http://www.generationgamerz.com/home/blog.php?id=214
CONFIRMED! Sony is Worried About Overheating!
* CigDangle * Tue 10th October 2006, 2:10 pm
[Well, not flammable, but damn hot!] Just as PS3 pre-orders are selling out nationwide at EB Games/GameStop stores, Generation: Gamerz has received information implying that Sony is worried about PlayStation 3 heat issues, contrary to recent reports.
In addition to the 3 crashes witnessed by many at the TGS show, at least one company that manufactures the store kiosks has been asked to implement last minute design changes to the displays: additional cooling is being implemented. Although our source reports that they have been unable to overheat the unit in house, they are to continue with the installation of a cooling fan in the display.
Seems as though Sony is experiencing many of the same problems Microsoft has. Let`s hope Sony provides a longer warranty.
Something fishy about this article...
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/9316.html
Police probe personal data theft from 2,300 U.K. computers
Posted on : 2006-10-11 Author : Alan Cross
LONDON: Credit card details and passwords stolen from thousands of computers users in the U.K. have found its way to a computer in the U.S. and British law enforcing agencies are investigating the circumstances that led to the theft of these confidential information and trying to find out the perpetrators.
According to the Metropolitan Police's Computer Crime Unit, which is investigating the incident, data found in the U.S. computer was apparently stolen from more than 2,300 U.K. computers using a virus. The unit said some 83,000 files in the U.K. computers were targeted by the hackers, but there could be more such instances around the world.
It added that the information was stolen using a malicious code named "backdoor." Email addresses, passwords, credit card numbers and other confidential information could have been stolen by the hackers.
The police have alerted banks and other financial institutions, which offer online services.
A spokesperson for the Met said the department has emailed known victims and they should immediately contact the Computer Crime Unit on the contact number provided.
The spokesperson said it is too early to establish how the computers have been infected. The department would also not say at this juncture whether the compromised information has been used in fraud.
The Met did not reveal the circumstances under which the U.S. computer was seized, saying investigations are going on. It is confident of cracking down on the criminals.
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/10/1953216&from=rss
Improving Open Source Speech Recognition
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday October 10, @04:10PM Announcements Linux
kmaclean writes, "VoxForge collects free GPL Transcribed Speech Audio that can be used in the creation of Acoustic Models for use with Open Source Speech Recognition Engines. We are essentially creating a user-submitted repository of the 'source' speech audio for the creation of Acoustic Models to be used by Speech Recognition Engines. The Speech Audio files will then be 'compiled' into Acoustic Models for use with Open Source Speech Recognition engines such as Sphinx, HTK, CAVS and Julius."
Read on for why we need free GPL speech audio.
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71928-0.html?tw=rss.index
Politics Get Caught in the Web
By Jennifer Granick 01:00 AM Oct, 11, 2006
In the quest for political office, modern campaigners deal in the currency of the moment, information. Information is power, and campaigns trade fiercely in it, exhaustively researching their opponents' past, [Take care! Dis-information could be planted... Bob] scrutinizing the moods of the elusive swing voter and spewing (or leaking) favorable information about their own candidate.
Of course, politicians try to harness the power of the internet, but some campaigns look more like they are stumbling than steering through cyberspace.
In August, Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman's campaign accused the office of his opponent, Ned Lamont, of coordinating a human, distributed denial-of-service attack on Lieberman's Joe2006 website. Lamont denied the allegation. Lieberman critics said various error messages suggested the campaign did not buy enough bandwidth to handle normal traffic.
Then, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger accused challenger Phil Angelides' campaign of breaking into a password-protected computer to obtain an embarrassing audio file of Schwarzenegger referring to a Latino state representative's "hot" blood. Investigation by the Angelides people showed that the governor's campaign had included audio recordings of private meetings with recordings of speeches and press conferences on a public, unsecured web server.
In mid-September, the Minnesota Senate campaign for Democrat Amy Klobuchar reported to the FBI that their communications director had viewed an unaired TV attack ad commissioned by their opponent, Mark Kennedy. A blogger sent the communications director a link to the ad. While the specific link was not password-protected, the blogger said he found the link after guessing the password to the website. Uncertain whether the blogger had discovered the ad illegally, the campaign felt compelled to report the incident to the authorities. [Wow! Ethics! Bob]
About a week later, two liberal bloggers traced comments on Democratic candidate Paul Hodes' webpage to the policy director for Hodes' opponent, Rep. Charles Bass (R-New Hampshire). The policy director, Tad Furtado, was "sock puppeting," pretending to be a Hodes supporter arguing that Bass held such a large lead in polls that like-minded New Hampshire Democrats should focus their campaign efforts on more competitive races in New York or Connecticut.
