Slashdot Mirror

Slashdot reader shanen poses the question: if you had to give a TED Talk, what would you talk about? They write: Mostly based on my experiences at TEDx events, though of course I've seen a lot of TED videos. Nick Hanauer's censored TED Talk is still my all-time favorite, though you couldn't see it on the TED website. Proximate trigger for this question was actually looking at the coming TEDx events in the neighborhood... In my own case, I think you'd need to put a gun to my head as motivation, but maybe my sig would be worth a laugh or two? What would your TED Talk be about? How does this idea resonate with you? Feel free to explain in as little as one sentence...

For example: "The inequality of opportunity and how the stereotypical success is a function of where one is born."

"The Tennessee Star claims to be the 'most reliable' online local paper in the state," reports Salon. "In fact it's just a GOP front." An anonymous reader quotes their report:
An investigation by the fact-checking outlet Snopes found that several new local news websites are actually being launched by Republican consultants whose company is funded in part by the candidates the sites cover. Politico first reported last year that Tea Party-linked conservative activists Michael Patrick Leahy, Steve Gill and Christina Botteri were behind the "Tennessee Star," a website that purported to be a local news website but mostly posted content licensed from groups linked to big Republican donors. Snopes discovered that the trio has since launched similar sites in other battleground states ahead of the 2020 elections: the Ohio Star and the Minnesota Sun...

The group behind the sites does not appear content with just three outlets. According to Politico, Leahy has purchased domain names associated with Missouri, New England, the Dakotas, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin, most of which are electoral battleground states that will be vital in 2020.

Kathleen Bartzen Culver, who heads the Center of Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told Snopes that political operatives are free to launch their own news platforms, but it's a problem if they are trying to deceive readers into believing the sites are nonpartisan local news. "I have no problem with advocacy organizations creating content that reinforces the positions they take on public policy issues on the left, right or center. The issue comes in when they're not transparent about that advocacy," Culver said... "The information sphere is so polluted right now that the average citizen has trouble telling what is real and what is not," Culver told Snopes. "I find that very troubling within a democracy."

A scientific paper, originally published in March, from peer-reviewed journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology has found its way in this week's news-cycle. The paper, which is co-written by 33 authors including molecular immunologist Edward Steele and astrobiologist Chandra Wickramasinghe, suggests that octopuses could be aliens, adding legitimacy to a belief, which otherwise has been debunked several times in the recent years.

An excerpt from the paper, which makes the bold claim: The genetic divergence of Octopus from its ancestral coleoid sub-class is very great ... Its large brain and sophisticated nervous system, camera-like eyes, flexible bodies, instantaneous camouflage via the ability to switch color and shape are just a few of the striking features that appear suddenly on the evolutionary scene. [...] It is plausible then to suggest they [octopuses] seem to be borrowed from a far distant 'future' in terms of terrestrial evolution, or more realistically from the cosmos at large."Ephrat Livni of Quartz questions the basis of the finding: To make matters even more strange, the paper posits that octopuses could have arrived on Earth in "an already coherent group of functioning genes within (say) cryopreserved and matrix protected fertilized octopus eggs." And these eggs might have "arrived in icy bolides several hundred million years ago." The authors admit, though, that "such an extraterrestrial origin...of course, runs counter to the prevailing dominant paradigm." Indeed, few in the scientific community would agree that octopuses come from outer space. But the paper is not just about the provenance of cephalopods. Its proposal that octopuses could be extraterrestrials is just a small part of a much more extensive discussion of a theory called "panspermia," which has its roots in the ideas of ancient Greece. Newsweek spoke with Avi Loeb, the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, who told the publication that the paper has raised "an interesting but controversial possibility." However, he added, that it offers no "indisputable proof" that the Cambrian explosion is the result of panspermia.

Further reading: Cosmos magazine has outlined some flaws in the assumptions that the authors made in the paper. It has also looked into the background of some of the authors. The magazine also points out that though the paper has made bold claims, it has yet to find support or corroboration from the scientific community. News outlet Live Science has also questioned the findings.

An anonymous reader writes: In 1938, CBS radio aired Orson Welles' dramatization of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds ; the broadcast was livened up by periodic "news bulletins" reporting strange activity on Mars and in New Jersey. There may or may have not been men on Mars at the time, and later opinions also differ on whether the broadcast caused widespread panic across the U.S. Eighty years later, scientists are again claiming to have found evidence on earth of Martian life. Well, not exactly Martian life... Washington State University reports: "For the first time, researchers have seen life rebounding in the world's driest desert, demonstrating that it could also be lurking in the soils of Mars. Led by Washington State University planetary scientist Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an international team studied the driest corner of South America's Atacama Desert, where decades pass without any rain. Scientists have long wondered whether microbes in the soil of this hyperarid environment, the most similar place on Earth to the Martian surface, are permanent residents or merely dying vestiges of life, blown in by the weather. Billions of years ago, Mars had small oceans and lakes where early lifeforms may have thrived. As the planet dried up and grew colder, these organisms could have evolved many of the adaptations lifeforms in the Atacama soil use to survive on Earth, Schulze-Makuch said. 'We know there is water frozen in the Martian soil and recent research strongly suggests nightly snowfalls and other increased moisture events near the surface,' he said. 'If life ever evolved on Mars, our research suggests it could have found a subsurface niche beneath today's severely hyper-arid surface.'" The study has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Honestly, most of the fake news is incredibly easy to debunk because it's such obvious bullshit..." says Brooke Binkowski, the managing editor of the fact-checking at Snopes.com. "It's not social media that's the problem. People are looking for somebody to pick on." mirandakatz shared this article from Backchannel: The problem, Binkowski believes, is that the public has lost faith in the media broadly -- therefore no media outlet is considered credible any longer. The reasons are familiar: as the business of news has grown tougher, many outlets have been stripped of the resources they need for journalists to do their jobs correctly. "When you're on your fifth story of the day and there's no editor because the editor's been fired and there's no fact checker so you have to Google it yourself and you don't have access to any academic journals or anything like that, you will screw stories up," she says.
I found this article confusing. Snopes seemed to be trying to steer the conversation back to erroneous stories from "legitimate publications," which erode the public trust in all mainstream outlets. (Which I guess then over time hypothetically makes people more susceptible to fake news stories on Facebook.) But her earlier remarks suggest it's not really credibility that's lacking there -- it's the absence of someone convenient to pick on. So what is the problem? Is it the news media's lack of credibility? Algorithms that disproportionately reward alarming stories? A human tendency to seek information that confirms our pre-existing biases? What do Slashdot readers think is causing what this article describes as "our epidemic of misinformation"?

