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Because the court says so. Not a good reason, but the real one. I'm sure if you searched way down to the court transcripts you could find the arguments made by the lawyers for the officers. Oh and they can search your house, they just have to have to properly justify it afterward. Perhaps they would argue that weapons or dangerous chemicals could have been present.

Of course some disagree
Not ok
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/2007/may/31/search_and_seizure_california_fe
Sure, ok
http://news.cnet.com/Police-blotter-Cops-OK-to-copy-cell-phone-content/2100-1030_3-6177464.html

Microsoft will continue to make advances in these types of safeguards and work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant.

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough -

http://www.cnet.com/8301-19736_1-20009717-251.html

Over half of all android apps are free. For iOS, it's more like 25%. Yes, there may be more iOS apps overall, but when Android hits 300,000 apps (where iOS currently is), it'll still be about 50%. So I stand by my point - The android market is full of a lot more free apps, maybe not by raw number (iOS certainly has that covered in pretty much all areas), but in all categories.

No it doesn't. TFA says "An Apple authorized Service Provider called System Graph is suing a customer..." Perhaps it was corrected, something that Slashdot rarely bothers to do.

However, this is yet another case of Slashdot promoting some link-whoring blog that reports a story instead of the real source.The actual (English language) source is CNET: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20026918-71.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20 which has a rather more complete story and background.

If you read the website (I linked to it), the author says texting costs 109 cents per kilobyte sent. But Verizon's data cost is only .015 cents per kilobyte. So do some quick math and it's a HUGE markup in cost. 109 divided by .015 == 7300 markup according to the website.

Actually that's not correct. It's actually a 109/.015 times 100 == 730,000% markup.
And also my math says Verizon Data costs $40/5 gigabyte == 0.0008 cents per kilobyte.
But it doesn't really matter.
The point is the amount charged for sending 160 characters is ridiculous. It should be a fraction of a penny not 20 cents. Even Congress noticed this and did an investigation for possible price collusion between the companies: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10037221-38.html

The proper form of profiling looks at behavior, not skin color or clothing. Detectives do it all the time, as well as good security guards.

It's what the Israeli's do for their airports, and they are right in the middle of the shit. I think they know a thing or two about this.

Basically, ask a few simple questions (where are you going, how long are you going to be there, etc), and see how they respond. You don't really give a rat's ass what their answers are, you are looking for signs of nervousness and irritation. Those who appear agitated you pull aside for further questioning and possibly a search.

It's exactly the same thing the boarder control does when trying to catch smugglers, except in the Israeli airports they do it four times instead of just once, making it extremely difficult to sneak past.

A person who can fool a lie detector test could probably pull it off, but the people capable of such a feat are few and far between (besides, getting no reaction at all from a person is potentially suspicious as well).

In your example, the five terrorists would have been pulled aside and searched, a cursory background check likely revealing terrorist ties, which would have got them pulled out for a more extensive investigation. Even if they eventually made it through security, the black guy from the US would have been pulled aside as well, the knives and fake ID discovered, and at the very least his ass would be in jail.

Plot foiled.

This kind of security is expensive, because your security professionals need to be real, trained security professionals and not the airport equivalent of a mall cop, but in the long run it saves a lot of money over the asinine security of the TSA because you actually get security.

My favorite new example of how utterly useless TSA's security measures is Adam Savage accidentally sneaking two foam scrapers (foot long razor blades) onto an airplane:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20023820-71.html

But even before that, I personally know several people who have accidentally brought box-cutters - the very weapon used on 9/11 - through security. It's one big joke, except the only ones laughing are the real security experts and the terrorists.

BTW, did you know nothing that has been implemented - including the body scanners - will catch a second underwear bomber if one were to try again? They wouldn't catch a laptop bomb or book bomb either, and I'm sure a terrorist could think of a lot more ways to sneak a bomb on a plane that TSA wouldn't have a hope of finding.

The Israeli's use a high-tech heuristic approach to catching their terrorist viruses.

The result? The country in the most active terrorist region in the world and they haven't had a "close call" in a decade.

How long does it take an Israeli to get through security? No more than 25 minutes.

See, in Israeli airports they only do basic x-ray and metal detector physical searches. They don't have strange rules for laptops and batteries and liquids and shoes and whatever else. They don't care what you're carrying with you as long as it isn't something obvious like a knife or a huge bomb.

What they do instead of all of TSA's useless rules is ask questions at four different security checkpoints (integrated into the flow of the airport check-in process, so they hardly take any extra time), and based on the responses they weed out suspicious people. Those people get the ringer, but nobody else does.

