Slashdot Mirror

Case 1
* FOX doesn't pay their taxes. "Don't worry about it" says Congress. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1999/02/ 99/e-cyclopedia/302366.stm http://www.vision.net.au/~apaterson/politics/econo mist_murdoch.htm Presidential Candidates eagerly take handouts from FOX http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070802/ap_on_el_pr/ed wards_news_corp
* Guy videos FOX's Simpson movie. Goes to Jail. http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/simpsons-filmed-on- mobile/2007/08/17/1186857730452.html

Case 2
* SONY regularly cracks the security on customer's computers. No prosecution.
* Some guy does it. 21 months jail. http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/20 05/05/va_threatkrew2.html
* Congress decide life jail for hackers would be better: http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2002/02/507 08

Case 3
* Disney Wants the law changed. Law gets changed. http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20020305_s prigman.html http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2002/02/21 /web_copyright/index.html
* What's Congress done for you lately? Health Insurance? Told their own kids to enlist?

Says Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "There is a growing trend for hacking gangs to break into innocent people's computers to spy, to steal, and to cause damage. This sentence sends out a strong message to other hackers that infecting others with Trojan horses and other malware is not acceptable." So Justice Department: You going to do anything about this, or are you corporate shills too?

This is actually explicitly legal. In an attempt to defend their lock-in business model the phone company previously tried to prohibit flashing their firmware under the DMCA. They later decided the only purpose to of this was to support a business model and hence they added it to the DMCA exception list.

DMCA on cell phones

Last week, he also said that, if the US Congress debates spy laws, "some Americans are going to die".

Here's a quote from the interview with El Paso Times:

What's this guy smoking? Or maybe it is a threat to the members of congress à la the film, Enemy of the State.

All you need is the correct sequence on the parking brake.

The mythical Honda override exists: It's a series of presses and pulls of the emergency brake. Each car, it seems, has a unique override code, which correlates to the VIN.

I'm stealing this from training I went to at LISA last year: you tell the LEO (law enforcement officer) politely, but firmly, that as company policy you're happy to help, but all such requests must be directed to the legal department.

The legal dep't will look at it and decide what to do, and then you do it. They know their job, you know yours; they don't make decisions about storage capacity or OS support, and you and I don't make decisions about constitutionality or legality. And if/when you've got the information they're looking for, you pass it back to the lawyers and they hand it over to the LEO.

This covers your ass, your company's ass, and the LEO's ass (assuming you or your friends aren't being socially engineered). Any LEO should be happy to talk to the lawyers.

Now, all that said...I realize that this leaves out questions of conscience. If Mark Klein hadn't had spilled the beans, we'd have been a lot longer finding out about this problem. But as a rule, I think those situations are rare; most law enforcement stuff is <handwave>your garden variety stuff -- robbery, fraud, yadda yadda</handwave> (sorry, no citation to back that up) -- and the odds of being involved in something truly offensive is pretty slim. I hope it stays that way.

Once you go pro you get in government and censer your opposition. case in point the censorship of dissenting opinions about global warming

Right, 'cause that's exactly what happens.

Oh, wait, you're just plain fucking wrong.

Thanks for playing, though. Now you can go back to pretending that the ideas of pop novelists and oil-company funded thinktanks somehow represent reality.

Manhunt 2 Meltdown Shows Game-Killing Power of Adults-Only Rating

Looking for Hitler=bad, you found money=bad instead, but too late: pwnt, you are.

DARPA issues a 2 million $ challenge to build a driverless car.
A brilliant engineer built such a car, that was able to navigate in complex environments at high speeds by predicting the size, shape and behavior of surroundings on its path through simulation, according to the behavior of similar environment and path structures it has already passed. This causes the car to actually gain speed and statistical confidence in its own upcoming actions simply by acquiring enough experience of driving in similar environment.
Same kind of algorithm can of course be applied to any machine that is expected to operate for a long time in a complex semi-predictable environment - such as forex trading, poker, or a battlefield
This is the story on Wired

I would like to talk you into doing something that will involve a lot of work on your part," he says. He pauses and stares intently at me before explaining that he feels he has been discriminated against because he's a computer geek. He wants me to investigate his custody fight and, among other things, validate his belief that violent videogames are not bad for kids. I agree to look into it and obtain a sheaf of custody filings from the case. I pore through the pages and discover that the issue of videogame violence has taken up a lot of his time over the past few years.

