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Comment Your Rights Offline (Score 1) 1

by jc2brown (#35986876) Attached to: Nottingham Uni student arrested under terriosm act
This is not a technological story, but it has great merit within the free speech community. I applaud the author for bringing this story to light under the circumstances.

For those who don't feel like reading 100+ pages, here's a summary:

A U of Nottingham lecturer recounts the details of one of his (muslim) Masters students who was discovered with research materials that address terrorism, resulting in his arrest and subsequent victimization by a disproportionate number of upper-level administrators, for no other reason than to uphold the University's public image.

Edit: The article is now unavailable. Not surprising, considering it portrays a school very unlike the image Nottingham is trying so hard to preserve.

Submission + - Nottingham Uni student arrested under terriosm act (bisa.ac.uk) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On May 15 2008, two university members — a student and a member of staff — were arrested under the Terrorism Act (2000) because they possessed copies of the"Al-Qaeda Training Manual" which had been downloaded from the United States Department of Justice website. An extended version of the same document is available for sale in book form on Amazon.com. The student, a member of the university's Politics and International Relations department, was researching terrorism for his postgraduate studies and was being advised by a friend of his, who was a former student and administrative member of staff. Both men were held in police custody for six days before being released without charge.
The Terrorism Act (2000) stipulates that: "A person commits an offence if he possesses an article in circumstances which give rise to a reasonable suspicion that his possession is for a purpose connected with the commission, preparation or instigation of an act of terrorism."

The postgraduate tutor of the student at that time has submitted a paper to the British International Studies Association documenting how the university helped get these men arrested and what the university has done to cover up the story since

Comment Re:I am not rightly able to comprehend... (Score 2) 112

by jc2brown (#35972650) Attached to: Amazon EC2 Crash Caused Data Loss
You might want to read this.

They're crediting all accounts that had any activity in the USA-East region for 10 days of usage, regardless if they were affected.

Remember that it was EC2 that was affected, which is just a virtual machine with volatile storage. Had it been S3 data that was lost one should expect restitution, but in this case downtime and data loss is ultimately the fault of the user.
Idle

Submission + - Semengate strikes the American College of Surgeons (huffingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Frosty Piss
Frosty Piss writes: Lazar Greenfield, M.D. is no ordinary surgeon. Until last week, he was the president-elect of the American College of Surgeons, and was also the lead editor of the Surgery News. In the February issue, he penned some thoughts on Valentine's Day under the heading of "Gut Feelings." Greenfield proceeded to then discuss the mating habits of fruit flies, the mating habits of the rotifer. In each case, Dr. Greenfield made sure to reference to the scientific literature. Then he turned his attention to humans. Dr. Greenfield noted the therapeutic effects of semen, citing research from the Archives of Sexual Behavior which found that female college students practicing unprotected sex were less likely to suffer from depression than those whose partners used condoms (as well as those who remained abstinent). His comments apparently didn't sit well in certain quarters. Dr. Greenfield was forced to resigne as editor of the Surgery News and gave up his stewardship of ACS after learning that his article had spurred threats of protests from outside women's groups.

Comment No need to speculate (Score 2) 125

by jc2brown (#35900732) Attached to: Amazon Outage Shows Limits of Failover 'Zones'
Since apparently no one's actually looked into the issue beyond "ZOMG the cloud is down," here's some info from Amazon:

8:54 AM PDT We'd like to provide additional color on what were working on right now (please note that we always know more and understand issues better after we fully recover and dive deep into the post mortem). A networking event early this morning triggered a large amount of re-mirroring of EBS volumes in US-EAST-1. This re-mirroring created a shortage of capacity in one of the US-EAST-1 Availability Zones, which impacted new EBS volume creation as well as the pace with which we could re-mirror and recover affected EBS volumes. Additionally, one of our internal control planes for EBS has become inundated such that it's difficult to create new EBS volumes and EBS backed instances. We are working as quickly as possible to add capacity to that one Availability Zone to speed up the re-mirroring, and working to restore the control plane issue. We're starting to see progress on these efforts, but are not there yet. We will continue to provide updates when we have them.

So the engineers failed to foresee a potential hazard. Hardly something to get worked up about, especially for a relatively young technology.

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