The physical scanners are also enclosed in a bomb-proof area, so if someone does try to sneak a bomb on, they simply cordon it off and open another security line - no need to shut down the entire airport just because they found a bomb.

That's real security, the nonsense TSA does is just theater.

Case in point:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20023820-71.html

FTFA: He was sentenced to six months each for the mail fraud and copyright infringement crimes and an additional 24 months for the aggravated identity theft.

--
windows media codec

Here you go. And here's a better one.

No, it isn't banned. We the state don't ban anything. You just won't be doing business in this town.

I much rather have state censorship. The state can be voted out. Amazon can not.

So, you are free to publish a book that upsets the powers that be, you just won't be finding a publisher or bookstore to sell it. But freedom is ensured as long as you don't try to exercise it.

This guy would also defend "No jews allowed" or "Whites only" on private businesses. The dream he chases? I want none of it.

The debate should be over whether or not the books really promoted what they were banned over. Then you can decide if Amazon was removing books for sale that were morally offensive and described illegal acts, or just rash to judge. This has NOTHING to do with "no jews allowed" (it's no illegal to be Jewish" or "whites only" (it's not illegal to be black). This has to do with rape, which is illegal, and incest, which is illegal. So you can describe the portrayal of it as legal but offensive, but portraying an illegal act in a book is not the same as against breaking the law yourself through discrimination. Also, Amazon has a monopoly... of Kindle users. Just like Apple has a monopoly... of iPad users. Kindle book store = Apple app store. Monopoly of the industry is quite a bit different. The most aggressive projects are 8 million Kindles sold this year . Sony claims to have sold a couple of million eReaders, which use ePub and support content from non-Sony stores, including Kobo (can't find a link now). B&N is making 18,000 NookColor tablets a day, and if they keep that pace for just 6 months that's over 3 million shipped. Then there are Kobo readers, people using non-Kindle apps on their iPads and iPods, folks using apps other than Kindle on their Android, discount no-name eReaders sold at KMart and other fine establishments, and before you know it, you realize that anyone in this comment thread suggesting a monopoly, really is way off base. WalMart doesn't sell music with explicit lyrics. Is it censorship? Sure. Nothing inherently ILLEGAL about it, nor do they possess any more of a monopoly in Music than Amazon does in eBooks.

- Can amazon send cops to raid my house or give me a Rodney King-style beating? Nope.
- Can amazon arrest me and put me in jail? Nope.

Under a capitalist state, corporations like Amazon have the government to raid your house or put you in jail for them, under laws like the DMCA. Adobe had the FBI to arrest Dmitry Sklyarov. The BSA has U.S. marshals to carry guns for them. Why should they bother to have their own cops or jails?

no WikiLeaks to post it to?

How about reporting it to the FBI.

1. FBI Prioritizes Copyright Over Missing Persons
2. Joe Biden's pro-RIAA, pro-FBI tech voting record
3. "The Leonard Peltier Defense Committee is proud to make available, the FBI files."
4. COINTEL PRO
5. U.S. Lets $101 Million Verdict Stand Over FBI Frame in Mob Slaying Case
6. J. Edgar Hoover
7. Martin Luther King
8. Because of J. Edgar Hoover's and others' hostility to the Civil Rights Movement, agents of the U.S. FBI resorted to outright lying to smear civil rights workers and other opponents of lynching. For example, the FBI disseminated false information in the press about lynching victim Viola Liuzzo, who was murdered in 1965 in Alabama. The FBI said Liuzzo had been a member of the Communist Party, had abandoned her five children, and was involved in sexual relationships with African Americans in the movement.

Ad you were talking about reporting corruption to the FBI?

Falcon

"All you really have to know about Net Neutrality is that its biggest promoters are George Soros and Google."

To begin with, the article linked is at www.dailykos.com, which is run by Markos Moulitsas. He is American born of a Salvadoran (a country with long standing socialist influences) mother and a Greek (more socialism) father, and grew up both in El Salvador and Chicago. Now I am from Indiana, not all that far from Chicago and know that a Republican in Chicago is regarded a Liberal in Indiana. He backed, and campaigned for Liberal Democrats throughout. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markos_Moulitsas]. He is a Leftist, and his web site reflects that.

