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je ne sais quoi writes "The Apple rumor mill is churning today. Reuters and the DOW Jones news wire are reporting that an anonymous source in Taiwan has leaked that Apple has ordered some 10-inch touch-screens from WinTek, the maker of the touch-screen for the iPhone. It looks like an Apple netbook could possibly be in the works for a delivery date in Q3 of this year, in time for back-to-school sales. CNET and Engadget have completely unsubstantiated mock-ups."

brothke writes "The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America is the third of James Bamford's trilogy. Bamford started this with The Puzzle Palace in 1982 and Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency in 2001. The Shadow Factory is likely the last book Bamford will find the NSA cooperative to, given his often harsh treatment of the agency and its directors. It is also doubtful that former NSA Director Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden will grant Bamford additional dinner invitations, given his portrayal of Hayden as a weakling who could not stand up to Dick Cheney and other in the Bush administration." Read below for the rest of Ben's review. The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America author James Bamford pages 416 publisher Doubleday rating When sticking to facts: 9. When digressing: 2 reviewer Ben Rothke ISBN 0385521324 summary Good overview of the NSA post-9/11, but some of the author's biases get in the way The book can be summed up with two basic themes: The top management of the NSA and CIA has not made the fundamental changes needed post 9/11, as the politicking and inter-agency squabbles are seemingly alive and well. Bamford's other premise continues to be his contempt towards Israel.

Often bands produce abysmal releases in order to fulfill contractual requirements. In some ways, The Shadow Factory is reminiscent of that; at almost half the size of Body of Secrets, and 2/3 the size of The Puzzle Palace. When the book sticks to the facts and avoids conspiracy theories, it is a fascinating read.

If nothing else, Bamford knows how to turn often mundane aspects of wiretapping and supercomputers into a gripping read. Divided into five interwoven sections, the book starts out with a fascinating account of how two of the 9/11 hijackers lived the American dream, all the while planning their devious acts. Had there been some semblance of interagency cooperation and shared databases, Khalid Al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi would have been identified in seconds.

Not only that, in the book, Bamford writes that many of the 9/11 terrorists set-up shop within miles of the NSA headquarters in Maryland, communicated with their counterparts in the Middle East, at the same time the NSA was searching the world over for them. Bamford makes the NSA seem like the keystone cops searching for these terrorists, while they were literally a par 5 away.

A number of the chapters details the Bush administration forays into its illegal wiretapping adventures and how Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card manipulated a sick and barely lucid Attorney General John Ashcroft into signing on to the program.

It has long been known that Bamford has no love lost for Israel. His previous books have incorrectly written of the details around Israel's attack of the Liberty, a US Navy technical research ship, which was sailing in the Mediterranean Sea during the Six-Day War.

The book details how Israeli high-tech data mining and surveillance companies such as Comverse, Verint, NICE and more have become indispensable to the US intelligence community. Bamford asserts that the vast majority of surveillance of telephone transmissions are done via technology from Israeli companies. He then makes the jump that the American intelligence community is placing itself as risk and that the Israeli companies will access this same information.

Such conspiracy theories are tired and old. For the longest time, there were claims that every Check Point FireWall-1 had a backdoor which the Mosad could tap into. Some years ago, the NSA even sent out a memo denying that fact, as it was getting in the way of firewall deployments at the agency.

As to Bamford's assertion of Israeli control of American intelligence, it makes great fodder for the conspiracy theory community, but lacks any sort of real evidence. What Bamford does is show that many of the founders of these companies are graduates of programs from the Israeli military, served in the same intelligence corps unit and therefore, guilty by some sort of association.

Irrespective of Bamford's deep hostility towards Israel, there is not the slightest indication that the American intelligence community was forced to purchase these Israeli products. They purchased these due to their superior capabilities produced by one of its closest allies. What Bamford fails to mention, is that Israeli and US intelligence groups have a long history of mutual cooperation. Much of the US success in its war against terror and monitoring of Iran are only due to help from Israel.

If the Shadow Factory is meant to be a critique of the NSA, then Bamford's unsubstantiated allegations about Israel and the Mosad show the agency to be a bastion of utter incompetency. Irrespective of problems with management at the NSA, it is utterly incredulous that the Mosad could single-handedly undermine the entire US intelligence effort, filling it with back doors and secret agents.

Bamford seems to be confused on his approach to the NSA. On one side, the NSA are the smartest guys in the room, successfully, surreptitiously and often illegally monitoring nearly every telephone call on the planet. They push supercomputers to the envelope and optimize ever CPU cycle. Yet simultaneously, these smart guys are simply pawns of a small group of Israeli intelligence agents who have managed to develop and get their software on various NSA projects.

