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Security

Submission + - DHS Sends Tourists Home Over Twitter Jokes (itworld.com)

Submitted by
itwbennett
itwbennett writes: "In a classic case of 'we say destroy, you say party hard,' the US Dept. of Homeland Security detained a pair of British twentysomethings for 12 hours and then sent them packing back to the land of the cheeky retort. At issue is a Tweet sent by Leigh Van Bryan about plans to 'destroy America,' starting with LA, which, really, isn't that bad an idea."

Submission + - Feds Shut Down File-Sharing Website Megaupload (go.com)

Submitted by Subratik
Subratik writes: Today, "Federal prosecutors in Virginia have shut down one of the world's largest file-sharing sites, Megaupload.com, and charged its founder and others with violating piracy laws."

The indictment given to Megaupload cites over $500 million in lost revenue from stolen intellectual-property.

Even though SOPA has drawn insurmountable criticism from both citizens and the White House, it would seem as if the US needs less of a reason everyday to not need it passed anyway.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: SOPA/PIPA Educational Material for L (eff.org)

Submitted by
killfixx
killfixx writes: "I would like to put together an educational packet, aimed at non-tech-savvy people, explaining why SOPA/PIPA should be considered an intolerable injustice. As most of you can appreciate, trying to explain this to lay-people is a rather long and painful procedure guaranteed to produce similar results as lecturing your children. I want people to not just listen, but be catalyzed. Does anyone know of a particularly effective video or website that's been helpful to them?"

Submission + - SOPA Protest Pages (theoatmeal.com)

Submitted by RobinEggs
RobinEggs writes: Since Slashdot's editorship see fit to post relentlessly about SOPA, but do not see fit to actually take an editorial stance or participate in the blackout, I thought we should at least get a thread in which to discuss the blackout as it unfolds and share with one another the best blacked-out sites.

My favorite so far is from TheOatmeal; their page has a good, simple explanation of the problem and explains it through their normal medium.

Don't forget that SOPA isn't officially dead until the end of the year, even if Eric Cantor has 'tabled' it for the moment. Write your congresspeople. Be heard. Make sure they never come back to this thing while they work for you.

And while you're writing letters to your congresspeople, write slashdot's editors and ask why they haven't done something about SOPA themselves. They buckled for scientology when that 'church' threatened the existence of slashdot, explaining their motives and urging readers to write their congresspeople; why won't they take the same public stance on something that threatens the entire internet?
Censorship

Submission + - 2 large media companies sending false DMCA claims

Submitted by bs0d3
bs0d3 writes: Today there's two large stories about false DMCA notices sent by large media corporations. One in which Universal tried to censor a megaupload commercial song created by many famous artists including P Diddy, Will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Chris Brown, The Game and Mary J Blige. Universal sent persistant notices to cause the video to be removed by reason of copyright infringement. However these were false notices as megaupload claims that they can prove that they own the copyright to their content. The other story is from a scientific video that used Jamendo audio in the back ground. All the tracks used by the video creator were creative commons licensed and not in violation of any copyright. A complaint made by the Music Publishing Rights Collecting Society has been persistant in removing these videos. After contacting the artist, "Jamendo" ; Jamendo has reiterated that the music is licensed under a creative commons attribution license and has sent a counter take down letter to youtube on behalf of the video creator.
Music

Submission + - Pop artists support Megaupload; Universal censors 1

Submitted by TheSHAD0W
TheSHAD0W writes: Several well-known artists, including P. Diddy, Will.I.Am, Snoop Dogg and Kanye West produced a song in support of the site Megaupload, recently targeted by law enforcement as a "rogue site". The music video was gaining popularity — until Youtube received a takedown notice from Universal Media Group, claiming it violated their copyrights.
Censorship

Submission + - Pirates Praise Draconian Anti Piracy Bill (activepolitic.com)

Submitted by bs0d3
bs0d3 writes: If you tell everyone that they have to survive on rations, like one candy bar a day.. they will complain. If you take away all of their food, and then give them a candy bar, they will be happy. That's exactly what's happened with SOPA. After people protested coica and pipa, SOPA was drafted. SOPA was so infinitely worse, that people would welcome the day when coica returned. That's exactly what happened. Today they've got pirates, freedom of speech advocates, and technology blogs; not only praising a new internet censorship bill, but also taking part in helping to create it. The language of the bill is similar to coica and protectip; bills that previously these groups had protested. But now that things seem to be going even worse, people have forgotten the original objective and are supporting this new process.

