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Australia

Submission + - Aussie pubs beat bar fights with biometrics (zdnet.com.au) 1

Submitted by mask.of.sanity
mask.of.sanity writes: Pubs and clubs in Australia are signing up in droves to national and state biometrics databases that capture patron fingerprints, photos, and scanned driver licenses in efforts to curb violence.

The databases of captured patron information mean that individuals banned at one location could be refused entry across a string of venues. Particularly violent individuals could be banned for years.

The databases are virtually free from government regulation as biometrics are not covered by privacy laws, meaning that the handling of details are left to the discretion of technology vendors.
Earth

Submission + - An Evangelical Backlash Against Environmentalism

Submitted by
Pickens
Pickens writes: "John Collins Rudolf reports that a fierce backlash against the mingling of Christianity and environmentalism has recently emerged led by the Cornwall Alliance, an evangelical nonprofit that strenuously opposes action on climate change and describes the environmental movement as a “false religion” that Christians must avoid at all costs and that while some environmental concerns are well founded and serious, others are without foundation or greatly exaggerated including "fears of destructive manmade global warming, overpopulation, and rampant species loss." This December, the group released a 12-part educational video series, “Resisting the Green Dragon,” warning Christians that radical environmentalism “is striving to put America, and the world, under its destructive control.” “We believe Earth and its ecosystems — created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence — are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory,” the group’s declaration reads. “Earth’s climate system is no exception. Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history.”"
Crime

Submission + - Is Reading Spouse's e-mail a Crime?

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The Detroit Free Press reports that Leon Walker is charged with unlawfully reading the e-mail of Ciara Walker, his wife at that time, which showed she was having an affair with her second husband, who once had been arrested for beating her in front of her son. Walker says he gave the e-mails to her first husband, the child's father, to protect the boy. "I was doing what I had to do," says Walker. "We're talking about putting a child in danger." Now prosecutors, relying on a Michigan statute typically used to prosecute crimes such as identity theft or stealing trade secrets, have charged Leon Walker with a felony for logging onto a laptop in the home he shared with his wife. Prosecutor Jessica Cooper defended her decision to charge Walker. "The guy is a hacker," says Cooper adding that the Gmail account "was password protected, he had wonderful skills, and was highly trained. Then he downloaded [the emails] and used them in a very contentious way.""
NASA

Submission + - Comet Snow Is Pouring Out Of Hartley 2 (discovery.com) 1

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "On Nov. 4, NASA's EPOXI mission flew past the comet Hartley 2 and discovered something strange. According to a press conference held on Thursday, particles of ice are pouring from the comet at a rate of 300 tons of the stuff per hour. Some of ice has accumulated into clumps as large as basketballs. “When we first saw this our mouths just dropped. The whole thing just looked like a snow globe,” Brown University’s Pete Schultz, a mission scientist, told reporters."

Submission + - Security Theater: The Ripples Spread to Japan (theatlantic.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Apparently the conditions for shipping packages via air to the United States have now become so restrictive that the Japanese Post Office has announced that, effective Nov. 17, it will no longer accept any packages weighing over a pound for shipment to the US by any method that involves air transport (including EMS, airmail, and SAL). Except for large corporate mailers, everything over a pound must apparently now come by sea. Asahi Shimbun is reporting that the Japanese equivalents of FedEx and UPS have followed suit. I assume that airmail service remains in effect for the remaining 200 countries across the globe that have not lost their collective minds.

Submission + - Supreme Court justices baffled by technology (washingtonpost.com) 3

Submitted by kcurtis
kcurtis writes: Not really surprising that a group of rich old lawyers don't really use technology the way the rest of us do.

From the Washington Post story: The 72-year-old justice [Stephen Breyer] said in a speech at Vanderbilt Law School on Tuesday that he was perplexed when he recently saw the film "The Social Network" about the origins of Facebook.

Chief Justice John Roberts in a public employee privacy case before the court earlier this year tried to figure out the role of a text-messaging service in enabling an exchange between two people. "I thought, you know, you push a button; it goes right to the other thing," Roberts said. Responded Justice Antonin Scalia: "You mean it doesn't go right to the other thing?"
Security

Submission + - Intrusion Detection Honeypots Compared (infoworld.com)

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: InfoWorld's Roger Grimes provides an in-depth comparison of intrusion detection honeypots — fake computer assets that exist only to alert owners if it is touched. 'When used as early-warning systems, honeypots are low cost, low noise, and low maintenance, yet highly effective at drawing attention to threats in the network environment. They belong in any defense-in-depth program,' Grimes writes. Grimes' honeypot primer puts KFSensor, HoneyPoint, and Honeyd through their paces, and for those interested in turning on old PC into a network security asset, Grimes also provides a guide on how to roll your own honeypot.
Google