In his review of the book in the New York Times, Christopher Dickey sums it up best when he writes of Bamford's habit of such conspiracy theories that "it's a fair bet that Bamford will find a way to work the bloodbath at the Taj Mahal hotel into the long NSA narrative that he began with "The Puzzle Palace" in 1982, followed up with "Body of Secrets" in 2001, and may well continue with paperback updates and further sequels after the present book. These are the kinds of details, or coincidences, that Bamford loves. In "The Shadow Factory" he piles one on top of another — events, addresses, room numbers — in a slapped-together text that often blends facts with speculation to evoke a pervasive atmosphere of conspiracy".

When Bamford is able to stick to the facts, which is about 2/3 of the book, he paints a frightening picture of the threats that the US is facing. Equally frightening was the response of the Bush administrations to the threats and attacks, which in some cases turned mince meat out of the Constitution. Bamford writes of Dick Cheney's attempt to give the President significant more control, while ignoring the need for separation of powers. There are many other such instances in the book. Yet when Bamford takes off his hat of reason and attempts to connect invisible dots, Christopher Dickey's observation should be kept in mind.

Seemingly on the brink of failure, the events of 9/11 recycled the NSA. For the astute reader who is able to discern between fact and fiction, The Shadow Factory is a fascinating read into an agency that still exists in the shadows. With a budget larger than the GDP of some countries, and a workforce that spans the globe, the NSA has long existed and thrived in the shadows that Bamford often describes so well.

Ben Rothke is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know.

You can purchase The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Slatterz writes "Cisco has inked a deal with NASA to build a new global system for tracking climate change. Dubbed 'Planetary Skin,' the network platform will connect a number of sensor and recording units throughout the planet in an effort to gather data for monitoring and tracking changes to the global climate. The company plans to begin building the system next year with a program called 'Rainforest Skin' which will track both climate change and deforestation in rainforest environments. Eventually, the company plans to take the system throughout the planet and create a global network of data-collecting systems for the project. A podcast and a video explain the project in further detail."

The New York Times reports that Cablevision Systems is testing a new project in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and some areas of New Jersey to bring targeted advertising to television audiences. "The technology requires no hardware or installation in a subscriber's home, so viewers may not realize they are seeing ads different from a neighbor's. But during the same show, a 50-something male may see an ad for, say, high-end speakers from Best Buy, while his neighbors with children may see one for a Best Buy video game." The test deployment includes 500,000 households, and separates viewers by demographic data from Experian. "Experian has data on individuals that it collects through public records, registries and other sources. It matches the name and address of the subscriber to what it knows about them, and assigns demographic characteristics to households. (The match is a blind one: advertisers do not know what name and address they are advertising to, Cablevision executives said.)"

nizcolas writes "Notable evolutionary biologist, author, and speaker Richard Dawkins was recently invited to speak on the campus of the University of Oklahoma as part of the school's celebration of Charles Darwin. However, Oklahoma lawmakers are working to silence Dawkins with the passage of House Bill 1015 (RTF), which reads in part: '... the University of Oklahoma ... has invited as a public speaker on campus, Richard Dawkins of Oxford University, whose published opinions, as represented in his 2006 book "The God Delusion," and public statements on the theory of evolution demonstrate an intolerance for cultural diversity and diversity of thinking and are views that are not shared and are not representative of the thinking of a majority of the citizens of Oklahoma ...'" Pending legal action, Dawkins is set to speak tonight at 7 pm. (Luckily, we no longer live in the era of Bertrand Russell's court-ordered dismissal on moral grounds from the College of the City of New York.) And reader thms sends word of the Vatican's Darwin conference (program): "The conference, marking the 150th anniversary of the publication of "The Origin of Species," has been criticized by advocates of Creationism or Intelligent Design for not inviting them. The Muslim creationist Harun Yahya, most famous for his Atlas of Creation, also complained about not being invited."

Hugh Pickens writes "California Assemblyman Joel Anderson plans to introduce a bill to force Google Earth and similar services to blur images of so-called 'soft targets' like schools, hospitals, churches and government buildings to protect them from terrorists. 'All I'm trying to do is stop terrorists,' said Anderson. 'I don't want California to be helping map out future targets for terrorists.' Concerns that detailed satellite imagery and photographs available on Web services could help terrorists plan attacks are not new, with reports that terrorists have used such imagery to carry out attacks in Iraq and Israel, and an Indian court is considering a ban on Google Earth following reports that its imagery played a part in the Mumbai terrorist attacks." "Security expert Bruce Schneier recently wondered what other things legislators might consider banning to prevent terrorism: 'Bank robbers have long used cars and motorcycles as getaway vehicles, and horses before then. I haven't seen it talked about yet, but the Mumbai terrorists used boats as well. They also wore boots. They ate lunch at restaurants, drank bottled water and breathed the air,' wrote Schneier. 'Society survives all of this because the good uses of infrastructure far outweigh the bad uses, even though the good uses are — by and large — small and pedestrian and the bad uses are rare and spectacular.'"

