Took 'em long enough.
http://www.azstarnet.com/news/163307
Los Alamos security problems spark N-weapons chief's ouster
The Associated Press Tucson, Arizona | Published: 01.05.2007
WASHINGTON — Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman on Thursday dismissed the chief of the country's nuclear weapons program because of security breakdowns at the Los Alamos, N.M., laboratory and other facilities.
... Brooks was reprimanded in June for failing to report to Bodman a security breach of computers at an agency facility in Albuquerque that resulted in the theft of files containing Social Security numbers and other personal data for 1,500 workers.
The theft did not become generally known, nor was Bodman made aware of it, for eight months.
Last fall, security at Los Alamos came into question anew. During a drug raid, authorities found classified nuclear-related documents at the home of a woman with top-secret clearance who worked at the lab.
That security breach was especially troubling, the department's internal watchdog said, because tens of millions had been spent to upgrade computer security at Los Alamos.
Another reason to feel warn and fuzzy (Wait! Those are symptoms!)
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/04/2047222&from=rss
North Korea's Secret Biochemical Arsenal
Posted by Zonk on Thursday January 04, @05:14PM from the i'd-keep-an-eye-on-that dept. Biotech Politics
mattnyc99 writes "Popular Mechanics has an in-depth report on North Korea's biological and chemical weapons stock, which has been developed in secret and has gone largely unnoticed amidst the country's nuke threat. From the article: 'North Korea's Chemical and Bioweapons (CBW) program appears to be modeled on that of the former Soviet Union, which covertly constructed a massive biological weapons infrastructure within the shell of a civilian research organization called Biopreparat. Inside Biopreparat, the Soviets developed deadly agents that included weaponized forms of anthrax and pneumonic plague. Intelligence reports from the United States and South Korea list anthrax, smallpox, pneumonic plague, cholera and botulism toxins as leading components of North Korea's bioweapons projects.' "
Know your enemy
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/05/0025204&from=rss
A Tour of the Google Blacklist
Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday January 04, @10:27PM from the taking-down-names dept. Google The Internet Security
WienerPizza writes "Michael Sutton takes us on a tour of the Google blacklist, a list of suspected phishing sites. He finds that eBay, PayPal and Bank of America combined account for 63% of the active phishing sites. Amusingly, he also reveals that Yahoo! has a nasty habit of hosting phishing sites that harvest — you guessed it — Yahoo! credentials!"
Once again, the Striesand effect rules... Make a fuss about something you don't want disclosed, and everyone wants to see it. By the way, where is the link to this video? A search returned 128 hits (she seems to be a Brazilian Bay Watch Babe) so I'll have to sift through them carefully. (Also see next article...)
http://techdirt.com/articles/20070104/081604.shtml
Brazil Wants Another Google Site -- YouTube -- Shut Down
from the good-luck-with-that dept
A few months ago, the Brazilian government got into a legal spat with Google after its Orkut social-networking site was being used for illegal activity. Google complied with some of the Brazilian demands, including shutting down parts of Orkut, but the government wasn't happy, and started harrassing Google's Brazilian office, which was just responsible for ad sales and had nothing to do with running Orkut. Now, a Brazilian judge has ordered that YouTube, another Google property, be shut down until it removes a celebrity sex video from its site. The video in question features a Brazilian model and her boyfriend having sex on a beach; it's been removed from YouTube several times, but users have uploaded it again and again. But don't expect your favorite source of exploding Mentos videos to disappear: just like with Orkut, the Brazilian court's going to have a hard time enforcing this order, since YouTube is based in the US, and generally subject to its laws and courts (except for local products in some cases).
Once again, the question of who has legal jurisdiction over the internet and sites on it comes into question. US courts tend to agree that online companies are bound by the laws of the country in which they're based, while there are continual efforts by groups like record companies and even some governments to assert that if an internet site can be reached from a particular place, it's subject to its laws and the jurisdiction of its courts. This leads to a problem of jurisdiction shopping, where people file lawsuits in unrelated countries to take advantage of their legal environments. Jurisdiction shopping, of course, isn't a new phenomenon, but the internet makes it a little easier. This is a sticky subject: the idea that anybody can be sued anywhere in the world for something the post online isn't a particularly appealing one, but many people don't have a problem with local laws being used to chase after criminals abroad when it comes to things like child pornography. So where is the line drawn, and who gets to determine it? While international treaties govern all sorts of things, international court systems have often been undermined by these very types of questions about jurisidiction.