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: "The creators behind Pokemon Go are developing a new Harry Potter version of the app, according to reports," claimed The Metro -- citing as their source the web site "Hello Giggles". But that site's source -- as well as the source for an inaccurate article in Yahoo! Style -- was the infamous JTXH, a parody news sites created three months ago, whose other false scoops have included "NASA to make announcement involving 'religious' implications" and "Denny's waitress assaulted by Muslims for serving bacon during Ramadan".
From Snopes.com: There is no real radio or television outlet with the call letters JTXH; that identifier is purely the province of a fake news web site masquerading as a legitimate news outlet. JTXH News has previously published fabricated clickbait stories such as "Bernie campaign caught distributing LSD to youth" and "Chick-Fil-A is considering banning anyone who 'can't figure out their gender.'"

Nerval's Lobster writes "In the early 1980s, Atari made what seemed like a slam-dunk bet: a game based on E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, one of the most beloved (and highest-grossing) films of all time. The company was so sure it had a hit in the making, in fact, that it manufactured millions of E.T. game cartridges, which flooded store shelves just in time for holiday shopping in December 1982. The game sold well at the outset, but it didn't sell well enough: By early 1983, Atari still had 3.5 million unsold cartridges on its hands. Embarrassed by the failure, Atari dumped those cartridges into a city landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. In 2003, Canadian entertainment company Fuel Industries received permission from Alamogordo's town counsel to excavate the landfill for the long-lost cartridges. Now some of those cartridges have surfaced on eBay, selling for $50 and up; if you ever wanted to own a little slice of video-game history, now's your chance." (You might recall the news from earlier this year that some copies of E.T. had been found.)

In a story that's sure to bring to the surface the long-debunked myth of an over-elaborate NASA quest to create a pen to operate in space, Wired reports that the coffee situation aboard the International Space Station is about to improve: the station will be getting a 20kg, custom designed Lavazza espresso machine, to be delivered along with Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. Among other differences from terrestrial espresso machines: the resulting beverage must be pumped into a straw-friendly bag rather than a demitasse. I wonder if there could be some way to adapt a (much lighter) Aeropress for space purposes, as a backup.

Copenhagen Suborbitals says their mission is "very simple. We are working towards launching a human being into space." That doesn't sound so simple, really, but they're approaching this gargantuan task with an intentionally simple approach: a small team, relatively unhampered by bureaucratic hassles, who are taking advantage of existing, off-the-shelf high-tech solutions when they make sense, and low-tech solutions when possible; if the parable of the Soviet space pencil hadn't worked its way into the mythology of space technology, it could have been based on the Copenhagen Suborbitals point of view. I talked with project co-founder Kristian von Bengston about the project's progress so far, as well as what the next steps are. Among those next steps: in summer 2014, the Suborbitals team plans to launch their HEAT2X lift vehicle loaded with the TDS-80 capsule; you can download the preliminary trajectory projections for both the launcher and the capsule.

netbuzz writes "Last night Linux creator Linus Torvalds took to his Google+ page and called Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney 'a f***ing moron.' Torvalds' stated reason? Romney's much-ridiculed suggestion that air passengers would be safer in emergencies if aircraft windows could be opened (a suggestion which some, including Snopes.com, have taken as a joke). Torvalds also recently called Mormonism, Romney's religion, 'bats**t crazy.' Is this just Linus being Linus? Or does such outspokenness on non-technical matters reflect poorly on the Linux community that Torvalds leads?"

Hugh Pickens points out an article by David Zweig at The Atlantic about the rise of fact-checking sites on the internet, and the power they give to journalists and average internet denizens to sniff out fiction parading as truth. Quoting: "Since the beginning of the republic (not the American republic, I'm talking the Greek republic) politicians have resorted to half-truths and bald-faced lies. And while tenacious reporters and informed citizens have tracked these falsehoods over the years, until now they've lacked the interconnectivity and real-time capabilities of the Web to amplify their findings. Sites like the Washington Post's Fact-Check column and FactCheck.org, which draws hundreds of thousands of unique visitors each month, often provide fodder for public fascination with fact-checking. ... Perhaps the masses don't care about inaccuracies. Many Democrats and Republicans alike will believe what they want and ignore or disregard the truth. ... But there are enough experts within a variety of fields rabidly conversing about errors that content-creators—be they politicians, journalists, or filmmakers—are now forced to be on their toes in a way they never have been before. And that's a good thing.'" Zweig also points out Snopes, Prochronisms, and Photoshop Disasters as useful tools for spotting errors or misrepresentations.

lightbox32 writes "Samsung has finally responded to an article recently published by HD Guru titled 'Is your TV watching you?' [See this related Slashdot post] which discussed the fact that new features in Samsung's top 2012 models — including built-in microphones, HDTV camera, wireless and wired Internet connection, built-in browser with voice to text conversion, face recognition and more — could be used to collect unprecedented personal information and invade our privacy. Samsung has now provided their privacy policy, which may or may not lay the issue to rest." I vote for "not" — conspiracy theories about mandatory (or just secret) surveillance equipment in consumer electronics is just too persistent, even when the technical capabilities turn out to be a hoax; when the equipment is actually all in place and the user is protected only by a corporate honor policy, it's hard to be sanguine. (I recall there was a much rumored secret capability for law enforcement agencies to secretly and remotely turn on the internal microphones in PCs meeting the PC 97 spec, and this was an integral part of the plan. Since the government insists that telecom equipment have built-in backdoors, why should that sound all that crazy?)

fprintf writes "There have been a number of studies over the years, some of which have been debunked, linking plastics with human disease. Now British researchers have released a study again linking common plastics used in food/liquid storage with human disease."

Regular Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton has some opinions on child safety online and the use of fear mongering. Here are his thoughts. "The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has been running online ads for several years saying that "Each year 1 in 5 children is sexually solicited online", a statistic that has been endlessly repeated, including by vendors of blocking software and by politicians who often paraphrase it to say that 1 in 5 children "are approached by online predators". While others have quietly documented the problems with this statistic, lawmakers still bring it out every year in a push for more online regulation (preempted this year only by the topic du jour of cyberbullying), so it's time for anti-censorship organizations to start campaigning more aggressively against the misleading "1 in 5" number. That means two things: framing the debate with more accurate numbers, and holding the parties accountable for disseminating the wrong ones -- and that means naming names, including those of organizations like the NCMEC that are normally beyond reproach." Read below for the rest. I have no doubt that on balance, the world is a better place because of the NCMEC and what they've done, and God knows how I'd feel about them if they'd helped me find a lost child. But the good things they've done shouldn't be viewed as political capital that they can withdraw against in order to be above criticism for spreading the "1 in 5" meme. The longer they go on implying to parents that there is a 1-in-5 chance their kid will be asked by an adult to meet in person for sex, the more I think it tarnishes their whole legacy. (The NCMEC did not respond to contact requests for this article.)