eldavojohn writes "There's no lack of news surrounding the settlement of Google's controversial move to digitize books — but how do you even start this endeavor? A New York Times story reveals the obstacles they face just to get the word out that they want to settle with publishers and authors everywhere. They turned to a world-wide ad campaign to start the $125 million settlement process and they're spending $7 million to $8 million in paper print ads and telephone hot-lines (handling 80+ languages) to reach as many people as possible. From the article: 'We looked at how many books were published in various areas and we knew from the plaintiffs and Google that 30 percent were published in the US, 30 percent in industrialized countries. The rest of the world is the rest.' That's quite the herculean task! Hopefully Google's efforts in digitizing books will breathe new life and revenue into authors and publishers the world over."

Peace Corps Online writes "In a non-electrified society, life is defined by the sun and little is accomplished once it sets around 6 pm. Only 19 percent of rural areas in Ghana have electricity. The rest use foul-smelling kerosene lamps to light their huts, which pollute, provide little light and are major fire hazards. But now Philips has partnered with KITE, a not-for-profit Ghanaian organization, to bring artificial light to villages that have no electricity. The new Philips products include a portable lantern which provides bright white light where it is needed, the Dynamo Multi LED self-powered (wind-up) flashlight that provides 17 minutes of light from two minutes hand winding, and the 'My Reading Light,' which is a solar-powered reading light with built-in rechargeable battery. 'People can now do things in the evening,' says Harriette Amissah-Arthur, KITE's director. 'If you could only see the joy these products bring the villagers. You look at their faces; you have to see it to believe it.'"

On Wednesday we discussed news that the Authors Guild had objected to the text-to-speech function on Amazon's Kindle 2, claiming that it infringed on audio book copyright. Today, Amazon said that while the feature is legally sound, they would be willing to disable text-to-speech on a title-by-title basis at the rightsholder's request. "We have already begun to work on the technical changes required to give authors and publishers that choice. With this new level of control, publishers and authors will be able to decide for themselves whether it is in their commercial interests to leave text-to-speech enabled. We believe many will decide that it is."

nandemoari writes "On Tuesday, Apple shareholders gathered at Apple's Cupertino corporate campus continued their pursuit of details regarding Apple chief Steve Jobs' health. They didn't get a whole heck of a lot of information out of Apple's executives, but they did receive some encouraging news on Jobs' status. Timothy Cook, Apple's chief operating officer, assured shareholders that Jobs still planned to return to the company in June. Jobs obviously wasn't present at the meeting, which might have made it rather uncomfortable when several stockholders stood to sing 'Happy Birthday.' Jobs' 54th passed on Tuesday."

An anonymous reader writes "The president of the Authors Guild has launched a rant in the NY Times about how the Kindle 2 provides Text-to-Speech capabilities that, oh the horror, allow the user to have any text on the Kindle read to her. Roy Blunt, Jr. moans that this is copyright infringement of audio books, and that Kindle users should be forced to pay royalties on audio even though they've already paid for the text version of a book! Amazingly he harps on about how TTS technology has become so good that it may replace humans — and then uses this to argue that it's unfair for Kindle to provide TTS! I think the Authors Guild need a new president — someone less of a Luddite, and more familiar with copyright law." (See also the Guild's executive director's similar claims that reading aloud, royalty-free, is an illegal function of software.)

Plasmoid writes "The NYTimes is reporting that scientists have starting developing what could turn out to be a 'universal' flu vaccine. They created antibody proteins that can neutralize different strains of the influenza virus, including the deadly H5N1 bird flu, the virus behind the 1918 epidemic, and common seasonal strains. These new antibodies target part of the virus that is shared between different strains and thus appear to be broadly effective. However, some experts question whether a universal vaccine of this kind is even possible, since the human body has been unable to come up with an antibody solution. An article on nature.com describes the work further."

mattnyc99 writes "Two weeks after the launch of Google Latitude, your inbox is probably full of requests and privacy advocates probably have even more concerns than they did at first. But some tech pundits are already seeing the bigger picture of a digital lifestyle based around the always-on, GPS-based mobile map. The NYTimes's John Markoff has a great piece in today's Science Times about the map as metaphor for a time when 'future systems will probably begin to blur the boundaries between the display and the real world.' Over at Esquire.com's Tech Therapist, Erik Sofge talks to the geek behind Latitude and offers a similar reality check: 'Latitude will be precisely as annoying as e-mail and social networking sites and cell phones themselves — and just as useful. What won't stop Latitude, or the wider rollout of location-based tracking, is bitching about it. These are juggernauts of free, culture-reorienting technology. And you and me, we are but posts on the massive Facebook profile of history.'"

