Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes: Reason.com's Robby Soave criticizes an article published in the journal Progress in Human Geography, for being "utterly incomprehensible," and "the least essential paper ever written." Entitled Glaciers, Gender, and Science--A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental climate change, the article is authored by researchers at the University of Oregon and funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Despite being filled with "buzzwords -- colonialism, marginalization, masculinist discourses, etc. -- with such frequency that the entire thing comes off like a joke," the article is accompanied by an enthusiastic press release from the University of Oregon, stating that "glacier research has been intertwined with gender relations, masculine cultures of exploration, geopolitics, and individual and institutional power. That, in turn, led to glacier-related academic and governmental jobs being predominantly filled by men. ... Melting glaciers are today considered a national security risk for numerous countries,' [one of the researchers] said. 'Power and colonialism have shaped the science.' That message is detailed extensively in the paper."

Contributor Bennett Haselton writes with a interesting take on the recent release of racy celebrity photos: "Lawyers for Olympic gymnast McKayla Maroney succeeded in getting porn sites to take down her stolen nude photos, on the grounds that she was under 18 in the pictures, which meant they constituted child pornography. If true, that means that under current laws, Maroney could in theory be prosecuted for taking the original pictures. Maybe the laws should be changed?" Read on for the rest.

Online warnings about the dangers of teen sexting, from sources ranging from the FBI to MTV, frequently warn that even a minor who takes a sexually explicit picture of themselves can be prosecuted for violating child pornography laws.

And these prosecutions really do happen. One Pennsylvania district attorney threatened child pornography charges against two teen girls who posed for a photo in their bras making peace signs, and tried to force them to write a report on why their actions were wrong and "what it means to be a girl in today's society." (With the ACLU's help, the girls' parents sued to stop the D.A. from following through.) A study from the American Academy of Pediatrics found that in teen "sexting" incidents reported to the police, even in cases where the sexting was between two minors and there were no "aggravating" circumstances (abuse or lack of clear consent), police made arrests in 18% of those cases. (The arrest rate was higher in cases involving "aggravating" circumstances or where an adult was involved in the sexting.)

Meanwhile, hundreds of articles have been written about Porn.com being forced to take down the nude pictures of McKayla Maroney, after receiving word from her lawyers that she was underage when the pictures were taken. As far as I can tell, none of the articles about the incident mentioned that, if her lawyers are correct, then Maroney could be theoretically prosecuted for creating, possessing, and distributing child pornography. Of course nobody wants to see that happen, but the elephant in the living room is that before Maroney's photo leak scandal, many teens were arrested for doing essentially the same thing, and more of them will continue to be arrested after the celebrity nude hacking scandal is old news.

That's not to say that Maroney's photos necessarily did constitute child pornography. Nude or topless photos of minors are not necessarily illegal, if they're not sexually explicit; Thora Birch was under 18 for her topless scene in American Beauty. I haven't seen the Maroney photos (honest -- although I'd like to think that whatever she was doing, she was making her not impressed face). Maybe they really were explicit enough to qualify as child pornography. Maybe they weren't, and Maroney's lawyers misunderstood the law and thought that any of her underage nude or topless selfies were automatically child porn. Or maybe her lawyers knew the pictures were not really child porn, but they were bluffing when they demanded that Porn.com take the pictures down. Whatever the case, Maroney's lawyers claimed the pictures were child pornography, and if they're right, the lawyers just criminally implicated their client as well.

If the pictures really were explicit and she sent them to any of her same-age friends, she could also be charged with disseminating obscene material to a minor. Iowa teenager Jorge Canal was convicted on this charge, and his conviction upheld by the Iowa Supreme Court, after his 14-year-old female friend asked him to send him a picture of his erect penis, and he obliged. (Although since he was 18 at the time of sending the picture, there was no child porn charge.) If his defense attorneys tried a defense along the lines of, "My clients actions harmed absolutely no one, and it's the prosecutors who have ruined the lives of not only my client but also his supposed 'victim', by putting them both through a trauma that will hang over them for the rest of their lives," it didn't work.

Many states have attempted to pass laws specifically addressing sexting by and/or to teenagers by reducing the penalty from a felony child pornography charge to something less severe. What all of these laws still have in common, though, is that they retain the option to impose some criminal penalties on teens for sexting even among themselves. The ACLU has opposed such a bill in Pennsylvania on the grounds that even a misdemeanor charge for teen sexting would be too draconian of a punishment.

