Comment Re:Global government (Score 2, Insightful) 406
The way the summary reads it seems more like a U.S. initiative with the goal of undermining the freedom and liberties of global citizens...
Comment MythBusters (Score 1) 652
Let's see : Who has easy access to explosives and could do some scientific testing on said devices, apply a little critical thinking and discredit the whole concept to a relatively large audience... I wonder?
Comment Re:OK, new policy. (Score 1) 543
And that list should be available with an API as part of some package of WebServices fully indexed and searchable
Comment IPREDator (Score 1) 255
And what happens if you're Dutch and use IPREDator to access the Pirate Bay? I doubt they built a "dutch backdoor" into that.
A Layman's Guide To Bandwidth Pricing 203
narramissic links to IT World's A Layman's Guide to Bandwidth Pricing, writing "Time Warner Cable has, for now, abandoned the tiered pricing trials that raised the ire of Congressman Eric Massa, among others. And, as some nice data points in a New York Times article reveal, it's good for us that they did. For instance, Comcast says it costs them $6.85 per home to double the internet capacity of a neighborhood. But the bit of the Times article that we should commit to memory is this: 'If all Time Warner customers decided one day not to check their e-mail or download a single movie, the company's costs would be no different than on a day when every customer was glued to the screen watching one YouTube video after another.'"
Comment Where in Europe is... (Score 1) 344
So it's the cotton swabs? That is exactly what Carmen Sandiego would want you to think.
Details Emerge On the 2006 Hacking of Congress 77
The National Journal just published an article with details about the hacking of Congress in 2006, possibly by agents in China, though the attack's origin is uncertain. The article notes the difficult work of the House Information Systems Security Office, which must set security policies and then try to enforce them on a population of the equivalent of C-level executives. The few members who have called attention to the issue of Congressional cyber-security have been advised to shut up about it, by whom the reporter did not discover. "Armed with this information about how the virus worked, the security officers scanned the House network again. This time, they found more machines that seemed to match the profile — they, too, were infected. Investigators found at least one infected computer in a member's district office, indicating that the virus had traveled through the House network and may have breached machines far away from Washington. Eventually, the security office determined that eight members' offices were affected; in most of the offices, the virus had invaded only one machine, but in some offices, it hit multiple computers. It also struck seven committee offices, including Commerce; Transportation and Infrastructure; Homeland Security; and Ways and Means; plus the Commission on China, which monitors human rights and laws in China."
Maryland Police Put Activists' Names On Terror List 426
aaandre writes with word of a Washington Post story which begins:
"The Maryland State Police classified 53 nonviolent activists as terrorists and entered their names and personal information into state and federal databases that track terrorism suspects, the state police chief acknowledged yesterday. The police also entered the activists' names into the federal Washington-Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area database, which tracks suspected terrorists. One well-known antiwar activist from Baltimore, Max Obuszewski, was singled out in the intelligence logs released by the ACLU, which described a 'primary crime' of 'terrorism-anti-government' and a 'secondary crime' of 'terrorism-anti-war protesters.'"
According to the article, "Both [former state police superintendent Thomas] Hutchins and [Maryland Police Superintendent Terrence] Sheridan said the activists' names were entered into the state police database as terrorists partly because the software offered limited options for classifying entries." Reader kcurtis adds "The State Police say they are purging the data, but this is one more example (on top of yesterday's news that datamining for terrorists is not feasible due to false positives) of just how badly the use of these lists can be abused."
Feed The Register: Court defends America's right to online smut (theregister.com)
First Amendment meets Groundhog Day
Ten years after it was rubber stamped by US lawmakers, the free-speech-throttling Child Online Protection Act (COPA) remains in legal limbo, but its chances of survival took another blow this week as a federal appeals court upheld an earlier ban on the statute.
Comment Re:Good (Score 5, Insightful) 731
Patenting software is like patenting a math equation.
It's not even "like", it is patenting math. Software is math. Someone might say that everything can be reduced to math, but the fact is that a ball tossed in the air may follow a parabola, but the ball isn't math, it is just described by math. Whereas software is math, as surely as "y = ax^2 + bx + c" is math. One is a human-readable representation of a pure mathematical concept, and software is a machine-readable representation of a pure mathematical concept. You can't patent the human-readable form of math, you should not be able to patent the machine-readable form of the exact same math.
You can patent the machine that is capable of reading and acting on the mathematical operations described by the software. But not the software itself, because that is, literally, no metaphor at all, patenting math.
Feed New Scientist: Material that turns heat to power gets efficiency hike (pheedo.com)
Adding the right metal to a thermoelectric compound can more than double its efficiency - paving the way for heat wasted by engines and computers to be recovered
Submission + - Why Privacy & Security are Not Zero-Sum Games (arstechnica.com)
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes: "Ars Technica has a nice article on why security consultant Ed Giorgio's statement that "privacy and security are a zero-sum game" is wrong. They reason that, due to Metcalfe's law, the more valuable a government network is to the good guys, the more valuable it is to the bad guys. Given the trend in government to gather all of its eggs into one database (to mix a metaphor), unless more attention is paid to privacy, we'll end up with neither security nor privacy. In other words, privacy and security are a positive sum game with precarious trade-offs — you can trade a lot of privacy away for absolutely no gain in security, but you don't have to."
Submission + - Dreams Are Virtual Reality Threat Simulation
Time Slows Down writes: "Psychology Today has an interesting story on a new theory of why we dream. Finnish psychologist Antti Revonsuo believes that dreams are a sort of nighttime theater in which our brains screen realistic scenarios simulating emergency situations and providing an arena for safe training. "The primary function of negative dreams is rehearsal for similar real events, so that threat recognition and avoidance happens faster and more automatically in comparable real situations," he says. We have 300 to 1,000 threat dreams per year — one to four per night and just under half are aggressive encounters: physical aggression such as fistfights, and nonphysical aggression such as verbal arguments. Faced with actual life-or-death situations — traffic accidents, terrorist attacks, street assaults — people report entering a mode of calm, rapid response, reacting automatically, almost without thinking. Afterward, they often say the episode felt unreal, as if it were all a dream. "Dreaming is a sensitive system that tries to pay much attention to the threatening cues in our environment," Revonsuo says. "Their function is to protect and prepare us.""
Feed Science Daily: Helium Supplies Endangered, Threatening Science And Technology (sciencedaily.com) 1
In America, helium is running out of gas. The uplifting element is being depleted so rapidly in the world's largest reserve, outside of Amarillo, Texas, that supplies are expected to be depleted there within the next eight years. This deflates more than the Goodyear blimp and party favors. Its larger impact is on science and technology.
Submission + - Communities of Mutants Form as DNA Testing Grows (nytimes.com) 1
GeneRegulator writes: The NY Times is running a story on communities that are forming around kids with rare genetic mutations. New technology that can scan chromosomes for small errors is being applied first to children with autism and other "unexplained developmental delays." It turns out that many of them have small deletions or duplications of DNA, and doctors creating a whole new taxonomy of syndromes with names like 16p11.2 and 7q11.23 that refer to the affected region of the genome. Meanwhile, hundreds of little groups are forming around the banner of their children's shared mutations.
As new research shows that many of us have small deletions and duplications of DNA that separate us from our parents, and that many of these "copy number variants" contribute to skills and senses the families described in the story may presage the formation of all sorts of "communities of the genetically rare" in the general population, not just amongst the developmentally delayed.