ponraul writes "When Judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., 58, sentenced Hillary Transue, 17, on a harassment charge stemming from a MySpace parody of her high school's assistant principal, Hillary expected to be let off with a stern lecture; instead, the Wilkes-Barre, PA area teen got three months in a commercially operated juvenile detention center. In a reversal of fortune, Ciavarella and his colleague, Judge Conahan, 56, find themselves trying to plea-bargain an 87-month sentence in Federal correctional facilities relating to a kick-back scheme that netted the pair $2.6 Million and PA Child Care 5000 inmates." True poetic justice would be for these corrupt, callous judges to serve their sentences in the same kind of environment to which they were happy to dispatch juvenile defendants.

Richard.Tao and a number of other readers sent in a NYTimes piece by John Markoff asking whether the Internet is so broken it needs to be replaced. "...[T]here is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over. What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a 'gated community' where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety. Today that is already the case for many corporate and government Internet users. As a new and more secure network becomes widely adopted, the current Internet might end up as the bad neighborhood of cyberspace. You would enter at your own risk and keep an eye over your shoulder while you were there." A less alarmist reaction to the question was blogged by David Akin: "If you build a new Internet and you want me to get a license to drive on it, sorry. I'm hanging out here in v.1."

The New York Times is running a story about the criteria involved when Google scraps one of their projects. While a project's popularity among users is important, Google also examines whether they can get enough employees interested in it, and whether it has a large enough scope — they prefer not to waste time solving minor problems. The article takes a look at the specific reasons behind the recent cancellation of several products. "Dennis Crowley, one of two co-founders who sold Dodgeball to Google in 2005 and stayed on, said that he had trouble competing for the attention of other Google engineers to expand the service. 'If you're a product manager, you have to recruit people and their "20 percent time."' ... [Jeff Huber, the company's senior vice president of engineering] said that Google eventually concluded that Dodgeball's vision was too narrow. ... Still, Google found the concepts behind Dodgeball intriguing, and early this month, it released Google Latitude, an add-on to Google Maps that allows people to share their location with friends and family members. It's more sophisticated than Dodgeball, with automatic location tracking and more options for privacy and communication."

The New York Times is running a story about the criteria involved when Google scraps one of their projects. While a project's popularity among users is important, Google also examines whether they can get enough employees interested in it, and whether it has a large enough scope — they prefer not to waste time solving minor problems. The article takes a look at the specific reasons behind the recent cancellation of several products. "Dennis Crowley, one of two co-founders who sold Dodgeball to Google in 2005 and stayed on, said that he had trouble competing for the attention of other Google engineers to expand the service. 'If you're a product manager, you have to recruit people and their "20 percent time."' ... [Jeff Huber, the company's senior vice president of engineering] said that Google eventually concluded that Dodgeball's vision was too narrow. ... Still, Google found the concepts behind Dodgeball intriguing, and early this month, it released Google Latitude, an add-on to Google Maps that allows people to share their location with friends and family members. It's more sophisticated than Dodgeball, with automatic location tracking and more options for privacy and communication."

Greg Chudecke writes "The New York Times recently ran an article on game companies that get design input from gamers. The article is branded as 'The Brave New World of Open-source Game Design.' The title may be a little misleading as it isn't exactly like the game design is open source for editing, however it is interesting that gamers are getting an opportunity to shape the games they play."

Vigile writes "Intel recently announced that it was moving up the production of 32nm processors in place of many 45nm CPUs that have been on the company's roadmap for some time. Though spun as good news (and sure to be tough on AMD), the fact is that the current economy is forcing Intel's hand as they are unwilling to invest much more in 45nm technologies that will surely be outdated by the time the market cycles back up and consumers and businesses start buying PCs again. By focusing on 32nm products, like Westmere, the first CPU with integrated graphics, Intel is basically putting a $7 billion bet on a turnaround in the economy for 2010."