The DailyKos article links to an article at thinkprogress.org, from which google tells us that Soros funds Thinkprogress and following the money, behind Net Neutrality, just as Rush alleged. And for that matter, reading the entire list of inter-networked organizations covered at http://discoverthenetworks.org/ finds George Soros deeply involved in funding a vast network of anti USA, anti-freedom, anti-capitalism, anti-Business organizations of the progressive Left. That includes the attack on the Chamber of Commerce.
George Soros, a statist Socialist who wants to control the world, is behind “Net Neutrality” [link here]

All of these individuals and organizations are committed Socialists and Progressives. The problem with that here is the USA, is that it is the diametric opposite of the US Constitution, Liberty, Capitalism (which is just people saving their money and investing it), and all else this country stands for. It is nothing new that Socialism has been infiltrating the USA for over 100 years. And it is nothing new that Socialism has never, ever, not one time, worked for an extended period of time. It seems to work, until it runs out of other peoples money. It will then die as it has always in the past, and with a fair share of suffering and violence as the throes of death proceed.

In short, Net Neutrality, especially done by the FCC, is un-Constitutional

The problem of the FCC “regulating” the internet is that they have NO governmental right to do so.

They were denied that right previously in court.

They were denied that right by Congress regardless of how many times it was tried.

Briefy, the Executive branch (President, and *his* FCC) cannot make law. Congress makes law, which when passed must be approved by the President. And that can be revoked in the Courts. The case here is that the President through the FCC is making law.

Obama, long before he was elected President, Obama lamented that the "Constitution is a charter of negative liberties". [audio]. The problem here is that the Constitution in every point, limits government and gives it NO right to do anything TO its citizens. That was done by design of the Founders. Obama laments that because he wants to impose Socialism and wealth re-distribution. These two, Socialism and the US Constitution, are incompatible.

I also cannot understand why people here ca

Who is saying that this chunk of 700MHz is going to be used only for mobile devices?

The article related to AT&T so most of the discussion here has that focus:
"In an announcement made Monday, the telecommunications giant said the extra wireless spectrum will help it provide 4G mobile broadband to its customers in the next few years."

What you're doing is interesting and no doubt much appreciated, but I'd be surprised if it could scale very far with many people and heavy consumption. I'm sure I'm not alone in being interested in hearing more details of hardware you're using. I don't expect AT&T to be aggressive at all in serving low-density areas with wireless that way unless it is part of some subsidy.

It is tough for any wireless ISP to scale to handle things like widescale video consumption. Getting good page-load burst speeds is one thing, but handling many people with sustained streamed video demand is far tougher. Once those former dialup users discover high quality streaming video, their usage patterns will likely change significantly. That's if caps or the network choking don't stop them. Net video delivery is still in its infancy and Netflix alone already accounts for 20% of peak-period net traffic. How many simultaneous customers using a steady 1 megabit/second plus can each site support per 6 MHz of spectrum? The many just reading mail or occasionally loading a web page have much less impact of course, but fear those who really use what's out there.

Netflix story
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20020434-17.html

The monthly bandwidth caps seen on most mobile plans could easily be used in one day by someone trying to get all of their HD video that way. The system would need 30 times the capacity to deliver that every day. Peak speed is just a selling point, it's total capacity that really matters.

It's pretty clear why AT&T was quick to kill their unlimited data plan, why Apple introduced Facetime (video chat) with it enabled only on WiFi and why wireless data plans generally have relatively low monthly caps. There just isn't the spectrum/capacity for many people to use the networks as heavily as with home (cable/DSL) providers. Jumping to those other paths whenever possible is one of the things needed to moderate the load.

I'm not chopping up by debit MasterCard since it's also my ATM card, but I have moved all my automated payments to Amex and will no longer be using MasterCard for any purchases. (As a bonus, Amex also has much better cash back rewards.)

I'm also emailing several relevant addresses the following letter:

To whom it may concern:

I was disappointed when I heard that MasterCard had cut off payments to WikiLeaks (as reported at http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20024776-281.html), claiming it is participating in "illegal activity" even though WikiLeaks hasn't been charged or convicted of anything, and even though WikiLeaks's actions have been substantially no different than those of the New York Times, the Guardian, and other news sites that distributed the same material.

Now I see that MasterCard is also siding with the music and movie cartels in their war on technology (http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20025879-261.html), cutting off payments to web sites accused of file sharing, and lending support to the so-called "Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act" which would grant the government the power to censor web sites without a trial.

It seems that every time I swipe my MasterCard, I'm funding an assault on freedom of speech.

December 19, 2010, was the last time I used my MasterCard -- and it will be the last time I use *any* MasterCard, or Cirrus, or Maestro, or anything related. In fact, I almost want to boycott Audi and the Olympics just for having similar logos.

I have three other charge networks to choose from, not to mention online payment systems and EFT. Comparing MasterCard to those, I see no advantages and two huge downsides. Goodbye.

However, they certainly have raided businesses.

Yes, they have.

Sterling Ball, a jovial, plain-talking businessman, is CEO of Ernie Ball, the world's leading maker of premium guitar strings endorsed by generations of artists ranging from the likes of Eric Clapton to the dudes from Metallica.