At the end of 2004, as the divorce and custody proceedings get under way, Nina asks Reiser to stop playing violent videogames like Battlefield Vietnam with young Rory. In that game, napalm explosions envelop villages in fire, bodies are hurled through the air, and, when shot, characters collapse to the ground and choke on their own blood, realistic sound effects included. "Hans has a deeply held unreasonable belief that it is good to show children, no matter how young, violent videos and movies," Nina writes to the court. She wants him to stop.

For Reiser, this is not about videogames; it's about life and death. "Little boys take to violent computer games like monkeys take to trees," he says in a court filing. "[They] do not have instincts that favor combat rehearsal activities for no reason, they have them because they affect whether they live or die a significant amount of the time." Violent videogames are an ideal way to hone these survival skills, for several reasons, he says. A kid is clearly not going to become battle-hardened in the quiet, idyllic neighborhoods of the Oakland hills. Reiser believes that history -- in, for instance, an Electronic Arts videogame set in Vietnam -- is the best teacher, though he is quick to point out that the learning process will not necessarily be easy. "Becoming a man normally is psychologically traumatic for boys," he says. What matters most, he says, is that the exercise "allows him to achieve results in defending family and country."

Rory has nightmares. When he's awake, he spends time drawing monsters and soldiers, and he tells his mother that he and his father have a secret. Nina thinks that Reiser is still playing videogames with their son and worries that Rory is developing a condition called sensory integration dysfunction, which can make the smallest sound or touch overwhelming.

• Global warming vs climate change
• The adequacy of our current lines of embryonic stem cells
• The effectiveness (or lack thereof) of abstinence only sex education
• Mercury emissions
• Baby Einstein
• Reproductive health issues
• the list goes on but these are off the top of my head...

As I understood, one of the entertainment "industry" proposals was to watermark everything then convince or require by law that consumer electronic manufacturers put watermark detection into their hardware. Such hardware wouldn't copy or play "unauthorized" watermarks. In fact, wasn't this put into the SSSCA?

Actually such a system seems to be in place for banknotes and photoshop... I also heard some printer drivers do this. Seems to require lots more CPU time as one would expect. Here are some interesting articles: Adobe anti-counterfeiting code trips up kosher users. Currency Detector Easy to Defeat.

Yep, it's been used over here, and runs on Linux live CDs. http://www.softimp.com.au/evacs/index.html

There's a Wired article here: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2003/11/61 045

He threw a huge hissy fit.

They were really, really ticked! Here's a snippet from Wired News, it's from late '04 when this whole thing was going down: (FTA @ Public Fiber Tough to Swallow):

...

Kutztown Borough manager James Vettraino said his town's fiber-access project is on schedule to break even after seven years. Vettraino said there are currently 600 customers using data, video and voice services in the community.

"We wanted to have broadband throughout the community as an economic development tool for businesses, and we were not happy with the availability (at the time)," he said.

Vettraino said the incumbent cable TV provider, Service Electric, voiced opposition to the project at several town hall meetings. He said the cable provider also dropped prices to be more competitive in Kutztown while not changing rates in areas where it continues to have a monopoly.

Kutztown was the first community in Pennsylvania to offer fiber to the home for its residents, and a bill in the Pennsylvania House could make it the last. The aim of the Government Competition Against Private Enterprise Act (HB298) is to "protect economic opportunities for private enterprise against unfair competition by government agencies" in services "beyond their government function."

The bill, which was drafted a few months after Kutztown began providing fiber to the home, is a direct result of the threat of competition to cable TV and telecommunications providers, according to Nicholas Giordano, a telecommunications strategist at consulting firm Affinity Group.

Giordano, who previously worked for Pennsylvania's telecommunications department, said that data and video services providers have made it known to state legislators that they do not want to battle with municipalities for market share.

"It shows how threatened they are by that activity (in Kutztown)," he said.

Giordano said small municipalities might encounter difficulties in delivering fiber-based services because "they aren't familiar with managing these kinds of information systems." But he believes communities that are not receiving adequate broadband and cable service from the private sector should be able to fill the void themselves.

"Bandwidth is a necessity for the public good like water or electricity," he said. "You are not going to get a creative society (which) will be the engine of job growth in places where they can't have access to information."

I find that most people who reject number plate tracking, CCTV cameras, automatic logging and vehicle license MOT test (legal UK vehicle check to ensure it is road worthy) and the like generally have something to hide.

http://www.wired.com/print/politics/onlinerights/n ews/2007/08/wiki_tracker

On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.