Pickens writes "MacArthur fellow Carl Safina, an adjunct professor at Stony Brook University, has an interesting essay in the NYTimes that says that equating evolution with Charles Darwin opened the door for creationism by ignoring 150 years of discoveries, including most of what scientists understand about evolution — Gregor Mendel's patterns of heredity, the discovery of DNA, developmental biology, studies documenting evolution in nature, and evolution's role in medicine and disease. Darwinism implies an ideology adhering to one man's dictates, like Marxism, says Safina. He adds that nobody talks about Newtonism or Einsteinism, and that by making Darwin 'into a sacred fetish misses the essence of his teaching.' By turning Darwin into an 'ism,' scientists created the opening for creationism, with the 'isms' implying equivalence. 'By propounding "Darwinism," even scientists and science writers perpetuate an impression that evolution is about one man, one book, one theory,' writes Safina. '"Darwinism" implies that biological scientists "believe in" Darwin's "theory." It's as if, since 1860, scientists have just ditto-headed Darwin rather than challenging and testing his ideas, or adding vast new knowledge.'"

Ponca City, We Love You writes with a New York Times story saying there could be a shortage of DTV converter boxes in addition to the problem with coupons. "At the current rate of coupon redemption, 115,000 per day, plus sales without coupons, that means the current stock of converters could be sold out by the end of this month. So what would have happened if the whole digital transition worked the way it was supposed to? Many of those 3.7 million people would be marching into their local Radio Shack and Best Buy stores trying to buy converter boxes next weekend right before the scheduled cutoff on Feb. 17. And if the electronics association's numbers are right, the boxes would have sold out." Good thing the extended cut-off date was approved.

Hugh Pickens writes "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is going back to work as chief scientist at Fusion-io, a start-up company that tweaks computers to let them tap vast amounts of storage at very quick rates. In the early days of Apple, Wozniak stood out as one of Silicon Valley's most creative engineers, demonstrating a knack for elegant computer designs that made efficient use of components and combined many features into a cohesive package and Wozniak will do similar work at Fusion-io, although this time with larger server computers and storage systems rather than PCs. 'I have a pretty quiet life, and I like to watch technology evolve,' says Wozniak. 'In this case, I like the people and the product, and said I would like some greater involvement.'"

je ne sais quoi writes "The New York Times recently posted an article describing what really happened between Apple and the Record labels that culminated with the January 6th Macworld Keynote by Apple Senior VP Phil Schiller." Essentially they discuss a bit of a swap: Apple allowed variable pricing for songs and the industry allowed DRM free music. And apparently the iTunes homepage is a huge hit making device. Big shock.

Rog-Mahal writes "The fictional Kingdom of Wallachia has made the front page of Czech newspapers lately. The practical joke turned tourist attraction started by photographer Tomas Harabis has been locked is a power struggle between Bolek Polivka, the current king, and Harabis, the foreign minister. The faux country has received international attention over the years: 'Wallachia makes money several ways, including offering tastings of its famed plum brandy, slivovitz, to corporate clients. Its biggest source of revenue is the Wallachian passport, which costs the equivalent of $7.69. There are roughly 90,000 citizens of the make-believe nation, once including George W. Bush, who was given a passport some years ago by a Czech living in Texas. Mr. Bush's citizenship was revoked in 2003 after the United States invaded Iraq. The passport has created some confusion, however. When a man from Pakistan recently asked the kingdom for political asylum, Mr. Harabis said he had to gently explain that Wallachia was not a real country. The Wallachian passport now warns: "This passport is not yet an official document of the Czech Republic."' We can only hope for a peaceful end to hostilities."

Dekortage writes "'Dear Iranian nation, your children have placed the first indigenous satellite into orbit,' announced Iran's President Ahmadinejad yesterday. The satellite, named Omid ('hope'), was launched to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the Islamic revolution. Video shown on Iranian television shows a Safir-2 rocket rising into the sky, as a follow-up to a test firing last August."

ProfJonathan writes "According to a story in the IAPP's Privacy Advisor, Google's Paris-based global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, is facing criminal charges in Italy for defamation based upon a user's posting of a video to Google Video. Mr. Fleischer was on his way to the University of Milan for a speaking engagement when he was met by Italian law enforcement officials. As with the 1997 case of Compuserve's Felix Somm and the 2006 arrest in Texas of BetOnSportsUK's CEO during a layover on a trip to Costa Rica, this case once again highlights the risks faced by executives and employees of online companies whose activities may be legal and protected in their own countries, but illegal elsewhere in the world. Troubling, and worth watching."

theodp writes "While earlier generations learned to Read with Dick and Jane, the NYT Magazine reports that today's tykes are getting their reading chops at online sites like Starfall (free) and One More Story (subscription). Quoting the Times Magazine: 'In their book "Freakonomics," Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt write that kids who grow up in houses packed with books fare better on school tests than those who grow up with fewer books.' So how will kids who learn to read online fare when they grow up?"

theodp writes "At the World Economic Forum, Michael Dell's pitch to help Russia with its computers got the cold-as-Siberia shoulder from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. 'We don't need help,' shot back Putin. 'We are not invalids. We don't have limited mental capacity' (video — rant starts at 1:24). 'Our programmers are some of the best in the world,' Putin continued. 'No one would contest that here — not even our Indian colleagues.'"