But since jettisoning all of Microsoft products three years ago, Ernie Ball has also gained notoriety as a company that dumped most of its proprietary software--and still lived to tell the tale.

In 2000, the Business Software Alliance conducted a raid and subsequent audit at the San Luis Obispo, Calif.-based company that turned up a few dozen unlicensed copies of programs. Ball settled for $65,000, plus $35,000 in legal fees. But by then, the BSA, a trade group that helps enforce copyrights and licensing provisions for major business software makers, had put the company on the evening news and featured it in regional ads warning other businesses to monitor their software licenses.

Humiliated by the experience, Ball told his IT department he wanted Microsoft products out of his business within six months. "I said, 'I don't care if we have to buy 10,000 abacuses,'" recalled Ball, who recently addressed the LinuxWorld trade show. "We won't do business with someone who treats us poorly." ...

I became an open-source guy because we're a privately owned company, a family business that's been around for 30 years, making products and being a good member of society. We've never been sued, never had any problems paying our bills. And one day I got a call that there were armed marshals at my door talking about software license compliance...I thought I was OK; I buy computers with licensed software. But my lawyer told me it could be pretty bad.

The BSA had a program back then called "Nail Your Boss," where they encouraged disgruntled employees to report on their company...and that's what happened to us. Anyways, they basically shut us down...We were out of compliance I figure by about 8 percent (out of 72 desktops).

How did that happen?
We pass our old computers down. The guys in engineering need a new PC, so they get one and we pass theirs on to somebody doing clerical work. Well, if you don't wipe the hard drive on that PC, that's a violation. Even if they can tell a piece of software isn't being used, it's still a violation if it's on that hard drive. What I really thought is that you ought to treat people the way you want to be treated. I couldn't treat a customer the way Microsoft dealt with me...I went from being a pro-Microsoft guy to instantly being an anti-Microsoft guy.

Did you want to settle?
Never, never. That's the difference between the way an employee and an owner thinks. They attacked my family's name and came into my community and made us look bad. There was never an instance of me wanting to give in. I would have loved to have fought it. But when (the BSA) went to Congress to get their powers, part of what they got is that I automatically have to pay their legal fees from day one. That's why nobody's ever challenged them--they can't afford it. My attorney said it was going to cost our side a quarter million dollars to fight them, and since you're paying their side, too, figure at least half a million. It's not worth it. You pay the fine and get on with your business. What most people do is get terrified and pay their license and continue to pay their licenses. And they do that no matter what the license program turns into.

"iPhone makes sniping easier", "Bullet Flight 1.0.0 – the US$15 iPhone app for snipers"... You'd be surprised just at how many ballistics calculators there are! There are, in fact, tons of places in combat where iPhones already have a foothold. And I'm pretty sure that a good bumper that covers the ports would make it sand-proof, too.

http://www.xboc.com/ (I know but to save against the stupid: NOT SAVE FOR WORK!)
http://www.whitehouse.com/ was porn ( http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-202985.html )

pretty much every phone has similar systems.
phones can be turned on remotely, have components turned on and even place a call at the behest of whoever has the right keys.

unless you physically take out the battery your phone could be transmitting everything you say already.
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1029_3-6140191.html

of course it will be misused eventually but such tech isn't new, it's been around for years.

To tell you the truth I haven't reached a decision as to whether wikileaks is good or bad as yet.

However the reaction the US government has to this is leading me to believe they have something to hide, Stories like http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/12/15/0038211/Air-Force-Blocks-NY-Times-WaPo-Other-Media and others make the us government out to look like a bunch of censors.

While wikileaks is not a US company and cannot be threatened / controlled directly by the US government, US companies that do business with them (Amazon) have been dropping support for wikileaks like a hot potato, have they been threatened by their government not to do business with wikileaks? The fact that their DNS provider also dropped them is not helping to dismiss such a question, especially since EveryDNS is run by donations (they don't even remotely have the funds to be able to stand up to a lawsuit, especially one by the US government).

If the above claims are ever proven to be true, it shows that a single government already has too much control over the internet and unlike China which (for now) is content to only censor what it's own citizens see the US government is willing and able to censor what the entire world sees.

I agree with you that other explanations may exist however given that the documents specifically target the US government I seems almost obvious that they would react to the only target they have which is wikileaks. I invite you to propose a alternate explanation, as I said in my earlier comment the rape charges are the only case where I can come up with a somewhat reasonable counter explanation (maybe he actually did rape the woman, I don't know the man and cannot make such a judgment).

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20024169-38.html is a decent start, there are public calls from Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee to have wikileaks classified as a terrorist organization.

