A battle in the war against RFID beacons in US passports has been won. The State Department now admits that their previous RFID proposal would put Americans at risk and is now considering other options. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the State Department continues to blindly cling to the false promise of planting RFID chips in passports — via BoingBoing
Firefox already contains a pop-up blocker by default, but this does not handle pop-ups launched by plug-ins such as Flash and Java. Mozilla developers are responding to the increasing number of advertisers that are using plug-ins to launch pop-up ads. While you’re adding things, you may want to check out how to put Firefox into overdrive
An alcoholic cousin of an aide to Ahmed Chalabi has emerged as the key source in the US rationale for going to war in Iraq. According to a US presidential commission looking into pre-war intelligence failures, the basis for pivotal intelligence on Iraq’s alleged biological weapons programmes and fleet of mobile labs was a spy described as crazy
by his intelligence handlers and a congenital liar
by his friends. I have to wonder how this guy missed a career in politics — via Warren Ellis
The grand finale of a wedding taking place near Felsted, Essex, UK was the release of dozens of Thai lanterns into the night sky. Shortly after, concerned citizens called the Stansted Airport and the police to warn authorities that aliens may be invading — via The Pagan Prattle
A report from the University of Pennsylvania claims that psychological therapy and counselling can be just as effective as drugs in the early stages of treating moderate to severe depression. The findings run counter to current practice in the United States
Kong has added a very cool piece of artwork to his gallery.
Go, check out The KLam Xperiment
The new Puma Beisser (or Bites
) have rubberised fangs on the soles, designed not to improve traction, but instead to look wicked. They are very limited edition, however, with just 500 pairs being released to retailers — via Gizmodo
Google’s indexing service dropped all Web sites with a .com.au extension for a few hours on Friday afternoon, effectively leaving millions of sites unattainable from the Net’s most popular search engine
Photo hosting services that allow users to publish their digital pictures online are being threatened by a vulnerability in the PHP scripting language that could be exploited by a malicious image file
BeOS, the operating system that could have been the foundation for Mac OS X, but almost died, instead has returned as Zeta OS — which is supposed to be fast, stable, media centric and boot within 15 seconds. Zeta is being released by yellowTAB of Germany and has applications such as an office suite and the Firefox browser bundled with it. Most BeOS applications will also run as-is. Screenshots are available — via Slashdot
US delegates to the US Commission on Human Rights say that body’s country membership must be reformed to prevent those who abuse human rights from using their positions on the committee to prevent criticism of their records
If you’ve ever wanted a boar-skin rug, but thought that perhaps pink was the colour for you, you may want to check out the DIY tips from Hemi*Housewife’s recent craft project.
I have to wonder if you can statically charge and stick balloons to the result for a more festive look — via BoingBoing
Microsoft escalated its efforts to crack down on Internet fraud, announcing that it filed 117 civil lawsuits against unnamed individuals in federal district court in Seattle, hoping to learn the identities of those behind a rash of e-mail phishing scams identified over the past six months that specifically targeted customers of Microsoft’s MSN Internet and Hotmail e-mail services
John Gillatt of Bolton, Manchester, managed to get lost in the Malaysian rain forest for five days without a map or compass, or any other basic survival material. To cap it all he said that he did not realise there were leopards in the jungle, poisonous snakes and tarantulas
. Not bad for someone describes as an English biologist
— via Improbable Research
Police in Malaysia are hunting for members of a violent gang who chopped off a car owner’s finger to get round the Mercedes S-class’ fingerprint recognition system
Belgian trainers helping police to understand body language have caused a controversy by likening the retarded monkey boy‘s facial expressions to a chimpanzee’s. I’m guessing the chimps complained
WordPress, an incredibly popular Open Source Blogging system was found to be spamming Google by inserting hidden links to junk content on high paying Adsense keywords such as mesothelioma and debt consolidation. Following Threadwatch picking up the story an anonymous Google rep appeared in the original thread admonishing bloggers not to use sneaky tactics to rank highly for duplicate content
such as the 100,000 hidden articles on the WordPress site. The articles have now dissapeared from Google and it remains to be seen whether Google will ban WordPress outright as they tend to do when SEO’s and web dev’s pull these kinds of stunts — via Slashdot
The day after the BBC confirmed there will be a second Doctor Who series next year, as well as a Christmas special, new Dr Who actor Christopher Eccleston has revealed he will not continue in the role, for fears of being typecast. Billie Piper, who plays his assistant Rose, will probably continue in her role
Google has enabled results prefetching for Mozilla based browsers, which means that the top results of queries are being loaded in the background and pages will load faster. It can be turned off
One of the many complaints about the GIMP is that of its user interface and how it should be more like Photoshop. If you feel that this is true then Scott Moschella has hacked together GimpShop which turns GIMP’s user interface into something more akin to Photoshop for OSX. However, if you’re not running that operating system, fret not, because there is are ports for Linux and Windows too — via Slashdot
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