"The Need for Sexting Law Reform: Appropriate Punishments for Teenage Behaviors", written by Alexandra Kushner, a legal associate at Winston & Strawn LLP, and published in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change, argues for de-criminalizing consensual sexting among teens. (The paper argues for retaining the option to prosecute cases involving abuse or malicious forwarding of a sexted picture.) Much of the paper is refreshing for the plain language not often found in legal argumentation; discussing the case of a 16-year-old and 17-year-old who faced child pornography charges for taking sexy pictures of each other, Kushner writes, "They should not have been charged at all because they were not harming each other or anyone else by taking and keeping these pictures." This is exactly the right way to frame the issue, but to most legal scholars, sentences like these are considered simply adorable.

For the other side, you can read "A Legal Response Is Necessary for Self-Produced Child Pornography", by law professor Susan Hanley Duncan. I found it less than convincing because much of the paper stresses that sexting can have serious unforeseen consequences for teens, including public humiliation if the pictures are forwarded to their friends. Well, we know that. But that just raises the obvious question: Isn't that punishment enough, and why do we need criminal charges on top of that? Even buying into the stereotype that teens are focused only on the present -- if a teen is not deterred by the humiliating prospect of having her photo forwarded around the entire school, then why would they be deterred by the threat of prosecution, which is less likely, further out in the future, and a potential risk that they might not even be aware of?

(Note that this logic does not apply to students who forwarded sexted images to harass the person appearing in them -- the person forwarding the image usually does not face the short-term threat of public humiliation, which means a legal penalty might be the only deterrent they would care about. That's one argument for retaining the option to prosecute people who forward sexted pictures maliciously.)

Even the FBI, in their "Advice for Young People" regarding sexting, betrays a certain embarrassment over the hypocritical nature of the laws. To a person forwarding an image of someone else, they warn: "You could face child pornography charges, go to jail, and have to register as a sex offender;" but to the person taking the original picture, they say only vaguely that you could "even get in trouble with the law" -- while leaving out the fact that all of the draconian penalties in their list, also apply to the person who takes the picture, under the laws that the FBI enforces.

But unless or until sexting laws are changed, Maroney probably did violate them according to the statements from her own lawyers, which might lead cynics to think that she escaped being charged because of her celebrity status. I think that's unlikely. Recall that "only" 18% of teens who sexted each other were arrested in cases where the incidents were reported to police, so if she had been a non-celebrity, she probably would have gotten off scot-free as well. Whether a teen gets arrested or charged for "sexting," probably depends less on what they actually did, than the luck of the draw as far as which police officer hears the report of the incident, and which prosecutor ultimately has the discretion to decide whether to file charges. (Of course that makes me a cynic too, but I'm the kind who thinks that people see patterns and non-existent reasons for outcomes that are far more random than we'd like to believe.)

Public reaction is another matter. When District Attorney George Skumanick prosecuted those two girls for posing in their bras making peace signs, he may not have had all of the public on his side, but there would have been an absolute tsunami of outrage if he had tried the same thing against a celebrity like Maroney, trying to get her to write an essay about "what it means to be a girl in today's society." I'm sure she would have been not impressed.

ananyo writes "A controversial paper published in Nature argues that enigmatic fossils regarded as ancient sea creatures were actually land-dwelling lichen. If true, that would suggest life on land began 65 million years earlier than researchers now estimate. The nature of fossils from the Ediacaran period, some 635 million–542 million years ago, has been fiercely debated by palaeontologists. But where others envisage Ediacaran sea beds crawling with archaic animals, Gregory Retallack, a geologist at the University of Oregon in Eugene, sees these sites in southern Australia as dry, terrestrial landscapes dotted with lichens. He proposes that rock in the Ediacara Member in South Australia — where palaeontologist Reginald Sprigg first discovered Ediacaran fossils in 1947 — represents ancient soils, and presents new geological data. Among other lines of evidence, Retallack argues that the rock's red colour and weathering pattern indicate that the deposits were formed in terrestrial — not marine — environments (abstract). Others strongly disagree."

ananyo writes with an excerpt from a Nature news release: "By bringing long-dead proteins back to life, researchers have worked out the process by which evolution added a component to a cellular machine. ... In a paper published in Nature, researchers recreated an 'ancestral' version of a cellular machine called the V-ATPase proton pump, which channels protons across membranes and is vital for keeping cell compartments at the right acidity. Part of this machine is a ring of six proteins that threads through the membrane. Animals and most other eukaryotes have a ring composed of two types of protein component; fungi are alone in having a ring with three. The researchers used computational methods to work backwards and find the most likely sequences of these proteins hundreds of millions of years ago. The team inserted the DNA into yeast and found that just two mutations can turn the simple 2-protein ring into the more complex 3-protein ring."