First, what the 1-in-5 number actually means. It originated with a study done in 2000 by the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, which surveyed 1,501 Internet-using youth age 10 through 17. The actual relevant findings of the study were as follows:

• The 1 in 5 figure was the number that had received at least one instance of unwanted sex talk (including from other teenagers), or sex talk from an adult (whether wanted or not), in the past year.

• The proportion of respondents who received a sexual flirtation from an adult, followed by a request to talk on the phone or meet in person, was about 1%.

• The number of survey respondents who actually befriended an adult online and then met the adult in person for sexual purposes, was zero.

Specifically: About 19% of respondents said had received a "sexual solicitation or approach" (my emphasis), and "sexual solicitations and approaches" were defined as: "requests to engage in sexual activities or sexual talk or give personal sexual information that were unwanted or, whether wanted or not, made by an adult". That means any unwanted sex talk, including from other teens, even if limited to one occurrence in the entire previous year, would cause a respondent to be included in the 19% figure (which, when you define it that broadly, actually sounds pretty low). To say that those 1 in 5 minors were "sexually solicited" -- literally, asked for sex -- is simply false.

The actual proportion of respondents who reported that someone made sexual overtures and asked to talk on the phone or meet in person -- what the study called an "aggressive sexual solicitation" -- was 3%, and 34% of those requests were known to have been made by adults. And even this overestimates the proportion of minors who were truly "sexually solicited", because all it means is that an adult started out by talking to them sexually, and then made some request for offline contact, which could have merely been asking for a phone number. So the scenario that comes to mind when hearing that "1 in 5 children is sexually solicited online" -- of being approached sexually by an adult and asked for an in-person meeting -- had actually happened to no more than 1% of respondents, and probably much fewer than that.

And this is just considering the percentage of youth who received solicitations, not taking into account how they responded. Out of 1,501 youth surveyed, none of them reported actually meeting an adult in person for anything that they described as sexual contact. Two teens in the study had "close friendships" with adults that the authors wrote "may have had sexual aspects". One 17-year-old boy had a relationship with a woman in her late twenties that he described as "romantic" but not sexual, and they never met in person. Another 16-year-old girl became close to a man in his thirties, and they met in a public place, but she described the relationship as non-sexual, and she declined to spend the night with him. (While these could still be considered "close calls", it's worth noting that even if the 16- and 17-year-olds had actually had a sexual relationship with their adult friends, that would have in fact been legal in many U.S. states, and in any case it's not what most people think of when they hear about "children" being "sexually solicited online".)

Of course all of this depends on the accuracy of the answers that the youth gave to the surveyors. But the "1 in 5" figure was based on the youths' stated responses as well. People who cite the study can't have their cake and eat it too, taking the "1 in 5" number as accurate but discounting the fact that none of the teens surveyed reported a sexual relationship with an adult they met online.

These were the data that were available in 2000, when the "1 in 5" number started being spread. The authors of the original study followed up with a 2005 report, "Online Victimization of Youth: Five Years Later", in which the corresponding statistics were:

• 1 in 7 respondents received unwanted sex talk or sex talk from an adult, at some point in the past year.

• The proportion of respondents who received a sexual flirtation from an adult, followed by a request to communicate offline, was again about 1-2%. (4% of respondents reported a sexual flirtation plus a request to correspond offline. The new study reported that 39% of all sexual solicitations were made by adults, but did not say what proportion of "aggressive sexual solicitations" -- which included requests for offline contact -- were made by adults.)

• Out of 1,501 respondents surveyed in 2005, two did report an in-person meeting that led to a sexual crime -- one was a 15-year-old girl who met a 30-year-old man in person and had consensual sex with him, and another was a 16-year-old girl who went to a party with an older male she met online who later tried to rape her. But even these incidents (which were both reported to law enforcement) do not mean that the Internet is a more dangerous environment for youth with regard to interaction with adults. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's own Web site links to a study -- also by one of the authors of the "Online Victimization" report -- which found that when all types of abuse are counted, 20% of females experience some type of sexual victimization before adulthood, compared to 2 out of 750 female survey respondents in the "Online Victimization" study who reported sexual abuse by someone they met online.

The NCMEC has updated their Web site to say that "one in seven youths (10 to 17 years) experience a sexual solicitation or approach while online", although the banner ads still say 1 in 5. But I think the 1-in-7 versus 1-in-5 is hardly worth nit-picking, when the real problem is that the statement "1 in 5 children is sexually solicited online" is written in a way that virtually guarantees it will be mis-heard and passed along as a statement involving "online predators" or "pedophiles". "Authorities Say 1 in 5 Children Has Been Approached By Online Predators" reads the sub-heading of a story on ABC news. "20% of children who use computer chat rooms have been approached over the Internet by a pedophile" says an online safety site sponsored by the Albemarle County government in Virginia. "One in five kids in America are approached by online predators" says a Congressman's press release.

The NCMEC itself never says that 1 in 5 or 1 in 7 children is "approached by a pedophile", merely that they are "sexually solicited online". I still think this is false because that is not the proportion of minors who are literally solicited for sex, but suppose that you expanded "sexual solicitation" to include all sex talk, so that the statement was "technically true". That still misses the point, because the issue shouldn't be seen as a game where sides try to make their statements as alarmist as possible while still being "technically true", like the kid with his petition to ban "dihydrogen monoxide". If you say something that is virtually guaranteed to get passed along as a wrong and alarmist statement about "pedophiles", aren't you at least partly responsible?

Why, then, does the NCMEC do it? Their site does have a "Donate" link, but it's very low-key, and the site generally seems to steer first-time visitors towards actions that they can take with regard to their own children. So I'm not cynical enough to think the "1 in 5" statistic is a campaign to scare up donations; I think they really do believe they are doing good by getting people to believe that number and to take action based on it. The problem is that there is such a thing as too much worrying and too much overprotection. Sites like Facebook are often used to organize parties and events and send out venue changes, just because that's the most efficient way to do it, and if your parents ban you from getting on Facebook, you'll miss out on simple things like that. What good does that do for anybody? Critics of overprotection often say that overly sheltered kids may rebel later on and get themselves in worse trouble, and that's often true, but so what even if they don't? Your quality of life is still worse off if you're the only one in your peer group who can't get updates about your friends' parties. And your parents' quality of life will be worse if they're constantly wringing their hands thinking that there is a 1 in 5 chance their kid will be propositioned online by a pedophile.

So I would urge the NCMEC to reconsider what they're telling people. Regarding the "1 in 5" meme that's already out there, it's spread so far that it's probably too late for the NCMEC to put the genie back into the bottle. But any anti-censorship group participating in a debate about online safety should put the real statistics forward, and since many in the audience will have heard the "1 in 5" figure somewhere, take a minute to knock it down as well. You don't have to commit political suicide by calling out the NCMEC specifically for spreading the "1 in 5" number, but put the right numbers out there.