In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.

Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of CalTech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

Inspired by news last year that Congress members' offices had been editing their own entries, Griffith says he got curious, and wanted to know whether big companies and other organizations were doing things in a similarly self-interested vein.

"Everything's better if you do it on a huge scale, and automate it," he says with a grin.

This database is possible thanks to a combination of Wikipedia policies and (mostly) publicly available information.

The online encyclopedia allows anyone to make edits, but keeps detailed logs of all these changes. Users who are logged in are tracked only by their user name, but anonymous changes leave a public record of their IP address.

Share Your Sleuthing!

Cornered any companies polishing up their Wikipedia entries? Spotted any government spooks rewriting history? Try Virgil Griffith's Wikipedia Scanner yourself, then submit your finds and vote on other readers' discoveries here.

The organization also allows downloads of the complete Wikipedia, including records of all these changes.

Griffith thus downloaded the entire encyclopedia, isolating the XML-based records of anonymous changes and IP addresses. He then correlated those IP addresses with public net-address lookup services such as ARIN, as well as private domain-name data provided by IP2Location.com.

The result: A database of 5.3 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization's net address has made.

Some of this appears to be transparently self-interested, either adding positive, press release-like material to entries, or deleting whole swaths of critical material.

Voting-machine company Diebold provides a good example of the latter, with someone at the company's IP address apparently deleting long paragraphs detailing the security industry's concerns over the integrity of their voting machines, and information about the company's CEO's fund-raising for President George Bush.

The text, deleted in November 2005, was quickly restored by another Wikipedia contributor, who advised the anonymous editor, "Please stop removing content from Wikipedia. It is considered vandalism."

A Diebold Election Systems spokesman said he'd look into the matter but could not comment by press time.

Wal-Mart has a series of relatively small changes in 2005 that that burnish the company's image on its own entry while often leaving criticism in, changing a line that its wages are less than other retail stores to a note that it pays nearly double the minimum wage, for example. Another leaves activ

The solution to this is of course making many copies of your RFID identity and getting many people to carry it, as well as sticking it to random vehicles, birds and even insects. Let them try to track you, when you are in a few hundred different places at the same time, exchange them over the Internet and you could be in a few thousand places at the same time, subvert the system. Would confuse the hell out of RFID detectors, when according to the detector a thousand people just walked past it at the same time, add to this jamming tags would likely become very popular http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2004/03/62 468.

You could have been polite and come back with a reasonable response, agreeing that money is corrupting both sides but you have issues with the source, and that'd be just fine.

I don't think the money is corrupting both sides. Read what I wrote. There's a big difference between getting supervised government grant money to spend on research and getting completely unsupervised personal checks from the oil companies to spend on Ferraris.

Just having a steady job is enough to make most people compromise their principles.

Oh, for god's sake. So now, anybody who's employed can't be trusted?

Paranoid much?

And to top it all off, how often do men like Spencer and Christy get the kind of exposure that Newsweek gives to the alarmists?

All the damn time! You can't hardly turn on the TV without seeing something like "The Great Global Warming Swindle", which Christy appeared in. On the other hand, who can you think of, off the top of your head, who's actually come out supporting the scientific consensus on global warming?

Al Gore, pretty much. I can't think of a single actual scientist who's gained any notoriety as a result of this. That's because the legitimate climatology community leads with evidence, not with credentials and personalities.

I wonder what kind of car Richard Lindzen or Patrick Michaels drives?

Sen. Inhofe, who you linked to, has received more than $650,000 from ExxonMobil alone. Denialist Steve Milloy runs two organizations that each have received more than $40,000 from ExxonMobil. As for Lindzen and Michaels, I imagine they're both making out handsomely from their royalties from the "Global Warming Swindle" show. Anyway, if Lindzen doesn't drive a Ferrari, it's not for being unable to afford one - he was making more than $2,500 a day in the 90's to shill for the oil and coal industries.

Pat Michaels was the personal beneficiary of more than $150,000 from Colorado energy companies last summer. I'm not really a car guy - does $150,000 buy a Ferarri?

Are you ignoring recent comments that Shuttleworth made saying he wouldn't rule out working with MS? He might not play patent ball, but don't be shocked if some other deal comes up eventually. http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/06/mark_shu ttlewor.html

Wired had a great photo gallery of factories and assembly lines in China.