An anonymous reader writes "Copyright law has previously been used by some states to try to prevent people from passing around copies of their own government's laws. But in a new level of meta-absurdity, the attorney general of Oregon is claiming copyright over a state-produced guide to using public-records laws. That isn't sitting well with one frequent user of the laws, who has posted a copy of the guide to his website and is daring the AG to respond. The AG, who previously pledged to improve responses to public-records requests, has not responded yet." The challenger here is University of Oregon Professor Bill Harbaugh.

An anonymous reader writes "Copyright law has previously been used by some states to try to prevent people from passing around copies of their own government's laws. But in a new level of meta-absurdity, the attorney general of Oregon is claiming copyright over a state-produced guide to using public-records laws. That isn't sitting well with one frequent user of the laws, who has posted a copy of the guide to his website and is daring the AG to respond. The AG, who previously pledged to improve responses to public-records requests, has not responded yet." The challenger here is University of Oregon Professor Bill Harbaugh.

deglr6328 writes "In light of recent, somewhat disappointing news in the world of nuclear fusion research, it is worth noting that there are still reasons to keep up hope that some breakthroughs are yet to be made. At 12:53 pm on the 13th. of this month the Levitated Dipole Experiment achieved its first plasma. The Levitated Dipole Experiment(LDX), built at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center as a joint project of Columbia University and MIT, is a magnetic confinement fusion research device, that unlike all previous stellarator, reverse-field pinch and tokamak like experiments, uses a superconducting levitated torus to confine its plasma. The LDX's achievement of first plasma is, in a way, about 17 years in the making even though it has only been in construction since 1999. The concept for LDX was first considered by Akira Hasegawa as he was studying the data coming in from the Voyager missions which flew through the (dipole) magnetospheres of the outer planets. He noticed that unlike laboratory confined fusion plasmas which tended to be unstable, difficult to control, and which lost energy quickly, the plasma of a magnetosphere is intrinsically more quiescent, stable and actually reacts favorably (increases its density/temperature) to outside perturbations such as ie. bombardment by a solar storm. A highly informative and interesting video of operations on the day of first shot can be found here. Congratulations to the scientists and engineers who have worked very hard on getting the project to this point and here's looking forward to the possibility that LDX will reveal fundamentally new physics in the arduous quest for clean fusion energy."

mod12 writes "After just attending a two-week summer program on the theoretical foundations of security (one of the speakers was from Microsoft research), I have been interested in trying to find out if the "trusted computing" initiative was still alive. I got my answer today in the New York Times from an article that was fortunately rather critical of the concept."

mod12 writes "After just attending a two-week summer program on the theoretical foundations of security (one of the speakers was from Microsoft research), I have been interested in trying to find out if the "trusted computing" initiative was still alive. I got my answer today in the New York Times from an article that was fortunately rather critical of the concept."

David Lechnyr writes "This article goes into detail on optimizing KDE for speed. Typically, most distributions include pre-compiled binaries of KDE which are optimized for an Intel i386 computer. Chances are that you're running something faster than this; if so, this should help you tweak the compile process to speed things up a bit."

Phronesis writes "In "The Future Needs Us," Freeman Dyson reviews Michael Crichton's Prey. After disposing of the bad science (The Reynolds number of nanobots 'the size of red blood cells' would limit their top speed to 2 mm/sec, which would make it hard for them to swarm or chase people; Solar power would provide no more than 20 nanowatts, which would not be sufficient for the activities the book describes; etc.) he turns to the more general theme of fearmongering about nanotechnology and biotechnology, comparing Prey to Nevil Shute's On the Beach ('Prey is not as good as On the Beach, but it is bringing us an equally important message')." Read on for a few more notes from the story, which makes an interesting followup to reader cybrpnk2's positive review of Prey .

"Dyson notes Joy's oddly prescient comment in April 2000 that

I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.

but objects to Joy's recommendation that we should 'relinquish pursuit of that knowledge...so dangerous that we judge it better that [it] never be available.' After a discussion of the actual history of biological warfare and bioterrorism, Dyson quotes Milton's Areopagitica in defense of intellectual and scientific freedom, concluding that 'Perhaps, after all, as we struggle to deal with the enduring problems of reconciling individual freedom with public safety, the wisdom of a great poet who died more than three hundred years ago may still be helpful.'"