Unfortunately the subject of child safety is such that wrong information, from any source, is unlikely to be criticized if it's erring on the side of caution, but some memes die faster than others. Microsoft's resource page about "online predators" says that "if you find pornography on the family computer" -- not child porn, but regular pornography -- that could be a warning sign that "your child is the target of an online predator". I think that's a wildly irresponsible thing to be telling parents, but fortunately the meme does not seem to have spread beyond that one page, which probably not one parent in a thousand will ever actually read.

Captain DaFt writes "Snopes.com has an article that gives an interesting look back at the first commercial hard drive, the IBM 350. Twice as big as a refrigerator and weighing in at a ton, it packed a whopping 4.4MB! Compare that to the 1-4GB sticks that most of us have on our keychains today."

Frequent Slashdot Contributor Bennett Haselton is back with a story about fighting censorship with spam. He starts "Is it OK to send unsolicited e-mail to users in China, Iran, and other censored countries, telling them about new proxy sites for getting around Internet censorship? I hasten to add that I have NOT done this, am not planning on doing it and would not have any idea how to go about it anyway. Between the various companies that offer proxy services, I don't know of anyone who is doing it (no, not even people who swore me to secrecy about it). But I think the question involves ethical issues that would not apply to most discussions of spam." Hit that big link below to read the rest of his words.

Lest there be any doubt, I hate spam, getting about 10,000 of them a week with no way to filter them without blocking at least some of my important mail as well; I've tried suing some spammers mostly without success, and humbly proposed one anti-spam algorithm which caught on like wildfire, if the wildfire were spreading through a... rainforest, in the... rain. But I am not against spam a priori (Latin for "unless they are telling me I need to add extra inches"), I'm against spam because that follows from other principles, and in some situations there is some question as to whether those principles still apply. (It is not as simplistic as saying that it is OK to spam "for the greater good". Stay with me!)

Getting back to basics: Why is spam a problem? Because the cost of receiving a message, however minor, is more than the benefits, which are usually microscopic considering the probability that a typical recipient would buy what they're selling. Take a small cost that exceeds a small benefit, multiply by millions of messages per day, and the cost exceeds the benefit by about $70 billion per year.

But, just as a thought experiment, could you conceive of a kind of spam that would not be a nuisance? Suppose you sent an e-mail to millions of people offering them free $20 bills. And you actually followed through and sent the money to anybody who claimed the offer. Then the conventional argument against spam no longer applies, because the e-mails are benefitting people more than they're costing them. It's hard to think of any real-life examples, but if you had sent out mass e-mails telling people about the refund checks for anybody who had bought a CD (it was real, I got my $13.86 in the mail in 2004), I probably wouldn't have come to your house to egg your windows.

"Aha!" some spammer is thinking, "my product does benefit people more than the e-mail costs them! I can help them refinance their homes at a low rate, to take out money they can multiply many times with my new stock tip, and then spend at my friend Tiffanee's new site to help pay her way towards her physics degree!" Wait. Let's just say that you're offering some miracle product at a low price, conferring some huge benefit on each person who buys it. The only costs of spreading your bounty to the world, are whatever advertising costs are incurred in getting the word out. But if your product is really the miracle you say it is, then the benefits to people (even after subtracting the price they paid for it), exceed the costs of the advertising.

Then you have several choices. You can spam to advertise the product. In this case, the costs of the advertising are passed on to unwilling recipients. But if the benefits your product confers are greater than the cost of getting people's attention, then you've still arguably done more good than harm to the world, even if the net effect on some individual people was harmful (on annoyed recipients who didn't end up buying your product). By forcing the advertising costs on other people, you've saved that much more money; you can pocket that benefit yourself, or if you pass on the savings in the form of reduced prices (which you may have to do in a competitive market anyway), you've basically transferred that much benefit by stealing it from the spam recipients and distributing it to your customers. So the main benefit to the world was the wonderfulness of your product, and on top of that, you stole some small benefit from a large number of people and redistributed it to other people, which has no positive or negative net effect.

But, because the benefits of the product outweigh the costs of the advertising, that means in a mostly-free country where your product is legal, you can also buy advertisements to get people's attention, pass the costs on to the customers in the form of slightly higher prices, and have benefits for them left over (otherwise they wouldn't still buy what you're selling). The customers still get the major benefit, the benefit of owning your awesome product. What's missing in this case is the small extra benefit that they were getting before, from you stealing from all the spam recipients and passing the savings on to them.

So for that reason, spammers are prohibited from saying "The benefits of my products exceed the costs of people's attention span to read about it, so it's OK for me to spam", by the reply: "If the benefits really exceed the costs, then you can buy advertising to tell people about it like everyone else."

But now the big question: Would that argument still hold if you wanted to advertise proxies to people in China and Iran?

It doesn't seem that you could use conventional channels to advertise proxies to Chinese and Iranian users. If you bought ads on Google AdSense or a similar ad-serving network, China might threaten to block all ads served from that network unless they started screening out ads for anti-censorship services (especially in the case of Google, which seems to comply with most Chinese self-censorship demands). Then there's the question of how to charge Chinese and Iranian users even small amounts for the services. It would not be a good idea to have the charges show up on their credit cards issued by Chinese banks. Paying small amounts with PayPal would be a little bit better since the charge would simply show up from "PayPal", without revealing the recipient. And since all traffic to the PayPal site is encrypted over SSL, Chinese censors wouldn't be able to detect or block users who were paying to circumvent the Great Firewall, unless they blocked all traffic to the PayPal site. But could PayPal be leaned on to provide the identities of Chinese users who were paying for circumvention services, under threat of having their site blocked otherwise? And the biggest impediment of all would be that once you start charging even $1 for a service, there's a huge dropoff in people willing to sign up, even if they would have to spend much more than $1 worth of effort to find a free alternative somewhere else.

So, if circumvention services provide enough benefit to Chinese users, maybe spamming proxy sites would do more good than harm, and if the lack of freedom in the country means that you could not sell or advertise the services to Chinese users by conventional means, maybe that means spamming the proxy locations would be the only way to do this.

Reading over this, I just realized that if you also believed that pot was beneficial to society, this could also justify spamming to advertise pot. I expect we'll all start getting marijuana spam just as soon as the pothead reading this gets around to it... on, like Tuesday... maybe. Just make sure they don't really get their act together enough to get pot legalized, because if that happens, they lose their rationale for spamming to advertise it! (Thinking about the pot question more seriously, I'd say that if the government banned sales and advertisements of something beneficial like milk, then spamming to advertise milk would be a good thing. The only real argument against spamming for pot is that it isn't as beneficial as milk.)

