Slashdot Mirror

Western Pennsylvania's shale oil deposits have lately attracted interest not only from companies who have been extracting some of that oil, but from locals who object to what they perceive as sharp dealing by the companies involved, favorable treatment by the state government, and environmental degradation as a result of the extraction. Some of the most visible of those protesters, it turns out, have been tracked (including "Web traffic") by Pennsylvania's own Homeland Security department, and that information about them has been shared not only within the department, but with the oil companies themselves. Homeland Security director James Powers defended the information shared with the oil companies as part of a triweekly bulletin, saying "We want to continue providing this support to the Marcellus Shale Formation natural gas stakeholders while not feeding those groups fomenting dissent against those same companies."

athe!st writes "International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) are a major headache for companies trying to put their satellites into space, so much so that some companies are using 'ITAR-free' (aka free of US technology) as a selling point. The European Space Agency is trying to reduce its dependence on ITAR components, and the regulations are also threatening the nascent space tourism industry."

bonch writes "A new study on Greenland's and West Antarctica's rate of ice loss halves the estimate of ice loss. Published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the study takes into account a rebounding of the Earth's crust called glacial isostatic adjustment, a continuing rise of the crust after being smashed under the weight of the Ice Age. 'We have concluded that the Greenland and West Antarctica ice caps are melting at approximately half the speed originally predicted,' said researcher Bert Vermeeersen."

Kilrah_il writes "The fine-structure constant, a coupling constant characterizing the strength of the electromagnetic interaction, has been measured lately by scientists from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia and has been found to change slightly in light sent from quasars in galaxies as far back as 12 billion years ago. Although the results look promising, caution is advised: 'This would be sensational if it were real, but I'm still not completely convinced that it's not simply systematic errors' in the data, comments cosmologist Max Tegmark of MIT. Craig Hogan of the University of Chicago and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., acknowledges that 'it's a competent team and a thorough analysis.' But because the work has such profound implications for physics and requires such a high level of precision measurements, 'it needs more proof before we'll believe it.'"

smellsofbikes writes "Wired has a short but pithy interview with Simon Singh about his defense against a libel suit brought by the British Chiropractic Association, in which he spent more than $200,000 and emerged victorious."

eldavojohn writes "A new paper up for prepublication from the controversial solid-state physicist Godfrey Louis claims that the cells Louis collected from a Keralan red rain incident divide and produce daughter cells at 121 degrees Celsius. While unusual, this is not unheard of as the paper recalls cells cultivated from hydrothermal vents are known to reproduce at 121 C as well. Of course, caution is exercised when dealing with the possible explanation surrounding the theory of panspermia but the MIT Technology Review says researchers 'examined the way these fluoresce when bombarded with light and say it is remarkably similar to various unexplained emission spectra seen in various parts of the galaxy. One such place is the Red Rectangle, a cloud of dust and gas around a young star in the Monocerous constellation.'"

eldavojohn writes "A new paper up for prepublication from the controversial solid-state physicist Godfrey Louis claims that the cells Louis collected from a Keralan red rain incident divide and produce daughter cells at 121 degrees Celsius. While unusual, this is not unheard of as the paper recalls cells cultivated from hydrothermal vents are known to reproduce at 121 C as well. Of course, caution is exercised when dealing with the possible explanation surrounding the theory of panspermia but the MIT Technology Review says researchers 'examined the way these fluoresce when bombarded with light and say it is remarkably similar to various unexplained emission spectra seen in various parts of the galaxy. One such place is the Red Rectangle, a cloud of dust and gas around a young star in the Monocerous constellation.'"

eldavojohn writes "A new paper up for prepublication from the controversial solid-state physicist Godfrey Louis claims that the cells Louis collected from a Keralan red rain incident divide and produce daughter cells at 121 degrees Celsius. While unusual, this is not unheard of as the paper recalls cells cultivated from hydrothermal vents are known to reproduce at 121 C as well. Of course, caution is exercised when dealing with the possible explanation surrounding the theory of panspermia but the MIT Technology Review says researchers 'examined the way these fluoresce when bombarded with light and say it is remarkably similar to various unexplained emission spectra seen in various parts of the galaxy. One such place is the Red Rectangle, a cloud of dust and gas around a young star in the Monocerous constellation.'"

wiedzmin writes "Public broadcaster ARD's show 'Plusminus' teamed up with the known hacker organization 'Chaos Computer Club' (CCC) to find out how secure the controversial new radio-frequency (RFID) chips were. The report shows how they used the basic new home scanners that will go along with the cards (for use with home computers to process the personal data for official government business) to demonstrate that scammers would have few problems extracting personal information. This includes two fingerprint scans and a new six-digit PIN meant to be used as a digital signature for official government business and beyond." That was quick. Earlier this year, CCC hackers demonstrated vulnerabilities in German airport IDs, too.

An anonymous reader writes "The has been a lot of buzz in the industry lately about NoSQL databases helping Twitter, Amazon, and Digg scale their transactional workloads. But there has been some recent pushback from database luminaries such as Michael Stonebraker. Now, a couple of researchers at Yale University claim that NoSQL is no longer necessary now that they have scaled traditional ACID compliant database systems."

Hugh Pickens writes "CIOL reports that Wikipedia has revealed the secret of Agatha Christie's famous murder mystery 'The Mousetrap' by identifying the killer in the world's longest running play, now at over 24,000 performances ever since its maiden performance in 1952, despite protests from the author's family and petitions from fans who think the revelation is a spoiler. Angry at the revelation, Matthew Prichard, Christie's grandson, who describes the decision of Wikipedia as 'unfortunate,' says he will raise the matter with the play's producer, Sir Stephen Waley-Cohen. 'My grandmother always got upset if the plots of her books or plays were revealed in reviews — and I don't think this is any different. It's a pity if a publication, if I can call it that, potentially spoils enjoyment for people who go to see the play.' Unrepentant, Wikipedia justifies the decision to reveal the ending of the play. 'Our purpose is to collect and report notable knowledge. It's exceedingly easy to avoid knowing the identity of the murderer: just don't read it.'"

