Slashdot Mirror

SocialWorm writes "Google has just announced work on OCRopus, which it says it hopes will 'advance the state of the art in optical character recognition and related technologies.' OCRopus will be available under the Apache 2.0 License. Obviously, there may be search and image search implications from OCRopus. 'The goal of the project is to advance the state of the art in optical character recognition and related technologies, and to deliver a high quality OCR system suitable for document conversions, electronic libraries, vision impaired users, historical document analysis, and general desktop use. In addition, we are structuring the system in such a way that it will be easy to reuse by other researchers in the field.'"

compuglot writes "Google has released the third leg of the stool in its quest to dominate online marketing. Google Website Optimizer is a multivariate testing application that allows users to test elements and combinations of elements in a website or landing page. The goal is increased conversions, and of course AdWords market share."

yaohua2000 writes "Google's laboratory in China has launched its first product, a Pinyin Input Method Editor. The software allows the romanized characters to be translated to more traditional Chinese symbols , via entering on a QWERTY keyboard. Users soon discovered that the data Google used for the product was unusually similar to the data used by a Chinese rival, Sogou. Google has evaded the question about software similarities, reports PC World. 'The similarities, which included an error involving the name of a celebrity, were noted on a Google Labs discussion board about its Pinyin IME. Users noted that entering the Pinyin pinggong into the Google IME incorrectly produced the name of Feng Gong, an actor and comedian.'"

The Webguy wrote to mention a C|Net article talking about Google's newest toy - Local Voice Search. The service is dirt simple: you call a 1-800 number and, via voice recognition software, say the category of business you're trying to reach. You can also try for a specific name, though the C|Net blogger had some problems with that. The Google Blog has been updated with details as well: "Google Voice Local Search lets you search for local businesses from any phone and for free. If you're in the US, call 1-800-GOOG-411 and say what you want to find. Here are some of the features -You can find a business listing by category. Just say "pizza," for example. You can send the listing details to your mobile phone via SMS. The service is fully automated, so it doesn't rely on human operators. It connects you directly to the business, free of charge."

SlashRating^© 600673 slashdottit! ^tm Ashish Kulkarni writes "Google has just announced the launch of Google TiSP (BETA)(TM), a free in-home wireless broadband service that delivers online connectivity via users' plumbing systems. All the dark fibre that google has supposedly laid out is now fully operational! Check out the description of how it works."

SlashRating^© 600673 slashdottit! ^tm Ashish Kulkarni writes "Google has just announced the launch of Google TiSP (BETA)(TM), a free in-home wireless broadband service that delivers online connectivity via users' plumbing systems. All the dark fibre that google has supposedly laid out is now fully operational! Check out the description of how it works."

SlashRating^© 56 slashdottit! ^tm nacturation writes "Everyone loves Gmail. But not everyone loves email, or the digital era. What ever happened to stamps, filing cabinets, and the mailman? Now with Gmail Paper, you can request a physical copy of any message with the click of a button, and it'll be sent to you in the mail. Photo attachments are printed on high-quality, glossy photo paper, and secured to your Gmail Paper with a paper clip. And it's totally free: the cost of postage is offset with the help of relevant, targeted, unobtrusive advertisements printed on the back of every print."

simon_kehler writes "The Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a Java AJAX framework that provides an easy to use programming paradigm for web developers using the Java programming language. It is one of the more recent entrants into this field, but has been gaining a lot of traction and popularity. GWT Java AJAX Programming authored by Prabhakar Chaganti and published by Packt Publishing addresses the use of GWT to build ajaxified user interfaces. The author gently introduces the reader to GWT and then leads the reader through a series of tasks, each of which shows how to perform an useful action with GWT." Read below for Simon's review. GWT Java AJAX Programming author Prabhakar pages 240 publisher Packt Publishing rating 8 reviewer simon Kehle ISBN 1847191002 summary A great book for learning the different facets and features of GWT

I am a software architect working for a startup that is evaluating the use of GWT for a new project. I lead a team of experienced Java developers that are comfortable working with Swing and have reasonable familiarity with Struts. We have looked on with envy at all the nice things you could do with the AJAX integration built into web frameworks in languages such as PHP and Ruby. When I came across GWT we decided to take it for a spin and see if your team would be comfortable using it. The documentation that comes with the GWT download is a bit sparse. I was looking for a more in depth intro to the framework and came across this book. this seems to be the first print book on the GWT framework.

The book is divided into ten chapters. An introduction to GWT and its download and setup is provided in the first chapter. The author then shows how to create random quote GWT application in chapter 2. This is a nice example that immediately gives you the flavor of what its like to work with GWT. It shows you the steps involved in writing and running a simple GWT app. Chapter 3 details the service interfaces that you need to create as a part of any GWT application. These are the heart of how the AJAX mechanism works in this framework. Chapters 4-6 go through a lot of tasks that show you how to create increasingly complex user interfaces using the GWT framework. Chapter 7 deals with creating custom widgets that can be shared across applications. Unit testing for GWT applications is covered in chapter 8 (Yes, you can unit test your AJAX apps!). I18N and client XML support are dealt with in chapter 9 and finally chapter 10 shows how to deploy your applications.