Last Thursday, Rick Bolanos, the Democratic candidate for Congress in San Antonio, Texas, filed a lawsuit alleging Rep. Henry Bonilla's campaign was cybersquatting on a dozen domain names Bolanos would normally use for his campaign's website.
Why are so many campaigns tripping over the internet?
Campaigns are about collecting, controlling and disseminating information. The internet has a lot of rules about information transfer. These rules include complicated "unauthorized access" statutes, copyright law, trademark law and domain-name regulations.
Campaigns are down-and-dirty struggles for power. Leaking favorable information and researching your opponent are fundamental tools in the contest. The internet provides a wealth of new outlets and sources of information, but the ethics of internet use are in flux, if only because it is still relatively new and does not always match up well with the ethics of campaigns, or of the rest of society.
Where law and ethics are unclear, there's risk, and where there's risk, there are traps for the most aggressive users of the internet, including campaigns.
Furtado resigned for pretending to be someone he was not. But on the internet, it is accepted to go by a false name. [On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog! Bob] California's governor accused his opponent of "hacking", but the information was not password-protected. It was secure only by virtue of the fact that no one had stumbled on it yet. In the real world, if you stumble upon juicy information, you are allowed to publicize it. In cyberspace, you might run afoul of computer-trespass laws.
The federal law, and every state, has a "computer trespass" statute that prohibits access to computers without authorization or without permission. Mostly, we use the internet assuming that we have permission to connect to this or that web server unless there is some indication to the contrary. After all, the owner intentionally hooked the machine to the public network.
The law is much less clear. Some cases suggest that a user needs explicit permission before connecting. Other cases hold that using a networked computer in a way that's contrary to the owner's interests is trespassing.
In a campaign, every time a candidate's team searches for the opponents' latest speeches and press releases, they are acting against the opponent's interests. Perhaps Klobuchar's former communications director could have known she was on Kennedy's media consultant's website looking at an unreleased ad. But without password-protecting it, is she supposed to look away just because her viewing it is contrary to what Kennedy's team would have preferred?
This uncertainty applies outside of campaigns as well.
When students found an archive of e-mails documenting that Diebold electronic voting machines were insecure, the company initially argued that an unidentified hacker had stolen the e-mails and thus no one should redistribute them. When former AT&T employee Mark Klein disclosed to the Electronic Frontier Foundation internal documents showing the company was diverting all telephone and internet communications to a secret room for National Security Agency surveillance, the company (unsuccessfully) argued that EFF should have to return the documents.
Where there's legal uncertainty, you want to be the good guy, rather than a bad actor. [What a concept... Bob] That way, even if you technically broke the law, prosecutors will be reluctant to charge and juries reluctant to convict. Campaigns have a particularly tough time mitigating legal uncertainty. It's difficult to look like a good guy when you're trying to bloody the opponent's nose to gain power for yourself. And with the internet, reasonable people differ on what an ethical choice would be.
As more politicians start to use the internet, and as Election Day nears, we'll see more cases of campaigns making embarrassing security mistakes, violating various internet regulations and transgressing an equally complicated web of ethical constraints. [Count on it! Bob]
Campaigns need to learn how the internet works and how to secure their data and protect their information from attack. Internet law needs to accommodate the fact that real life is messy, and hard-fought campaigns are even messier.
At the same time, there has to be enough cyberspace for the Rick Bolanoses of the world to get their message out. In the meanwhile, a lot of computer-savvy aides are going to be resigning.
- - - Jennifer Granick is executive director of the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, and teaches the Cyberlaw Clinic.
For example:
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/012733.html
October 10, 2006
Center Posts State Legislators' Personal Financial Disclosures
"Effective October 6, 2006 financial disclosure statements filed across the country in 2006 in most states will be available online at the Center for Public Integrity's Web site...select a state at www.publicintegrity.org/iys and, under the "Documents & Databases" section, click "Legislator Personal Financial Disclosures." The Center has collected these documents since 2000 — more than six thousand filings each year — and posted them online. These documents can shed light on what personal interests might influence lawmakers' votes and legislation."
Students of Constitutional Law might find this video amusing. Remember, you have no right to view this video!