eldavojohn writes "A new analysis of millennia old mummy bones (abstract; full article is paywalled) shows high concentrations of tetracycline, which indicates empirical knowledge and use of antibiotics — most likely consumed in beer. The researchers traced the source of the antibiotics to the soil bacteria streptomyces present in the grain used to ferment the beer. Astonishingly enough, 'Even the tibia and skull belonging to a 4-year-old were full of tetracycline, suggesting that they were giving high doses to the child to try and cure him of illness.' The extent of saturation in the bones leads the scientists to assert that the population regularly consumed tetracycline antibiotics knowing that it would cure certain sicknesses."

egil writes "Chris Fenton built his own fully functional 1/10 scale Cray-1 supercomputer. True to the original, it includes the couch-seat, but is also binary compatible with the original. Instead of the power-hungry ECL technology, however, the scale model is built around a Xilinx Spartan-3E 1600 development board. All software is available if you want to build one for your own living room. The largest obstacle in the project is to find original software."

egil writes "Chris Fenton built his own fully functional 1/10 scale Cray-1 supercomputer. True to the original, it includes the couch-seat, but is also binary compatible with the original. Instead of the power-hungry ECL technology, however, the scale model is built around a Xilinx Spartan-3E 1600 development board. All software is available if you want to build one for your own living room. The largest obstacle in the project is to find original software."

eldavojohn writes "Some light is being shone on comic book history today as the Library of Congress opens up the 222 boxes of a German psychiatrist's evidence and papers against comic books. Dr. Fredric Wertham is well known by comic book fans as the author of Seduction of the Innocent, a bestselling book linking comic books and juvenile delinquency — leading to a full blown congressional investigation (some say witch hunt) of the comic book industry. Wertham was long involved with criminal trials before campaigning against comic books and promoting industry and government censorship for children. Ars adds a little more context for the younger crowd and notes that he later tried to move against television violence but couldn't find the publisher backing he had against comic books."

Hugh Pickens writes "The Philippine Daily Inquirer reports on a recent case where the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) lost an appeal after seeking to impeach the testimony of a defendant's expert witness by citing an article from Wikipedia. In her brief, the defendant said 'the authority, alluded to by oppositor-appellant, the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders DSM-IV-TR," was taken from an Internet website commonly known as Wikipedia,' and argued that Wikipedia itself contains a disclaimer saying it 'makes no guarantee of validity.' The court in finding for the defendant said in its decision that it found 'incredible ... if not a haphazard attempt, on the part of the (OSG) to impeach an expert witness, with, as pointed out by (the defendant) unreliable information. This is certainly unacceptable evidence, nothing short of a mere allegation totally unsupported by authority.'"

timothy writes "Matt Fischer's ramen page is never something to ignore (especially if you like to vary your ramen choices by creative additions), but a few days ago reported an admirable act of charity that I would like to see extended, perhaps even to my own house (please make it some Jha Jhan Myun packets, the kind with oil, veggies, and powder). An anonymous customer walked into an Osaka ramen shop and left (in yen; be creative) more than $10,000, with the instruction to use the money to feed kids. Makes me nostalgic for Juzo Itami's masterpiece Tampopo."

gphilip writes "I have been asked to contribute ideas for the preparation of a textbook for ninth graders (ages circa 14 years) in the subject of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Could you suggest material to include in such a text? More details below." Quite a few details, actually — how would you add to the curriculum plan outlined below? "Background: This is for the public school system of the state of Kerala, India. The state has near-total literacy (we achieved this goal in 1991 following a massive literacy drive), and the government is keen on achieving total e-literacy as well. This drive for e-literacy — and the school curriculum that is the subject of this question — is based entirely on free and open-source software; the school system uses a customized version of Debian for teaching purposes.

ICT is a subject that has been recently introduced into the school curriculum. Currently we have, for all intents and purposes, a 'first generation' of students (and teachers) in this subject. To be more precise, the general public is just beginning to use computers in a big way, and the goal now is to familiarize them with the use of computers, and more specifically, with FOSS. The ICT textbook for the eighth grade (native language version), therefore, focusses on introducing various GNU/Linux software and showing how they can help in learning the other, more traditional, subjects. This textbook introduces the following software: The Gimp, Sunclock, OOO Writer, Calc, and Impress, Kalzium, Geogebra, Marble, and Kstars. In addition, there are simple introductions to elementary Python (variables, the print statement, and if-else), networking, and the Internet.

What we need: In the ninth grade textbook, we would like to shift the focus a bit. We want to introduce concepts which give more scope for creativity, and form a basis for further studies and/or a vocation in the future. The student spends one more year (the tenth grade) in the school system, and so there is scope for developing further on the theme of the ninth grade ICT book when designing the textbook for the tenth grade.

Given this background, are there some other FOSS software that, in your opinion, it would be good to introduce to our ninth graders?

I am partial towards introducing more of Python : the two loops, and perhaps the notion of a function. Do you have suggestions/pointers on how to go about doing this in a way that is easy to learn and to teach?

I would also like to give a glimpse of some ideas from computer science — the idea of an algorithm, for example — so that those kids with a math/CS aptitude get to see that there are such things out there. Which algorithms would be good for this purpose? Binary search is perhaps a good candidate, given that it is easy to describe informally, relates easily to things with which the student is familiar (phone book, dictionary), and it is easy to bring out the contrast in running time with the more natural linear search. What other algorithms would be instructive and motivating? Which other notions from computer science can be introduced to this audience in this manner?

Any other ideas/suggestions about this are also welcome."

eldavojohn writes "Details are limited but state media is reporting on $75 million being put into a new research facility in Qingdao, Shandong Province that will conduct research into mining the sea floor. From the article: 'Scientists believe sea beds at a depth of 4,000 to 6,000 meters hold abundant deposits of rare metals and methane hydrate, a solidified form of natural gas bound into ice that can serve as a new energy source.' The research center's first goal is to do surveying and exploration with a new submersible named 'Jiaolong' (a mythical aquatic Chinese dragon). Hopefully these quests yield energy resources to meet growing demand for resources like liquefied coal in China."