This book moves along at a fairly rapid pace and is a quick read. The examples chosen for the tasks are well thought out and show different features in GWT. There are several really cool and innovative examples in this book: Password strength checker, uses colored check boxes to visually show the strength of a password. A very different way of using a check box. Dynamic Lists, change list entries as selections change. Flickr label, recreates the cool label widget that was made famous by Flickr. Sticky Notes, you create post it notes in your browser and drag them around to place them as you want (uses GWT drag support.) Mona Lisa jigsaw puzzle, rearrange Mona Lisa (uses GWT drag support.) Moo.fx, uses moo.fx javascript library for effects (uses JSNI.) Color Selector, integrates Rico Javascript library into GWT (uses JSNI.) Calendar, a very cool mac os x like calendar widget (Creates a compound widget.) Weather, another widget (creates a compound widget.) I18N, displays the country flag based on the locale (uses i18n support.)

I had played around a bit with GWT before. So some of the things in the book were not new to me, but there were several things that I found very useful. GWT provides a way to integrate Java and Javascript (you can call into Java from JS or from JS to Java) called JSNI (Javascript Native interface). The JSNI examples in this book showed how to integrate with moo.fx, Rico and scriptaculous libraries. This was great as we have some homegrown Javascript libs that we would like to continue to use even when we move to GWT. If we can try to hook those in and call them from GWT, that would be sweet! The ability to create widgets that can be shared across applications is very important to our project. The author creates two widgets in chapter 7 — calendar and weather. Both of these were very cool and reminded me of my mac desktop widgets! The weather widget uses Yahoo's weather service to retrieve the information that is displayed. Again, very nicely done. The ability to unit test is another thing that is crucial for us. GWT leverages and extends JUnit to provide this support. However, this is one of the parts of GWT that people do not seem to be using much. Searching on the GWT forums reveals as much confusion about this topic. This book contains a chapter that shows how to unit test a GWT application. The examples are quite simple, but the creation of test suites was a good one, as I had struggled with that before. I really liked the author's coverage of deployment. He first shows how to manually deploy a GWT application. this gives you a feel for whats involved and what's going where. Then he automates that using ant and finally shows how to deploy from within eclipse. This is very useful as I have tripped over deployment before.

Overall, this is a well written book that was very useful to our team. There were a few examples that we had implemented differently than the author — table sorting, paging and in place editing of the tree nodes. I18N is a big topic and the author covers only one way to use it. It would have been nice to have a complete chapter devoted to that topic, as this is a topic of particular interest to us as we work with a multitude of languages. This is a very developer oriented book and assumes that you know Java, HTML, some Javascript and some CSS. Of course if you did not know those topics, you probably wouldn't be too interested in GWT! This is not a book that dives into the internals of how GWT works or tries to impress you with all the nitty gritty of the GWT architecture. The author provides you with ways in which you can accomplish most common tasks that require GWT. They may not be the only way to do things using GWT but it gets you comfortable using GWT and thinking about how you would actually apply it for your problem. I really enjoyed reading this book and its focus on the practical side of using GWT.

You can purchase GWT Java AJAX Programming from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

chrisd writes "Hi everyone, just wanted to do one last shake of the old tree...the Summer of Code student application deadline is coming up on the 26th. We've got some great applications but I'd love to see more. We're accepting 800 students this year into the program and we have 131 open source organizations who'd love to see you apply. Anyone can talk about open source but you could be coding some with some of the best developmers out there. Apply today." Just a note: the 26th is an extension of the previous deadline. If you thought you wouldn't have time, you now have until next Monday. Get crackin'.

theodp writes "Valleywag reports on a new caste system at Google, which will mean compulsory lunch breaks, two additional unpaid 15-minute breaks, limited OT, and e-clock punching for those reclassified as hourly workers starting April 1. Could be worse, though. Google also offers gigs through WorkforceLogic (the company that helped Microsoft deal with its pesky permatemps), which come with a guarantee of unemployment after one year. Guess that's what passes for the Best Employer in the US these days."

Andreas writes "A discussion at the mozilla.dev.planning list has given the birth to the idea of a Mozilla Desktop Environment. This sure sounds like a possibility for Mozilla as it already has many of the applications needed; and the company is thoroughly familiar with XUL, which is a more-than-potent language upon which to build a desktop environment. By building a desktop environment Mozilla wouldn't have to worry about drivers (and such) and could choose from a variety of kernels, and still be in the center of attention. Mozilla has to expand some of the applications for this to work, though, like adding local file management with Firefox."

The accepted Google Summer of Code 2007 mentors list is now complete at the Summer of Code website — 131 projects could use your help. Student applications are open and the end date is March 24. Google has an application guide in the Summer of Code Announce discussion group that provides more information on the application process.

