266139
submission
mrogers writes:
According to the Financial Times, the US Director of National Intelligence is preparing to launch A-Space, 'an internal communications tool modelled on the popular social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace.' A-Space will go live in December, alongside spook-centric versions of Wikipedia and del.icio.us, in an attempt to encourage cooperation between the United States' sixteen intelligence agencies.
There's no mention of what the A stands for, though — any suggestions?
239993
submission
mrogers writes:
Many Slashdot readers will have come across files that claimed to be leaked copies of the seventh Harry Potter book — perhaps some even downloaded the genuine bootleg that was made by photographing every page. But the IHT reports that in China, Potter piracy has become a cottage industry.
Here, the global Harry Potter publishing phenomenon has mutated into something altogether Chinese: a combination of remarkable imagination and startling industriousness, all placed in the service of counterfeiting, literary fraud and copyright violation.
Titles like "Harry Potter and the Hiking Dragon" are available alongside digital copies of the genuine article, raising the question of where fan fiction ends and counterfeiting begins. Is this a glimpse of what culture would be like without copyright?
233807
submission
mrogers writes:
The FBI requires a warrant to install spyware on a suspect's computer, according to a new appeals court ruling. An earlier ruling had appeared to grant the FBI permission to install spyware under the weaker provisions applied to pen registers, which record the telephone numbers or IP addresses contacted by a suspect. However, yesterday's amendment made it clear that the pen register provisions only apply to equipment installed at the suspect's ISP.
The FBI recently used spyware to determine the source of a hoax bomb threat, as reported here and here.
152313
submission
mrogers writes:
Physorg has an intriguing story suggesting that humans may have evolved as running hunters, long before the invention of the first weapons:
Humans ... have several adaptations that help us dump the enormous amounts of heat generated by running. These adaptations include our hairlessness, our ability to sweat, and the fact that we breathe through our mouths when we run, which not only allows us to take bigger breaths, but also helps dump heat.
"We can run in conditions that no other animal can run in," Lieberman said.
I for one welcome our new hairless, sweaty, mouth-breathing overlords.
151217
submission
mrogers writes:
Infowars brings us the following news from the UK, which is fast becoming the front line of the war on privacy:
Perhaps the lip-reading cameras and the shouting cameras will find something to talk about.
25450
submission
mrogers writes:
Reporters Without Borders has published its annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index, which ranks countries according to the level of censorship, legal pressure, intimidation and violence experienced by journalists. Finland, Iceland, Ireland and the Netherlands top the list; North Korea, Turkmenistan, Eritrea and Cuba are at the bottom, and were among the ten most censored countries according to New York's Committee to Protect Journalists.
The UK occupies an unimpressive 27th place in the Press Freedom Index, and the US is 53rd. The ranking criteria can be found here.
7980
submission
mrogers writes:
Hacktivismo, an international group of computer security experts and human rights workers, has announced the release of Torpark, an anonymous, fully portable Web browser based on Mozilla Firefox. Torpark comes pre-configured, requires no installation, can run off a USB memory stick, and leaves no tracks behind in the browser or computer. Torpark uses the TOR (The Onion Router) network to anonymize the connection between the user and the website that is being visited.
6230
submission
mrogers writes:
An intriguing new study from the University of Kent has found differences in the way male and female players respond to competition in a public goods game. Male players are more likely to cooperate with their team-mates when competing against another team, whereas the presence of competition does not affect the behaviour of female players. The gender difference has been dubbed 'the male warrior effect'. The study does not indicate whether the differences are due to cultural or biological factors.
5545
submission
mrogers writes:
Servers participating in the TOR anonymizing network have been seized by public prosecutors during a child porn crackdown in Germany. TOR provides anonymity for clients and servers by redirecting traffic through a network of volunteer-operated relays; the German prosecutors may have been trying to locate an anonymous server by examining the logs of the captured relays.
2330
submission
mrogers writes:
Following on the heels of last year's collision search attack against SHA-1, researchers at the Crypto 2006 conference have announced a new attack that allows the attacker to choose part of the colliding messages. "Using the new method, it is possible, for example, to produce two HTML documents with a long nonsense part after the closing </html> tag, which, despite slight differences in the HTML part, thanks to the adapted appendage have the same hash value." A similar attack against MD5 was announced last year.