The Narrative Fallacy writes "In the aftermath of disclosures that Belkin employees paid users for good reviews on Amazon, David Pogue reports in the NYTimes that Carbonite has gone one better with 5-star reviews of its online backup services written by its own employees. Pogue recounts how Bruce Goldensteinberg signed up for the backup service, and all went well until his computer crashed and he was unable to restore it from the online backup while Carbonite customer support kept him on hold for over an hour. Frustrated, Goldensteinberg started reading Carbonite reviews on Amazon and a few of them seemed suspicious. 'They were created around the same date — October 31, 2006 — all given 5 stars, and the reviewers all came from around the Boston, MA area, where Carbonite is located,' including a review by Swami Kumaresan that read more like a testimonial. 'It turned out that Swami Kumaresan is the Vice President of Marketing for Carbonite. His review gives no indication that he is employed by the company.' Another review posted by Jonathan F. Freidin extols Carbonite without mentioning Freidin's position as Senior Software Engineer at Carbonite. 'It doesn't matter to me that Carbonite's fraudulent reviews are a couple of years old,' writes Pogue. 'These people are gaming the system, deceiving the public to enrich themselves. They should be deeply ashamed.'"

Shipud writes "There are ten times more bacterial cells in our body than our own cells. Most of them are located in our guts, and they affect our well-being in many ways. A group at Washington University has recently reported that although our gut microbes perform similar functions, it appears that different people have completely different compositions of gut bacteria: every man is an island, a unique microbial ecosystem composed of completely different species. One conclusion is that the whole division of bacteria into species may well be over-used in biomedicine."

theodp writes "Imagine a technology that lets you pay for products just by waving your cellphone over a reader. You wouldn't have to if you lived in Japan, where people have been using it for the last five years to pay for everything from train tickets to groceries to candy in vending machines. While nearly everyone who's tried it has liked this form of payment, consumers in the United States won't be able to wave-and-pay anytime soon: The companies that must work together to give the technology to the masses can't agree on how to split the resulting revenue."

The New York Times Magazine is running a story about the rise in political activism in Egypt through sites like Facebook, which allow citizens to gather and share ideas in ways they otherwise aren't allowed. A state-of-emergency law has been active in Egypt since 1981, which, among other things, "allows the government to ban political organizations and makes it illegal for more than five people to gather without a license from the government." As affordable internet access has spread throughout the country, the government is having a much harder time keeping wraps on the ideas of dissidents. Blocking access to the sites isn't a good solution for the government, because many non-dissidents use it for mundane communications. As Harvard's Ethan Zuckerman puts it, "...doing so would alert a large group of people who they can't afford to radicalize."

theodp writes "Indian police arrested two employees from the affiliate of PricewaterhouseCoopers who audited Satyam Computer Services, the IT outsourcing giant at the center of the nation's largest fraud inquiry. The move comes after Satyam founder Ramalinga Raju said he had fabricated $1 billion of assets and confessed to making up more than 10,000 employees to siphon money from the software company. State Farm Insurance has severed its ties with Satyam, citing uncertainty about the company's future as 'the only factor responsible for the termination of the contract,' which will reportedly affect at least 400 on-site Satyam employees. Other customers, including GE, are standing by Satyam, one of the top recipients of H-1B and L visas (so much for those $500 Fraud Prevention and Detection fees!)."

theodp writes "Using Yahoo's free e-mail service to conduct government business was good enough for Sarah Palin. And now the Washington Times reports that Obama staffers turned to Gmail on Inauguration Day to conduct their business. Those wishing to contact members of the incoming Obama administration were instructed to contact staffers at wh.LASTNAME@gmail.com until official White House e-mail addresses became available."

TarrVetus writes "The Associated Press reports that a federal appeals court in Philadelphia has ruled that the Child Online Protection Act will not be revived, upholding a 2007 decision that the unimplemented 1998 law is unconstitutional. The law, which made it a crime for websites to allow children access to 'harmful' material, was declared a violation of the First Amendment because of existing elective filtering technologies and parental controls that are less restrictive to free speech than the 'ineffective' and 'overly broad' ban."