The accepted Google Summer of Code 2007 mentors list is now complete at the Summer of Code website — 131 projects could use your help. Student applications are open and the end date is March 24. Google has an application guide in the Summer of Code Announce discussion group that provides more information on the application process.

dhinckley writes "Google Maps has added some new features including pictures of the front of the locations you're searching for. Additionally, Local Businesses can enter custom information about their companies including pictures, websites, what type of payment they accept, and even offer coupons through Google Maps."

UnreasonableMan writes "Jeff Hawkins is best known for founding Palm Computing and Handspring, but for the last eighteen months he's been working on his third company, Numenta. In his 2005 book, On Intelligence, Hawkins laid out a theoretical framework describing how the neocortex processes sensory inputs and provides outputs back to the body. Numenta's goal is to build a software model of the human brain capable of face recognition, object identification, driving, and other tasks currently best undertaken by humans. For an overview see Hawkins' 2005 presentation at UC Berkeley. It includes a demonstration of an early version of the software that can recognize handwritten letters and distinguish between stick figure dogs and cats. White papers are available at Numenta's website. Numenta wisely decided to build a community of developers rather than trying to make everything proprietary. Yesterday they released the first version of their free development platform and the source code for their algorithms to anyone who wants to download it."

oski4410 writes "The Google engineers just published a paper on Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population. Based on a study of 100,000 disk drives over 5 years they find some interesting stuff. To quote from the abstract: 'Our analysis identifies several parameters from the drive's self monitoring facility (SMART) that correlate highly with failures. Despite this high correlation, we conclude that models based on SMART parameters alone are unlikely to be useful for predicting individual drive failures. Surprisingly, we found that temperature and activity levels were much less correlated with drive failures than previously reported.'"

mikesum writes "February 13 was Haiku's big day at Google, and we can say with a good degree of confidence that the Haiku Tech Talk was quite successful. We had a very special guest for this event: former Be Inc. CEO Jean Louis Gassée, who not only joined us at Google for our presentation, but also gave a few words of support and encouragement for our project. It was great to have JLG's presence, as well as that of the several ex-Be engineers who showed up for the talk. We were also glad to see Java for BeOS developer Andrew Bachman join us for this special event. Have a look at the pictures taken during the presentation, as well as the video of the event."

An anonymous reader writes "Looks like Google has announced that it will be doing Summer of Code again this year. The program looks pretty much the same this year but they have built time into the program schedule for students to get up to speed before they start coding. Nice job, Google."

Reader Russian Art Buyer lets us know that GMail is now open for all ("Google Mail" in the UK). The service is no longer by invitation only. This welcome page shows an ever-increasing amount of storage available per user, currently about 2,815 MB.

tabandmountaindew writes "Too much time is wasted re-implementing code that someone else has already done, for the sole reason it's faster than finding the other code. Previous source code search engines, such as google codesearch and krugle, only considered individual files on their own, leading to poor quality results, making them only useful when the amount of time to re-implement was extremely high. According to a recent newsforge article a fledgling source-code search engine All The Code is aiming to change all of this. By looking at code, not just on its own, but also how it is used, it is able to return more relevant results. This seems like just what we need to unify the open-source community, leading to an actual common repository of unique code, and ending the cycle of unnecessary reimplementing."

Cyphoid writes "While viewing my school (the University of Massachusetts Lowell) with Google Maps, I noticed that a select portion of the campus was pixelated: the operational nuclear research facility on campus. Curious, I attempted to view the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant in Plymouth, Massachusetts. It too was pixelated. What or who is compelling Google to smudge out these images selectively? Will all satellite images of facilities that the government deems 'sensitive' soon be subject to censoring?" Not surprisingly, the same areas are blurred in Google Earth. But how about images from satellites operated by other nations, such as SPOT or Sovinformsputnik?

Cyphoid writes "While viewing my school (the University of Massachusetts Lowell) with Google Maps, I noticed that a select portion of the campus was pixelated: the operational nuclear research facility on campus. Curious, I attempted to view the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant in Plymouth, Massachusetts. It too was pixelated. What or who is compelling Google to smudge out these images selectively? Will all satellite images of facilities that the government deems 'sensitive' soon be subject to censoring?" Not surprisingly, the same areas are blurred in Google Earth. But how about images from satellites operated by other nations, such as SPOT or Sovinformsputnik?

Intel announced a major breakthrough in microprocessor design Friday that will allow it to keep on the curve of Moore's Law a while longer. IBM, working with AMD, rushed out a press release announcing essentially equivalent advances. Both companies said they will be using alloys of hafnium as insulating layers, replacing the silicon dioxide that has been used for more than 40 years. The New York Times story (and coverage from the AP and others) features he-said, she-said commentary from dueling analysts. If there is a consensus, it's that Intel is 6 or more months ahead for the next generation. IBM vigorously disputes this, saying that they and AMD are simply working in a different part of the processor market — concentrating on the high-end server space, as opposed to the portable, low-power end.