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/10/10/olbermann-why-does-habeas-corpus-hate-america/
Olbermann: “Why does habeas corpus hate America”
By: Jamie Holly on Tuesday, October 10th, 2006 at 6:04 PM - PDT
Olbermann-HabeusCorpus_0001.jpg
Keith did a great report tonight on what the recently passed Military Commissions Act of 2006 means to America and our Constitution.
... Transcript available below the fold.
http://www.dvguru.com/2006/10/10/gootube-match-made-in-heaven/
Posted Oct 10th 2006 8:07AM by Randall Bennett
Filed under: Trends, Business, The Little Guy, Web, Online, Editorial
There's no denying the success of YouTube... Alexa puts it as the 10th most visited website on the internet. [in case you're wondering, DV Guru is about 13,000]. With all that success, many pundits around the web said YouTube was Web2.0 Napster and would likely see the same fate, but they've come through and proved all the naysayers wrong. Now that they're nearly legit, with only a regulatory hurdle away, the $1.65 Billion company isn't being sued into oblivion, but instead striking content deals with big media companies.
While the site was worth $1.6 Billion to Google, and the big media companies feel like they've got a place to distribute their content online to the masses, what does the deal mean for indies? The impending sale doesn't affect independent content creators as much as it does big media, but there are defininite advantages for the independent content producer. Read on after the break for a breakdown of today's transaction.
YouTube isn't technologically different than a host of other companies offering online video. DVG broke down the differences between ten different online video sharing services earlier this year, and other than popularity, what does YouTube really have going for it? They broke new ground (some reactions are here). Their major differentiating factor plays off of another Web2.0 breakout: MySpace. YouTube allowed users to leech their bandwidth, and syndicate content on MySpace pages, blogs and any form of web site. That alone opened up the distribution channel. Millions of internet users knew the name YouTube and knew it was the place to find free movies on the web. With clips like "Juggernaut, Bitch!" and Ok Go's "Here it goes again" among a smattering of fart jokes, men getting hit in the crotch, and other random home movies, YouTube became the place to go for video on the web.
Google and YouTube is the only scenario that works in YouTube being purchased. If a traditional media company purchased YouTube, their competitors would remove their copyrighted content thereby limiting YouTube's effectiveness. Google, being the internet zen garden for smart internet startups (although some would argue YouTube isn't necessarily a smart startup), had their own solution, Google Video, failing to gain traction. Ultimately, Google is the only company that could be a neutral third-party that traditional content creators could trust to distribute their content.
Now that you're up on the history of the site, let's talk about the future, post-Google buyout. The house that Sergey built says they're planning on leaving YouTube as its own entity, and now that they've got a sugar daddy, YouTube's employees will get paid, no more worrying about astronomical bandwidth charges and Google will be taking the cease and desist letters, as well as the deep pockets for lawsuits.
As for Google, they've essentially taken the lead in online video with this move. $1.6 Billion may seem like a huge amount, but Google just purchased a huge catalog of content that they can slap AdSense on. Since YouTube will stick around, one can safely assume Google Video's destiny lies in the trash heap. The Google Video programmers will likely keep their jobs, and relocate to YouTube, adding great new features. While we'll have to see whether Google scraps Google Video in favor of YouTube.
Independent content creators can (mildly) rejoice, since the leader in syndicated web video will stick around for a while. The most obvious benefits are added stability: videos already uploaded will continue to work in spite of lawsuits. That, and as Jason Calacanis pointed out, Google is the sort of media company that will be unlikely to put pre-roll advertisements in front of other people's video content.
That's the obvious route, but what other benefits might we see as independent producers? A direction I'm certain Google is thinking of would be dynamic ads for video content. Their AdSense for Video program hasn't been incredibly well received, but with the YouTube acquisition, dynamically placed revenue sharing advertisements could be coming to a video near you. Videobloggers have longed for a solution that leverages the power of the web with the ease of drop-in spot advertising. Perhaps the GooTube alliance will see some traction towards monetized videoblogs, and for that matter monetized home videos.
One feature Google video has that YouTube hasn't touched yet is selling videos for download. The new GooTube conglomeration has the potential to offer indpenedent content creators the ability to reach a wide audience, and even make money off of potential direct sales. Time will tell if they end up implementing this with YouTube, but regardless, there's definate potential.
GooTube is really in it's infancy, and we'll have to see where it goes. There's one thing for certain though, YouTube is going to stick around, and we'll all be watching.
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