So that's the mathematical argument in a nutshell:

1. Spam is bad because the costs to society are greater than the benefits. This would not be the case if you were spamming to advertise something whose benefits were greater than the costs of the spam.
2. However, in a mostly-free country where your product is legal to sell, #1 should never be used to justify spamming, because if the benefits of your product are really greater than the costs of the advertising, you can pay for the advertising, add the costs on to the cost of the product, and still have benefits left over to split between the seller and the customer.
3. #2 is not true in non-free countries like China, in which case if a product conferred more benefits than the costs of the spam but was not legal to sell, it might be OK to spam it.

Perhaps this logic is flawed, and I'm sure some people will tell me why they think so. The other question is whether these circumvention services really provide as much benefit to the Chinese and Iranians as those of us who run the services would like to believe. Earlier I argued that the real obstacle to most anti-censorship services is apathy on the part of the target audience, and that it was an unpleasant surprise, when I found some Chinese users on MSN Messenger to ask for help with some technical issue, to find that most of them either supported the Chinese government's censorship or didn't care enough to do anything about it. So for proxy spam to be defensible, it should -- come on, all together now, I can't believe I'm quoting the members of the industry that is the bane of my existence -- include an unsubscribe link that users can click to stop receiving any further e-mails. And a postal return address! Because who could have any cause to complain about an unsolicited e-mail that includes the sender's full mailing address in the footer?

Slashdot regular contributor Bennett Haselton writes "The reports of Sinbad's death become greatly exaggerated. A Wikipedia contributor is unmasked as a fraud, raising questions about why he wasn't called out earlier. NBC airs a piece about how anybody can edit any article on Wikipedia, and errors creep in as a result. (Duh.) But what's most frustrating about all these controversies surrounding Wikipedia is that news reports describe these incidents as if they are a permanent, unsolvable problem with any type of community-built encyclopedia, when in fact there seems to be a straightforward solution." More words follow. Just click the link.

In its simplest form, couldn't a person's academic credentials be verified by sending a confirmation link to their .edu e-mail? (Which could be identified as a faculty address either by a domain name like "faculty.schoolname.edu", or by a Web page in the faculty section of the school's Web site identifying the person's e-mail address?) And then once the user's bona fides have been verified in this or some other way, couldn't they put their seal of approval on any article whose contents need to be considered reliable, or that readers want to cite as an authoritative source? In this way, with only a few minutes of effort and without changing a single word of the article, its value is increased many times -- surely one of the best possible trade-offs in terms of effort versus reward. (As for the question of "What experts would do this?", the answer is, presumably the same people who contribute to sites like Wikipedia currently. If their motives are altruistic in the first place, hopefully they would be willing to take this extra step if they knew it would increase the article's usefulness.)

Something like this model is planned by the operators of Citizendium.org, a Wikipedia alternative (I balk at using the word "rival" although it is inevitable that people will see them that way). The last time I wrote about Citizendium, some thought it sounded like such a valentine to the project that they wondered if I was a shill; actually, sometimes a project just comes along that aligns almost exactly with what I would have done if I could have re-done a popular project like Wikipedia with a few design changes, and when that happens, I just say so. Some others may have wondered if I was sucking up for a board position or something. No, that would be, like, work. But I think they have some good ideas that will make them a more useful alternative in some cases, unless Wikipedia copies back some of their ideas in order to serve both needs at once, which would also be a good thing.

Consider the two major issues on which Citizendium is planning to take a different approach from Wikipedia: (1) user verification, and (2) putting published articles into an "approved" state under the stewardship of a credentialed editor, who has to sign off on any future changes to the article. The issue of user verification can be further divided into two sub-issues: (a) verifying users for the purpose of ascertaining their credentials, and (b) verifying users for the purpose of limiting the amount of vandalism committed by new users under pseudonyms. (While editorial control on Citizendium means that it is not possible to vandalize the public-facing version of an article after it has gone into an "approved" state, users can still vandalize an article while it is a "work in progress" being built up towards the first milestone where it can be approved. Citizendium founder Larry Sanger says that such vandals are surprisingly, pathetically motivated even though their work is only seen by a small audience.)

On the first issue, the one of verifying user credentials, I think the verification of .edu addresses especially would be a cheap and easy way to increase the value of every article that that user writes, or signs off on. I don't think, however, it's necessary to go as far as Citizendium is currently planning on going, by requiring real names and biographies of all users. My thinking is that if an article is synthesized by 100 monkeys with typewriters but the finished product is giving the blessing of a credentialed professor of physics, it's pretty much just as reliable as if the professor had written it themselves. And if the same article gets the blessing of multiple credentialed experts, it could justifiably be considered more reliable than many printed sources written by a single author. The point is that the credentials that matter, are those of the people who stake their reputation on the accuracy of the article, not necessarily those of the people who contribute to it. So on this front, I think that while Wikipedia asks too little of users' backgrounds, Citizendium's current plan would ask too much, because as long as you have the credentials of one person who has signed off on an article, collecting non-verifiable bios of the article's other contributors doesn't actually gain anything.

The other side of verifying credentials is the use of credentials to prevent vandalism. In this situation it's not necessary to verify that the user actually is who they say they are; the system only needs to ensure that the same user is not signing up over and over again after previous accounts get banned for abuse. (You could ban users by IP address, but tools like Tor make it easy for users to connect from what appears to be a different IP address every time.) A blog post from Citizendium founder Larry Sanger lists three possible approaches instead: (a) requiring existing user X to vouch for new user Z before Z can join; (b) requiring new user Z to provide a link to a "credible" Web page establishing their identity; or (c) requiring new user Z to provide a link to a "credible" Web page of some person X who can vouch for Z's identity. I don't know how quickly a system could grow by referrals only -- after all, I was surprised that GMail took off so quickly during the period when you could only join with an "invite" from an existing user. Then again, GMail was giving away something for free that almost everyone could use, so most people who wanted it, would find themselves closely linked to someone else who had it. Citizendium, on the other hand, asks not what they can do for you but what you can do for them, and so might not achieve enough penetration to spread by referrals only.

I suggested that one alternative would be to send a postcard to each new user's physical address with a unique six-digit number, which they would have to enter in order to complete their registration, in order to verify that new users really were unique. The problem here, apart from the privacy concerns, is the delay that users would incur before their registration was complete, which would take away the "instant gratification" that they could get from starting to contribute right away. (You could let users edit before their address is verified, but that would just enable the same person to keep re-creating new accounts with unique but fake addresses, and use them to commit vandalism before the account was found out.)