Franki3 invites our attention to a SecurityFocus interview with Bill Cheswick. He started the Internet Mapping Project in the 90s; you have probably seen the maps that resulted. The interview ranges over firewalling, logging, NIDS and IPS, how to fight DDoS, and the future of BGP and DNS. From the interview: "I have been impressed with the response of the network community. These problems, and others like security weaknesses, security exploits, etc., usually get dealt with in a few days. For example, the SYN packet DOS attacks in 1996 quickly brought together ad hoc teams of experts, and within a week, patches with new mitigations were appearing from the vendors. You can take the Internet down, but probably not for very long."

Elektroschock asks: "Public data belongs to the public, some advocates believe. BSD Unix is one of the most striking business examples of that 'public data' rule. Gauss and Google made patent data available. But what about classical research results? Should free access to knowledge get regulated? A new petition supported by Open Society Institute wants free public access to research: 'Evidence is accumulating to indicate that research that is openly accessible is read more and used more and that open access to research findings would bring economic advantage'. How do scientists feel about it? Does public funding really turn their results into public property?"

sciurus0 writes "In his session at Macworld on OS X filesytems, Google's Amit Singh announced that he has ported Linux's FUSE module to OS X. The port is called MacFUSE and it is available in source form and as a pre-compiled kernel extension with associated tools. Many FUSE filesystems such as sshfs and ntfs-3g are reported to work."

Panaqqa writes "It appears that Fenner Investments, a Texas based patent troll, is at it again. This time, they are suing Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo for infringing a patent they hold on joystick ports. Perhaps they felt they needed a "Plan B" now that their lawsuit against Juniper Networks, Nokia, Cisco, Alcatel and Ericsson is not going so well."

Anonymous Coward writes "By simply logging in to GMail and visiting a website, a malicious website can steal your contact list, and all their details. The problem occurs because Google stores the contact list data in a Javascript file. So far the attack only works on Firefox, and doesn't appear to work in Opera or Internet explorer 7. IE6 was un-tested as of now."

brajesh writes "Recently some people lost all their Gmail emails and contacts. The problem seems to be contained and fixed, but this incident shows how far are we in terms of moving all communication online on services like Gmail for your domain(beta). Will it ever be possible to do away with desktop solutions like Outlook and Thunderbird? Given the nature of the internet, will it ever be possible to truly move to an 'online desktop'?"

brajesh writes "Recently some people lost all their Gmail emails and contacts. The problem seems to be contained and fixed, but this incident shows how far are we in terms of moving all communication online on services like Gmail for your domain(beta). Will it ever be possible to do away with desktop solutions like Outlook and Thunderbird? Given the nature of the internet, will it ever be possible to truly move to an 'online desktop'?"

brajesh writes "Recently some people lost all their Gmail emails and contacts. The problem seems to be contained and fixed, but this incident shows how far are we in terms of moving all communication online on services like Gmail for your domain(beta). Will it ever be possible to do away with desktop solutions like Outlook and Thunderbird? Given the nature of the internet, will it ever be possible to truly move to an 'online desktop'?"

Regular Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes in to say "The December 1st release of Psiphon has sparked renewed interest in the various software programs that can help circumvent Internet censorship in China, Iran, and other censored countries. (Some of this interest undoubtedly being motivated by the fact that many of these programs also work for getting around blocking software at work or school.) Have you ever wanted to understand the science behind these programs, the way that mathematicians and codebreakers understand the magic behind PGP? If you loved the mental workout of reading "Applied Cryptography", have you ever wanted a tutorial to do the same for Psiphon and Tor and other anti-censorship programs?" The rest of his editorial follows.

Well, here's a primer, but you might be disappointed. Like making the Statue of Liberty disappear, it doesn't sound very cool once you know how it's done; the truth is that most anti-censorship programs, including mine, only work because the censors are not trying very hard.

(Note that I am going to be talking about ways that certain anti-censorship programs can be defeated. I don't believe that this is giving much help to censors, because these are obvious weaknesses that would occur to anyone who knows how the programs work. For reasons I'll get into at the end, I don't think these weaknesses actually make much difference.)

Basically, all anti-censorship programs fall into two categories: those that require you to have a helper outside of the censored country, and those that don't.

Take Psiphon. To use Psiphon, someone in a non-censored country has to install it on their home computer, which turns their computer into a Web server with an interface similar to Anonymouse.org, where you type in the URL of the page you want to view and it fetches it for you. The difference, of course, is that Anonymouse.org is widely known and blocked by any self-respecting Internet filtering system, while your newly created Psiphon URL pointing to your home computer is not blocked anywhere, yet. So if you set up a Psiphon URL on your computer in the U.S. and e-mail it to your friend in China, your friend can use it to surf wherever they want. (Note that this also has the desirable property that the person in China doesn't have to install any software, so they can use the URL even from a cybercafe computer with restricted user permissions.) The hurdle, of course, is that the person in China has to have a contact outside the country to help them. This is not a huge barrier for many Chinese, but it still means the program doesn't have the instant gratification property of something that you turn on and it just works.

