An anonymous reader writes "Repeated requests toward the Wikileaks staff regarding their use of PGP have gone unanswered. The current public PGP key posted has been expired since November 2nd, 2007. A response on their PGP talk page notes that the 'SSL based mail submission system' will be the secure online method of document submission. At the current time, there is no method to safely encrypt any postal communications with Wikileaks or verify that any given communication actually originated from a Wikileaks staff member." Doubtless there are some complicating factors here -- but what is the best way to keep a confidentiality-centric site like Wikileaks trustworthy?

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "On January 2, 2008, the Massachusetts State Police ordered MediaSentry, the RIAA's investigator, to cease and desist from conducting investigations in Massachusetts without a license. Based on what appears to be irrefutable proof that MediaSentry has been violating that order, the Boston University students who tentatively won, in London-Sire v. Doe 1, an order tentatively quashing the subpoena for their identities, have brought a new motion to vacate the RIAA's court papers altogether, on the ground that the RIAA's 'evidence' was procured by criminal behavior."

psyced writes "Steganography is a technique to encode secret messages in the background noise of an audio recording or photograph. There have been attempts at steganalysis in the past, but scientists at FH St. Pölten are developing strategies to block out secret data in VoIP and even GSM phone calls by preemptively modifying background noise (link is to a Google translation of the German original) on a level that stays inaudible or invisible, yet destroys any message encoded within. I wonder if this method could be applied to hiding messages in executables, too."

Amy Bennett writes "A recent poll of about 12,000 US business decision-makers by market researcher CoreBrand found that Microsoft's brand power has taken a dive over the past four years. According to the study, Microsoft dropped from number 12 in the ranking of the most powerful US company brands in 2004 to number 59 last year. In 1996, the company ranked number 1 in brand power among 1,200 top companies in about 50 industries. The CEO of CoreBrand said: 'When you see something decline with increasing velocity, it's a concern.' To add some historical context, IBM suffered a much faster and more severe decline in brand power in the early 1990s and it took them 10 years to rebuild the brand's reputation."

ZonkerWilliam recommends a bulletin from the American Institute of Physics, which discusses a study noting that recent spacecraft, such as NEAR, appear to display velocity anomalies much like those seen in Pioneer 10 (which were observed beginning ten years ago). The anomalies amount to up to 13 mm/sec., with a measurement accuracy of 0.1 mm/sec. Quoting: "A new look at the trajectories for various spacecraft as they fly past the Earth finds in each case a tiny amount of surplus velocity. For craft that pursue a path mostly symmetrical with respect to the equator, the effect is minimal. For craft that pursue a more unsymmetrical path, the effect is larger."