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Comment I trust Google... (Score 2, Informative) 150

more than banks hands down. My family are invested in a regional bank and I just got an e-mail stating that they are ending my free checking and that if I don't deposit more money they will charge me $5 a month.

Google may not be perfect and they screw up sometimes but they are the kind of screw ups you glance at shame on you and move on. I mean sure they were taking public wifi data but cmon' it was public data and it was just random packets so that they do location services. Heck, I have an incredibly hard time finding unsecured networks as almost all routers nudge users to security a lot more then they used to. My friend's aptartment has no internet and there are 15 wifi networks and all of them are secure.

Anyways, how can credit unions be shamed for "collusion", they aren't even a for-profit company. Credit unions are the closest thing the banking sector has to a charity so saying they are colluding is like saying the United Way, Red Cross, and Goodwill are colluding for holding joint event.

Comment Photography is not a crime (Score 1) 878

This has been said time and time again. Some Rep tried to do some grandstanding "resolution" but what we really need is a law protecting people's rights to video tape public officials. You can add whatever "under reasonable conditions, without directly impeding, only in a public place (street, public building etc.)" as long as the general act of video taping a cop under normal circumstances (such as in your own damn vehicle) is not a crime in itself.

What the motorcyclist did was stupid and he deserved to be booked with at least careless driving and at most reckless endangerment but the cop shouldn't have pulled a gun out without identifying himhelf as such. The correct thing would have een to flash his badge/say "I'm a police officer, dismount immediately" and THEN pull out his gun and THEN point it at him if he didn't comply.

In Florida the police officers and FHP don't usually chase speeding motorcyclists because it would endanger other drivers due to the speed and maneuverability of motos and just try and get their tag written down.

Censorship

China Censors HIV/AIDS Awareness Documentary 120

eldavojohn writes "Amnesty International is reporting an unusual case of censorship in which Chinese police questioned HIV/AIDS workers in China and instructed them to cancel an airing of a documentary made by Aizhixing Institute of Health Education on the disease. The director of that NGO recently left China after constant police harassment. The canceled documentary was about Tian Xi, a patient who contracted HIV by blood transfusion at age 9."
Firefox

Firefox 4 Beta 1 Shines On HTML5 256

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner takes a first look at Firefox 4 Beta 1 and sees several noteworthy HTML5 integrations that bring Firefox 4 'that much closer to taking over everything on the desktop.' Beyond the Chrome-like UI, Firefox 4 adds several new features that 'open up new opportunities for AJAX and JavaScript programmers to add more razzle-dazzle and catch up with Adobe Flash, Adobe AIR, Microsoft Silverlight, and other plug-ins,' Wayner writes. 'Firefox 4 also adds an implementation of the Websockets API, a tool for enabling the browser and the server to pass data back and forth as needed, making it unnecessary for the browser to keep asking the server if there's anything new to report.'"
Security

Cisco Says Vegas Conference Attendees' Information Was Leaked 97

Julie188 writes "Thousands of people got a nasty e-mail this morning from Cisco. The company was warning people that its attendee registration database for its Cisco Live 2010 event was hacked. Cisco Live 2010 is the company's annual user conference, held last week in Las Vegas with an estimated 18,000 in attendance. If it's not embarrassing enough for a company that sells security gear to get hacked, the e-mail also went out to people who didn't register and didn't attend the event. That raises questions about exactly what database was pried open and how bad the damage is. Cisco's e-mail said the hole was quickly closed and only business-card type information was exposed."
Science

The Proton Just Got Smaller 289

inflame writes "A new paper published in Nature has said that the proton may be smaller than we previously thought. The article states 'The difference is so infinitesimal that it might defy belief that anyone, even physicists, would care. But the new measurements could mean that there is a gap in existing theories of quantum mechanics. "It's a very serious discrepancy," says Ingo Sick, a physicist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who has tried to reconcile the finding with four decades of previous measurements. "There is really something seriously wrong someplace."' Would this indicate new physics if proven?"

Comment Most Comically Big Brother Patents...ever (Score 2, Interesting) 85

Could Microsoft have filed for patents that were any more big brother-ish. I mean having people disclose their health to their potential dates or having employees have to disclose ever aspect of their health to their employer.