Peacefire, by the way, had released the Circumventor program in 2003 which did essentially the same thing. (And the Circumventor was itself really just a wizard for installing a Web server with James Marshall's CGIProxy script, which deserves most of the credit, although the Circumventor did help bring it "to the masses", since most users don't have the ability to set up an SSL-enabled Web server themselves.) Psiphon made some improvements, namely:

• Ability to create password-protected accounts to restrict the URL to certain users.
• Smaller download (although it may not matter much since only broadband users would be installing it anyway).
• Ability to run on Linux. (Circumventor only works on Windows, although you can install CGIProxy on a Linux webserver if you know how.)

Circumventor has some of its own advantages, although they're the kind that could easily be incorporated into Psiphon soon:

• A wizard to help users forward incoming connections on their router and enter exceptions in software firewalls to make the software work. (If they want to. No tweaking people's firewall settings without asking them!)
• Slightly harder to block, due to some strategies such as using a different SSL certificate for each install (Psiphon uses the same one each time).

And both programs fall victim to the same attacks, although as far as I know, none of these have been implemented in practice:

• Blocking sites whose SSL certificates do not match the site hostname (easier for a censoring proxy server like the ones used in the Middle East, than for an IP firewall like the Great Firewall of China).
• Blocking outgoing Web connections to residential IP address ranges like Comcast.

But basically, they're the same program -- so the difference in press coverage has been illustrative of how much context matters to reporters. Psiphon is the "politically correct" version -- they've played down the fact that it can be used to get around blocking software in schools and played up the fact that it can be used to beat the censors in China and Iran, and the press coverage has focused exclusively on that human rights aspect. The Circumventor was also written to help foreign victims of censorship, and articles have been written about its uses for that purpose, but I've also been unapologetically promoting its use to get around blocking software at home and in school, as part of an advocacy for greater civil rights for people under 18. (Also because the more installations there are in the U.S., the more it helps users abroad.) As a result, some of the TV news pieces about it have used such ominous music and lighting that they practically looked like recycled footage from "To Catch a Predator". Of course, Psiphon can be used for exactly the same thing. (I also emailed some of the reporters who recently wrote about Psiphon, to tell them about Circumventor; so far, I haven't heard back from any of them, but I doubt they're being politically correct this time, I think they're just not thrilled that C-Net scooped them by three years and seven months.)

So, Psiphon and Circumventor fall in the first category -- programs that only work if you've got a contact outside the censored country to help you. In the second category is Tor, which was originally written to provide mathematically secure anonymity, but had the nice property that it could be used to get around the Great Firewall of China as well. With your browser in China using Tor as a proxy, packets are routed to other Tor nodes outside the country, which connect you with any blocked Web site that you want to see. Best of all, you just install it on a machine in China, and presto, it works, no nagging your expat cousin in the U.S. to install something on their computer to help you. Dynamic Internet Technologies, run by Chinese dissident Bill Xia in North Carolina, runs another service that works "out of the box" -- you send an instant-message to one of the DIT screen names, and it replies with a list of currently running Web proxies. (Bill has asked me not to publicize the actual screen names that perform this service, because it's intended only for Chinese users. I think that's a case of "security through obscurity", but I respect his wishes.)

Unfortunately, all such "instant gratification" solutions have the same basic weakness, which by a simple argument can be extended even to hypothetical future programs in the same category. In the case of a program like Tor, the censor only has to install the software, look at what IP addresses the software connects to when it bootstraps itself, and add those IP addresses to the blacklist. Even if the software chooses at random from multiple IP addresses to bootstrap to, the censor can still obtain all of them by repeatedly re-installing the software (possibly wiping the machine each time so the software can't tell that it's been installed before). No matter how you slice it, if Alice the legitimate user and Bob the censor download the program on the same day, Bob can make the program not work for Alice if he updates the blacklist quickly enough. He doesn't even have to reverse-engineer the software, he just has to use a network sniffer to see where it connects to. (For DIT's proxy-by-instant-message system, the censor can instant-message the screen name repeatedly, from different accounts, until they've collected and blocked all the available proxies; this would be analogous to re-installing Tor repeatedly and seeing what IPs it connects to.)

Peacefire has produced other approach which is a simple, obvious idea, and it was quite by accident that we found out it slips through the cracks of the seemingly "unsolvable" problem with instant-gratification outlined above. Like the other solutions, it works only as long as the censors are fairly lazy, but they are, and it does. About 30,000 people have signed up through a form on our site to be notified each time we create a new Circumventor site and mail it out, every 3 or 4 days. Agents of the blocking companies have joined the list too, of course, but we mail different sites to different subsets of the list. Now, an attack analogous to the attacks listed in the previous paragraph, would be for the censors to join under many different accounts, and then block any site that gets mailed to any of those accounts. But the catch is that when an address joins the list, a new site doesn't get mailed to that address until some random time in the future. So the censor has to check all of the fake Hotmail accounts that they've created, over and over, if they want to block all of the new sites as soon as they're released. Hardly impossible, but the censor can no longer use the instantaneous approach of: (1) enter the system / join the list / install the software; (2) see where it connects to and block those points of access; (3) repeat. (If we instantly e-mailed a randomly selected site to each new signup, then this attack would work.) By going from instant gratification to almost-instant-gratification, you change one of the conditions for the theorem stated in the previous paragraph, so that it no longer holds true. Still, like Tor and the DIT system, it could be blocked with a moderate amount of effort.