Useful Wheat writes "Recently slashdot covered the reappearance of UVB-76. The function of the mysterious transmitter has been revealed: UVB-76 is used to transfer orders to military personnel, along with the time at which they should be executed. 'Words for the radio messages and code tables are selected mainly from the scientific terms of chemistry (Brohman), Geology (ganomatit), philology (Izafat), geography (Bong), Zoology (kariama), history (Scythian), cooking (drying), sports (krolist) and others, as well as rare Russian words (glashatel).' The page continues to list all 23 transmissions that have been made from the station in the past, showing that UVB-76 may be more active than believed."

An anonymous reader writes "Peter Jansen, a PhD student and member of the RepRap community, has constructed a working prototype of an inexpensive table-top laser cutter built out of old CD/DVD drives as an offshoot of his efforts to design an under $200 open-source Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) 3D printer. Where traditional laser cutters use powerful, fixed-focus beams, this new technique dynamically adjusts the focal point of the laser using a reciprocating motion similar to a reciprocating saw, allowing a far less powerful and inexpensive laser diode to be used. The technique is currently limited to cutting black materials to a depth of only a few millimeters, but should still be useful and enabling for Makers and other crafters. The end-goal is to create a hybrid inexpensive 3D printer that can be easily reconfigured for 2D laser cutting, providing powerful making tools to the desktop."

Slashdot regular Bennett Haselton has written a piece on a new program called Collage that can circumvent censorship by embedding messages in user-generated content on sites like Flickr. The program demonstrates that a long-standing theoretical concept can be reduced to practice but Bennett wonders if anybody would actually need it, as long as they can exchange encrypted messages over Gmail and AIM. He begins "In a presentation delivered at USENIX, Georgia Tech grad student Sam Burnett and his colleagues described how their new program, "Collage," could circumvent Internet censorship by embedding messages in user-generated content on sites like Flickr. The short version is that a publisher uses the Collage system to break a message into pieces that are small enough to embed into a photograph using standard steganography, the photos are published according to some protocol (e.g. "all photos in the photostream of user xyz" or "all photos tagged with the 'xyz' tag"), and receivers who know the protocol for identifying the photos, can retrieve them and decode the message. According to the authors' paper, the system is general enough that it could be adapted to almost any site where user-generated content is published. (All of this can be done by hand using existing tools, but Collage automates the process to hide the individual steps from the user.)" From this short description, you can see the two salient facts about Collage: (1) it's robust, in the sense that in order to shut it down completely, the censor would have to block every site containing user-generated content; and (2) it's efficient only for small text messages (which is what the authors used to test it), and not for high-bandwidth communications such as video. The authors have also highlighted the claim that Collage is (3) deniable, in the sense that in using it, you won't attract the attention of the censors for browsing "innocent" sites like Flickr. On this point, I'm not so sure; I think it's highly dependent on the kinds of publication system that the sender and the recipient agree on. For example, if the sender publishes their messages in photos all in one user's photostream, and that photostream is used primarily by recipients in censored countries to receive encoded messages, and if virtually nobody ever visits that photostream for any other reason, then if the censor ever finds out about that photostream, they could flag any user who ever visits it. It doesn't matter if the "site" as a whole is "innocent", if that one user's photostream is not.

But there's a more fundamental issue: Currently, in all censored countries, there is at least one way to receive prohibited text messages more efficiently (and with greater deniability) than with Collage. So Collage may work perfectly, but even when it gets released, I'd be very surprised to see large numbers of people using it unless all the simpler alternatives get blocked.

Most tools that people use to circumvent Internet censorship, are not "deniable" in the sense described above. If you visit a proxy site like VTunnel, any censor who is monitoring your Internet connection can see that you connected to a known proxy site. If you connect to the proxy site using "https://" instead of "http://", then a censor eavesdropping on your connection, won't be able to tell what you looked at through the proxy site (unless they confiscate your computer and look through your browser history), but they'll still be able to tell that you visited a proxy site. Similarly, if you use a tool like UltraSurf or Tor, those tools can circumvent the censor's filters by re-routing your Internet connection through a server outside the censored country -- but a censor monitoring your traffic, can still see that you connected to an UltraSurf or Tor server outside the country, even if they can't tell what Web sites you were visiting.

But if all you want is to receive short text messages, then there are many options that are completely "deniable." The simplest is probably to use Gmail and to choose the option to always read messages over https://. (If you sign in to Gmail, under "Settings" you can choose between "Always use https" and "Don't always use https".) If you read your inbox contents using https, then a censor eavesdropping on your connection can't see anything at all -- not the contents of messages that people send you, not the email addresses of people who are writing to you, not even the username that you use to sign in to read your Gmail messages. This gives you more or less perfectly deniability. As long as many Gmail users are using Gmail over https://, then doing this by itself would not attract undue attention from censors monitoring your Internet traffic. Using Gmail, you could also exchange higher-bandwidth content like images and video (up to Gmail's attachment size limit, currently 25 megabytes), something not possible with Collage.

Of course, if you remember the case in which Yahoo turned over information about one of its Chinese account-holders to the Chinese government (who subsequently arrested the user and sentenced them to 10 years in prison), you may be wary of trusting any Western corporation with your privacy. But in this case, you wouldn't have to. Because even if the Chinese government found out that some Gmail users were using Gmail to receive anti-government messages from the U.S., the censors wouldn't be able to eavesdrop on https-protected connections to find out which users were receiving the messages or what they said, so there would be no information for them to demand that Google turn over to them.

Or if you want to exchange encrypted text messages in real time, you can use any instant messaging client that supports encryption. Whether or not this is "deniable", in the sense of not attracting undue attention for "suspicious activity", depends on what proportion of other users are using the chat program in encrypted mode as well. The current version of AOL Instant Messenger, for example, apparently encrypts all instant messages by default. (Although you should take care to understand exactly what is "encrypted" when using an instant messaging client. In my experiments, when using AOL Instant Messenger, the contents of messages were encrypted, but the specific screen names that you're sending and receiving messages from, are not. In other words, a censor eavesdropping on your traffic, can see which screen names you exchanged messages with, but not the message contents. So if there were an AOL user account in a non-censored country that was a dummy account used primarily for passing banned information to users in censored countries, then if the censors ever found out about that account, they could flag and investigate any user in their country who exchanged messages with that screen name.)