I'll finish with the following, if the US had followed the rules (most of them laid down by the US) what is there to fear from these documents? If they have broken rules and have been covering it up, what would you as a moral human being do if you happen across such information? I'm not American but this is more dangerous to the integrity of democracy in the US than anything an external entity could ever do.

I think it was an attempt at a joke based on the rate at which exploits against the Windows platform are discovered.

That said, Microsoft does share the Windows source code with governments (Source, and yes, I consider that to be a bloody stupid move on MS's part). That being the case, any flaws the recipient governments have found but not reported back to Microsoft could be considered back doors - assuming that any exist.

Akamai had a role to play in the defense as well.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20025477-281.html

Akamai says it can defend against Anon attacks

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20025477-281.html#ixzz187QnPlDV
Akamai managers say they could have bolstered the Web sites that buckled under attacks launched recently by Internet vigilantes.

The world's largest content delivery network says it has enough servers and the right kind of network to "mitigate distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks," Neil Cohen, Akamai's senior director of product marketing told CNET. DDoS describes the practice of overwhelming a Web site with traffic so that it can't be accessed.

Some well-known sites were the targets of DDoS attacks launched by a loosely connected group of WikiLeaks supporters who call themselves Anonymous or Anon for short. The group lashed out at companies they consider to be hostile to WikiLeaks, the service responsible for publicizing an enormous amount of classified U.S. government documents. Some of those attacked were MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, and Amazon.

MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal stopped processing donations made to WikiLeaks while Amazon stopped hosting WikiLeaks servers. At this point it appears that Amazon was able to withstand the attack while MasterCard and Visa's sites were inaccessible for extended periods.

Cohen said few other companies have as much experience as his with defending Web sites from this kind of threat. He said that late last month, a number of U.S. retail sites came under DDoS attack from multiple different countries. Cohen said he was unaware of who was behind it or why, but he said that Akamai helped some of the retailers withstand the onslaught of hits to their sites, which in some cases reached to 10,000 times the normal daily traffic to some of these sites. None of the sites went down, he said.

"What we did over the last decade was built out our network and we now have 80,000 servers in 70 countries," Cohen said. "We can mitigate DDoS attacks by having a server extremely close to the court rather than try to absorb the attack in one centralized location. As an attack grows in size and distributes out to more bots, we have a server near the compromised machines. As the attack gets bigger, our network scales on demand."

While there are reports that Anonymous is giving up on DDoS attacks related to the WikiLeaks case, it is unlikely that we've seen the end of them. In retaliation against the entertainment industry's antipiracy attempts, Anonymous knocked out the Web sites belonging to the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, Hustler magazine, and the U.S. Copyright Office.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20025477-281.html#ixzz187QiBtJU

Akamai had a role to play in the defense as well.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20025477-281.html

Akamai says it can defend against Anon attacks

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20025477-281.html#ixzz187QnPlDV
Akamai managers say they could have bolstered the Web sites that buckled under attacks launched recently by Internet vigilantes.

The world's largest content delivery network says it has enough servers and the right kind of network to "mitigate distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks," Neil Cohen, Akamai's senior director of product marketing told CNET. DDoS describes the practice of overwhelming a Web site with traffic so that it can't be accessed.

Some well-known sites were the targets of DDoS attacks launched by a loosely connected group of WikiLeaks supporters who call themselves Anonymous or Anon for short. The group lashed out at companies they consider to be hostile to WikiLeaks, the service responsible for publicizing an enormous amount of classified U.S. government documents. Some of those attacked were MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, and Amazon.

MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal stopped processing donations made to WikiLeaks while Amazon stopped hosting WikiLeaks servers. At this point it appears that Amazon was able to withstand the attack while MasterCard and Visa's sites were inaccessible for extended periods.

Cohen said few other companies have as much experience as his with defending Web sites from this kind of threat. He said that late last month, a number of U.S. retail sites came under DDoS attack from multiple different countries. Cohen said he was unaware of who was behind it or why, but he said that Akamai helped some of the retailers withstand the onslaught of hits to their sites, which in some cases reached to 10,000 times the normal daily traffic to some of these sites. None of the sites went down, he said.

"What we did over the last decade was built out our network and we now have 80,000 servers in 70 countries," Cohen said. "We can mitigate DDoS attacks by having a server extremely close to the court rather than try to absorb the attack in one centralized location. As an attack grows in size and distributes out to more bots, we have a server near the compromised machines. As the attack gets bigger, our network scales on demand."