Just before noon today, Eastern time, Barack Obama was sworn in before the US Capitol building as the 44th President of the United States (Whitehouse.gov has already been updated to reflect the new President), and offered an inaugural address which outlined some of the challenges that the country currently faces, both within the country's borders and abroad. Obama's election has been called "a civil rights triumph," and his candidacy has inspired perhaps the most visible political involvement of young voters of any candidate since John Kennedy. Here's your chance to discuss the newest occupant of the White House and what you'd like to see happen over the course of his presidency.

holy_calamity writes "The FBI has released images of some of the kit that will be deployed to safeguard Obama's inauguration, including mine-proof armored trucks like those used in Iraq to protect against IEDs, and a large armored chamber that any bombs will be shoved inside to be transported away and perhaps detonated inside. Interesting, even though the really good stuff is presumably being kept under wraps." Relatedly, necro81 writes "The Inauguration of Barack Obama tomorrow is expected to put considerable stress on the cellphone network around Washington, DC. The expected crowd could top two million people, and many of them are expected to call, text, tweet, photo, and blog their way through the event. In response, the major wireless carriers in the area have spent millions of dollars upgrading their local networks and will bring in extra 'cells on wheels' (COWs) and 'cells on light trucks' (COLTs). They are also requesting that attendees limit their usage during the event, and avoid bandwidth-heavy activities — like uploading photos — until afterward."

CurtMonash writes "The New York Times reports on President-Elect Obama's continued commitment to electronic health records (EHRs), which on the whole are a great idea. The article cites a number of legislative initiatives to deal with the privacy risks of EHRs. That's where things start to go astray. The proposals seem to focus on simply controlling the flow of information, but from a defense-in-depth standpoint, that's not enough. Medical care is full of information waivers, much like EULAs, only with your health at stake. What's more, any information control regime has to have exceptions for medical emergencies — but where legitimate emergencies are routine, socially-engineered fake emergencies can blast security to smithereens. So medical information privacy will never be adequate unless there are strong usage-control rules as well, in areas such as discrimination, marketing, or tabloid-press publication. I've provided some ideas as to how and why that could work well."

BuhDuh writes "The New York Times is carrying a story concerning that well known bastion of legal authority, the 'Foreign Intelligence Surveillance' court, which has ruled that the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping program was perfectly legal. It says, 'A federal intelligence court, in a rare public opinion, is expected to issue a major ruling validating the power of the president and Congress to wiretap international phone calls and intercept e-mail messages without a court order, even when Americans' private communications may be involved, according to a person with knowledge of the opinion.'"

Thomas M Hughes writes "We're all familiar with the claim that it's horribly dangerous to allow our children on to the Internet. It's long been believed that the moment a child logs on to the Internet, he will experience a flood of inappropriate sexual advances. Turns out this isn't an accurate representation of reality at all. A high-profile task force representing 49 state attorneys general was organized to find a solution to the problem of online sexual solicitation. But instead the panel has issued a report (due to be released tomorrow) claiming that 'Social networks are very much like real-world communities that are comprised mostly of good people who are there for the right reasons.' The report concluded that 'the problem of child-on-child bullying, both online and offline, poses a far more serious challenge than the sexual solicitation of minors by adults.' Turns out the danger to our children was all just media hype and parental anxiety." Those who have aggressively pushed the issue of the dangerous Internet, such as Connecticut's attorney general Richard Blumenthal, are less than happy with the report.

CurtMonash writes "Much is being made of the deliberations as to whether President Obama will be able to keep using his beloved "BarackBerry." As the NYTimes details, there are two major sets of objections: infosecurity and legal/records retention. Deven Coldeway of CrunchGear does a good job of showing that the technological infosecurity problems can be solved. And as I've noted elsewhere, the 'Omigod, he left his Blackberry behind at dinner' issue is absurd. Presidents are surrounded by attendants, Secret Service and otherwise. Somebody just has to be given the job of keeping track of the president's personal communication device. As for the legal question of whether the president can afford to put things in writing that will likely be exposed by courts and archivists later — the answer to that surely depends on the subject matter or recipient. Email to his Chicago friends — why not? Anything he'd write to them would be necessarily non-secret anyway. Email to the Secretary of Defense? That might be a different matter."

eldavojohn writes "The New York Times is reporting on MIT's migration away from large lectures as many colleges and universities have. Attendance at these lectures often falls to 50 percent by the end of the semester. TEAL (Technology Enhanced Active Learning) gives the students a more hands on approach and may signal the death of the massive lecture hall synonymous with achieving a bachelors of science."

funfail writes "What's the Value of a Facebook Friend? About 37 Cents... To earn your free burger, download the Whopper Sacrifice Facebook application and dump 10 unlucky friends deemed to be unworthy of their weight in beef. After completing the purge, users are prompted to enter their addresses and the coupons are sent out via snail mail." Mmmmm....social isolation and hamburgers, sounds delicious.

