Comment: ping-pong (Score 0) 196
(wait, does china have a patent on *that*?)
Comment: Re:iPhone users talking about freedom? (Score -1, Flamebait) 127
git tag apple-troll
+ - Piratebay, Vimeo blocked in India-> 1
Submitted
by
webanish
webanish writes "Vimeo and The Pirate Bay have been blocked in India. The current ruling coalition has been looking to censor the internet ever since social media triggered mass movements hit it badly during the anti corruption agitation in Aug-2011. Then we had the alleged 'sex-scandal' where a senior cabinet minister was videographed having sex (for favor) in his high-court chambers, a story blacked out by main stream media (a.k.a. paidmedia), but went viral on twitter, facebook. Are we heading into dark times, where information flow is increasingly controlled by the high and mighty?"
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
+ - History Professor Teaches How to Falsify Wikipedia
Submitted
by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Yoni Appelbaum reports in the Atlantic that as part of their coursework in a class that studies historical hoaxes, undergraduates at George Mason University successfully fooled Wikipedia's community of editors launching a Wikipedia page detailing the exploits of a fictitious 19th-century serial killer named Joe Scafe. The students, enrolled in T. Mills Kelly's course, Lying About the Past, used newspaper databases to identify four actual women murdered in New York City from 1895 to 1897, victims of broadly similar crimes and created Wikipedia articles for the victims, carefully following the rules of the site. But while a similar page created previously by Kelly's students went undetected for years, when students posted the story to Reddit, it took just twenty-six minutes for a redditor to call foul, noting the Wikipedia entries' recent vintage and others were quick to pile on, deconstructing the entire tale. Why did the hoaxes succeed in 2008 on Wikipedia and not in 2012 on Reddit? According to Appelbaum, the answer lies in the structure of the Internet's various communities. "Wikipedia has a weak community, but centralizes the exchange of information. It has a small number of extremely active editors, but participation is declining, and most users feel little ownership of the content. And although everyone views the same information, edits take place on a separate page, and discussions of reliability on another, insulating ordinary users from any doubts that might be expressed," writes Appelbaum. "Reddit, by contrast, builds its strong community around the centralized exchange of information. Discussion isn't a separate activity but the sine qua non of the site." If there's a simple lesson in all of this, it's that hoaxes tend to thrive in communities which exhibit high levels of trust. But on the Internet, where identities are malleable and uncertain, we all might be well advised to err on the side of skepticism (PDF).""
Comment: time to get that ham radio license! (Score 1) 151
on a more depressing note, most govt-regulated mass-communication systems are open to this type of abuse :-/
Comment: Aperture fever is... (Score 1) 106
...when your 'eye-dressing' is bigger than you. I'm an innocent victim of this malaise ;-)
Comment: (political) Shooting of someone else's shoulder (Score 5, Informative) 160
An analysis here suggests that the target of Internet censorship was against political blasphemy rather than any generic web censorship.
Its worse than a state trying to censor the web as consistent with their national policies; in this case the 'ruling government' is molding laws as it sees fit to its political advantages.
Only one of the so called complaints by the ministers was deemed a national security threat.
Comment: Great! (Score 3, Insightful) 48
Big-time censorship in three dimensions.
Comment: Well... (Score 1) 272
Does using the stepper motors from old Floppy Disk drives count?
Comment: Re:Keep these C molecules on Earth please (Score 1) 145
Huh! I want earth to have a Saturn-like ring as well :-)
Comment: That's what happens when... (Score 5, Funny) 101
...you don't sign each other's gpg keys!
Comment: Hey! (Score 1) 145
Don't just dump me in some random orbit around earth. I wanna rise from the ashes on Ganymede.
Comment: When patents attack... (Score 5, Informative) 422
FWIW, "This American Life #441: When Patents Attack" lays out the problem with patents very clearly.
Apple is just ONE company.
Comment: Uh... (Score -1, Troll) 748
Windows IS the virus!
+ - Worst plane crash in Indian aviation history->
Submitted
by
Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "ibnlive.in.com reports the worst plane crash in Indian avation history. A Mangalore bound Air India Express flight coming in from Dubai with 166 people on board crashed early on Saturday killing 158 people. The Air India Express IX-812, operated by a Boeing 737-800, had 160 passengers and six crew members on board overshot the touchdown point on the Mangalore airport runway by 2000 feet on Saturday at 6:30 AM while attempting to land.
What is equally disturbing, (I think,) is the fact that the family of the dead will be given just 4,264.4 U.S. dollars in lieu of a lost life!"
Link to Original Source
What is equally disturbing, (I think,) is the fact that the family of the dead will be given just 4,264.4 U.S. dollars in lieu of a lost life!"
Link to Original Source