And here is a write-up about someone from Chumby Industries visiting Shenzhen to get their production line up-to-date. It's more about the area than anything about the factory.

Interesting related side bars:

Deep Packet Inspection and Net Neutrality
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/26/16 8202&from=rss
The AT&T Whistleblower's Evidence
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/18/16 26248
newbies Guide to Detecting the NSA
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2006/06/the_newbi es_gui.html?entry_id=1510938
NarusInsight Secure Suite
http://narus.com/products/index.html
NarusInsight Secure Suite (NSS) enables carriers and service providers to detect any network attack, abuse or behavioral anomaly in real time and at core speeds, and then direct a variety of actions: to raise an alarm, send an SNMP trap, or even mitigate the attack. Traditional edge-based security solutions are insufficient for Next Generation Networks and IMS because of their limited visibility into network traffic and elements. They are aware only of partial information of traffic flowing through the single link of the network they are attached or listening to, and their basic statistical algorithms are able to detect attacks only at their last stage, for example large changes in the volume of traffic.

If you have 52 pages of what appears to be "garbage" data, I can promise you that the garbage is only filtered. They know the complete URL, what time you started loading it, the name, type and size of image you loaded from the page, how long it took to transfer, the bandwidtth you used to transfer it, etc, etc.
It is only "garbage data" on your bill.

The Internet provides the pack leaders with an unprecedented level of identifying and controlling dissenters. We need heretics more than ever. As soon as people can no longer speak out against other beliefs, the social system fails by going to extremes and there are no good extremes, as for every winner there are losers. Create too many losers and you head towards civil unrest and even wars.

Not really sure where you get the idea that the IntarWeb promotes conformity - everything I've seen and read indicates a strong tendency towards the reverse. Variations include long tail economics, the rise of the amateur blog and "crowd-sourcing" and the Internet favorite, the the time cube.

Although heresy is important, I'd suggest that the Internet brings its own negative phenomenon - the most incredibly low signal-to-noise ratio communications medium ever conceived of in human history. Perhaps 95% of the content on the Internet is worthless even to its author, and the remaining 5% is often heavily guarded and unaccessible.

Case in point that's a bit closer to home? Simply browse Slashdot at -1...

Apart form the problems of actually using hydrogen in an engine

There is also the problems involved with storing the fuel

What are the "semantics" here? Is this like google images, where the nearby HTML text determines the classification of the image [i.e ASCII-text as meta-data for images]?

No. The matches are done in a purely data-driven manner, meaning by analyzing lots of images and guessing matches. Meta-data appears not to have been used.

Or is this a great big neural net of wavelet data which classifies the images mathematically?

Probably a lot closer to the truth.

Another paragraph gives a clue to how they're using the term (which could have been better chosen, I agree):

When our algorithm is successsful, the completion is semantically valid, although there might be slight low-level artifacts such as resolution mismatch, blurring from Poisson blending, or fine-scale texture differences between the image and the inserted patch.

As I read that, what they're saying is that they are pretty good at finding a piece that makes sense to fill in the hole (ie, semantically valid). However, he's conceding the fact that the low-level image statistics would still give away the fact that the patch was made - probably in reference to techniques such as the guy at BlackHat who discovered that Al Quaeda doctors their images/videos, using such low-level image statistics to prove it. http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/08/researche rs-ana.html

Except we have different predators now -- nanotech particles,
    "Office printers 'are health risk'"
      http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6923 915.stm
**AA and "Trusted Computing",
    http://www.lafkon.net/tc/
bureaucracies which use robots with guns,
    "First Armed Robots on Patrol in Iraq"
    http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/08/httpwwwnatio nal.html
Fox News, compulsory schooling,
    "The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
    http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
and so on. Think of modern day humans like early small mammals and big multinational corporations as dinosarus made up of eating such small mammals.

A sabertooth tiger seems much more manageable by comparison, doesn't it? Especially when approached by a village of people.

I don't think life expectancy past age five was all that different (that brings down the "average" even if most people past age five lived into their fifties or sixties). Many of us now just get an extra decade or two of frailness and senility tacked on the end, part of it bedbound in a nursing home.

