Electrical electoral injustice

Independent observers are being blocked from properly observing the trials of electronic voting at the UK's forthcoming local elections.

U.S. Special Forces may soon have a strange and powerful new weapon in their arsenal: a pair of high-tech binoculars 10 times more powerful than anything available today, augmented by an alerting system that literally taps the wearer's prefrontal

Filed under: Networking

It's always only a matter of time. A little less than a year after the first quantum cryptographic network was demoed, a group of researchers at MIT have announced a working implementation of a hack that's been around in theory since 1998 but never implemented. Skirting around ol' Wernie Heisenberg and that Principle of his, the team exploited quantum entanglement to read the encryption keys encoded in photon polarizations from their momentums, avoiding detection by either end -- in other words, doing what was once thought impossible by cryptographers. The system isn't perfect, however -- in this early incarnation it can only nab 40% of transmitted data before giving itself away, and more importantly, it requires the invention of a "quantum non-demolition box" before the attacker can be anywhere but the same room as the receiver, since right now both attacker and receiver need to be using the same photon detector. Sounds like that might put a damper on that whole "undetectable" thing. Still, the researchers sound upbeat -- they're saying the work proves that no secret is truly safe. We're just wondering if they're pushing MIT to rename their department SETEC ASTRONOMY.

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Business 2.0 failed to heed its own advice about backing up computer files when its editorial system crashed and the backup server failed to back up.

Responding to Viacom’s $1 billion copyright infringement suit, Google said that it would not back off, declaring that the law was on its side.

Tim Lee points us to an LA Times article on the growing success of The Pirate Bay's political movement, noting that its membership is growing in Sweden and is nearly equal to that of the country's Green Party. This is ironic for a few reasons -- most of all being that the entertainment industry was so proud over the raids on the Pirate Bay's servers last year, insisting that it had killed off the site. Instead, the site was back up in days, and the attention propelled what had been a fairly minor search engine for BitTorrent trackers into the limelight -- helping to get it many more users and to get the political movement some traction. In fact, we've now seen other political parties take on some of the Pirate Bay's platform. To be honest, I have mixed feelings about this. I don't support the Pirate Bay's position that unauthorized downloads are defensible. Instead, I think that copyright holders need to come to the realization that they're actually better off by letting people download content -- not that it needs to be forced upon them by users taking matters into their own hands. That said, by taking such an extreme position (and having it get some attention), perhaps it's more likely that content holders will come to this realization. They'll simply be forced to adapt and will start coming up with more successful business models that actually benefit from free downloads rather than trying to block them and sue their best customers.

Filed under: Laptops

Just when you thought you knew everything there was to know about the OLPC, Negroponte, and the Sugar interface, in comes the man himself using the "W" word in an open-sourced conversation. Curiously enough, Nik Neg has not only stated that the present is "perhaps the most critical stage of the OLPC's life," but he also blurted out a quasi-firm $176 pricetag that would be attached to them. Additionally, he went so far as to admit that "XO's developers have been working with Microsoft so a version of Windows can run on the machines," and while no direct linkages were drawn to the recent $3 software package that the firm had announced, the writing is somewhat on the wall. Furthermore, a whopping 19 state governors have reportedly shown interest in grabbing a few of the inexpensive machines for their own schoolkids, and while the creator initially stated that the XOs were "designed for a totally different situation," he was also quoted as saying that business in the US "couldn't be ignored." C'mon guys and gals, how about a little less conversation and a little more action?

Read - Hints of Windows on OLPC
Read - US schools could adopt OLPC

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