The Tor protocol, by the way, has been the subject of a great deal of sophisticated mathematical analysis, really brainy stuff that is beyond the scope of this article. But it's important to understand that that analysis focuses on the security of the Tor protocol for achieving anonymity. For anonymity, the protocol is very strong; for routing around censorship, it's fairly straightforward to defeat. That's not at all a criticism of the Tor developers; Tor was designed to achieve anonymity, and just turned out to work for beating censorship as well -- but only, of course, as long as the censors aren't making much effort to block it.

Which all leads to the obvious question: Why have the censors not bothered?

Nobody knows for sure, but I fear the answer is that the Chinese government and other censors know that the greatest weapon in their arsenal is not IP blocking, or keyword filtering, or even the threat of arrest. It's just apathy. The Chinese censors know what we anti-censorware developers in the free world keep forgetting: that most Chinese are not liberty-minded Jeffersonians chomping at the bit under the oppressive yoke of their government and waiting to be freed by circumvention software. As Michael Chase and James Mulvenon of the RAND Corporation put it in their report on Internet usage by Chinese dissidents, You've Got Dissent!: "[A]lthough some peer-to-peer applications... are designed specifically to combat censorship on the Internet and address privacy concerns, most Chinese Internet users are undoubtedly more interested in using peer-to-peer applications for entertainment purposes such as downloading MP3 music files." The censors know what Netscape knew when they fought tooth and nail against Microsoft including Internet Explorer on the desktop of every Windows machine: defaults matter. It doesn't matter that users can go to Netscape's site and download their browser, and it doesn't matter that users can access a banned site by installing a cool p2p program. Most people just don't.

When I first started working on the Circumventor, I assumed that since the Chinese Internet censorship bureau reportedly employed about 30,000 people, surely if they were already spending that much effort and money, they'd throw plenty of resources at defeating any new anti-censorship program, so the Circumventor would have to be able to withstand any such attack. But I was wrong. According to the RAND corporation paper, the censors have been quite busy, for example, policing political forums for dissident postings that other users might casually run into. But they apparently assume -- correctly, it seems -- that content doesn't pose much of a threat if users have to go out of their way and download a program to access it. And if the user has to have a friend outside the country to help them, then forget it.

This is not to downplay the enormous good that programs like Tor, Circumventor and Psiphon can do in bringing free speech to the people in censored countries who want it. But it's easy to forget that those often do not comprise a large part of the population.

One of the biggest disappointments for me came in May 2005 when I was looking for ways to get around the word filter on MSN China's blogging service. Microsoft, apparently acting on public relations advice from Lex Luthor, had decided to filter the words "freedom", "democracy", and "Taiwan independence" from the titles of blogs on MSN China. (I know, I know, they have to comply with Chinese laws to do business there. But I don't think the Chinese have actually outlawed the word "democracy".) Eventually I did find a loophole, so I searched on MSN for some Chinese blogs published by expatriates to ask them to help test the workaround for me. With a few exceptions, most of the bloggers were rather hostile, saying that they supported their government's efforts to censor the Internet and to stamp out Falun Gong as a dangerous "cult". (These were expats living in the U.S., so presumably they were not worried about the Chinese government sending a tank across the Pacific to run them over if they criticized the ruling party. Even if they thought they had to watch what they said because they might someday return to China, or because they still had family there, surely it would have been easier just to ignore me; the hostility that I encountered sounded genuine.) The moral is, no matter how much your movement believes in its efforts to help oppressed people, you can't just assume you'll be greeted as liberators (ahem).

So now you know most of what there is to know about the state of the art in anti-censorship software. It's just that there is less to understand than the hype originally suggests -- the programs aren't really secure, but they work because the censors aren't really trying. And there aren't any cool mathematical formulas that you can impress your friends with -- for that, you'll still have to go back to Applied Cryptography. It's a lot less impressive to be the Bruce Schneier of circumvention algorithms than it is to be the real Bruce Schneier.

twitter writes "The Register and others are examining a New York Times effort to eliminate bias from technology reporting by not echoing paid opinions. (Other coverage here.) They target Microsoft specifically. InfoWorld has an insightful summary of the two sides of this old debate. Fake think tanks, dubious sponsored research, and Astroturf are not considered but should be. Companies using these tactics deserve to be held at arm's length, but that's hard to do when the company is also a monopoly able to make or break any 'expert.' It would be refreshing to see the New York Times discover the FSF, opensource.org, EFF, and other sources of computing expertise."