Another idea would be that for new users, their first, say, three edits would go into a queue to be reviewed by verified users, and once the first three edits have been approved, the user is able to make edits in real time. (Since anybody would be able to review a new user's edits to make sure they were not spam, the new user's edits could be reviewed very quickly, since any Citizendium volunteer who was online, could review the latest entries in the edit queue and approve them.) It's true that a user could game this system by, for example, submitting three minor improvements, and then using their unblocked account to vandalize articles while they're being worked on. However, even in this case, the "vandal" would probably end up having a positive contribution to the site, because of the three small improvements that they'd already made. If a legitimate Citizendium volunteer would have to spend more effort making those three small improvements, than it would take to let a new user make those constructive changes and then ban them and revert their destructive changes once the user is caught committing vandalism (and the latter wouldn't take much effort at all), then Citizendium has actually gotten a good deal out of the "vandal"! (To make this work, a user's first contributions could not be "neutral" changes like replacing one word with a synonym; they would have to be actual improvements, even small ones, thus ensuring that the net effect of a potential "vandal" is positive.) There may be other possible solutions. These are just alternatives in case the model of referral by trusted users turns out not to work.

Now switching to the other side of the reliability issue: Whether the default article that is displayed to the public for a given topic, should be the latest "stable" version approved by credentialed users, or the very latest version incorporating all edits submitted by any user whatsoever. Having talked with members of the Citizendium and Wikipedia communities in their respective forums, there appear to be three schools of thought on the article stability issue. The first is that the whole idea of putting articles into an "approved" state and moderating all changes going forward, goes against the "spirit" of wikis in general and Wikipedia in particular. The second, suggested on the Wikipedia discussion list by Sheldon Rampton, is that it would be a useful feature if credentialed users could select certain page versions in the page history and "sign off" on the accuracy of one of those past versions; the page displayed by default would be the bleeding-edge latest one (with all of the possible vandalism and inaccuracies that entails), but users who wanted a reliable, citable source could look in the history. The third school of thought is that reliability is so valuable, that the default page displayed to the public and carrying the stamp of the project, should be the latest version approved by credentialed editors -- the model that Citizendium currently has in mind.

I'm not really partial to the first view, since I think the success of the project should be defined by how it achieves its goals (whatever you define those goals to be) and not in whether it kept with its original "spirit". Since Wikipedia has far more readers than contributors, if your motivations for contributing to or maintaining Wikipedia are at all oriented towards doing good for other people, presumably meeting the needs of readers is more important than keeping the party going for contributors (provided, of course, that the environment for contributors is at least pleasant enough to keep them contributing). The choice between the second and third points of view is more interesting. There's no obvious best-of-both-worlds choice here, because what motivates many contributors (the fact that their changes go live to the entire world, right away) is also what motivates vandals.

On the other hand, the problem doesn't sound unsolvable. You could go with the Citizendium model of editor-approved changes but create a prioritized system for "urgent" updates, in the case of changes to an article made to incorporate current events. Suppose users (who have been verified using one or more of the methods above) are each issued a certain number of "credits" that they can use to mark a proposed update as an urgent, breaking change. (Misusing these credits to mark changes as "urgent", that really aren't, would be considered abuse tantamount to spamming or vandalism.) Then let's say, for example, Anna Nicole Smith dies. A user could submit this change to the Anna Nicole Smith article, along with a link to a reliable news source (e.g. a wire service story) and a credit marking the change as "urgent". Since an editor would not need any particular expertise to view the article and verify that the change was accurate, any editor could review the "urgent request queue" and approve that particular change for publication, ensuring that the queue was checked frequently throughout the day and urgent updates would get pushed through quickly. Thus the site could keep pace with breaking current events without the kind of inaccuracies that plagued Kenneth Lay's Wikipedia entry when he died.

So there's a trade-off there, between displaying all the latest changes by default and motivating people to contribute but also running the risk of vandalism, versus displaying only the latest editor-approved page. Where there is not a trade-off, that I can see, is in the option of simply having an editor-approved version of a given page -- whether it's displayed by default, or only stored in the version history where people can look for it. To me, both of these steps seem to consist of pure gain for relatively little effort:

1. Verify credentials of academic professionals by poking their .edu address.
2. Allow them to give their "blessing" to certain versions of a page in the page history, so that users can rely on those specific page versions and even cite them as sources where appropriate.

So I hope that Citizendium will help bring more prominence to the idea, and that something similar might get incorporated back into Wikipedia. The approval of an identity-verified expert can improve an article's value so much, for such comparitively little extra effort, that it makes no sense not to have that option.

GrumpySimon writes "New research indicates that subliminal messages may actually work. In a paper titled Attentional Load Modulates Responses of Human Primary Visual Cortex to Invisible Stimuli, Bahrani et al. demonstrate that even though stimuli may not be available to consciousness, they are processed by the visual cortex. While I'm sure that marketing agencies all over the world are rubbing their hands in glee at this news, the authors report that there's no evidence that this can make people buy things against their will. So with any luck the use of subliminal messages in advertising will remain an urban legend."

An anonymous reader writes "There's a new Instant Messaging Worm on the loose that is wrapped up in more than a few interesting twists. The people behind the infection lure users in with a message on a Russian hosted website claiming to have 'a virtual card for you' — a reference to the famous Email hoax listed on Snopes and numerous other web hoax sites. At the point of infection, the worm opens up a picture of a heart (from a site called Quatrocantos.com that tackles web scams on a daily basis) — this picture itself related to a different 'virtual card' hoax from 2002. Bearing in mind the people behind this attack are deliberately serving up an image from a 'good guy' website related to virtual card hoaxes, the question is — are they attempting to create a real life infection out of a web-based piece of lore, making a calculated move to tie this attack into numerous Web hoaxes, possibly to confuse infected users looking for help online or simply having a little fun at the good guy's expense?"

KevlarGorilla asks: "I'm sure Slashdot users have done their fair share of university exams. A good portion may be going through the process right now. Many tales have been floating around the internet about cheating (successful and not), cram stories, and tales of post-test celebration, most often in the testing room itself. Recall any first-hand experiences and write them down in a few short paragraphs. If you've been waiting to clear your conscience, or share your experiences, now is the time."

Lam1969 writes "From Robert Mitchell's blog on Computerworld: '... Wallace, IT director at AAA Reading-Berks in Wyomissing, Penn. has been bringing a card reader with him on business trips to see what's on the magnetic strips of his hotel room access cards. To his dismay, a surprising number have contained his name and credit card information - and in unencrypted form.' " Update: 09/20 19:10 GMT by J : Snopes, as of two months ago, says this is false.

Markus Registrada writes "George Dantzig, the inventor of the Simplex method for solving Linear Programming problems, died on May 13. He was also the now-legendary student who turned in solutions for what he had taken to be a homework assignment, only to find out they had been posted as examples of what were suspected to be unsolvable problems."