It figures that the Brits would have the proper English terms for all this nonsense. Always happy to improve my vocabulary...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/04/youtube_shutdown/
Brazilian court orders YouTube shutdown
By Lester Haines Published Thursday 4th January 2007 15:20 GMT
A Brazilian court has ordered the closure of YouTube following the site's failure to completely remove a video showing Ronaldo's ex-missus and her new boyf indulging in a bit of beach rumpy-pumpy, Reuters reports.
Model Daniela Cicarelli sued YouTube after the offending film proved a smash hit among Brazilian YouTubers. She and squeeze Tato Malzoni last year "filed to force YouTube to take the video down and demanded $116,000 in damages for each day the video remains up". Although YouTube did indeed remove some copies, other users reposted it and the whole sorry exposure dragged on for months.
Finally, Cicarelli and Malzoni filed another suit in December "requesting that YouTube be shut down as long as the video is available to users". A Brazilian court agreed and a judicial clerk today said that it had "ordered the popular video sharing service ... to be shut down until it removes a celebrity sex video from its site".
This is likely to prove difficult to enforce, Reuters notes, since YouTube is based the US. No-one from owner Google was available to speak to the agency today.
In the interests of investigative journalism, and to save readers the bother of going and tracking it down themselves, we selflessly viewed the footage several times and can confirm it involves some hot ice cream-sucking action followed by what appears to be a semi-subaquatic Cicarelli riding Malzoni's visibly-armed torpedo. Accordingly, we can confirm it's NSFW, should you fancy doing a bit of investigative journalism yourselves.
Expect a new type of campaigning this time...
http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/1792/meeting-the-bloggers-in-new-hampshire
Meeting the bloggers in New Hampshire
Posted by Robert Scoble | January 4th, 2007 8:56 pm
One of the things I was studying is how the Edwards campaign would use bloggers. Here, John Edwards meets a variety of bloggers and videobloggers in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. You'll see Steve Garfield and Chuck Olsen, videobloggers, in the background (Chuck's video showed up on Rocketboom).
Politicians should fit right in – they are used to operating in an unreal environment. Imagine an environment where politicians can customize their message to match your views – EVERY politician could sound like your ideal candidate. Scary, isn't it.
http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-6147432.html?part=rss&tag=2547-1_3-0-5&subj=news
Democrat politico ventures into 'Second Life'
By Declan McCullagh Story last modified Fri Jan 05 05:42:32 PST 2007
As jubilant Democrats in Washington celebrated their newfound control of the U.S. Congress on Thursday, Rep. George Miller was doing the same thing in a more unusual place: Second Life.
Miller appears to be the first member of Congress to hold something akin to a press conference in this virtual world, which is operated by Linden Lab and boasts its own currency and a population of more than 2 million registered users.
... "It's going to develop into an important forum for members of Congress of both parties," predicted Miller, who has represented the district northeast of San Francisco since 1974.
... In a 2006 election scorecard prepared by CNET News.com that rated technology votes, Miller received a failing grade of 42 percent. That's largely because of his votes on morality hot-buttons such as opposing Internet gambling, approving a federal investigation of Grand Theft Auto, and siding with restrictions on social-networking sites like MySpace.com.
...and don't try to confuse us with facts! We already know everything we want to...
http://news.com.com/2100-7348_3-6147079.html?tag=nefd.top
U.S. bars lab from testing electronic voting
By Christopher Drew Story last modified Thu Jan 04 10:53:01 PST 2007
A laboratory that has tested most of the nation's electronic voting systems has been temporarily barred from approving new machines after federal officials found that it was not following its quality-control procedures and could not document that it was conducting all the required tests.
The company, Ciber, of Greenwood Village, Colo., has also come under fire from analysts hired by New York State over its plans to test new voting machines for the state. New York could eventually spend $200 million to replace its aging lever devices.
Experts on voting systems say the Ciber problems underscore longstanding worries about lax inspections in the secretive world of voting-machine testing. The action by the federal Election Assistance Commission seems certain to fan growing concerns about the reliability and security of the devices.
The commission acted last summer, but the problem was not disclosed then. [No need to alarm folks with an election pending... Bob] Officials at the commission and Ciber confirmed the action in recent interviews.