The bottom line is that as long as at least one of these alternatives remains unblocked in your country, they would serve as an easier way to achieve the same goals that Collage achieves. They're generally faster, more convenient, and most of the time, more "deniable", in the sense that the traffic they generate won't look as suspicious as, say, browsing a Flickr feed that later becomes widely known as source of banned encoded messages. Collage does demonstrate that an interesting idea can be reduced to practice, and is robust in the sense that the general scheme cannot be blocked unless a regime blocks access to every site hosting user-submitted content. But there doesn't seem to be a compelling reason to use it unless and until all of the simpler methods get blocked.

I write all of this as someone who also wrote a program a few years ago that was meant to serve as a more robust back-up, in case a more popular method of circumventing censorship ever got shut down by the censors. In my case, I thought that most censoring regimes would start blocking all popular Web proxy sites, so I wrote an install script called "Circumventor" that would let you set up a Web server and James Marshall's CGIProxy script on your home computer, turning it into a mini-Web-proxy site. I assumed that eventually, most people in censored countries would have to rely on someone in a non-censored country to set up a private Web proxy like this and e-mail them the URL, once China and Iran got their act together and started blocking most publicly known Web proxy sites. But that never happened, partly because Web proxy sites are now springing up faster than most censors' databases can keep up with. So the web proxy install script fell by the wayside -- but that's good news, because it means that nobody really needed it, since the simpler, more straightforward methods continued to work. Why pester your cousin in the U.S. to set up a Web proxy for you, when most Web proxies you can find in Google are not even blocked yet?

And so it goes for Collage. It sounds like a perfectly fine idea, and it will be great news all around if nobody ever actually has to use it, because the censors never get around to blocking all of the simpler alternatives.

Slashdot regular Bennett Haselton has written a piece on a new program called Collage that can circumvent censorship by embedding messages in user-generated content on sites like Flickr. The program demonstrates that a long-standing theoretical concept can be reduced to practice but Bennett wonders if anybody would actually need it, as long as they can exchange encrypted messages over Gmail and AIM. He begins "In a presentation delivered at USENIX, Georgia Tech grad student Sam Burnett and his colleagues described how their new program, "Collage," could circumvent Internet censorship by embedding messages in user-generated content on sites like Flickr. The short version is that a publisher uses the Collage system to break a message into pieces that are small enough to embed into a photograph using standard steganography, the photos are published according to some protocol (e.g. "all photos in the photostream of user xyz" or "all photos tagged with the 'xyz' tag"), and receivers who know the protocol for identifying the photos, can retrieve them and decode the message. According to the authors' paper, the system is general enough that it could be adapted to almost any site where user-generated content is published. (All of this can be done by hand using existing tools, but Collage automates the process to hide the individual steps from the user.)" From this short description, you can see the two salient facts about Collage: (1) it's robust, in the sense that in order to shut it down completely, the censor would have to block every site containing user-generated content; and (2) it's efficient only for small text messages (which is what the authors used to test it), and not for high-bandwidth communications such as video. The authors have also highlighted the claim that Collage is (3) deniable, in the sense that in using it, you won't attract the attention of the censors for browsing "innocent" sites like Flickr. On this point, I'm not so sure; I think it's highly dependent on the kinds of publication system that the sender and the recipient agree on. For example, if the sender publishes their messages in photos all in one user's photostream, and that photostream is used primarily by recipients in censored countries to receive encoded messages, and if virtually nobody ever visits that photostream for any other reason, then if the censor ever finds out about that photostream, they could flag any user who ever visits it. It doesn't matter if the "site" as a whole is "innocent", if that one user's photostream is not.

But there's a more fundamental issue: Currently, in all censored countries, there is at least one way to receive prohibited text messages more efficiently (and with greater deniability) than with Collage. So Collage may work perfectly, but even when it gets released, I'd be very surprised to see large numbers of people using it unless all the simpler alternatives get blocked.

Most tools that people use to circumvent Internet censorship, are not "deniable" in the sense described above. If you visit a proxy site like VTunnel, any censor who is monitoring your Internet connection can see that you connected to a known proxy site. If you connect to the proxy site using "https://" instead of "http://", then a censor eavesdropping on your connection, won't be able to tell what you looked at through the proxy site (unless they confiscate your computer and look through your browser history), but they'll still be able to tell that you visited a proxy site. Similarly, if you use a tool like UltraSurf or Tor, those tools can circumvent the censor's filters by re-routing your Internet connection through a server outside the censored country -- but a censor monitoring your traffic, can still see that you connected to an UltraSurf or Tor server outside the country, even if they can't tell what Web sites you were visiting.

But if all you want is to receive short text messages, then there are many options that are completely "deniable." The simplest is probably to use Gmail and to choose the option to always read messages over https://. (If you sign in to Gmail, under "Settings" you can choose between "Always use https" and "Don't always use https".) If you read your inbox contents using https, then a censor eavesdropping on your connection can't see anything at all -- not the contents of messages that people send you, not the email addresses of people who are writing to you, not even the username that you use to sign in to read your Gmail messages. This gives you more or less perfectly deniability. As long as many Gmail users are using Gmail over https://, then doing this by itself would not attract undue attention from censors monitoring your Internet traffic. Using Gmail, you could also exchange higher-bandwidth content like images and video (up to Gmail's attachment size limit, currently 25 megabytes), something not possible with Collage.

Of course, if you remember the case in which Yahoo turned over information about one of its Chinese account-holders to the Chinese government (who subsequently arrested the user and sentenced them to 10 years in prison), you may be wary of trusting any Western corporation with your privacy. But in this case, you wouldn't have to. Because even if the Chinese government found out that some Gmail users were using Gmail to receive anti-government messages from the U.S., the censors wouldn't be able to eavesdrop on https-protected connections to find out which users were receiving the messages or what they said, so there would be no information for them to demand that Google turn over to them.

