the event live, online. The project's fact sheet is to be found here.
49226721
submission
vikingpower writes:
Randall Munroe, the comic author best known as the author of the xkcd webcomic, reveals the secret backstory of his epic, 3099-panel "Time" comic in an interesting interview with Wired.
The comic can be seen as an animation on youtube. There is also a complete click-through version available on geekwagon, of this comic that inspired a dedicated wiki and has its own glossary.
49147067
submission
vikingpower writes:
There is new, quite hard material published by The Guardian on XKeyscore, a program permitting NSA analists to search pretty much everything a user does, types, searches or sends online. The Guardian has a slide show that is actually NSA training material for the XKeyscore program. It is now clear that NSA analysts require no prior authorization for searches. The article is partially based upon a further interview with Edward Snowden. Enjoy.
48785731
submission
vikingpower writes:
A Dutch newspaper has a ( Dutch-only, alas ) digital version of the letter Mr. Opstelten, Secretary of Justice and Security, sent to Dutch Parliament, in which he quietly admits to 56825 phone taps ( a 3% rise in one year ) and to 16676 internet taps in 2012, a 400% rise, or a fivefold increase, in one year. An older report alreay designed the Netherlands as one of the biggest wiretappers in the western world. Slate also knew, back in 2006, that Europeans actually love wiretapping and internet tapping. In the Netherlands, a country with a population of only 16 million, the practice has risen to the level of a staggering 1 in 1000 phones being tapped.
48758453
submission
vikingpower writes:
How a phone manufacturer making a somewhat successful come-back can shoot itself in the foot: Marc "van Hauser" Heuse, who works for German technology magazine Heise, has discovered that immediately after setting up an email account on Blackberry 10 OS, full credentials for that account are sent to Research In Motion, the Canadian Blackberry manufacturer. Shortly after performing the set-up, the first successful connections from a server located within the RIM domain appear in the mail server's logs. ( most of the story in english, some comments in German ). At least according to German law, this is completely illegal, as the phone's user does not get a single indication or notice of what is being done.
48397249
submission
vikingpower writes:
Anna Chapman, well-known for her having been arrested in New York for spying activities asked Edward Snowden to marry her, via Twitter. . Basically, Edward Snowden now has only two options left: to marry Anna, or to try and get to Venezuela. The latter is possibly his last option for obtaining political asylum anywhere in the world, according to Alexey Pushkov, a member of the Russian Parliament regularly taking the role of more or less official Kremlin speaker.