ICANN has been meeting in Bucharest this week; as this story goes live (assuming I handled the time zones correctly) they'll be starting their last day of meetings. Highlights of the day will almost certainly include the ICANN Board voting to eliminate the public participation that they were charged with implementing and have fought against for the last several years, and ICANN implementing a domain name tax to fund their operations. ICANN dismisses cynics who complain about taxation without representation. You can view the webcast online, assuming that the volunteers doing it manage to keep it up. If you prefer text, you may like Roessler's weblog or the ICANN blog (highly recommended), which also has many links to news stories, not that the reporters generally understand the issues very well.

EccentricAnomaly writes "Apple has announced the winners of this year's Apple Design Awards. And the winners are: Best New Mac OS X Product: Toon Boom; Most Innovative Mac OS X Product: Watson; Best Mac OS X User Experience and Best Mac OS X Technology Adoption: OmniGraffle; Best Mac OS X Open Source port: TeXShop; and Best Mac OS X Student Product: MacJournal." The last one appears to be down, due to "excessive bandwidth consumption." Maybe the Apple Design Awards people should've gotten together with the Apple iTools HomePage people.

Odie writes: "Since the first discovery of a planet around another star in 1995, some 60+ planetary systems have been discovered. That's about one every two month, most of them uninhabitable Jupiter-sized heavyweights. Not much statistics to put in the Drake equation. Recently though, the OGLE team has come up with more than 42 new candidates. Nice in itself, but what is spectacular is that they spent only 32 days finding them! At that rate COROT should soon find plenty of worlds to explore for you budding Starfleet sailors! "

joel jaeggli writes: "The Carnivore talk done by Marcus Thomas from the FBI at NANOG 20 is now online... you can retrieve it from: University of Oregon Videolab. This talk was meant for a technical audience, and the discussion and questions from the audience are very enlightening. Major thanks should go to the folks from Merit/NANOG for managing to schedule this talk, to Marcus Thomas and the FBI for their candor, and the NANOG crowd for asking the important questions."

joel jaeggli writes: "The Carnivore talk done by Marcus Thomas from the FBI at NANOG 20 is now online... you can retrieve it from: University of Oregon Videolab. This talk was meant for a technical audience, and the discussion and questions from the audience are very enlightening. Major thanks should go to the folks from Merit/NANOG for managing to schedule this talk, to Marcus Thomas and the FBI for their candor, and the NANOG crowd for asking the important questions."

Matthew Crouse sent it in: a PR squib from the University of Oregon that says, "Physicists at the University of Oregon have secured a $1.5 million federal grant to lead a three-university effort aimed at developing an advanced micro-processing device called a 'quantum logic gate.'" Quantum Computing possibilities have been mentioned on Slashdot here, here, and in a number of other articles over the years, but it's nice to see yet another research group working in this potentially exciting field. "Many eyes make all bugs shallow" and all that, eh?

Stephen Adler wrote a follow up to his article on the Slashdot Effect on the Meta Slashdot Effect. Its the effect of the article about the effect. I found it funny. Cheshire Cat sent us a link to Allcam.com which is a Yahoo-style page devoted solely to web cams. James Morris sent us a link to Linux Australia which has another tux logo. Jeff Hartmann sent us a link to a cute little Ice Penguin from Michigan Technological University's Winter Carnival '99. Surprised someone sobered up long enough to make it. MTU has a great campus though they need something besides snow cows. netweasel sent us a link to an Apple Ad that you will like. Patrik Rådman sent us a "pootified" version of slashdot. Adam Muntner sent us something that we all need: Virtual Crack zzg sent us a link to a bizarre page of cool stuff like ion guns and plasma pens (oh my)

The fun just keeps rolling in with the iMac stuff so I guess I'll just keep posting it. The major notable is that LinuxPPC.org has a page up for the iMac/Linux porting effort. As we all know, the messy stuff is the USB support. Robert Petty sent us this link where you can read about the iMac mystery slot. Tom Drabenstott sent us a link comparing windows and Macs at various every day tasks. Finally Sean Harding sent us a link to a page dedicated to documenting the iMac firmware.

The fun just keeps rolling in with the iMac stuff so I guess I'll just keep posting it. The major notable is that LinuxPPC.org has a page up for the iMac/Linux porting effort. As we all know, the messy stuff is the USB support. Robert Petty sent us this link where you can read about the iMac mystery slot. Tom Drabenstott sent us a link comparing windows and Macs at various every day tasks. Finally Sean Harding sent us a link to a page dedicated to documenting the iMac firmware.