ramsun - Slashdot User

US District Court Says Calculating a Hash Value = Search 623

Posted by timothy on Tuesday October 28, 2008 @11:02AM from the fair-enough dept.

bfwebster writes "Orin Kerr over at The Volokh Conspiracy (a great legal blog, BTW) reports on a US District Court ruling issued just last week which finds that doing hash calculations on a hard drive is a form of search and thus subject to 4th Amendment limitations. In this particular case, the US District Court suppressed evidence of child pornography on a hard drive because proper warrants were not obtained before imaging the hard drive and calculating MD5 hash values for the individual files on the drive, some of which ended up matching known MD5 hash values for known child pornography image and video files. More details at Kerr's posting." Update: 10/28 16:23 GMT by T : Headline updated to reflect that this is a Federal District Court located in Pennsylvania, rather than a court of the Commonwealth itself.

Comment Re:Clock can run in reverse. (Score 1) 696

by ramsun on Monday October 13, 2008 @01:08AM (#25351387) Attached to: National Debt Clock Overflowed, Extended By a Digit

we at one point WHERE paying down the debt.

so WERE exactly do you live?

Mathematicians Solve the Mystery of Traffic Jams 629

Posted by Zonk on Friday December 21, 2007 @01:16PM from the next-they'll-use-geometry-on-the-mystery-of-the-haunted-amusement-park dept.

mlimber writes "Do you ever find yourself in a traffic jam, thinking, 'Man, there must be a bad accident up ahead,' but as you plod along you see no evidence of any crash? Some mathematicians have solved the mystery by developing a mathematical model that shows how one driver hitting the brakes a little too hard can cascade into a backup miles behind. The mathematicians' future research will investigate how automatic braking systems may alleviate the problem."

Heat Wave Shuts Down Alabama Reactor 401

Posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday August 18, 2007 @11:05AM from the weathering-the-heat dept.

mdsolar writes "In a first for the US, one of three nuclear reactors at the Browns Ferry nuclear plant in Alabama has been shut down because the Tennessee River is too hot to provide adequate cooling for the waste heat produced by the reactor. This is happening as the TVA faces its highest demand for power ever, reports the Houston Chronicle. This effect has been seen in Europe in the past, forcing reduced generation, but the US has until now been immune to the problem. The TVA will buy power elsewhere and impose higher rates, blaming reduced river flow as a result of drought."

Submission + - Breastfeed your colleagues, says new fatwa

Submitted by ramsun on Tuesday June 12, 2007 @08:02AM

ramsun writes: A lecturer at the prestigious al-Azhar Islamic University in Cairo, Egypt, has been suspended after suggesting that one way to work around the Islamicist's ban on men and women working together could be to have the women symbolically breastfeed the men, which according to the Hadith, the Prophet Mohammed's sayings, creates a familial relationship. "The Dubai-based channel Al Arabiya quoted him as saying that after five breastfeedings the man and woman could be alone together without violating Islamic law and the woman could remove her headscarf to reveal her hair."

However, the Positive Liberty blog interprets this as Voltairean satire

What do you think? Should women breastfeed their male colleagues?

Self-Healing Plastic Skin 104

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday June 12, 2007 @07:58AM from the polymer-heal-thyself dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Scientists have developed a form of plastic skin that can heal itself when damaged. The material relies on an underlying network of vessels — similar to blood capillaries — that carry a healing agent to areas on the material's surface that sustain damage. Unlike previous self-healing systems that relied on capsules of agent buried in the polymer and which became depleted after one use, the new system can respond to damage at the same point many times over."

OpenBSD 4.1 Released 218

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday May 02, 2007 @03:42AM from the hot-bits dept.

adstro writes to quote from the BSD mailing list: "We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 4.1. This is our 21st release on CD-ROM (and 22nd via FTP). We remain proud of OpenBSD's record of ten years with only two remote holes in the default install. As in our previous releases, 4.1 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system."

Feed AACS Discovers The Streisand Effect: The More You Try To Suppress Something, The (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed on Wednesday May 02, 2007 @03:32AM

If you follow tech related sites, by now you've heard the story that the folks who control AACS, the copy protection used in next generation DVDs, have decided to send DMCA takedown notices to various sites that have posted the 128-bit integer that is needed, along with some software, to decrypt the video content on these new DVDs. This is odd for a few reasons. The key came out many months ago and has been available on the web for quite some time. There are, of course, the basic questions concerning whether or not this key alone really does violate the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA -- but that's a separate issue. What's more intriguing here is trying to understand the thought process behind the decision to send out these takedown notices. As anyone who's been online for more than about two days knows, the more you try to suppress something online, the more attention you're going to call to it. Years back, we joking referred to this as the Streisand Effect -- after an incident where Barbara Streisand tried to remove some photos from the web, making them a lot more popular. The name has stuck, and it still amazes us that anyone doesn't recognize what will happen when they try to make such a move. While the group has forced some sites to pull pages here and there, every page they pull is just increasing the anger from a growing group of folks who are making sure the number shows up in many, many more places -- including directly in a URL. Digg, which was one of the sites accused of taking down pages about this, has been under a massive effort from folks to make sure that every story on the front page somehow points to the key in question (and it's interesting to see the anger of users turned against Digg for taking down some of these stories, even though they're pretty much required to thanks to the DMCA). As happened with DeCSS, it's only a matter of time until someone writes a song incorporating the key as well. Effectively, all that's been done here is to draw much, much more attention to the fact that the encryption on next generation DVDs is incredibly weak -- so that a lot more people now know about it. Most of us honestly couldn't have cared any less about the integer or the inner workings (or non-workings) of the encryption system -- and yet now we know a lot more. That can't be the intended consequence of these notices, but that's what's happened. Nice work, Hollywood.

Slashdot Top Deals