Or if you want to exchange encrypted text messages in real time, you can use any instant messaging client that supports encryption. Whether or not this is "deniable", in the sense of not attracting undue attention for "suspicious activity", depends on what proportion of other users are using the chat program in encrypted mode as well. The current version of AOL Instant Messenger, for example, apparently encrypts all instant messages by default. (Although you should take care to understand exactly what is "encrypted" when using an instant messaging client. In my experiments, when using AOL Instant Messenger, the contents of messages were encrypted, but the specific screen names that you're sending and receiving messages from, are not. In other words, a censor eavesdropping on your traffic, can see which screen names you exchanged messages with, but not the message contents. So if there were an AOL user account in a non-censored country that was a dummy account used primarily for passing banned information to users in censored countries, then if the censors ever found out about that account, they could flag and investigate any user in their country who exchanged messages with that screen name.)

The bottom line is that as long as at least one of these alternatives remains unblocked in your country, they would serve as an easier way to achieve the same goals that Collage achieves. They're generally faster, more convenient, and most of the time, more "deniable", in the sense that the traffic they generate won't look as suspicious as, say, browsing a Flickr feed that later becomes widely known as source of banned encoded messages. Collage does demonstrate that an interesting idea can be reduced to practice, and is robust in the sense that the general scheme cannot be blocked unless a regime blocks access to every site hosting user-submitted content. But there doesn't seem to be a compelling reason to use it unless and until all of the simpler methods get blocked.

I write all of this as someone who also wrote a program a few years ago that was meant to serve as a more robust back-up, in case a more popular method of circumventing censorship ever got shut down by the censors. In my case, I thought that most censoring regimes would start blocking all popular Web proxy sites, so I wrote an install script called "Circumventor" that would let you set up a Web server and James Marshall's CGIProxy script on your home computer, turning it into a mini-Web-proxy site. I assumed that eventually, most people in censored countries would have to rely on someone in a non-censored country to set up a private Web proxy like this and e-mail them the URL, once China and Iran got their act together and started blocking most publicly known Web proxy sites. But that never happened, partly because Web proxy sites are now springing up faster than most censors' databases can keep up with. So the web proxy install script fell by the wayside -- but that's good news, because it means that nobody really needed it, since the simpler, more straightforward methods continued to work. Why pester your cousin in the U.S. to set up a Web proxy for you, when most Web proxies you can find in Google are not even blocked yet?

And so it goes for Collage. It sounds like a perfectly fine idea, and it will be great news all around if nobody ever actually has to use it, because the censors never get around to blocking all of the simpler alternatives.

Slashdot regular Bennett Haselton has written a piece on a new program called Collage that can circumvent censorship by embedding messages in user-generated content on sites like Flickr. The program demonstrates that a long-standing theoretical concept can be reduced to practice but Bennett wonders if anybody would actually need it, as long as they can exchange encrypted messages over Gmail and AIM. He begins "In a presentation delivered at USENIX, Georgia Tech grad student Sam Burnett and his colleagues described how their new program, "Collage," could circumvent Internet censorship by embedding messages in user-generated content on sites like Flickr. The short version is that a publisher uses the Collage system to break a message into pieces that are small enough to embed into a photograph using standard steganography, the photos are published according to some protocol (e.g. "all photos in the photostream of user xyz" or "all photos tagged with the 'xyz' tag"), and receivers who know the protocol for identifying the photos, can retrieve them and decode the message. According to the authors' paper, the system is general enough that it could be adapted to almost any site where user-generated content is published. (All of this can be done by hand using existing tools, but Collage automates the process to hide the individual steps from the user.)" From this short description, you can see the two salient facts about Collage: (1) it's robust, in the sense that in order to shut it down completely, the censor would have to block every site containing user-generated content; and (2) it's efficient only for small text messages (which is what the authors used to test it), and not for high-bandwidth communications such as video. The authors have also highlighted the claim that Collage is (3) deniable, in the sense that in using it, you won't attract the attention of the censors for browsing "innocent" sites like Flickr. On this point, I'm not so sure; I think it's highly dependent on the kinds of publication system that the sender and the recipient agree on. For example, if the sender publishes their messages in photos all in one user's photostream, and that photostream is used primarily by recipients in censored countries to receive encoded messages, and if virtually nobody ever visits that photostream for any other reason, then if the censor ever finds out about that photostream, they could flag any user who ever visits it. It doesn't matter if the "site" as a whole is "innocent", if that one user's photostream is not.

But there's a more fundamental issue: Currently, in all censored countries, there is at least one way to receive prohibited text messages more efficiently (and with greater deniability) than with Collage. So Collage may work perfectly, but even when it gets released, I'd be very surprised to see large numbers of people using it unless all the simpler alternatives get blocked.

Most tools that people use to circumvent Internet censorship, are not "deniable" in the sense described above. If you visit a proxy site like VTunnel, any censor who is monitoring your Internet connection can see that you connected to a known proxy site. If you connect to the proxy site using "https://" instead of "http://", then a censor eavesdropping on your connection, won't be able to tell what you looked at through the proxy site (unless they confiscate your computer and look through your browser history), but they'll still be able to tell that you visited a proxy site. Similarly, if you use a tool like UltraSurf or Tor, those tools can circumvent the censor's filters by re-routing your Internet connection through a server outside the censored country -- but a censor monitoring your traffic, can still see that you connected to an UltraSurf or Tor server outside the country, even if they can't tell what Web sites you were visiting.

But if all you want is to receive short text messages, then there are many options that are completely "deniable." The simplest is probably to use Gmail and to choose the option to always read messages over https://. (If you sign in to Gmail, under "Settings" you can choose between "Always use https" and "Don't always use https".) If you read your inbox contents using https, then a censor eavesdropping on your connection can't see anything at all -- not the contents of messages that people send you, not the email addresses of people who are writing to you, not even the username that you use to sign in to read your Gmail messages. This gives you more or less perfectly deniability. As long as many Gmail users are using Gmail over https://, then doing this by itself would not attract undue attention from censors monitoring your Internet traffic. Using Gmail, you could also exchange higher-bandwidth content like images and video (up to Gmail's attachment size limit, currently 25 megabytes), something not possible with Collage.