Corey Nachreiner writes "Until recently, I considered myself a Google power-user; so much so that I often call Google my "second brain." Whenever I stumble upon a computing dilemma I can't solve, I submit an advanced query to my second brain, Google, and let it supply the answers. That's why I was So There when Johnny Long released his recent book, Google Hacking for Penetration Testers . I heard Johnny's lively, light-hearted presentation to a packed house at the BlackHat Briefings last summer in Las Vegas. It was the hit of the show, but in one hour he could only present a few of his startling findings about Google hacking. After reading Johnny's book, I've learned a ton more and realized I wasn't quite as Google-savvy as I thought. As with my real brain, I've only been using about ten percent of my Google-brain's capacity." Read on for the rest of Nachreiner's review. Google Hacking for Penetration Testers author Johnny Long pages 448 publisher Syngress rating 8 reviewer Corey Nachreiner ISBN 1931836361 summary Google's dark and dork sides exposed; despite the title, useful for everyone who'd like to get the most out of google.

According to its cover, Johnny Long's book focuses primarily on revealing the "Dark Side" of Google -- a promise it delivers in spades. But I can also heartily recommend Google Hacking to newbies who simply want to learn how to harness Google's full potential.

The first few chapters of the book walk you through Google's interfaces and features, then introduce you to Google's advanced operators and techniques you can use to refine your Google searches. Instead of submitting basic searches that leave you arduously parsing hundreds of results for your desired answer, you quickly learn to submit powerful queries that almost instantly yield the results you intend. Even as an experienced Google user, I learned a lot from Google Hacking's early chapters. For Google neophytes, this alone makes the book worth its price.

However, we all know Slashdotters really want this book in order to learn how hackers misuse Google. Well, you won't be disappointed. As soon as Long has taught you to submit advanced queries, he wastes no time in showing you the techniques l33t Google hax0rs use to exploit the search engine's power. For example, did you know you can use Google as a free proxy server? By submitting a specially-crafted, English-to-English translation query, you can capitalize on Google's translation service to anonymously submit all your Web requests. This simple hack just scratches the surface of Google's malicious potential.

Most Web surfers don't realize the sheer amount of extremely sensitive information available for the harvesting on the Internet. In that sense, Google Hacking is eye-popping. Do you want to find misconfigured Web servers that publicly list their directory contents? A quick Google search does the trick. Or, suppose you found some new exploit code that only works against a particular version of IIS 5.0. Submit a quick Google query for a helpful list of possible targets. Do you want to harvest user logins, passwords (for example, mySQL passwords in a connect.inc file), credit card numbers, social security numbers or any other potentially damaging tidbit that Web users and administrators accidentally leak onto the Internet? Google Hacking shows you how, with highly refined searches gleaned from the community contributing to the Google Hacking database (GHDB) found on Long's Web site.

While Long's book discloses these and many other potentially malicious Google searching techniques, it does so responsibly, with the goal of prevention in mind. Only the less damaging search strings are fully revealed. Long saves the juicier (read: more dangerous) hacks for your own discovery. Long even obfuscates the sensitive results of the more damaging search strings in order to protect the innocent incompetents he refers to as "googledorks." After showing you how hackers subvert Google to their malicious intent, Long dedicates a chapter to how Web administrators can configure their Web servers securely in order to prevent sensitive data from making it into a Google Hacker's clutches.

Though I've gushed about the book so far, I will quibble with its inconsistent tone. Some of its chapters target readers having different levels of technical understanding. While the book starts out in a voice easy enough for even the most novice user to understand, some of the later chapters, on topics such as document grinding, database digging, and query automation, jump drastically and use language and techniques that only programmers or Unix power-users would understand. In addition, the humor that made Johnny's live presentation so memorable shows up in his book, but in scant supply; frankly, more jokes would be welcome.

But these negatives are mere nits. Whether you're a penetration tester wanting to exploit Google, a Web administrator wanting to protect yourself from information leaks, or even a newbie wanting to harness Google's full potential, Google Hacking for Penetration Testers makes an excellent resource. If you, too, use Google as a second brain, pick up Johnny Long's book and learn how to exploit this powerful search engine to its full capacity.

Corey Nachreiner, Network Security Analyst for WatchGuard's LiveSecurity Service, writes about network security on the free RSS news feed, WatchGuard Wire (browsable version, RSS feed.) You can purchase Google Hacking for Penetration Testers from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

boohiss asks: "I've been getting a lot of calls on my cell phone from '+001819'. I haven't answered them, of course. But what is this number? I've found some various explanations here and there, but nothing conclusive. There's also the story on Snopes about the famed 809 long distance scam, which may or may not be what this is. Could it be some form of cell phone spam that isn't compatible with my phone? Does anyone else get these calls, and has anyone figured out what they are?" If anyone is unfortunate enough to fall for one of these, what options do they have in terms of damage control?

spankfish writes "The following page features numerous great pictures of bizarre and creepy deep-sea creatures which have been dredged up by the recent tsunami and presented by normal divers. Fascinating stuff! The page is in Russian, but it's all about the pictures." Update: 01/15 18:02 GMT by J : As those of you who read the comments have already realized, this is an urban legend.

jangobongo writes "The folks that investigate urban legends at Snopes.com have looked into the rumor going around on the internet that says, "The outcome of Washington Redskins football games has correctly predicted the winner of every U.S. presidential election since 1936." Their findings? It's true! The predictive game for this year will happen on October 31 vs. Green Bay. Which team are you gonna root for?"

jangobongo writes "The folks that investigate urban legends at Snopes.com have looked into the rumor going around on the internet that says, "The outcome of Washington Redskins football games has correctly predicted the winner of every U.S. presidential election since 1936." Their findings? It's true! The predictive game for this year will happen on October 31 vs. Green Bay. Which team are you gonna root for?"

The House of Representatives voted on bill to reinstate the draft by Democrat Charles Rangel (NY), and defeated it soundly, 402-2. The bill, which languished in Congress with no real support since its introduction in January 2003, has often been used as evidence the Republicans favor a draft, despite the fact that a Democrat sponsored it, 14 other Democrats cosponsored it, and no Republicans supported it. The rumors reached urban legend status, leading the House Republicans to take the uncommon step of voting on a bill that was not under remotely serious consideration. The two voting in favor of the bill were Democrats John Murtha (PA) and Pete Stark (CA), who was one of the cosponsors. Republican Senate majority leader Bill Frist said the Senate will not address the issue.

localhost00 writes "The city of Aliso Viejo, CA nearly banned foam cups when they learned they are produced from a substance known as 'dihydrogen monoxide.' A paralegal working for the city apparantly found a professionally designed web site put up to describe the dangerous properties of this chemical. Apparantly, the report about Dihydrogen Monoxide was written by a then 14-year-old Nathan Zohner who was researching the gullibility of fifty ninth graders."