While there are reports that Anonymous is giving up on DDoS attacks related to the WikiLeaks case, it is unlikely that we've seen the end of them. In retaliation against the entertainment industry's antipiracy attempts, Anonymous knocked out the Web sites belonging to the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, Hustler magazine, and the U.S. Copyright Office.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20025477-281.html#ixzz187QiBtJU

Akamai had a role to play in the defense as well.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20025477-281.html

Akamai says it can defend against Anon attacks

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20025477-281.html#ixzz187QnPlDV
Akamai managers say they could have bolstered the Web sites that buckled under attacks launched recently by Internet vigilantes.

The world's largest content delivery network says it has enough servers and the right kind of network to "mitigate distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks," Neil Cohen, Akamai's senior director of product marketing told CNET. DDoS describes the practice of overwhelming a Web site with traffic so that it can't be accessed.

Some well-known sites were the targets of DDoS attacks launched by a loosely connected group of WikiLeaks supporters who call themselves Anonymous or Anon for short. The group lashed out at companies they consider to be hostile to WikiLeaks, the service responsible for publicizing an enormous amount of classified U.S. government documents. Some of those attacked were MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, and Amazon.

MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal stopped processing donations made to WikiLeaks while Amazon stopped hosting WikiLeaks servers. At this point it appears that Amazon was able to withstand the attack while MasterCard and Visa's sites were inaccessible for extended periods.

Cohen said few other companies have as much experience as his with defending Web sites from this kind of threat. He said that late last month, a number of U.S. retail sites came under DDoS attack from multiple different countries. Cohen said he was unaware of who was behind it or why, but he said that Akamai helped some of the retailers withstand the onslaught of hits to their sites, which in some cases reached to 10,000 times the normal daily traffic to some of these sites. None of the sites went down, he said.

"What we did over the last decade was built out our network and we now have 80,000 servers in 70 countries," Cohen said. "We can mitigate DDoS attacks by having a server extremely close to the court rather than try to absorb the attack in one centralized location. As an attack grows in size and distributes out to more bots, we have a server near the compromised machines. As the attack gets bigger, our network scales on demand."

While there are reports that Anonymous is giving up on DDoS attacks related to the WikiLeaks case, it is unlikely that we've seen the end of them. In retaliation against the entertainment industry's antipiracy attempts, Anonymous knocked out the Web sites belonging to the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, Hustler magazine, and the U.S. Copyright Office.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20025477-281.html#ixzz187QiBtJU

the camera has a bit more info due to the use of multiple lenses somewhat offset from each other, but that's just like regular stereoscopic vision, and your viewpoint is still severely limitedd.

It doesn't have to be like regular steroscopic vision. The clever bit wouldn't be so much in the camera positions.

It would be in the image/scene processing: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-9793272-39.html
See the video too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu31XWUxSkA

Based on both videos, Adobe's tech looks more impressive to me. And they did that years before.

Kirk James Murphy says SHE was playing with CIA-funded terror-tactics groups not so long ago: http://my.firedoglake.com/kirkmurphy/2010/12/04/assanges-chief-accuser-has-her-own-history-with-us-funded-anti-castro-groups-one-of-which-has-cia-ties/

The same groups publicly supported the coup in Honduras. The one which Wikileaks revealed US government lying not knowing about and being unable to intervene because of that.

More on how CIA is hunting Assange through Sweden (emphasis added):

The Swedes have a practical reason behind their deceptively slapstick police-work. The WikiLeaks founder, pursued by malevolent forces around the world, sought momentary relief beneath Sweden's reputation as a bastion of free speech. But the moment Julian sought the protection of Swedish media law, the CIA immediately threatened to discontinue intelligence sharing with SEPO, the Swedish Secret Service.

The suspicion of whether the rape farce is an orchestrated campaign, might be illuminated by these facts: (1) Sweden sent troops to Afghanistan, (2) Assange's WikiLeaks published the Afghan War Diary... --- ...new secret materials by WikiLeaks might just influence the general elections on September 19. Perhaps that explains the sudden police raid on a WikiLeaks server.

I went with one of these: http://reviews.cnet.com/digital-media-receivers/wd-tv-live-plus/4505-6739_7-34117510.html

It not only does Netflix, but will also play anything from USB drives and network file shares. It also has access to online stuff like Facebook, YouTube, Pandora, and a handful of others. The only (minor) drawback is no built-in WiFi (though it does support various USB-based WiFi devices).

For the extra geek factor, it's based on Linux, so there are plenty of custom firmwares and add-ons out there to customize it.

We're living in interesting times. It's obvious Oracle isn't going to be cutting people a whole lot of slack, here.

Maybe we should start taking bets on:

a) When Oracle starts requiring a per-core license for production JVMs, and
b) How many $$ per core that will be?