I guess Microsoft hasn't designed a system in which 'a camera hangs around your neck and records every aspect of your life' (like the truman show)...oh wait they already did that. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/sensecam/

Advertising

HP and Yahoo To Spam Your Printer 397

An anonymous reader writes "As many suspected when HP announced its web-connected printer, it didn't take long for the company to announce it will send 'targeted' advertisements to your new printer. So you'll get spammed, and you'll pay for the ink to print it. On the bright side, the FCC forbids unsolicited fax ads, so this will probably get HP on a collision course with the Feds."
Image

Ozzy Osbourne To Be Genetically Decoded Screenshot-sm 256

Dashiva Dan writes "DNA research lab Knome has announced that it is going to sequence Ozzy's entire genome. Ozzy, the former lead singer of Black Sabbath, reality television star, and spokesman for World of Warcraft among many other things, has been selected so they can discover, among other things, how drugs are absorbed in the body. The amount of abuse Ozzy has put himself through and survived is a large part of why he was chosen."
Google

YouTube Launches Video Editor 65

Jamie noticed that YouTube has announced a built-in video editor that lets you actually edit video online. The editor lets you manipulate video you've uploaded to your own account.

Comment Re:hmm (Score 1) 688

I don't usually believe in conspiracy theories but it isn't really a stretch to think that if the Soviets knew that there was trillions of dollars in minerals in Afghanistan that the U.S. government didn't have any idea that there were minerals in Afghanistan before going in.

I mean we have the most well-funded espionage and intelligence in the world. I feel like if there wasn't a conspiracy going on than we must have the most over payed spies in the world. I mean I'm don't know how easy it would be for the Soviets to keep a secret that huge from us.

Sometimes I wish our government had more conspiracies going on, at least our government would not be as incompetent as we are all lead to believe. But alas, I am not a believer in conspiracy precisely because our government is way too incompetent to actually be able to keep ridiculously huge secrets. I mean some intelligence analyst just leaked 250,000 intelligence documents to wikileaks.

Botnet

Prosecuting DDoS Attacks? 164

dptalia writes "We all have heard of major DDoS attacks taking down countries, companies, and organizations. But how many of them are ever prosecuted? And how many prosecutions are even successful? I've done some research and it appears the answer is very few (Well duh!). And those that are successfully prosecuted tend to have teenagers as the instigators. Does this mean DDoS is a fairly safe crime to conduct? Are the repercussions nonexistent? Does anyone have some knowledge an insight into this that I don't have? How would you go about prosecuting a DDoS attacker? What's your experience with getting the responsible parties to justice?"
Privacy

California Judge Routes Campaign Robocalls Through Colorado 191

Thomas Hawk writes "Victoria Kolakowski, a current sitting law judge at the California PUC, is running for Alameda Superior Court judge in California. As part of her campaign she is robodialing people in California with a pre-recorded message. The only problem is that in Califorina robodials are actually illegal unless first introduced by a non-recorded natural person who gains consent to play the call. Ironically, the agency set up to protect our privacy and enforce this law, the California PUC, is the very agency where Kolakowski works today. Kolakowski originally apologized for the calls but then later deleted messages on her Facebook account from people objecting to her use of these calls. Now Kolakowski is trying to argue that because 'technically' she is routing her calls through Colorado from outside the state that her robodials are actually legal."

Comment Spooky (Score 3, Funny) 336

This is pretty spooky, I mean the conspiracy theories are kind of warranted considering this station's eerie history.

Someone must have been funding a station that has lasted since 1982 and is powerful to be heard world wide. I have done a little bit of amateur radio and I know that in order to do that you need some serious power, a huge antenna, and quite a bit of constant maintenance. It is definitely not a stretch to think that this station was/is run by the Russian Government as at the very minimum for some sort of testing or maybe as an emergency broadcasting system during a disaster.

However, I really doubt its part of the Dead Hand system. I would think they would use something more secure if the dead hand system was under automatic control. If there is any possibility that it is part of the Dead Hand system than the Dead Hand system is certainly a system that requires some sort of human intervention due to possibilities of interference, false positives, or someone over riding the system to send a the activation codes.

Just my 2 cents, I am certainly no conspiracy theorist but it is always fun to think about the possibilities. There is plenty of stuff that we simply don't know about; however, I do hope that the some of the theories are real because than at least I would know that our government has a high enough level of competence to actually keep fool us in a significant way.

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