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Censorship

Submission + - Web search for bomb recipes should be blocked: EU

Submitted by the_insult_dog
the_insult_dog writes: Internet searches for bomb-making instructions should be blocked across the European Union, the bloc's top security official said on Monday .

Internet providers should also prevent access to any site giving instructions on how to make a bomb, EU Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini said in an interview.

Frattini said there would be no bar on opinion, analysis or historical information but operational instructions useful to terrorists should be blocked.
Google

Submission + - Search for Steve Fossett Using Amazon Turk Search! (mturk.com)

Submitted by wuzfuzzy
wuzfuzzy writes: On Monday, September 3, 2007, Steve Fossett, the first person to fly a plane around the world without refueling and the first person to fly around the world in a balloon went missing in Nevada. An airplane he was flying failed to return. No one has any idea where he is. Through the generous efforts of individuals at several organizations, detailed satellite imagery has been made available for his last known whereabouts. HITs have been created to ask volunteers to help review these images and flag potential areas of interest which will be instrumental in the search and rescue efforts. If you are interested in helping, please click here to participate in the search effort. This is a race against time and any help you can provide will make a huge difference. Friends and family of Steve Fossett would like to thank you for helping them with this cause. Amazon Mechanical Turk Team http://www.mturk.com/ http://www.mturk.com/mturk/searchbar?requesterId=A1U5V688O4PR3V
The Courts

Submission + - Jack Thompson Suspended 1

Submitted by Dr. Eggman
Dr. Eggman writes: GamePolitics.com has the story the Florida Bar has ordered Jack Thompson to undergo psychological testing and have suspended his license for 91 days. According to his 2005 book, he has been asked to undergo such testing by the bar before, but sued and successfully settled with the bar for $20,000.
Enlightenment

Submission + - Liberal and Conservative Mindsets - For Real

Submitted by McLuhanesque
McLuhanesque writes: A recent study published in Nature Neuroscience shows neurological differences in brain activity between people who are relatively left- or right-wing politically. "Political scientists and psychologists have noted that, on average, conservatives show more structured and persistent cognitive styles, whereas liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty. We tested the hypothesis that these profiles relate to differences in general neurocognitive functioning using event-related potentials, and found that greater liberalism was associated with stronger conflict-related anterior cingulate activity, suggesting greater neurocognitive sensitivity to cues for altering a habitual response pattern." No wonder liberals and conservatives can never see eye-to-eye. They aren't even able to think brain-to-brain!
Security

Submission + - Halifax port security to scan veins in hands (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by
DelMinor
DelMinor writes: "The Port of Halifax will soon beef up its security by scanning the veins in employees' hands before allowing them to enter through its gates. The port will use a new personal identification system known as vascular biometrics, and Colin Wright, of Identica Canada Corp. in Toronto, says it's much safer than scanning people's eyes. He said people can fool machines that examine the iris. "You get a picture of someone very close up and reproduce a picture of their eye, and reproduce it on a fake contact lens, and you become them," Wright explained Thursday."
Software

Submission + - Chicago public school's $60 million software fails

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: When the 380,730 students showed up for the first day of class at the Chicago Public Schools little did they know that the $60 million computer information system that records attendance would go kaput forcing the staff to resort to manual methods of taking attendance. Some students just disappeared from electronic rosters, then mysteriously reappeared by the end of the day, some teachers got the error 'out of memory' after repeated failed attempts to register student attendance.
Worms

Submission + - Tor spoofed by malware emails (eff.org)

Submitted by
Shava Nerad
Shava Nerad writes: "The Tor Project, a US non-profit organisation producing Internet
privacy software, is issuing an urgent warning about a spam email
being circulated as a fake promotion for their software.

The real Tor software provides privacy on the Internet to journalists,
bloggers and human rights activists all over the world. The spam email
promotes the virtues of the software, but then directs people to a
series of fake websites that contain malicious code that will attempt
to take over visiting machines, and the downloaded software is fake
and equally dangerous to run.