This might play into their strategy. We know they're putting some heat on Google, but maybe a move like this would buy them some leverage, say, against Salesforce.com (with whom they're engaged in an emerging, but heated battle)

Exactly the same thing, blocking donations to wikileaks.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20024776-281.html

he found it on street view.

He stole Google's intellectual property and sent it to his customers? That is a matter of national security!

This man must be stopped at all costs.

"The fragmentation issue is honestly just marketing nonsense."

Android fragmentation is real. Even the ever-so-popular Angry Birds had "severe performance issues" due to fragmentation and had to create a second Angry Birds game for low-end Android devices.

Droid has no less than 8 different versions, from 1.1 to 2.3, in addition to whatever custom wrapper or branding the manufacture or carrier added, and dozens of different kinds of handsets, all with different cpus, gpus and memory. iOS has at most 2 versions, 3.x and 4.x, (1.x and 2.x is used by less than 3% of iPhones) and at most 4 handsets, iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4.

So if you're developing an iPhone app you only have to test on 4 or 5 devices, iPhone 4 running iOS4, 3GS running 3.x and 4.x, and 3G running 3.x and 4.x, and iPhone running 3.1.3. If you're developing a Droid app you have dozens of devices with different software configurations you must test on or risk angry customers, and every time you want to update or Google pushes out a new version of Droid you again have to do testing on dozens of devices.

I know Android is the most popular smartphone OS but honestly I think it's going to self-implode, customers will eventually get tired of fragmentation issues, with apps not working and frustrated developers, and they'll either give up on smartphones entirely or turn to Blackberry or iOS.

Yet MasterCard did not see fit to block the credit cards of NYT journalists. Fun times.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20023951-261.html

I'm sure dissatisfaction has a lot to do with the iPhone antenna issue.

Doubtful. Customer satisfaction with AT&T was in bad shape long before iPhone 4 came out. It is, however, regional.

For a great way to check your coverage in many major cities, go to CNet's cell coverage map. As soon as you look at the San Francisco Bay area, you'll understand why the reviews are so negative. Verizon's data service map looks awful, but their voice service map looks good. AT&T is the reverse. Guess who is optimizing for what?

1. 1) Android is for Phones & Tablets; Chrome OS is for Netbooks for now but they may converge into a universal system
2. 2) Chrome OS won’t run Linux desktop or Android Apps ... yet
3. 3) Chrome OS Constantly Updated, but may go into a release cycle later as its capability expands [this isn't really an OS difference anyway]

Or was the likely convergence prediction premature?

Summary in cartoon. Here.

Again, where does it say that circumventing the Great Chinese Firewall is illegal?

People seem to flaunt this pretty openly:

http://asia.cnet.com/blogs/sinobytes/post.htm?id=63014818

What's the Samsung-built ARM stuff in an iPhone? Sapple? Samphone?

The world needs to know. This is important!

The ARM processor used by the iPhone 4 (Apple A4)...is the same than the used by the Samsung Wave (Samsung S5PC110A01).

At least according to an annalysis by cnet: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20007162-64.html)

This is the fundamental problem with "crowdsourcing" reviews. Where the number of reviewers is large compared to the number of items being reviewed, as with movies, it works fine. Where the ratio is small, it doesn't. It's far too easy to game the system. There are automated tools for that.

This problem has become worse since the October 27th change to Google, when Google Places/Maps results were merged into web search. This made "local" results much more prominent. Look at the first screen of Google search results for a local product or service. Most of what you see are Google Places results, maps, or ads. The organic results are so far down they don't matter.

As a result, the "black hat" SEO companies are now aggressively targeting Google's places and maps system. "Convert Offline" is quite open about this, with their article Dominating Google Maps- The Most Effective Spam Ever And What You Can Learn From It" In some ways, Google Places is more vulnerable to attack than organic search. The number of web mentions of a local business tends to be small, so the amount of phony material that has to be generated to make a business look good is also small. Each mention carries a lot of weight.

Google might lose this battle. Craigslist did. Back in 2008, Cory Doctorow wrote about "Spammers discuss breaking Craigslist verification system". It's become much worse since then. Personals were the first to go, and are now over 90% spam. Then Computer Services and Self Employment fell to the spammers. Jobs and Real Estate are under attack. Along the way, Gmail became a spam haven, especially after Jiffy Gmail Email Creator became widely used.

The fundamental design assumption of Google is that important stuff has lots of links to it. That's not a valid assumption in local search.

The best one I was able to find was this one:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20008540-37.html

Money quote:

So while App Store sales are through the roof, Apple's certainly not making a killing from them. But that's never been the point, anyway. Like iTunes itself, the App Store's purpose is to drive hardware sales. It's a secondary business.