prostoalex writes "ZDNet is reporting that USPTO issued a patent to Google, Inc. for 'ornamental design for a graphical user interface'. This is not, as ZDNet points out, a software patent (which is usually issued as a utility patent), but a design patent, which governs the look and feel of the product and prevents others from directly copying it." Ironic, given Google's recent slip-up of copying a Yahoo page. In news on the flipside, Google has launched a patent search service (in beta).

chrisd writes "When we first released the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) we were focused on building a great tool for people to build AJAX apps with. Now, we're happy to announce that all of the GWT source code is available, including the Java to JavaScript compiler and the debugging browser, under the Apache 2.0 license. If you'd like to see how we pulled off letting you avoid dealing with nasty browser quirks, you should take a look. More importantly, we're running this like a true open source project now: we'll be developing GWT completely in the open, as per our project charter. More info on the GWT blog."

chrisd writes "When we first released the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) we were focused on building a great tool for people to build AJAX apps with. Now, we're happy to announce that all of the GWT source code is available, including the Java to JavaScript compiler and the debugging browser, under the Apache 2.0 license. If you'd like to see how we pulled off letting you avoid dealing with nasty browser quirks, you should take a look. More importantly, we're running this like a true open source project now: we'll be developing GWT completely in the open, as per our project charter. More info on the GWT blog."

chrisd writes "When we first released the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) we were focused on building a great tool for people to build AJAX apps with. Now, we're happy to announce that all of the GWT source code is available, including the Java to JavaScript compiler and the debugging browser, under the Apache 2.0 license. If you'd like to see how we pulled off letting you avoid dealing with nasty browser quirks, you should take a look. More importantly, we're running this like a true open source project now: we'll be developing GWT completely in the open, as per our project charter. More info on the GWT blog."

theodp writes "Grab your COBOL Coding Forms and head on over to comp.lang.cobol, kids! Yesterday was Grace Hopper's 100th birthday, and many are still singing the praises of her Common Business-Oriented Language."

EricTheGreen writes "It isn't often that Google completely kills a product, which makes the announcement of the end of Google Answers noteworthy. I find it particularly interesting, given that there's clearly a market for this service. Yahoo!'s offering continues to flourish, it seems ... so what made Yahoo's service more attractive than Google's?" From the blog post: "Later this week, we will stop accepting new questions in Google Answers, the very first project we worked on here. The project started with a rough idea from Larry Page, and a small 4-person team turned it into reality in less than 4 months. For two new grads, it was a crash course in building a scalable product, responding to customer requests, and discovering what questions are on people's minds. Google Answers taught us exactly how many tyrannosaurs are in a gallon of gasoline, why flies survive a good microwaving, and why you really shouldn't drink water emitted by your air conditioner. Even closer to home, we learned one afternoon that our building might be on fire."

EricTheGreen writes "It isn't often that Google completely kills a product, which makes the announcement of the end of Google Answers noteworthy. I find it particularly interesting, given that there's clearly a market for this service. Yahoo!'s offering continues to flourish, it seems ... so what made Yahoo's service more attractive than Google's?" From the blog post: "Later this week, we will stop accepting new questions in Google Answers, the very first project we worked on here. The project started with a rough idea from Larry Page, and a small 4-person team turned it into reality in less than 4 months. For two new grads, it was a crash course in building a scalable product, responding to customer requests, and discovering what questions are on people's minds. Google Answers taught us exactly how many tyrannosaurs are in a gallon of gasoline, why flies survive a good microwaving, and why you really shouldn't drink water emitted by your air conditioner. Even closer to home, we learned one afternoon that our building might be on fire."

EricTheGreen writes "It isn't often that Google completely kills a product, which makes the announcement of the end of Google Answers noteworthy. I find it particularly interesting, given that there's clearly a market for this service. Yahoo!'s offering continues to flourish, it seems ... so what made Yahoo's service more attractive than Google's?" From the blog post: "Later this week, we will stop accepting new questions in Google Answers, the very first project we worked on here. The project started with a rough idea from Larry Page, and a small 4-person team turned it into reality in less than 4 months. For two new grads, it was a crash course in building a scalable product, responding to customer requests, and discovering what questions are on people's minds. Google Answers taught us exactly how many tyrannosaurs are in a gallon of gasoline, why flies survive a good microwaving, and why you really shouldn't drink water emitted by your air conditioner. Even closer to home, we learned one afternoon that our building might be on fire."

EricTheGreen writes "It isn't often that Google completely kills a product, which makes the announcement of the end of Google Answers noteworthy. I find it particularly interesting, given that there's clearly a market for this service. Yahoo!'s offering continues to flourish, it seems ... so what made Yahoo's service more attractive than Google's?" From the blog post: "Later this week, we will stop accepting new questions in Google Answers, the very first project we worked on here. The project started with a rough idea from Larry Page, and a small 4-person team turned it into reality in less than 4 months. For two new grads, it was a crash course in building a scalable product, responding to customer requests, and discovering what questions are on people's minds. Google Answers taught us exactly how many tyrannosaurs are in a gallon of gasoline, why flies survive a good microwaving, and why you really shouldn't drink water emitted by your air conditioner. Even closer to home, we learned one afternoon that our building might be on fire."

