the_leander writes "Prime Minister Gordon Brown has narrowly won a House of Commons vote on extending the maximum time police can hold terror suspects to 42 days. There is talk of compensation packages available for the falsely accused. The chances of you getting that money however are slim to none, lets not forget, this is the same country that charges prisoners who have been falsely accused for bed and boarding costs."

vsync64 writes "Last night, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) spent 4 hours reading into the Congressional Record 35 articles of impeachment against George W. Bush. Interestingly, those articles (63-page PDF via Coral CDN) include not just complaints about signing statements and the war in Iraq, but also charges that the President "Sp[ied] on American Citizens, Without a Court-Ordered Warrant, in Violation of the Law and the Fourth Amendment,' 'Direct[ed] Telecommunications Companies to Create an Illegal and Unconstitutional Database of the Private Telephone Numbers and Emails of American Citizens,' and 'Tamper[ed] with Free and Fair Elections.' These are issues near and dear to the hearts of many here, so it's worth discussing. What little mainstream media coverage there is tends to be brief (USA Today, CBS News, UPI, AP, Reuters)." The (Democratic) House leadership has said that the idea of impeachment is "off the table." The Judiciary Committee has not acted on articles of impeachment against Vice President Cheney introduced by Kucinich a year ago.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The Last H.O.P.E. ('Hackers on Planet Earth') Conference is set for July 18-20, 2008, at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City. The organizers have announced their supplemental speaker list, adding on to the initial list. Topics will include 'Crafting a Security-Enhanced Wikipedia,' 'VoIP (in)security: Italians Do It Better,' 'AntiSocial Networking: Vulnerabilities in Social Nets,' 'SWF and the Malware Tragedy,' 'Simulating the Universe on Supercomputers,' and my personal favorite, 'RIAA Litigations: How the Tech Community Can Help.'"

An anonymous reader writes "I attend a state university where a new building has recently been put in, and a new budget put in place. They have decided to upgrade all the computer systems involved in the department, with a few slight exceptions. From my limited understanding, State policy is that we cannot just let things go, they have to be sent back to the state capital in order to take them off the books. Then they put them in the dumpster. I feel that this is a huge waste of useful machines (some are merely two years old), but I know not how to change this. Any suggestions, or does anyone know where Illinois dumps used tech?"

Roland Piquepaille writes "The California Energy Commission is funding a research effort named CAPPS, short for California AUAV Air Pollution Profiling Study. CAPPS will use autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (AUAVs) to gather meteorological data as the aircraft fly through clouds over Southern California. The goal is to study smog and its consequences as well as better understand the sources of air pollution. The first flights started in April 2008 and data collection will continue until January 2009. But read more for additional references and photos of these autonomous unmanned aircraft."

Da Massive writes "Mark Dowd's paper "Application-Specific Attacks: Leveraging the ActionScript Virtual Machine" has alarmed researchers. It points out techniques that promise to open up a class of exploits and vulnerability research previously thought to be prohibitively difficult. Already, the small but growing group of Information Security experts who have had the chance to read and digest the contents of the paper are expressing an excited concern depending on how they are interpreting it. While the Flash vulnerability described in the paper[PDF] has been patched by Adobe, the presentation of a reliable exploit for NULL pointer dereferencing has the researchers who have read the paper fascinated. Thomas Ptacek has an explanation of Dowd's work, and Nathan McFeters at ZDNet is 'stunned by the technical details.'"

Smivs writes "Astronomers from St Andrews University in the UK have discovered a planetary system which looks much like our own. Dr Martin Dominik told BBC news: 'We found a system with two planets that take the roles of Jupiter and Saturn in our Solar System. These two planets have a similar mass ratio and similar orbital radius and a similar orbital period. The newfound planetary system, which orbits the star OGLE-2006-BLG-109L, is more compact than our own and is about five thousand light-years away. The OGLE planets were found using a technique called gravitational micro-lensing, in which light from the faraway planets is bent and magnified by the gravity of a foreground object, in this case a another star.'" Update: 04/08 12:26 GMT by Z : This story is talking about a subject we have already discussed.

LeCaddie writes "Last week German investigators raided 51 exhibitor stands at CeBIT, the German information technology fair in Hanover, looking for goods suspected of infringing patents. Some 183 police, customs officers, and prosecutors raided the fair on Wednesday and carried off 68 boxes of electronic goods and documents including cellphones, navigation devices, digital picture frames, and flat-screen monitors. Of the 51 companies raided, 24 were Chinese. Most of the patents concerned were related to devices with MP3, MP4, and DVB standard functions for digital audio and video, blank CDs, and DVD copiers, police said." In the US there are no criminal penalties associated with patents, and such a raid could not be conducted, especially in the absence of a court ruling of infringement.

Smordnys s'regrepsA writes "Fidel Castro, the leader of the island nation of Cuba has declined the possibility of keeping his seat as President, after the February 24th National Assembly election. "I neither will aspire to nor will I accept — I repeat — I neither will aspire to nor will I accept, the position of president of the council of state and commander in chief," Castro wrote almost 19 months after a severe illness caused him to hand power temporarily to his brother Raul."

Roland Piquepaille writes "Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a computer algorithm based on a mathematical model of the social interactions of swarms which was first described in 1995. Now, researchers in the UK and Jordan have carried this swarm approach to photography to 'intelligently boost contrast and detail in an image without distorting the underlying features.' This looks like a clever concept even if I haven't seen any results. The researchers have developed an iterative process where a swarm of images are created by a computer. These images are 'graded relative to each other, the fittest end up at the front of the swarm until a single individual that is the most effectively enhanced.'"

This week the US Patent and Trademark Office issued a surprisingly (although I guess it shouldn't be) broad patent for a "mobile entertainment and communication device". Upon closer inspection you may notice that it pretty much outlines the ubiquitous smartphone concept. "It's a patent for a mobile phone with removable storage, an internet connection, a camera and the ability to download audio or video files. The patent holding firm who has the rights to this patent wasted no time at all. At 12:01am Tuesday morning, it filed three separate lawsuits against just about everyone you can think of, including Apple, Nokia, RIM, Sprint, ATT, HP, Motorola, Helio, HTC, Sony Ericsson, UTStarcomm, Samsung and a bunch of others. Amusingly, the company actually first filed the lawsuits on Monday, but realized it was jumping the gun and pulled them, only to refile just past the stroke of midnight. "

The Burton Group, an IT research company, published a study urging that enterprise organizations adapt OOXML rather than ODF. Their reasons include things like "ODF is controlled indirectly by Sun," "MS Office is cheaper than OpenOffice.org," and "OOXML improved many problems of DOC." The Burton Group also claims that although ODF is well-designed, OOXML is better suited for the specific needs of enterprise organizations. The study claims to be impartial in that Microsoft didn't pay for it. Ars Technica now has up a pretty thorough debunking of the Burton study. Ars wonders how the Burton authors can so blithely overlook Microsoft's vote-buying in Sweden, while wielding unfounded accusations of chicanery in Sun's direction.

Roland Piquepaille writes "European astronomers have for the first time ever been able to detect and monitor the visible light that is scattered in the atmosphere of an exoplanet. Designated HD 189733b, also known as a 'hot Jupiter,' orbits a star slightly cooler and less massive than the Sun about 60 light-years from Earth. According to a Zurich news release, 'Polarization technique focuses limelight,' the researchers used 'techniques similar to how Polaroid sunglasses filter away reflected sunlight to reduce glare. They also directly traced the orbit of the planet, a feat of visualization not possible using indirect methods.' The team thinks that their findings are opening new opportunities for exploring physical conditions on exoplanets."