GNU Savannah was hacked in 2003 also. http://news.cnet.com/2100-7344-5117271.html

"We expect to take measures in the aftermath of the Savannah incident," said Eben Moglen, general counsel for the Free Software Foundation, which maintains the GNU Project, a source of freely available software for Unix and Linux systems. Among the measures, the project leaders will force developers to digitally sign any code they submit, and they plan to introduce additional features to freely available source-code maintenance systems--the best known being the Concurrent Versions System, or CVS--to check developers' digital signatures before accepting changes.

"We believe (adding digital signatures) is the single most useful technical change to tighten these systems to assure the integrity of the code they contain," Moglen said.

Does anyone know if the changes described here came to be? Did they help at all in this attack?

-molo

Err, Bing does a better job with privacy. It sanitizes IPs in 6 months versus Google's 9 months. http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10437137-265.html

Microsoft plans to cut the amount of time it stores the IP addresses associated with search queries from 18 months to six months, in compliance with new European regulations and with a mind to putting pressure on its biggest rival.

Searchers on Bing already have their IP addresses immediately anonymized following a search query, but to comply with a new European Commission directive on Internet privacy the company will delete the IP addresses entirely after six months. Microsoft said it will roll out the new policy over the next 12 to 18 months, however.

Google anonymizes IP addresses after nine months, and deletes IP addresses after 18 months, which the company says is necessary to protect its search results and ads against click fraud and spam.

I'm somewhat amused of these anti-american accusations that pretty much everyone who criticizes the US government in form or another is subjected to on internet forums. Wasn't it recent US president who was so eager to make it clear for everyone that "You are either with us or against us"? Seems like many people in US have taken that advice to their hearts.

In recent news from the same front the incoming chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee says WikiLeaks should be officially designated as a terrorist organization.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20023941-38.html

If this goes through, whatever you do, please don't preach to the rest of the world about freedom.

And we let the our own government get away with irradiating our bodies at no benefit to the traveler.

Thanks, terrorists, for buttering up an incompetent bureaucracy to give itself a reason to take a power trip.

To Comcast?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20023949-93.html


Because I can damn well tell you that spilled over into other New England area networks, including the SAVVIS and Cogent networks in Boston area. Comcast says their DNS system failed, so how the fuck does a DNS attack knock out all the peering/routing/IP transport up there?

That whole thing smells bad, and I wonder if anyone knows the truth about wtf happened.

One more thing I almost forgot. Load shedding > Peaker Plants.

You don't want the utility being able to shut your AC compressor down. OK. My utility also has the same plan, where they pay you for the ability to shut my compressor down for 2 hours every so many hours. Why? Peak demand. It's cheaper to perform load shedding (i.e. remotely shut down compressors) than it is to maintain and operate gas turbine peaker plants that sit idle 95% of the year, and than consume costly (comparatively) natural gas when called upon to provide peak power.

Distribution infrastructure is one thing. Peak power needs a quite another. You want better infrastructure, which is fair. It's also fair that utilities should provide time of use power costs, so their power costs are passed on to customers instead of them insulating customers with a flat rate. If you don't allow market pricing to work, poor decisions result.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9803658-7.html

http://www.epa.state.il.us/air/fact-sheets/peaker-power-plant.html

http://www.google.com/search?q=peak+power+cost

http://energypriorities.com/entries/2006/02/pse_tou_amr_case.php

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/connecticut-power-light-proposes-10-1-ratio-for-peak-power/

Utter nonsense. G1 sold 1 million after 6 months. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10226034-94.html

And how can you compare iPhone 3G to the first release of a new platform?

Also, TFA extrapolates sales from one deals site in the UK to the rest of the world.

Will lightpeak be able to power my external hard drive? Will it charge my HD video camera while I pull video off it?

According to Intel, yes:

In addition, Intel said it's working on bundling the optical fiber with copper wire so Light Peak can be used to power devices plugged into the PC, he said.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10360047-264.html

Lightpeak wasn't an Apple idea, that rumour was squashed last year: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10363956-64.html Still excited to see it coming out next year!

So, they will get the IP address of everyone who ever reads the news and goes to the site to check it out. What are they going to do, send me flowers for St. Valentine? This is literally the first time in my life I visited that domain. It's not a crime to visit a website.

The curious thing is that they are using client side scripts to harvest IPs. Perhaps they are trying to harvest IPs through proxies and other obfuscating services. I'm pretty sure my IP is personal information which I am not willingly sharing if I were to use proxy. I wonder what US privacy laws have to say about that. I'm pretty sure identifying me when I clearly intended not to be identified is a crime where I live.