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I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Not satisfied with pitiful potential penalties of $150,000 for infringing upon a $0.99 song, Congress is proposing new copyright cops in the "'PRO IP' Act of 2007, specifically the creation of the Office of the United States Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative (USIPER). They also feel that the authorities need the authority to seize any computers used for infringement and to send copyright cops abroad to help other countries enforce US laws. MPAA boss Dan Glickman praised the bill saying that, 'films left costs foreign and domestic distributors, retailers and others $18 billion a year,' though Ars points out that it allegedly costs the studios only $6 billion."

An anonymous reader writes "In his brand new hackademix.net blog, Giorgio Maone, known as the author of the NoScript security extension for Firefox, reveals how popup blockers can be easily circumvented using Java. Worse, popups opened this way are really evil, because they can be sized to cover the whole desktop (the wet dream of any phisher) and cannot be closed by user (the wet dream of any web advertiser). Impressive demos available, all cross-browser and cross-platform, in the best Java tradition: 'Write once, hack anywhere' "

Philipp Lenssen writes "Google News now allows individuals or organizations who are mentioned in news stories to add comments. (I've posted some screenshots.) "Our long-term vision is that any participant will be able to send in their comments, and we'll show them next to the articles about the story. Comments will be published in full, without any edits, but marked as 'comments' so readers know it's the individual's perspective, rather than part of a journalist's report," Google writes in the official Google News blog. Comments (for the US version of Google News only, right now) need to be sent to news-comments@google.com and will then be manually approved to verify that the sender is indeed who they claim they are. You can check out a live example at Google News."

Interesting: In fact, vein recognition technology has one fundamental advantage over finger print systems: vein patterns in fingers and palms are biometric characteristics that are not left behind unintentionally in every-day activities. In tests conducted by heise, even extreme close-ups...
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/08/another_biometr.html

Crazy Taco writes "

Two deep-diving Russian mini-submarines descended more than 2 1/2 miles under North Pole ice to stake a flag on the ocean floor Thursday, part of a quest to bolster Russian claims to much of the Arctic's oil-and-mineral wealth.

So, according to Russian thought in this article, does the United States just get the moon then? After all, we went there and planted our flag. Should that be ours? Should we just give in and accept that the Russians get the Arctic for planting a flag, since that gives us the moon (which is WAY better in the long run)?"
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,291830,00.html

Researchers have long known that at about 18 months children experience a vocabulary explosion, suddenly learning words at a much faster rate. They have theorized that complex mechanisms are behind the phenomenon. But new research suggests far simpler mechanisms may be at play: word repetition, variations in the difficulty of words, and the fact that children are learning multiple words at once.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070802182054.htm

Type 2 diabetes is reaching epidemic proportions in the developed world. Determining if and how certain genes predispose individuals to type 2 diabetes is likely to lead to the development of new treatment strategies for individuals with the disease. A new study now shows that certain variants of the gene TCF7L2 make individuals more susceptible to type 2 diabetes and provides a mechanism by which these genetic variants might cause susceptibility to the disease.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070802182122.htm