Comment Does NOT apply to US Citizens (Score 3, Informative) 676

by adiemus (#28134227) Attached to: Homeland Security To Scan Citizens Exiting US

TFA seems to be wrong about this including US citizens. While I think fingerprinting anyone, citizen or not, coming into the country isn't something we should be doing, and certainly not when exiting, the bit about fingerprinting exiting US citizens is found nowhere other than in the article from IT News Australia. The actual DHS press release is very specific that this is a planned extension to US-VISIT and, as such, only applies to non-US-citizens:

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=AUSASAIR.story&STORY=/www/story/05-28-2009/0005034173&EDATE=THU+May+28+2009,+01:22+PM

Several additional articles all clearly indicating that this applies only to non-citizens:

http://www.fcw.com/Articles/2009/05/27/Web-US-VISIT-pilots.aspx
http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20090528_7835.php?oref=rss
Education

Submission + - 'Floating Bridge' Property of Water Found (physorg.com)

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "When exposed to high voltage, water does some interesting things. From the article, ' When exposed to a high-voltage electric field, water in two beakers climbs out of the beakers and crosses empty space to meet, forming the water bridge. The liquid bridge, hovering in space, appears to the human eye to defy gravity. Upon investigating the phenomenon, the scientists found that water was being transported from one beaker to another, usually from the anode beaker to the cathode beaker. The cylindrical water bridge, with a diameter of 1-3 mm, could remain intact when the beakers were pulled apart at a distance of up to 25 mm.'"
Security

Submission + - Lobbyists brainwash bureaucrats for REAL ID (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by
Christopher Blanc
Christopher Blanc writes: "State bureaucrats have converged in Washington DC for a two-day conference on REAL ID compliance. It's a panel discussion called "Bringing your public onboard for smoothing legislative changes." The summary states that "every State DMV needs to find a way to educate their public so that they can ensure the legislature changes necessary to become Real ID compliant." The panel will also "examine how much of your (i.e., the DMV's) budget a public relations exercise is worth." Such a "public relations exercise" would presumably be conducted at taxpayer expense. The conference is sponsored by Digimarc, Viisage, NXP, and JPMorganChase, all of whom sell the sort of high-tech identification equipment that states will need to comply with the REAL ID Act. In effect, the conference provides a forum for vendors to lobby state bureaucrats to support REAL ID implementation and to encourage them to go back to their states and lobby their legislators for "necessary" legislative changes. And presumably, most of the bureaucrats are attending the conference at the expense of their state's taxpayers.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070924-state-bureaucrats-trained-to-lobby-for-real-id.html"
Supercomputing

Submission + - NASA to build largest Supercomputer ever (linuxworld.com.au) 1

Submitted by Onlyodin
Onlyodin writes: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has given the green light to a project that will build the largest ever supercomputer based on Silicon Graphics' (SGI) 512-processor Altix computers.

Called Project Columbia and costing around $160-million, the 10,240-processor system will be used by researchers at the Advanced Supercomputing Facility at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

What makes Project Columbia unique is the size of the multiprocessor Linux systems, or nodes, that it clusters together. It is common for supercomputers to be built of thousands of two-processor nodes, but the Ames system uses SGI's NUMAlink switching technology and ProPack Linux operating system enhancements to connect 512-processor nodes, each of which will have more than 1,000G bytes of memory.

Full Story at Linuxworld
Privacy

Submission + - Ruling by Secret US Court Allegedly Reduces Spying

Submitted by conspirator57
conspirator57 writes: TFA http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la- na-spying2aug02,0,5813563.story?coll=la-home-cente r states that the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (a court that no citizen can establish standing to appear before) has ruled against Executive requests for so-called "basket warrants" as violating the 4th amendment to the Constitution, namely that such warrants do not meet the clearly expressed criteria in the second half of the amendment. To accomplish this they must have looked startlingly like British general warrants which were the original motivation for the 4th amendment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_(law) for more.

TFA is very sympathetic to the Executive branch, going on to depict ways in which we're all less safe because of this ruling. Personally, I feel safer with more rulings like this one. Just wish the process were a bit more transparent.

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Networking

Submission + - Last-Minute Senate Amendment to appease RIAA

Submitted by Rodrigo
Rodrigo writes: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has found the time to forget about fighting that pesty Iraq War and focus on the issues that really matter: making the influence of the RIAA and MPAA a mainstay in our college campuses. The EFF has put a call to arms against the proposed Senate amendment to the Higher Education Act. The amendment aims to force certain schools to police their network or risk losing federal funding for student aid. Naturally, this policing will come at the school's expense and through "technology-based deterrents," which raise privacy concerns. Please call your representatives and make sure they know what they're voting for under Senate Amendment 2314.

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