Of course, if you remember the case in which Yahoo turned over information about one of its Chinese account-holders to the Chinese government (who subsequently arrested the user and sentenced them to 10 years in prison), you may be wary of trusting any Western corporation with your privacy. But in this case, you wouldn't have to. Because even if the Chinese government found out that some Gmail users were using Gmail to receive anti-government messages from the U.S., the censors wouldn't be able to eavesdrop on https-protected connections to find out which users were receiving the messages or what they said, so there would be no information for them to demand that Google turn over to them.

Or if you want to exchange encrypted text messages in real time, you can use any instant messaging client that supports encryption. Whether or not this is "deniable", in the sense of not attracting undue attention for "suspicious activity", depends on what proportion of other users are using the chat program in encrypted mode as well. The current version of AOL Instant Messenger, for example, apparently encrypts all instant messages by default. (Although you should take care to understand exactly what is "encrypted" when using an instant messaging client. In my experiments, when using AOL Instant Messenger, the contents of messages were encrypted, but the specific screen names that you're sending and receiving messages from, are not. In other words, a censor eavesdropping on your traffic, can see which screen names you exchanged messages with, but not the message contents. So if there were an AOL user account in a non-censored country that was a dummy account used primarily for passing banned information to users in censored countries, then if the censors ever found out about that account, they could flag and investigate any user in their country who exchanged messages with that screen name.)

The bottom line is that as long as at least one of these alternatives remains unblocked in your country, they would serve as an easier way to achieve the same goals that Collage achieves. They're generally faster, more convenient, and most of the time, more "deniable", in the sense that the traffic they generate won't look as suspicious as, say, browsing a Flickr feed that later becomes widely known as source of banned encoded messages. Collage does demonstrate that an interesting idea can be reduced to practice, and is robust in the sense that the general scheme cannot be blocked unless a regime blocks access to every site hosting user-submitted content. But there doesn't seem to be a compelling reason to use it unless and until all of the simpler methods get blocked.

I write all of this as someone who also wrote a program a few years ago that was meant to serve as a more robust back-up, in case a more popular method of circumventing censorship ever got shut down by the censors. In my case, I thought that most censoring regimes would start blocking all popular Web proxy sites, so I wrote an install script called "Circumventor" that would let you set up a Web server and James Marshall's CGIProxy script on your home computer, turning it into a mini-Web-proxy site. I assumed that eventually, most people in censored countries would have to rely on someone in a non-censored country to set up a private Web proxy like this and e-mail them the URL, once China and Iran got their act together and started blocking most publicly known Web proxy sites. But that never happened, partly because Web proxy sites are now springing up faster than most censors' databases can keep up with. So the web proxy install script fell by the wayside -- but that's good news, because it means that nobody really needed it, since the simpler, more straightforward methods continued to work. Why pester your cousin in the U.S. to set up a Web proxy for you, when most Web proxies you can find in Google are not even blocked yet?

And so it goes for Collage. It sounds like a perfectly fine idea, and it will be great news all around if nobody ever actually has to use it, because the censors never get around to blocking all of the simpler alternatives.

eldavojohn writes "The European Southern Observatory has announced that with the aid of their 190 HARPS measurements they have found the solar system with the most planets yet. Furthermore they claim 'This remarkable discovery also highlights the fact that we are now entering a new era in exoplanet research: the study of complex planetary systems and not just of individual planets. Studies of planetary motions in the new system reveal complex gravitational interactions between the planets and give us insights into the long-term evolution of the system.' The star is HD 10180, located 127 light-years away in the southern constellation of Hydrus, that boasts at least five planets (with two more expected) that have the equivalent of our own Titius–Bode law (their orbits follow a regular pattern). Their survey of stars also helped reinforce the correlation 'between the mass of a planetary system and the mass and chemical content of its host star. All very massive planetary systems are found around massive and metal-rich stars, while the four lowest-mass systems are found around lower-mass and metal-poor stars.' While we won't be making a 127 light-year journey anytime soon, the list of candidates for systems of interest grows longer."

An anonymous reader writes "Some specific bacteria colonies from Beer (the place, not the beverage) left for several days outside the ISS actually survived extreme temperatures, UV and other radiations, lack of water and all the like. They were later brought back to Earth for examination: such resistant bacteria may be the base of life support systems or bio-mining on colonies off Earth, and of course for terraforming, eventually. No clue in the article about how dangerous those bacteria might have become after the exposure or when they'll start eating their examiners."

mattclar writes "SpaceX just released footage and pictures of last week's Dragon parachute drop test. Using an Erickson Air-Crane, the Dragon capsule was carried to 14,000 feet, then released. After a few seconds of freefall, the drouge chutes appeared, followed by the main chutes. The test concluded with a gentle touchdown within the target area to conclude a test described by SpaceX as '100% successful.'"

angry tapir writes "Canon has decided to liquidate a subsidiary developing a flat-panel display technology called SED, effectively bringing to an end once high hopes that the screens would replace LCD panels and plasma displays in living room TVs. Development of SED (surface-condition electron-emitter display) screens began in 1986 at Canon and was joined in 1999 by Toshiba. SEDs combine elements of both CRT (cathode ray tube) and LCD (liquid crystal display) technologies. As with CRTs, electrons hit a phosphor-coated screen to emit light. But instead of being shot from an electron gun, electrons are drawn out of an emitter through a slit that is only a few nanometers wide. The result is a picture that is as bright as a CRT and does not suffer a time lag sometimes seen on LCD panels with rapidly moving images."

