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United States

Submission + - Ron Paul raises record $6 million in single day (ultrasonicdesigns.com)

Submitted by
SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: "Sarah Lai Stirland of Wired News reports Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul made history Sunday by raising $6 million in online contributions in 24 hours, breaking the record for the most money raised by a national candidate in a single day, and potentially putting Paul on track to surpass the fourth quarter fund raising of all of his competitors in both parties. Full article: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/12/ron-paul-suppor.html"
Republicans

Submission + - Ron Paul raises record $6 million in single day (ultrasonicdesigns.com)

Submitted by
SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: "Sarah Lai Stirland of Wired News reports:

"Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul made history Sunday by raising $6 million in online contributions in 24 hours, breaking the record for the most money raised by a national candidate in a single day, and potentially putting Paul on track to surpass the fourth quarter fund raising of all of his competitors in both parties."

Full article:
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/12/ron-paul-suppor.html"
Communications

Submission + - Bees can optimize Internet bottlenecks (msn.com)

Submitted by
prostoalex
prostoalex writes: "Georgia Tech and University of Oxford scientists claim bees can help up develop a better Internet traffic algorithms. By observing bees, the researchers noticed that bees pass back information on route quality: "On a basic level, the honeybee's dilemma is a tale of two flower patches. If one patch is yielding better nectar than the other, how can the hive use its workforce most efficiently to retrieve the best supply at the moment? The solution, which earned Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch a Nobel Prize, is a communication system called the waggle dance." Any practical applications of that? Well, apparently ad servers, serving banners across a variety of servers, can report back on the time it took to generate the page: "As a stand-in for the dance floor, Tovey and his colleagues used what they called an advertisement board, which sent messages to communicate the location of hot Web sites. When one server received a user request to help out at a specific site, an internal ad popped up on the board to attract other servers in the hosting center. As in the hive, ads for locations in demand and offering better income potential lasted longer. And the longer the ads aired, the more they increased the chance that other servers would be recruited to help power the site du jour. Tovey said revenue, page hits or other parameters measuring a site's popularity could all do nicely as online nectar substitutes.""
Privacy

Submission + - Judge:Man can't be forced to divulge passphrase (news.com) 2

Submitted by
mytrip
mytrip writes: "A federal judge in Vermont has ruled that prosecutors can't force a criminal defendant accused of having illegal images on his hard drive to divulge his PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) passphrase.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Jerome Niedermeier ruled that a man charged with transporting child pornography on his laptop across the Canadian border has a Fifth Amendment right not to turn over the passphrase to prosecutors. The Fifth Amendment protects the right to avoid self-incrimination.

Niedermeier tossed out a grand jury's subpoena that directed Sebastien Boucher to provide "any passwords" used with his Alienware laptop. "Compelling Boucher to enter the password forces him to produce evidence that could be used to incriminate him," the judge wrote in an order dated November 29 that went unnoticed until this week. "Producing the password, as if it were a key to a locked container, forces Boucher to produce the contents of his laptop."

Especially if this ruling is appealed, U.S. v. Boucher could become a landmark case. The question of whether a criminal defendant can be legally compelled to cough up his encryption passphrase remains an unsettled one, with law review articles for the last decade arguing the merits of either approach. (A U.S. Justice Department attorney wrote an article in 1996, for instance, titled "Compelled Production of Plaintext and Keys.")"
The Matrix

Submission + - Google's knol completes Wikipedia cycle (chrisblanc.org)

Submitted by
Technical Writing Geek
Technical Writing Geek writes: "When they wanted to take out Microsoft Internet Explorer, they pumped money and developers into Mozilla Firefox, making it as corporate of a project as IE. Result? Many people use it, believing it to be a real alternative, while Google slowly slackens its support into the background.

Finally, Wikipedia: Google needed a way to provide some kind of standard result for any search query, because too many people were spamming. So they encouraged wikipedia, knowing that its content would eventually get out of hand.

Now, they've introduced Google Knol, which is a wikipedia clone — except that it's hybridized with a group blog, and is only open to select contributors. Thinking of Associated Content or Reddit? Yeah, me too.

It's a good way of acknowledging what Wikipedia tries desperately not to let the world know. Most wikipedia articles are written by relatively few people, maybe 2% of the contributing audience. They are augmented by another 10%-20% of the people there. The rest of the people on Wikipedia perform really obvious monkey tasks like plagiarizing websites that are expert in their area, so the Wikipedia page appears above them in search results. This was basically a giant web real estate grab.

With Knol, Google is starting where Wikipedia left off.

http://www.chrisblanc.org/blog/web/2007/12/17/googles-knol-and-what-it-means/"
Republicans

Submission + - Dark Horse uses internet to make millions.