... Experts say the deficiencies of the laboratory suggest that crucial features like the vote-counting software and security against hacking may not have been thoroughly tested on many machines now in use.
Work expands to fill the time allotted. Storage expands as fast as hard drive capacity (Why delete it, if you're not short of space?) Should make for interesting e-discovery efforts – if there are 100,000 emails in a gigabyte, then there are 100 million emails in a terabyte.
http://news.com.com/2100-1041_3-6147409.html?part=rss&tag=2547-1_3-0-5&subj=news
Here comes the terabyte hard drive
By Michael Kanellos Story last modified Fri Jan 05 05:49:59 PST 2007
Last year, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies predicted hard-drive companies would announce 1 terabyte drives by the end of 2006. Hitachi was only off by a few days.
... A terabyte is a trillion bytes, or a million megabytes, or 1,000 gigabytes, as measured by the hard-drive industry. (There are actually two conventions for calculating megabytes, but this is how the drive industry counts it.) As a reference, the print collection in the Library of Congress comes to about 10 terabytes of information, according to the How Much Information study from U.C. Berkeley. The report also found that 400,000 terabytes of e-mail get produced per year. About 50,000 trees would be necessary to create enough paper to hold a terabyte of information, according to the report.
... Consumers, meanwhile, are gobbling up more drive capacity because of content like video. An hour of standard video takes up about 1GB, while an hour of high-definition video sucks up 4GB, Pickford said.
It's computerized! It can't be wrong! The computer meant to type 42 MPH!
See: Ford Motor Credit Company v. Swarens, 447 S.W.2d 53 (1969).
http://techdirt.com/articles/20070104/182710.shtml
Going 420 mph In A 30 mph Zone?
from the you-might-want-to-slow-down-a-bit dept
It's been almost exactly three years since we wrote about a UK driver who received an automated ticket from a speeding camera, clocking his car cruising at a speedy 406 mph. The police chalked it up to a "clerical error." However, apparently those clerical errors are still happening, as a cab driver in the UK has now been issued a ticket for traveling 420 mph in a 30 mph zone. Again, the police chalk it up to "an employee processing error." Unfortunately, despite the driver's claims in the article that he's set a new land speed record, that's not even true in the world of bogus tickets. We've seen other reports clocking people at at least 480 mph. It's probably not such a big deal when the errors are so obvious [but any manager worth his pay should have eliminated this type of error by now! Bob] -- but it makes you wonder how many people get in trouble for similar errors that aren't so extreme? Unless you happen to be good enough at math to disprove a slight exaggeration in your speed, you might just be completely out of luck. You would think that systems like these would (a) not let humans adjust the recorded speed and (b) have some sort of "reality" filter to pick up these extreme errors -- but apparently neither feature is in place. Perhaps that's why we once had that story of a brick wall clocked at 58 mph.
Attention student researchers! Prove any hypothesis!
http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2007-01-04.html#n31
Create Fake Google Results
This is fun, and much easier than googlebombing: Gooogie.co.uk – that’s three “o” and an “i” in the domain – lets you create customized Google searches that don’t return any results, but a spelling correction instead. Like this one. (Let’s hope the site gets filed under “parody,” not “trademark infringement”...)
Free is good!
http://www.oculture.com/weblog/2007/01/free_beethoven_.html
January 04, 2007
Free Beethoven and Mozart Recordings via Podcast
Courtesy of Deutsche Welle, the German international broadcasting service, you can fill your iPod at no cost with some exceptional classical music. We'd particularly encourage you to focus on two podcasts. First, Beethovenfest (iTunes Feed Web Site), which lets users download "Beethoven's most famous symphonies performed by excellent young orchestras." Next, Classical Masterpieces (iTunes Feed Web Site), which gives you free access to symphonies by Mozart, Strauss, Schumann, Brahms, and Bruckner, each presented by conductor Kent Nagano and the internationally known DSO Berlin. (Incidentally, a quite large collection of free classical music can also be found on Wikipedia. Thanks to one of our readers for letting us know.)
Finally, we should mention that Deutsche Welle offers a lot of other free podcasts in English. Take for example Inspired Minds (iTunes Feed Web Site), a series of podcasts exploring the world's great thinkers, or Deutsche Warum Nicht? (iTunes), a multi-part series that will teach you German from the ground up. A great trove of content that's worth your time.
Also see our larger Arts & Culture podcast collection or our larger Podcast Portal.
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