KentuckyFC writes "In 1978, the CalTech mathematician Robert McEliece developed a cryptosystem based on the (then) new idea of using asymmetric mathematical functions to create different keys for encrypting and decrypting information. The security of these systems relies on mathematical steps that are easy to make in one direction but hard to do in the other. Today, popular encryption systems such as the RSA algorithm use exactly this idea. But in 1994, the mathematician Peter Shor dreamt up a quantum algorithm that could factorise much faster than any classical counterpart and so can break these codes. As soon as the first decent-sized quantum computer is switched on, these codes will become breakable. Since then, cryptographers have been hunting for encryption systems that will be safe in the post quantum world. Now a group of mathematicians have shown that the McEliece encryption system is safe against attack by Shor's algorithm and all other known quantum algorithms. That's because it does not depend on factorisation but gets its security from another asymmetric conundrum known as the hidden subgroup problem which they show is immune to all known quantum attacks."

eldavojohn writes "Dr. Adam Maloof has found fossils of sea sponges in Australia from 650 million years ago. You might think this is no big deal unless you consider that sea sponges were thought to have arisen 520 million years ago. These fossils predate the oldest hard bodied fossils we have by a hundred million years. Dr. Maloof is now wondering if life might have arisen twice after the first attempt was quashed 635 million years ago: 'Since animals probably did not evolve twice, we are suddenly confronted with the question of how some relative of these reef-dwelling animals survived the Snowball Earth.' So how is it that life survived the Marinoan glaciation? The BBC has a video on the topic and Wikipedia has a time line of the Proterozoic Eon into the Paleozoic Era."

eldavojohn writes "Dr. Adam Maloof has found fossils of sea sponges in Australia from 650 million years ago. You might think this is no big deal unless you consider that sea sponges were thought to have arisen 520 million years ago. These fossils predate the oldest hard bodied fossils we have by a hundred million years. Dr. Maloof is now wondering if life might have arisen twice after the first attempt was quashed 635 million years ago: 'Since animals probably did not evolve twice, we are suddenly confronted with the question of how some relative of these reef-dwelling animals survived the Snowball Earth.' So how is it that life survived the Marinoan glaciation? The BBC has a video on the topic and Wikipedia has a time line of the Proterozoic Eon into the Paleozoic Era."

An anonymous reader writes "Ikatako is a virus that spreads through Japanese P2P network Winny, aided by the pirates' lack of wit. Once downloaded and run, the virus sends their data to a central server and replaces it with cephalopod and cnidarian imagery. Japanese hacker (and virus creator) Masato Nakatsuji thought he wouldn't be arrested this time. However, Japanese police considered the files in Japanese pirates' hard drives to be more important than his manga depictions of octopods and other tentacled fauna."

theodp writes "Patently Apple reports that a new Apple patent application has surfaced describing an application that would record your personal journey through a video game and turn it into a custom comic or iBook when you're done playing. Imagine how thrilled little Billy's Mommy would have been if she only had the chance to read the story of her son's foray into Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas or see how he dealt with BioShock's Little Sisters."

pq writes "In a paper published today (abstract) in Science, astronomers are reporting the discovery of a radio pulsar in data acquired at the world's largest radio telescope and analyzed by hundreds of thousands of volunteers in 192 countries for the Einstein@Home project. This is the first scientific discovery by a distributed computing project, and specific credit is being given to Chris and Helen Colvin of Ames, Iowa, and Daniel Gebhardt of Germany." The claim that this is the first discovery to be made through distributed computing is hard to swallow; there are quite a few distributed projects out there, several of which have reported positive results, such as the discovery of the 47th known Mersenne number.

gpronger writes "The journal Nature reports that newly discovered tool marks on bones indicates that we were using tools at minimum 800,000 years earlier than previously thought. This places the start of tool use at 3.4 million years ago or earlier. The most likely ancestor in this time frame would be Australopithecus afarensis. The researchers, led by palaeoanthropologist Zeresenay Alemseged of the California Academy of Science, San Francisco,and Shannon McPherron, (an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany) state that cut marks on the bones of an impala-sized creature and another closer in size to a buffalo, indicate butchering of the animals by our distant ancestors. However, they do not believe that they were in fact hunters, more likely scavenging the remains left behind by large predators."

necro81 writes "The NY Times is reporting that former Senator Ted Stevens was aboard a small plane with eight others that crashed in remote southwest Alaska Monday night. Some news outlets are reporting that he died, along with at least four others. Meanwhile, the North American CEO of aerospace firm EADS and former NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe was was also reported in the crash. Rescue crews from the Alaska Air National Guard reached the site about ten hours after the initial crash."

necro81 writes "The NY Times is reporting that former Senator Ted Stevens was aboard a small plane with eight others that crashed in remote southwest Alaska Monday night. Some news outlets are reporting that he died, along with at least four others. Meanwhile, the North American CEO of aerospace firm EADS and former NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe was was also reported in the crash. Rescue crews from the Alaska Air National Guard reached the site about ten hours after the initial crash."

baronvoncarson and a few other readers sent in the unconfirmed report that the Russian torrent site TorrentReactor had bought the Russian town of Gar for $148,000, on the condition that the town rename itself Torrentreactor.net. Torrent Freak notes circumspectly that TorrentReactor has been known in the past for — how best to put this? — publicity stunts and hoaxes. And Torrent Freak at the time of writing had no confirmation from any Russian authority that the purported cash-for-renaming deal is genuine. Here is the announcement on TorrentReactor's site, which contains this explanation of how Gar was chosen: "We've picked a few thousands of godforsaken places around the world that are close to operating nuclear reactors to make a connection to the name of our company. The list was numbered and a random number was picked by a generator. The number 377 was a lucky one for Gar village. We think it was a good choice since Gar citizens are very kind and generous people." The whole (purported) transaction is reminiscent of the dot-com boom, when in 1999 the not-yet-launched Half.com offered $100,000 to a small town, Halfway, Oregon, if it would rename itself for the company. It did. The record is vague as to whether the money was ever actually paid, as Half.com was acquired by eBay just over a year later.

morsch writes "Researcher Vinay Deolalikar from HP Labs claims proof that P != NP. The 100-page paper has apparently not been peer-reviewed yet, so feel free to dig in and find some flaws. However, the attempt seems to be quite genuine, and Deolalikar has published papers in the same field in the past. So this may be the real thing. Given that $1M from the Millennium Prize is involved, it will certainly get enough scrutiny. Greg Baker broke the story on his blog, including the email Deolalikar sent around."