The real website is hosted at http://tor.eff.org/ and the Tor
software can be downloaded from there. Users are able to check that
they have received the official version by following the instructions
at: http://wiki.noreply.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/Ver ifyingSignatures

Shava Nerad, Development Director for the Tor Project said, "I am
disgusted that criminals who want to recruit more machines for their
illegal activities should trade on our reputation for providing
privacy on the Internet. Fortunately we already have systems in place
so that people can verify that they are downloading the official
software. But this is a distraction from our work that we could do
without.""
Biotech

Submission + - A step nearer to creating artificial life (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by
slick_shoes
slick_shoes writes: "To the untrained eye, the tiny, misshapen, fatty blobs on Giovanni Murtas's microscope slide would not look very impressive. But when the Italian scientist saw their telltale green fluorescent glint he knew he had achieved something remarkable — and taken a vital step towards building a living organism from scratch. The green glow was proof that his fragile creations were capable of making their own proteins, a crucial ability of all living things and vital for carrying out all other aspects of life."
Networking

Submission + - Justice dept. says no to net neutrality

Submitted by Maximum Prophet
Maximum Prophet writes: "The Justice Department on Thursday said Internet service providers should be allowed to charge a fee for priority Web traffic..."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20625194/

Is anyone surprised? The anti-net neutrality people sound good, but the powers to be aren't going to allow just anyone to dig up the streets to lay new cable for last mile access, so there is never going to be real compitition for internet access. Without real competition, there's no free market, so "The Market" can't decide.

The FCC needs to realize that if consumers had a choice among many providers, almost no one would choose a provider that restricted their access. (unless that provider had a cost near zero, like broadcast TV)
Censorship

Submission + - Libraries Defend Open Access

Submitted by aisaac
aisaac writes:
Publisher plans to equate public access to federally funded research with government censorship and the destruction of peer review were exposed earlier this year (Nature, January 25, 2007). In an open letter last month, Rockefeller University Press castigated the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine (PRISM) for using distortionary rhetoric in a coordinated PR attack on open access. Now the Association of Research Libraries has released an Issue Brief addressing this PR campaign in more detail. The Issue Brief exposes some of the distortions used to persuade key policy makers that recent gains open access scientific publishing pose a danger to peer reviewed scientific research, free markets, and possibly the future of western civilization. As an example of what the publishers backing PRISM hate, consider the the wonderfully successful grants policy of the National Institutes of Health, which requires papers based on grant-funded research to be published in PubMed Central.
Windows

Submission + - BBC's windows only iPlayer

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The BBC will have to change their policy of offering the Windows only iPlayer. The British government has asked for changes so that iPlayer is available on a variety of operating systems. See http://www.pm.gov.uk/output/Page13090.asp
Privacy

Submission + - Skip to the front of the airport security line

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: You have the right to fly without ID within the US. It's been widely reported before that attempting to fly without ID can actually be faster than following all the rules at the airport. The reason being that they will bump you to the front of the security line. However, TSA agents often do not know their own rules, and thus passengers have been told no such right exists, while others have had airport police threaten them with arrest unless they produced a drivers license. To the delight of activist passengers everywhere, TSA has finally clarified the rules, and provided written proof of every passenger's right to decline to show ID — and yet still board their flight. Print it out and take it with you the next time you fly. CNET has more on the story....
Media

Submission + - Laser Hard Drives on the Horizon (tfot.info)

Submitted by
Iddo Genuth
Iddo Genuth writes: "Researchers from the Netherlands and Japan have succeeded in flipping the value of a magnetic memory bit without any external magnetic field interference. Instead, they flashed a very short pulse of circularly-polarized laser light at it. This method is about 50,000 times faster than those used in other magneto-optic data storage systems, which means that the technology can enable the development of ultra-fast all-optical magnetic hard disk drives."

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