Submission + - Hard-Coded Bias In Google Search Results? (benedelman.org)

Submitted by bonch
bonch writes: Technology consultant Benjamin Edelman has developed a methodology for determining the existence of a hard-coded bias in Google's search engine which places Google's services at the top of the results page. Searching for a stock ticker places Google Finance at the top along with a price chart, but adding a comma to the end of the query removes the Google link completely. Other variations, such as 'a sore throat' instead of 'sore throat,' removes Google Health from its top position. Queries in other categories provide links to not only Google services but also their preferred partners. Though Google claims it does not bias its results, Edelman cites a 2007 admission from Google's Marissa Mayers that they placed Google Finance at the top of the results page, calling it 'only fair' because they made the search engine. Edelman notes that Google cites its use of unbiased algorithms to dismiss antitrust scrutiny, and he recalls the DOJ's intervention in airlines providing favorable results for its own flights in customer reservation systems they owned.
Earth

Submission + - Wrong Turn Brought Australian Sharks to Club Med

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The Herald Sun of Australia reports that genetic studies suggest great white sharks from around Australia may have turned up in the Mediterranean after they made a wrong turn about 450,000 years ago. "We looked at the DNA signature of the sharks and found they were all from the same extended family. The founding mothers had the same DNA as great white sharks found off the coast of Australia," says Dr. Les Noble. The sharks frequently swim between Australia and Africa and with the Agulhas leakage in full force during the late Pleistocene period shutting off the route between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, a few pregnant females headed west and entered the Atlantic Ocean. The sharks tried to turn around but by then their path was blocked by the west coast of Africa, so following the coast eastwards they eventually reached the Straits of Gibraltar, and the mouth of the Mediterranean. "We discovered that genetically Mediterranean white sharks are effectively a displaced Australian population which was probably a consequence of a historical navigational error by a few pregnant females during a time of global climate change," says Dr Cathy Jones, a shark geneticist from the University of Aberdeen's School of Biological Sciences. "Once they got to the Mediterranean they may have become trapped because its peninsulas and channels make it like a giant lobster pot." Their singular ancestry is potentially bad news because shark populations in the Mediterranean are plummeting fast. If the great whites were the result of a one-off accident, it means that their dwindling numbers are unlikely to be replaced by new migrants from elsewhere in the world."
Idle

Submission + - Pastor: Married Church Leaders Must Drop Facebook (nj.com) 2

Submitted by WrongSizeGlass
WrongSizeGlass writes: Rev. Cedric Miller is ordering about 50 married church officials to delete their Facebook accounts or resign from their leadership positions. Miller said 20 couples from his Living Word Christian Fellowship Church have recently run into marital trouble after a spouse connected with an ex-flame via the social networking site. On Sunday, he plans to "strongly suggest" that all married people to stop using Facebook, lest they endanger their marriage.

Is Facebook now one of the Deadly Sins? Is it the latest excuse for infidelity or just the latest scapegoat?
Robotics

Submission + - Robots learn from rats' brains (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by schliz
schliz writes: Engineers and neuroscientists are translating how rats navigate into probabilistic algorithms that could direct robots through complicated human environments. The Australian research team has developed software versions of three types of brain cells — place cells, head direction cells, and grid cells — and hope their findings will allow cheap, domestic robots like the Roomba to navigate intelligently, without the need for expensive sensors.
The Media

Submission + - Adventurer's photos capture a bygone Mecca - CNN.c (cnn.com)

Submitted by timothy
timothy writes: Says the story: "He was an adventurer, a scholar, and possibly a spy — but as Dutchman Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje proved with his rare 1885 photographs and sound recordings of Mecca, he was also a pioneering multimedia journalist."

Submission + - Monster Cable Takes Down Search Engine With DMCA (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Monster Cable was apparently upset that people could use the Jaxed.com classified search engine (which search eBay, Craigslist and others...) to find Monster Cable products, so it sent DMCA notices and had the website taken down by GoDaddy. The site is back up, now that it's deleted its entire Electronics category, but it's difficult to see how the original takedown was even legitimate in the first place. Jaxed wasn't hosting any of the content and it's unclear how it could be accused of infringing on Monster's copyright.
Science

Submission + - Scientists fix major quantum computing problem (techeye.net)

Submitted by bossanovalithium
bossanovalithium writes: Scientists have been working on a theoretical quantum computer that can work even if one in four quantum bits were missing or partying in Vegas with a dead cat and Elvis.

The plan works on paper and could help scientists build devices as large as three qubits and lower the engineering requirements of a functional machine.

University of Queensland physicist Thomas Stace worked with Sean Barrett of the Imperial College London said quantum computers that used photons as qubits risked losing some of these particles as they were scattered or absorbed.

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