Feed New Scientist: Men with younger women have more children (pheedo.com)
Couples in which a man is several years older than a woman have the most children, according to an analysis of Swedish birth records
FBI's Unknown Eavesdropping Network 362
An anonymous reader writes "Building off the design mandates of CALEA, the FBI has constructed a 'point-and-click surveillance system' that creates instant wiretaps on almost any communications device. A thousand pages of restricted documents released under the Freedom of Information Act were required to determine the veracity of this clandestine project, Wired News reports. Called the Digital Collection System Network, it connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It is intricately woven into the nation's telecom infrastructure. From the article: 'FBI wiretapping rooms in field offices and undercover locations around the country are connected through a private, encrypted backbone that is separated from the internet. Sprint runs it on the government's behalf. The network allows an FBI agent in New York, for example, to remotely set up a wiretap on a cell phone based in Sacramento, California, and immediately learn the phone's location, then begin receiving conversations, text messages and voicemail pass codes in New York. With a few keystrokes, the agent can route the recordings to language specialists for translation.'"
Bookmark SPAM: Free computer wallpaper
Submission + - New theory on 5,000-year-old Iceman's death (www.ctv.ca)
CmpEng writes: ROME, Italy — Researchers studying Iceman, the 5,000-year-old mummy found frozen in the Italian Alps, have come up with a new theory for how he died, saying he died from head trauma, not by bleeding to death from an arrow.
Just two months ago, researchers in Switzerland published an article in the Journal of Archeological Science saying the mummy — also known as Oetzi — had died after the arrow tore a hole in an artery beneath his left collarbone, leading to massive loss of blood, shock and heart attack.
Submission + - Canadian villagers petition for cell phone ban (www.ctv.ca)
CmpEng writes: ""NEW DENVER, B.C. [Canada] — To some residents of New Denver, the greatest threat to their way of life is not terrorism, but cellphones.
Citing concerns over health and a change of culture, about 250 people — roughly half the population of the southeastern B.C. village — are petitioning against Telus's plan to install an antenna and bring cellphone service to the community.
'People come here because in New Denver it feels like you're living 50 years ago and we would lose that if we had an influx of cellphones. Our teenagers would all start using them,' said Julia Greenlaw, chairwoman of the Healthy Housing Society.""
PHP Security Expert Resigns 386
juct writes "PHP security holes have a name — quite often it was Stefan Esser who found and reported them. Now Esser has quit the PHP security team. He feels that his attempt to make PHP safer "from the inside" is futile. Basic security issues are not addressed sufficiently by the developers. Zeev Suraski, Zend's CTO of course disagrees and urges Stefan to work with the PHP development team instead of working against it. But given the number of remote code execution holes in PHP apps this year, Esser might have a point. And he plans to continue his quest for security holes in PHP. Only that from now on, he will publish them after reasonable time — regardless if a patch is available or not."
Update: 10/30 12:57 GMT by KD : Zeev Suraski wrote in to protest: "I'm quoted as if I 'point fingers at inexperienced developers,' and of course, there's no link to that — because it's not true! The two issues — security problems in Web apps written in PHP, and security problems in PHP itself — are two distinct issues. Nobody, including myself, is saying that there are no security problems in PHP — not unlike pretty much any other piece of software. Nobody, I think, argues the fact that there have been many more security problems at the application level, then there were at the language level. I never replied to Stefan's accusations of security problems in PHP saying 'that's bull, it's all the developers' fault,' and I have no intention to do it in the future."
Journal Journal: digital archiving
So I've been getting more dvd's recently and I'm starting to have a fairly respectible sci-fi collection. I've had a "wanted" list for some time now, and it keeps getting shorter, but now i'm almost to the point of having to get certain titles that I find to be boring (solaris) just for the sake of completeness. Having a complete archive is important to me, but I'm starting to wonder at what point I need to restrain myself. Another issue I have to start thinking about is the dvd end-of-life s
Journal Journal: cycle class
I've enrolled into a motorcycle training class a while ago, and the class is coming up on my schedule soon. I'm excited to learn how to ride bikes without pedals! I'm almost payed up on my Xterra, and I'm starting to shop around for a cheap used motorcycles that I wouldn't mind trashing. Hopefully if everything goes as planned I can be riding my own bike in 3 or 4 months. I want to geek modify the bike as ghetto-akira-fabulous as possible! I will possibly have an integrated 802.11 war-finder,
