Comment Cardinal Richlieu 2010 (Score 2, Insightful) 699
“If you give me a 640x480 JPEG of the most honest of men, I will find something in it which will hang him”
School Spying Scandal Gets Even More Bizarre 699
Several sources following the recent school webcam spying debacle are reporting that an even stranger twist has surfaced. The student in question that was disciplined for an "improper act" was apparently accused of either drug use or drug selling. Turns out he was eating Mike & Ike candy, not popping pills. While there is probably more to this story than has made it to the general public, the officials involved have done a particularly bad job of actually managing the events.
Google Gets US Approval To Buy and Sell Energy 218
An anonymous reader writes "The US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on Thursday granted Google the authority to buy and sell energy on a wholesale basis. Google applied for the authorization last December through a wholly owned subsidiary called Google Energy. 'We made this filing so we can have more flexibility in procuring power for Google's own operations, including our data centers,' Google spokeswoman Niki Fenwick said via e-mail. But the authorization also raises the prospect that Google may start to buy and sell energy as a business." Reader angry_tapir supplies a link to the approval document itself (PDF).
Emmerich Plans Foundation As a 3D Epic 283
spuke4000 writes "Roland Emmerich, the writer/director/producer behind Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012 is planning to adapt Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. The plans include using technology developed for Avatar including 3D and motion capture technology. When asked about using this technology Emmerich responded: 'It has to be done all CG because I would not know how to shoot this thing in real.'"
Comment Re:Warrent (Score 2, Interesting) 175
I just checked my most recent Yfrog upload (of something completely innocuous) which I shot and tweeted directly from my iPhone and it looks like every last bit of metadata has been stripped. It doesn't even say what it was shot with.
Don't know how Twitpic and others work, but so far so good.
Comment Schneier already covered this recently (Score 4, Interesting) 427
Bruce Schneier had a pretty good takedown of this kind of argument just the other day.
Accept that you'll never truly know where a packet came from. Work on the problems you can solve: software that's secure in the face of whatever packet it receives, identification systems that are secure enough in the face of the risks. We can do far better at these things than we're doing, and they'll do more to improve security than trying to fix insoluble problems.
Comment Re:Facts bout public libraries (Score 1) 494
I would say "wooosh," but these are good points regardless of TFA's status as satire.
Comment Re:Stupid question but... (Score 1) 345
It's a display. And it's a port.
Comment Re:Monster? (Score 5, Funny) 345
Not to drag this dry videophile discussion out too long, but I presume you're not using cheap factory-raised unicorn horn, notorious for its poor standing wave sync-sweetening and shallow inter-bitstream raster resonance?
Only unicorns raised in the Swiss Alps have the protein content in their horns that allows a digital signal to hit such crisp, sparkling 1s and deep, thick 0s.
Newton's Apple Story Goes Online 114
Hugh Pickens writes "Although many historians are skeptical of the story, Rev. William Stukeley, a physician, cleric, and prominent antiquarian, wrote that he was once enjoying afternoon tea with Sir Isaac Newton amid the Woolsthorpe apple trees when the mathematician reminisced that he was just in the same situation as when the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasioned by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. The original version of the story of Sir Isaac Newton and the falling apple first appeared in Stukeley's 1752 biography, Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life. Now BBC reports that UK's Royal Society has converted the fragile manuscript into an electronic book, which anybody with internet access will now be able to read and decide for themselves. 'The story of Newton and the apple, which had gradually become debunked over the years. It is now clear, it is based on a conversation between Newton and Stukeley,' says Martin Kemp, emeritus professor of the history of art at Oxford University's Trinity College. 'We needn't believe that the apple hit his head, but sitting in the orchard and seeing the apple fall triggered that work. It was a chance event that got him engaged with something he might have otherwise have shelved.'"
Comment Re:World War III - The Cyber War (Score 1) 651
Could this happen?
I mean, not just vanilla NAT but the development of an alternative flavor of IP to be deployed on state-owned routers with standard IP gateways on the outside ends.
Imagine some exotic fork of IPv6 with a few strange omissions and other surprising features, geared toward efficient DPI, content filtering, and social network analysis, designed by some of China's most brilliant network architects, theorists, and engineers.
Google Attackers Identified as Chinese Government 651
forand writes Researchers, examining the attacks on Google and over 20 other companies in December, have determined 'the source IPs and drop server of the attack correspond to a single foreign entity consisting either of agents of the Chinese state or proxies thereof.'"
Comment Re:The disc is DRM (Score 3, Funny) 213
we should get a sane version on Wii as well
Yes, putting discs in drives is madness!
Comment Re:distinction (Score 2, Funny) 766
Nah, someone would have to actually try bringing GMO seeds aboard a plane and shouting in Arabic while attempting to throw them out the bulkhead hatch.
Then the TSA would not only ban bringing seeds on planes, but also issue guidelines stating that passengers may not look out the window while flying over farmland, may not read books about farming during the middle two hours of a trip, and may not think about corn at any time while the plane is in the air.
Comment Re:hmm (Score 2, Interesting) 316
As long as you have a decently accurate clock, you can get a lot closer than that without any externally-dependent navigational system.
