The Bush administration has confirmed for the first time that American telecommunications companies played a key role in the NSA’s domestic eavesdropping program after asserting for nearly two years that any role played by the companies was a state secret
Joop Houtkooper of the University of Giessen, Germany, said the Viking spacecraft may in fact have found signs of a weird life form based on hydrogen peroxide on the subfreezing, arid Martian surface. His analysis of one of the experiments carried out by the Viking spacecraft suggests that 0.1 percent of the Martian soil could be of biological origin
Protesters are accusing police of using undercover agents to provoke violent confrontations at the North American leaders’ summit in Montebello, Quebec. Such accusations have been made before after similar demonstrations but this time the alleged agents provocateurs
have been caught on camera. A video, posted on YouTube, shows three young men, their faces masked by bandannas, mingling Monday with protesters in front of a line of police in riot gear. At least one of the masked men is holding a rock in his hand. Late Tuesday, photographs taken by another protester surfaced, showing the trio lying prone on the ground. The photos show the soles of their boots adorned by yellow triangles. A police officer kneeling beside the men has an identical yellow triangle on the sole of his boot. Quebec provincial police admitted Thursday that their officers disguised themselves as demonstrators during the protests — via Boing Boing
National Geographic is reporting on a deep-sea expedition in the North Atlantic where a team of 31 scientists have discovered new and rare marine animals, including a Jewel Squid (Histioteuthis) and Glass Squid — via Squid
Redheads are becoming rarer and could be extinct in 100 years. Less than two per cent of the world’s population has natural red hair, created by a mutation in northern Europe thousands of years ago. Global intermingling, which broadens the availability of possible partners, has reduced the chances of redheads meeting and producing little redheads of their own. It takes only one red-haired parent to produce ginger-headed babies, but two redheads obviously create a much stronger possibility. If the redheads really want to save themselves they should move to Scotland. An estimated 40 per cent of Scots carry the red gene and 13 per cent actually have red hair
Seagate Technology, best known as a maker of magnetic hard drives, plans to make storage components based on flash memory as well. Seagate’s decision is a significant turning point in the religious war in the storage market. The flash versus magnetic debate has been issue number one in the storage world for the past two years
Brazil’s government has promised to investigate allegations that its policy of settling landless communities in the Amazon is encouraging deforestation. Greenpeace has claimed that some of these areas are being exploited by logging companies, after what it says was an eight-month investigation. Brazil’s environment ministry says deforestation in those areas is falling but it will investigate the claims. The government says land distribution to the poor is an important objective. But Greenpeace says the implementation of the policy is encouraging uncontrolled logging and deforestation in some parts of the Amazon
We did a bit of screenprinting on the weekend to make some clothes for people’s birthdays and the like. The design is based on Kamineko, the biting cat from the manga Azumanga Daioh.
Here’s the screen in action:
And here are the results:
Experts expect an announcement within three to ten years from someone in the now little-known field of wet artificial life
. That first cell of synthetic life — made from the basic chemicals in DNA — may not seem like much to non-scientists. For one thing, you’ll have to look in a microscope to see it — via Warren Ellis
Wal-Mart has hopped on the DRM-free bandwagon with the announcement that it will be participating in Universal’s DRM-free sales pilot. The quality looks good: 256Kbps MP3 for 94 cents apiece, but customers are likely to be turned off by the retail chain’s continued censorship — via Slashdot
Mutant frogs with gold skin and red eyes were reportedly found by school children in Shimanto, Japan. They’re now on display at the Shimanto River Gakuyukan science centre. According to a centre spokesperson who says the golden specimens are highly unusual, the 2.4cm amphibians appear to be black-spotted pond frogs whose skin turned gold because of an albino mutation that prevents the formation of pigment cells — Boing Boing
John Stottlemire found a way to print duplicate coupons from Coupons.com by deleting some files and registry entires on his PC. Now he’s being sued for a DMCA violation. He says, All I did was erase files or registry keys.
Says a lawyer: [The DMCA] may cover this. I think it does give companies a lot of leverage and a lot of power.
So now the copyright cartels are saying that not only can we not copy things on our computers, but we can’t delete things on our computers? — Slashdot
Video Ezy is planning to release an electronic movie rental box in time for Christmas in an attempt to hold off online competition. Video Ezy has ordered 10,000 home media centres from data communications producer Mobilesoft, at a cost of $4.5 million. The centres will underpin its electronic rental service. Customers will use the centres to play movies they have downloaded on portable storage devices in a store. Portable storage devices will be used to download files from in Video Ezy stores, and they can be watched on the media centres
A two day outage that left millions of Skype users unable to use the internet phone service was caused by an abnormally high number of restarts after people had downloaded a Windows security update. In an update to users on Skype’s Heartbeat blog, employee Villu Arak said the disruption was not because of hackers or any other malicious activity. Instead, he said that the disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update
. As Windows updates are a regular occurence, it seems odd that this would be the cause of the problem
Pay TV sales company Multi Channel Network has cast doubt on the future of the digital video-recording platform TiVo, which is backed by the Seven Network, telling advertisers the venture may never get off the ground. Rob Leach, head of MCN’s interactive television division and formerly of British pay-TV company BSkyB, said TiVo had bombed
in Britain after proving to be a difficult product to market
partly due to high set-top box costs. The comments come after media buyers denied a report last week that 20 advertisers had paid $1 million to participate in interactive advertising trials on the TiVo platform
The US Army recently unveiled a new hybrid-electric propulsion system for use in a new line of manned ground vehicles (MGVs). The new line will have eight different variants, all using the same chassis. The unique feature of the new MGVs is that the traditional engine has been decoupled from the drive train and is used only to recharge the battery and power other systems within the vehicle
I’ve been meaning to take a crack at amigurumi, but haven’t been able to find a pattern I liked until running across heavens_hellcat‘s crochet pattern on LiveJournal — via CRAFT
Four journalists and one of their family members are suing Hewlett-Packard for obtaining their personal phone records. The journalists filed lawsuits in California this week. They claim that HP invaded their privacy. HP acknowledged in a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing last year that it investigated journalists in order to find out who, inside the company, had been leaking information to the press. The actions of HP board members and contractors led to congressional hearings about pretexting, the use of deception to obtain confidential and detailed phone records. They also led to the resignations of Board Chairperson Patricia Dunn and lawyer and ethics chief Kevin Hunsaker
Two years after announcing a somewhat vague software-distribution partnership, Google and Sun Microsystems have clarified their tactics for jointly attacking Microsoft and its ubiquitous Office software. Google has quietly begun including Sun’s StarOffice suite of word processing, spreadsheets and other workplace-oriented programs for free as part of the Google Pack download
A web site is aiming at blocking Firefox users. This because a fraction of the Firefox users installed an Ad Blocker and are therefor stealing money
from web site owners that use ads. They recommend using IE, Opera or IE tab. From the site: Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers.
The site is owned by a loony fundie by the name of Danny Carlton, so we know intelligence was a big part of his cunning plan — via Slashdot
RSS – Posts