Airport security in America is a sham — security theatre
designed to make travellers feel better and catch stupid terrorists. Smart ones can get through security with fake boarding passes and all manner of prohibited items — as Jeffrey Goldberg did with ease
A once-secret 1940s tunnel complex under the centre of London that housed military intelligence and linked the Cold War hotline phone between Washington and Moscow has been put up for sale
ComScore’s most US search engine Rankings for August 2008 suggest that YouTube achieves a greater level of search traffic than Yahoo. If you were to consider YouTube’s integrated search a regular search engine, you would have to hand Google the top two spots for search engine traffic. In combination, Google has about four times the search traffic of Yahoo and more than ten times the search traffic of Microsoft’s MSN sites
The Communications Data Bill (2008) will lead to the creation of a single, centralised database containing records of all e-mails sent, web sites visited and mobile phones used by UK citizens. In a carnivore-on-steroids programme, as all vestiges of communication privacy are stripped away> The BBC reports that Home Secretary Jacqui Smith says this is a necessity
— via Slashdot
A prolonged, ongoing Gmail outage has some Google Apps administrators pulling their hair out as their end users, including high-ranking executives, complain loudly while they wait for service to be restored
A pair of paralysed monkeys regained the ability to move their arms after researchers wired individual neurons to the monkeys’ arm muscles. A team of researchers at the University of Washington temporarily paralysed each monkey’s arm, then rerouted brain signals from a single neuron in the motor cortex around the blocked nerve pathway via a computer. When the neuron fired above a certain rate, the computer translated the signal into a jolt of electricity to the arm muscle, causing it to contract. The monkeys practiced moving their arms by playing a video game — via Slashdot
Australians will be unable to opt-out of the government’s pending Internet content filtering scheme, and will instead be placed on a watered-down blacklist, experts say. Under the government’s $125.8 million Plan for Cyber-Safety, users can switch between two blacklists which block content inappropriate for children, and a separate list which blocks illegal material. Pundits say consumers have been lulled into believing the opt-out proviso would remove content filtering altogether
Steven Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, has announced a new line of Apple laptop computers that he said were made with a new manufacturing process. Jobs introduced new versions of the company’s MacBook Pro and MacBook portable computers that are carved from 1.1kg blocks of aluminium
Defendants can’t deny police an encryption key because of fears the data it unlocks will incriminate them, a British appeals court has ruled
Russian security developer Kaspersky Labs is boosting its local presence and anti-virus guru Eugene Kaspersky is here to announce the opening of a Melbourne office. Alexey Gromyko, formerly Kaspersky’s Australia-New Zealand manager, has been appointed head of the company’s Oceania business, operating out of Melbourne
The nightly builds of Firefox 3.1 have added a significant improvement to the session restore dialogue you normally see after a crashed browsing session. The upshot: Rather than displaying a modal dialog that requires you to restore your old session or start from scratch, Firefox will display an about:sessionrestore tab in which you can selectively disable any tab or window from the previous session before you continue with the restore. If you suspect any web site of causing your crash, the option to disable it from the session restore is a real boon
Dozens of country internet users have been disconnected because of a dispute between a service provider and its wholesale reseller. Customers of LiSP and GoBush Broadband lost internet services late last week
Authorities said Tuesday they have shut down one of the largest spam operations in the world, a vast network involving countries from New Zealand to China and the United States
A project to develop small solar panels that can be woven into people’s clothing to generate electricity is among the research initiatives to have won funding from the federal government
Quantenna Communications, expects to announce three chipsets that boost Wi-Fi signals with a small footprint. The chips are being designed to solve the problem of uneven Wi-Fi coverage that results when signals are forced to travel through walls, weakening their strength. The design also tries to avoid interference from other devices operating in the 2.4 or 5 Ghz bands with a dual-band chip and MIMO technology. The firm is offering a chipset for the 2.4 Ghz band, one for 5 Ghz, as well as a dual-band chipset
OpenOffice has released version 3 of its eponymous open-source alternative to Microsoft Office, which includes a native version for Mac OSX
Postage costs on eBay sometimes beggar belief (and lead to the suspicion that vendors are trying to use postage to bolster their own profits). In that context, a new move by eBay to restrict the amount of flat-rate postage that can be charged in some categories is welcome news for buyers, though it might not do much to please sellers who’ve already had a messy 2008 when it comes to eBay policy. The limits, which will come into effect from early November, apply to CDs ($5), DVDs ($8) and books ($6). Those are still somewhat higher than the likely standard postage costs in many cases, but at least the new policy sets a ceiling
Gordon Brown last night abandoned his parliamentary battle to allow police to detain terror suspects without charge for up to 42 days, after the Lords overwhelmingly rejected the proposal by 191 votes. In an emergency statement to MPs tonight, Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, said that the counter-terrorism bill would continue its journey through parliament without the 42 day measure
AC/DC will release its new album Black Ice
worldwide on 20 October, in physical format only since the band doesn’t sell its music online. However, the upcoming album has already been digitised by pirates, as it leaked to BitTorrent five days ago. In that time it has taken the trackers by storm, racking up a staggering 400,000 downloads
It started with a Harvard physicist acting on a hunch. It ended up producing a new material, called black silicon, that could have a broad impact on technologies ranging from ultrasensitive sensors to photovoltaic cells. Black silicon was discovered because Dr Mazur started thinking outside the boundaries of the research he was doing in the late 1990s. His research group had been financed by the Army Research Organisation to explore catalytic reactions on metallic surfaces
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