theodp writes "After baring his DNA for the world to see, Steven Pinker follows up in the NYT Magazine with his take on the coming era of consumer genetics. Pinker comes away less wide-eyed than Time Magazine about the current predictive ability of $399 genetic tests, but is convinced enough to opt out of learning whether he has a gene that increases the risk of Alzheimer's and believes that genetic-testing-for-the-masses may hasten the arrival of national health insurance ('piecemeal insurance is not viable in a world in which insurers can cherry-pick the most risk-free customers'). Pinker believes that personal genomics is just too much fun to ban, but for now suggests: 'if you want to know whether you are at risk for high cholesterol, have your cholesterol measured; if you want to know whether you are good at math, take a math test.'"

pln2bz writes "Astronomers looking for confirmation for emissions from early stellar formation in the cosmic microwave background radiation instead found a signal indicating large amounts of unaccounted-for spiraling magnetic fields in space, but without any accompanying infrared emissions. The discovery possibly dredges up the claims of plasma cosmologists like Eric Lerner, who claim that the intergalactic medium is a strong absorber of the CMB with the absorption occurring in a fog of narrow filaments. These filaments are the result of plasma's natural tendency, as observed within the plasma laboratory and in novelty plasma globes, to form braided, ropelike structures which are collimated by coiled magnetic fields."

gregg writes "Six weeks before the nation's television stations are scheduled to convert to digital transmission, the Obama administration is asking Congress to consider a delay. In the most significant sign to date of concern about the impending digital TV transition, the Obama transition team co-chair John Podesta said the government funds to support the change are 'woefully inadequate' and said that the digital switch date, Feb. 17, should be 'reconsidered and extended.'"

BartlebyScrivener writes "The New York Times has an article on the R programming language. The Times describes it as: 'a popular programming language used by a growing number of data analysts inside corporations and academia. It is becoming their lingua franca partly because data mining has entered a golden age, whether being used to set ad prices, find new drugs more quickly or fine-tune financial models. Companies as diverse as Google, Pfizer, Merck, Bank of America, the InterContinental Hotels Group and Shell use it.'"

A few weeks back we discussed the perspective that the economic meltdown could be viewed as a global computer crash. In the NYTimes magazine, Joe Nocera writes in much more depth about one aspect of the over-reliance on computer models in the ongoing unpleasantness: the use of a single number to assess risk. Reader theodp writes: "Relying on Value at Risk (VaR) and other mathematical models to manage risk was a no-brainer for the Wall Street crowd, at least until it became obvious that the risks taken by the largest banks and investment firms were so excessive and foolhardy that they threatened to bring down the financial system itself. Nocera explores the age-old debate between those who assert that the best decisions are based on quantification and numbers, and those who base their decisions on more subjective degrees of belief about the uncertain future. Reliance on models created a 'false sense of security among senior managers and watchdogs,' argues Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who likens VaR to 'an air bag that works all the time, except when you have a car accident.'"

The New York Times is running a story about Google engineer T. V. Raman, who lost his vision at age 14 but didn't let that stand in the way of his interest in technology. In addition to modifying a version of Google's search engine to give preference to pages that were more compliant with accessibility guidelines, Raman is now working on making cell phones easier to use without needing to look at them. "Since he cannot precisely hit a button on a touch screen, Mr. Raman created a dialer that works based on relative positions. It interprets any place where he first touches the screen as a 5, the center of a regular telephone dial pad. To dial any other number, he simply slides his finger in its direction — up and to the left for 1, down and to the right for 9, and so on. If he makes a mistake, he can erase a digit simply by shaking the phone, which can detect motion." Raman and a co-worker, Charles Chen, are also attempting to extend various phones' ability to read back scanned text to include signs that are anywhere in the phone's field of view.

theodp writes "Working as a NASA intern, grad student Erez Lieberman had a eureka moment, resulting in an algorithm that detects whether a person is standing correctly or is off balance. Unfortunately, MIT liked it so much they decided to patent it. Seeking permission to use his own idea for his iShoe startup, which develops products like insoles to address the problems of seniors, Lieberman was told no problem — as long as he promised a hefty royalty and forked over a $75,000 upfront payment. Whether or not students are aware of it, the NYTimes reports that most universities own inventions created by students that were developed using a 'significant' amount of schools resources. Colleges and universities once obtained fewer than 250 patents a year, but that was before the Bayh-Dole Act gave them ownership of inventions developed through federally financed research. Now they acquire about 3,000 a year, and in 2006 licensing fees and equity in spinoff companies totaled at least $45B — research powerhouses like Stanford and NYU pocketed $61M and $157M, respectively."