Phronesis writes "Photo District News is running a story reporting that three historic photos of John Kerry from the early 1970s, including the one used for the Jane Fonda forgery, were pirated from Corbis. The photographers who own the copyright on the photos are asking Corbis to use its fancy watermarking technology to find the culprit. Corbis hopes either to track the responsible people down using watermarks, or to invoke DMCA if the watermarks were removed."

Thanks to Yahoo for reprinting a press release announcing Nokia has teamed up with Eidos to give away over 70,000 copies of the N-Gage version of Tomb Raider at this year's Sugar Bowl college football game. An Eidos spokesperson oddly opines: "Lara [Croft] has always been the number one video game heroine, and it's appropriate for her to be present at this year's Sugar Bowl where the national champion will be crowned", and insider suggestions that Nokia are pulling an Atari of sorts, in the face of allegedly limited demand for the N-Gage 'game deck' are, of course, fatuous. Meanwhile, GameSpy weighs in with some reasons to like the N-Gage, still suggesting: "Nokia's game deck has a lot going for it, and is in many ways superior to the system that has dominated the portable gaming market for over a decade: Nintendo's Game Boy (now Game Boy Advance)." Update: 01/02 16:46 GMT by S : According to a L.A Times/TribNet article, Tomb Raider on N-Gage sold around 3,000 copies in October, the last stats available to the reporter.

Thanks to Shacknews for their feature revealing The Warshaw Awards for 2003, celebrating "some of the worst missteps of the year" in videogaming. The awards are named after Howard Scott Warshaw, creator of the famously poor E.T. for the Atari 2600, and victors include Namco for R: Racing Evolution, which "eschews virtually everything that Ridge Racer fans had come to expect", David Duchovny for "quite possibly the worst [voice acting] I've ever heard from a mainstream actor" in Ubisoft's XIII, and the IGN gaming website for their "obscene McDonald's advertising campaign."

SlashChick writes "In an interesting twist on political correctness, L.A. County has banned the use of the terms 'Master/Slave' (commonly used to denote hard drive arrangements.) According to Snopes.com, 'someone within the County bureaucracy... had taken offense at "master/slave" references and complained to the board.' L.A. County now requires that vendors working with the county remove all 'master/slave' references. Incredible. Read the full story."

SlashChick writes "In an interesting twist on political correctness, L.A. County has banned the use of the terms 'Master/Slave' (commonly used to denote hard drive arrangements.) According to Snopes.com, 'someone within the County bureaucracy... had taken offense at "master/slave" references and complained to the board.' L.A. County now requires that vendors working with the county remove all 'master/slave' references. Incredible. Read the full story."

An anonymous reader writes "The currently-airing Discovery Channel show MythBusters has been profiled in a Newsweek article. Basically, the show takes two former Hollywood effects designers as they set out to prove or disprove various folklore myths that have come about over the years, such as the actual effect of a poppy-seed bagel on a drug test, or what effect a penny dropped from the Empire State Building observation deck will have on a human at ground level."

quogmire writes "Australia's ABC reports that biologists from the Universities of Finland and Freiburg (Germany) have finally solved the question of lemming population fluctuations once thought to be caused by lemmings mass-suiciding by plunging off cliffs. 'Lemming populations, they say, surge spectacularly and fall just as quickly, thanks to the combined feasting of four predators: the stoat, arctic fox, snowy owl and a seabird called the long-tailed skua.' The original article (Login required) is published in Science."

Roland Piquepaille writes "Some days bring big surprises. Like many people, I always believed that it was impossible to write in space with ordinary pens because ink would not flow. So imagine my astonishment when I read Pedro Duque's diary from space this morning. Pedro Duque is an astronaut since 1992. Now, he's on board of the International Space Station (ISS) since October 18, 2003. And he's writing -- from space -- with a cheap ballpoint pen, like Russians apparently always did: 'So I also took one of our ballpoint pens, courtesy of the European Space Agency (just in case Russian ballpoint pens are special), and here I am, it doesn't stop working and it doesn't "spit" or anything.' Isn't it amazing? This summary contains more details and a photograph of Pedro Duque on board ISS." Note that NASA didn't go crazy developing a pen for space. Surface tension is the important factor for all pens, not gravity.

Eric Greif writes "I've just discovered information on an odd arcade game from 1981, only released in some backwater suburbs in Portland, Oregon. This game was called Polybius and was apparently featured in a recent article in GamePro magazine. This game boasts strange effects on the players of the game, such as various forms of amnesia, as well as behavior and mood changes." GamePro say that " Credited to a company called Sinnesloschen [German for 'sense-deleting'], Polybius... was an abstract puzzle game... one arcade owner claimed that black-coated gentlemen would periodically come to collect data - but not coins - from the machines." Snopes.com call Polybius out as a hoax, correctly, but after all this recent attention, does anyone know who devised this elegant spoof, and when?

pipingguy writes "Online Journalism Review interviews David Mikkelson of the Urban Legends Reference Pages. While the Internet has taken its share of knocks for helping scammers perpetrate e-mail and Web hoaxes (the Bambi hunt reportedly was staged to sell videos on the proprietor's Web site), not enough credit is given to the folks who are using the Internet to debunk them. Snopes.com is the work of the husband-and-wife team of David and Barbara Mikkelson, who have taken their passion for urban myths to the Web since 1995."

pipingguy writes "Online Journalism Review interviews David Mikkelson of the Urban Legends Reference Pages. While the Internet has taken its share of knocks for helping scammers perpetrate e-mail and Web hoaxes (the Bambi hunt reportedly was staged to sell videos on the proprietor's Web site), not enough credit is given to the folks who are using the Internet to debunk them. Snopes.com is the work of the husband-and-wife team of David and Barbara Mikkelson, who have taken their passion for urban myths to the Web since 1995."

Lev13than writes "Canada.com is reporting that some 20,000 Canadians listed "Jedi" as their religion in the last national census (2001). Apparently this is the offshoot of an Internet joke which originated in Australia a few years back. The results are interesting on a couple of levels. While it show that some people may have too much time on their hands, it also raises questions of privacy rights, Internet activism and data integrity. Although it's not statistically significant given Canada's population of 31.5 million, 20,000 lightsabre-wielding census-takers is nothing to sneeze at. StatsCan's full report (with no mention of Jedis) can be found here."

senort01 writes: "Who couldn't find this humorous? 602P, (the post office will charge for e-mail being sent to make up for lost revenue), a classic Internet hoax, was asked about in the New York Senate debate. Needless to say, both parties aren't going to support it! Thank god!" And for those who prefer their news both more direct and more fun, ContinuousPark writes: "Declan McCullagh's Politechbot mailing list is reporting that the lame e-mail hoax made it into the Clinton-Lazio debate." the_quark helpfully points out not only the famous Bill 602P itself but the USPS's stock page denying its existence.