Submitted by
gebbeth
gebbeth writes: "Republican and Libertarian minded candidate Ron Paul raises 6 million+ ONLINE on 12/16/07 (Anniversery of the Boston Tea Party). This record breaking donation spree counterpoints the Mainstream Media and polling coverage of the same candidate which are both suspiciously lacking. If a candidate is popular enough to gather enough support to break fundraising records, then surely he deserves the same coverage as other more well known candidates. The only factor that is really leveling the playing field is the internet, where a candidates' views can be presented without biased questions and barbs designed to disrupt the speaker. Additionally, supporters of a candidate who might previously have been segregated by geography now can band together with easy by virtue of social networking sites like Meetup.com. To see the fundraising graph and the number of donors you can go to Ronpaul2008.com or RonPaulGraphs.com. Friends...protect the internet, it is our last bastion of free speech!!!"
Media

Submission + - A&E beaming adverts directly into your head. 2

Submitted by Fantastic Lad
Fantastic Lad writes: Hear Voices? It May Be an Ad. New Yorker Alison Wilson was walking down Prince Street in SoHo last week when she heard a woman's voice right in her ear asking, "Who's there? Who's there?" She looked around to find no one in her immediate surroundings. Then the voice said, "It's not your imagination." Indeed it isn't. It's an ad for "Paranormal State," a ghost-themed series premiering on A&E this week. The billboard uses technology manufactured by Holosonic that transmits an "audio spotlight" from a rooftop speaker so that the sound is contained within your cranium.
Government

Submission + - National ID to use Texas Instruments RF360? (obscureresearch.net)

Submitted by
SaffronMiner
SaffronMiner writes: "The Texas Instruments RF360 has been announced for use in National ID cards , and Extended Access Control (EAC) requirements developed by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) .

"RF360 smart integrated circuit platform for the government identification market The Texas Instruments RF360 is the first contactless smart integrated circuit (IC) platform developed specifically to meet the rigorous demands of the government electronic identification market. It integrates TI's ultra-low power MSP430 microcontroller, advanced embedded Ferroelectric Random Access Memory (FRAM) and high-performance RF Analog Front-End (AFE) technologies. Leveraging a low power architecture and enhanced write capability, the RF360 smart IC platform provides fast chip transaction speeds enabling governments to quickly and efficiently produce a multitude of passive electronic identification (ID) such as electronic passports (e-passports) and national ID cards . (See http://www.ti.com/govid .)"


...

"Answering the Security Call

The RF360 platform provides both the memory and processing power to accommodate current and future security and encryption requirements, such as Basic Access Control (BAC) and Extended Access Control (EAC) requirements developed by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) . It integrates advanced security countermeasures and is designed to meet the stringent requirements of the Common Criteria EAL5+ security certification per the BSI (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik) Smartcard protection profile (BSI-PPP-0002). The RF360 platform features innovative, fast hardware co-processors on chip which support both public key cryptography (RSA, Elliptic Curve) and symmetric key cryptography (DES/Triple DES, AES). The RF360 architecture supports both contactless (ISO/IEC 14443 air interface protocol) and contact (ISO/IEC 7816 smart card interface protocol) communication."
"
Networking

Submission + - Cisco's biggest acquisitions of 2007 (networkworld.com)

Submitted by whitehartstag
whitehartstag writes: Cisco made 11 acquisitions this year culminating in 126 purchases since Cisco's birth. It made three more acquisitions than it did last year, when it spent a measly $256 million buying ho-hum technologies. This year was different, not only in the sheer dollar size of some acquisitions, but also because of the breadth of technologies it acquired. From social networks to broadband wireless, Network World takes a look at Cisco's top-six acquisitions of 2007, and discusses what Cisco should have bought and what Cisco may be looking to buy in 2008.
VA

Submission + - Proof of Dell's froudolent sales system, technique (mruproject.com)

Submitted by
Marco Ruocco
Marco Ruocco writes: "I conducted a research project using participant-based experimental methodologies on plain data related to Notebook PC cost (in euros) on Dell.it Website , and I found that Dell is offering the same product at different price according to what is the first link you click when you choose a configuration pre-selection. This offers the right-jab to give a look at Dell's world behind just around The Corner. Final research paper on Dell fraudolent behaviour http://www.mruproject.com/document/MRU_HOWTO_Order_a_Dell_Notebook_Online_and_Save.pdf Source Experimental Data from MichealDell.it website http://www.mruproject.com/document/experimental_data.zip Regards, Marco Ruocco MRU di Ruocco Marco http://www.mruproject.com/"

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