Domain: iq.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to iq.org.
Stories · 3
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Underground Surfaces
Julian Assange writes: "I'm very pleased to announce that thanks to Random House, Suelette Dreyfus and myself the complete and unabridged electronic text to our well-known book "Underground: tales of hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier" (approx 500 pp.) has been publicly and freely released... hacked to support Palm Doc!" Good reading. -
Australia Orders Olympic Web Site Accessible to Blind
Julian Assange writes "An article in The Age reports that the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission has ordered the Sydney 2000 Olympics organisers (SOCOG) to use ALT tags on all images and image map links on its web site. IBM who was contracted to develop the site, claims it needs a cool $2 million and a year to retrofit ALT tags to the entire site, including real-time score pages. But Simon Moran of the Public Access Internet Advocacy Centre says the modifications would cost only between $30,000 and $40,000 to implement. It goes without saying that changes would have cost $0 if IBM had correctly used ALT tags the first time around." -
NSA has Patented New Eavesdropping Technology
Julian Assange writes "According to an article by Suelette Drefyus in the British paper The Independent, the US National Security Agency has designed and patented a new technology that could aid it in spying on international telephone calls. (continued)"The NSA patent, granted on 10 August, is for a system of automatic topic spotting and labelling of data. The patent officially confirms for the first time that the NSA has been working on ways of automatically analysing human speech. The NSA's invention is intended automatically to sift through human speech transcripts in any language. The patent document specifically mentions "machine-transcribed speech" as a potential source.
Bruce Schneier, author of Applied Cryptography, a textbook on the science of keeping information secret, believes the NSA currently has the ability to use computers to transcribe voice conversations. 'One of the holy grails of the NSA is the ability automatically to search through voice traffic. They would have expended considerable effort on this capability, and this indicates it has been fruitful,' he said." You can find more details here.