Dreben writes "Gaia, an opensource project to develop a 3D API to Google Earth, has decided to comply with a request from Google. The search giant's Chief Technologist, Michael Jones, contacted the project with a request to cease and desist from all past, present and future development of the Gaia project. Amongst other things, they cited 'improper usage of licensed data,' which Google licenses from assorted third party vendors. They are going so far as to request anyone who has ever downloaded any aspect of Gaia to purge all related files. From the post to the freegis-l mail list: 'We understand and respect Google's position on the case, so we've removed all downloads from this page and we ask everybody who have ever downloaded gaia 0.1.0 and prior versions to delete all files concerned with the project, which include source code, binary files and image cache (~/.gaia).' How does such a request, likely to have turned into a demand, affect fair usage? While the API is intended to interface with the the Google Earth service, Google Earth is nothing without the data. Yet at the same time, Google openly publishes their own API which uses the same data in the same manner."

An anonymous reader writes "F/A-18 Hornet jet fighters just having some fun — and making science interesting at the same time: Video #1, #2, #3, and a photo gallery. The formal name for the cool 'vapor cone' is Prandtl-Glauert Condensation Cloud, which is due the Prandtl-Glauert singularity."

Lauren Weinstein writes to raise an alarm about a new Google service, Click-to-Call. As he describes it, the service seems ripe for abuse of several kinds. One red flag is that Google falsifies the caller-ID of calls it originates for the service. From the article: "Up to now, the typical available avenue for manipulating caller-ID has been pay services that tended to limit the potential for large-scale abuse since users are charged for access. Google, by providing a free service that will place calls and manipulate caller-ID, vastly increases the scope of the problem. Scale matters."

Baldrson writes "One of the founders of the US Tokamak fusion program, Dr. Robert W. Bussard, gave a lecture at Google recently now appearing as a Google video titled 'Should Google Go Nuclear?'. In it, he presents his recent breakthrough electrostatic confinement fusion device which, he claims, produced several orders of magnitude higher fusion power than earlier electrostatic confinement devices. According to Bussard, it did so repeatably during several runs until it blew up due to mechanical stress degradation. He's looking for $200M funding, the first million or so of which goes to rebuilding a more robust demonstrator within the first year. He claims the scaling laws are so favorable that the initial full scale reactor would burn boron-11 — the cleanest fusion reaction otherwise unattainable. He has some fairly disturbing things to say in this video, as well as elsewhere, about the US fusion program which he co-founded."

ajs writes "As previously announced, 'Babylon 5: The Lost Tales' is a direct-to-DVD project based on the popular series from the mid-1990s. Lost Tales first DVD, titled 'Voices of the Dark' has now begun production. As usual, J. Michael Straczynski and Doug Netter will be running the show with Straczynski directing. The characters, President John Sheridan (Boxleitner), Captain Elizabeth Lochley (Scoggins) and the technomage Galen (Woodward) are returning. The Lost Tales is an anthology series of sorts with two movies (previously three) per DVD starting in 2007. Straczynski has commented on Usenet that a more CG-intensive installment is coming in the next batch, featuring the character of Michael Garibaldi (Doyle)."

Rockgod writes to tell us about Google Earth's latest expansion. From the article: "Google skipped right past the third dimension and landed directly in the fourth (time) by offering historical maps on Google Earth. Now you can travel back in time — for example, I am looking at the globe of 1790. Don't expect detailed high resolution photography from days gone by, but it's still interesting to see old maps overlaid on the satellite imagery of today." I suppose a link to Earth4 would have been good.

prostoalex writes "HBO's controversial special 'Hacking Democracy' on issues with Diebold voting machines is now available in full on Google Video." Covered earlier on Slashdot, the documentary seems to have gathered quite a bit of heat from Diebold in addition to the one that didn't air.

Herbert H. Thompson, PhD ("Hugh" to his friends), is one of the people featured in the HBO documentary, Hacking Democracy, that Diebold tried to keep from airing. Hugh is a long-time Slashdot reader who called me to volunteer for this interview — on his own, not through anyone's PR department. Here's a YouTube excerpt from a CNN Lou Dobbs show with Hugh in it. (Find more articles by and about Hugh here. And perhaps check this brand-new MSNBC story about e-voting, too.) Hugh suggests that you give him "your wildest questions about what went on behind the scenes and how safe the e-voting systems actually are." Let's take him up on that challenge, hopefully while following Slashdot interview rules. Note to Diebold and other voting machine companies: We welcome comments and questions from you, same as we welcome them from everyone else. If you feel you are being vilified unfairly by Slashdot readers, please respond and set the record straight.