morsch writes "Researcher Vinay Deolalikar from HP Labs claims proof that P != NP. The 100-page paper has apparently not been peer-reviewed yet, so feel free to dig in and find some flaws. However, the attempt seems to be quite genuine, and Deolalikar has published papers in the same field in the past. So this may be the real thing. Given that $1M from the Millennium Prize is involved, it will certainly get enough scrutiny. Greg Baker broke the story on his blog, including the email Deolalikar sent around."

wdef writes "The UK's controversial ContactPoint database has actually been switched off! It's rare that we hear anything this sensible from government about an expensive, privacy-destroying, 'think of the children' solution: 'The government argued the system was disproportionate to the problem, so is looking at developing other solutions.' Perhaps the UK coalition government really is winding back Big Brother, as they had promised to do? Does seem unlikely."

jamie spotted this eye-opening presentation (here's a longer explanation) about how easy it is to access sensitive data on many sites using memcached, writing "If you already know what memcached is, skim to slide #17. The jaw-drop will happen around slide #33. Turns out many websites expose their totally-non-protected memcached interface to the Internet, including gowalla, bit.ly, and PBS."

databuff writes "Less than 24 hours ago, Jeff Sonas, the creator of the Chessmetrics rating system, launched a competition to find a chess rating algorithm that performs better than the official Elo rating system. The competition requires entrants to build their rating systems based on the results of more than 65,000 historical chess games. Entrants then test their algorithms by predicting the results of another 7,809 games. Already three teams have managed create systems that make more accurate predictions than the official Elo approach. It's not a surprise that Elo has been outdone — after all, the system was invented half a century ago before we could easily crunch large amounts of historical data. However, it is a big surprise that Elo has been bettered so quickly!"

An anonymous reader noted an epic battle is waging, the likes of which has not been seen since we all agreed that tab indenting for code was properly two spaces. He writes "Do you hit the space bar two times between sentences, or only one? I admit, I'm from the typewriter age that hits it twice, but the article has pretty much convinced me to change. My final concern: how will my word processor know the difference between an abbr. and the end of a sentence (so it can stretch the sentence for me)? I don't use a capital letter for certain technical words (even when they start a sentence), making it both harder to programmatically detect a new sentence and more important to do so. What does the Slashdot community think?"

eldavojohn writes "The FBI got in contact with Wikipedia's San Francisco office to inform them they were violating the law in regards to 'unauthorized production' of this seal. The FBI quoted the law as saying, 'Whoever possesses any insignia... or any colorable imitation thereof... shall be fined... or imprisoned... or both.' Wikipedia refused to take the image down and stated that the FBI was misquoting the law. The FBI claims that this production of this image is 'particularly problematic, because it facilitates both deliberate and unwitting violations of restrictions by Wikipedia users.' Wikipedia's lawyer, Mike Godwin (please omit certain jokes), contacted the FBI and asserted, 'We are compelled as a matter of law and principle to deny your demand for removal of the FBI Seal from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons,' adding that the firm was 'prepared to argue our view in court.' Wikipedia appears to be holding their ground; we shall see if the FBI comes to their senses or proceeds with litigation."

phorce phed and several other readers sent news that a system notification was sent out this evening through the Xfire IM client, to wit: "Xfire was bought by new owners today. Most of the team that has built Xfire over the last six years is leaving. We enjoyed working for you for the last 127 releases and wish we could stay to create the next 127. Good bye, good luck, and game on. — The Xfire Team." According to Wikipedia, the new owner is 3D Realms.

eldavojohn writes "As we strive closer and closer to quantum computing, physics may need to be improved. A paper released in Nature Physics suggests that the limit defined by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle can be beaten with quantum memory. From the article, 'The cadre of scientists behind the current paper realized that, by using the process of entanglement, it would be possible to essentially use two particles to figure out the complete state of one. They might even be able to measure incompatible variables like position and momentum. The measurements might not be perfectly precise, but the process could allow them to beat the limit of the uncertainty principle.' Will we find out that Heisenberg was shortsighted in limiting the power of quantum physics or will the scientists be surprised to find that such a theoretical scenario — once conducted — performs unexpectedly in Heisenberg's favor?"

Timoris writes "With the Perseids approaching rapidly, I am looking for a good beginner's motorized equatorial mount for astrophotography. I have seen a few for $150 to $200, but apparently the motor vibrations make for poor photographs. Orion makes good mounts, but are out of my price range ($350) and the motor is sold separately, adding to the price half over again. Does anyone have any good experience with any low- or mid-priced mounts?"

Twisted64 writes "If you're interested in voting below the line in the upcoming federal election in Australia, but don't want to waste time in the booth individually ranking up to 76 candidates (for the unfortunates in New South Wales), then Cameron McCormack's website may have what you need. The website allows voters to set their preferences beforehand, dragging and dropping Stephen Conroy at the bottom of the barrel and thrusting the Sex Party into pole position (as an utterly random example). Once preferences are set, the site can generate a PDF to be printed and taken to the booth." (More, below.) "There's also something to educate the above-the-line voters — if you check the box for your single party of choice, the site will fill out the effective party preferences below the line. This shows that a vote for The Climate Sceptics hands first preferences to Family First, and so on.

The website claims not to harvest voting information, but for the paranoid it recommends printing out a blank ballot sheet and copying your preferences from the screen. There is also a button to set up a donkey vote when in the ballot view, in case you have trouble counting from 1 to 100."

thecarchik writes "The Porsche 918 Spyder hybrid supercar, first shown as a concept at this spring's Geneva Motor Show, got official approval as a production model today from the company's board of directors. Just consider the specs: a 500-horsepower, 3.6-liter V-8 engine with a 9200-rpm redline, 0-to-62-mph acceleration of 3.2 seconds, and top speed of 198 miles per hour. Oh, and did we mention it gets 78 miles per gallon on the European cycle? The astounding fuel efficiency comes courtesy of an E-Drive mode that lets the 918 Spyder drive up to 16 miles on pure electric power, though [ahem] not at 198 mph."