Nice quote at the end. Personally, we can't go back and still have big populations, and people get used to the new toys. But I am responding so much on this thread because without understanding where people have been, I think it is harder to see what we want to get out of technology to bring us full circle back to the leisure and meaning and relative freedom which many people had many thousands of years ago. Likely, so much of what it used to mean to be human (and part of a village or tribe) has been forgotten and propagandized -- some for the good, but also some for the bad.

Funny thing, your second link to "cell phone encryption" lead to this Wired article which documents a flaw in the encryption used, thereby rendering most of it useless for current "secure phones".

Yes, but what happened after that? Are they doing anything with them like releasing better quality to the public? I remember Wired (good read) mentioned this.

here's real photos of the mole
photo 1
photo 2

Note to NBC: if you're gonna send a mole to a hacker's convention, try to pick someone other than the fairly attractive 20-something slim blonde.

Maybe you should have sent in one of those predators from To Catch A Predator? They all could pass for hackers.

here's real photos of the mole
photo 1
photo 2

Note to NBC: if you're gonna send a mole to a hacker's convention, try to pick someone other than the fairly attractive 20-something slim blonde.

Maybe you should have sent in one of those predators from To Catch A Predator? They all could pass for hackers.

LOL! You mean.. you mean to tell me that that was going to pass as a DefCon hacker? That is just a great end to my Friday.

The only thing surprising here was that they had to be tipped off.

http://blog.wired.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/08 /03/dateline_mole.jpg - she's cute.

From TFA:

WN: Would you say you're on a mission(ary position)?

McKellar: Yes. Absolutely.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/15-08/st_ infoporn

Cool Pixel graph that says:
37% Other
18% Transportation
16% Shelter
13% Food
5% Tech
4% Apparel
3% Health Ins
3% Entertainment
1% Prescriptions

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/forensics/

Or maybe he did. Your google-fu is weak.

You don't need people to detect camcorders. Technologies like PirateEye detect camera lenses and find people who are recording in theaters.

Wired had a full article on this months ago:
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2004 /11/65683

The Smart Cow Problem describes the method by which a group of individuals, faced with a technically difficult task, only requires one of their number to solve the problem. Having been solved once, an easily repeatable method may be developed, allowing non-technically proficient entities to accomplish the task. The term Smart Cow Problem is thought to be derived from the expression: "It only takes one smart cow to open the latch of the gate, and then all the other cows follow." [1]

This has recently been applied to Digital Rights Management (DRM), where, due to the rapid spread of information on the internet, it only takes one individual to defeat a DRM scheme to render the method obsolete. [2]

      1. ^ http://www.wired.com/news/business/1,60901-0.html Buck a Song, or Buccaneer? , retrieved 2007-02-13
      2. ^ http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,67556,00 .html Give Your DVD Player the Finger, retrieved 2007-02-13

The Smart Cow Problem describes the method by which a group of individuals, faced with a technically difficult task, only requires one of their number to solve the problem. Having been solved once, an easily repeatable method may be developed, allowing non-technically proficient entities to accomplish the task. The term Smart Cow Problem is thought to be derived from the expression: "It only takes one smart cow to open the latch of the gate, and then all the other cows follow." [1]

This has recently been applied to Digital Rights Management (DRM), where, due to the rapid spread of information on the internet, it only takes one individual to defeat a DRM scheme to render the method obsolete. [2]

      1. ^ http://www.wired.com/news/business/1,60901-0.html Buck a Song, or Buccaneer? , retrieved 2007-02-13
      2. ^ http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,67556,00 .html Give Your DVD Player the Finger, retrieved 2007-02-13

This is the third time Slashdot has featured a story on CIPAV, and not one of them has been as thorough as the original story broken by Kevin Poulsen at Wired News. http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2007/07/fbi _spyware?currentPage=all Declan McCullagh at News.com simply re-wrote Poulsen's story and introduced errors (slashdotting #1). Heise doesn't write original content (slashdot #2, a clear dupe) and this Computer World article (slashdot #3) looks like a later version of this: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/07/fbi-spywa re-how.html.

How about some Slashdot love for the reporter who broke the story?

This is the third time Slashdot has featured a story on CIPAV, and not one of them has been as thorough as the original story broken by Kevin Poulsen at Wired News. http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2007/07/fbi _spyware?currentPage=all Declan McCullagh at News.com simply re-wrote Poulsen's story and introduced errors (slashdotting #1). Heise doesn't write original content (slashdot #2, a clear dupe) and this Computer World article (slashdot #3) looks like a later version of this: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/07/fbi-spywa re-how.html.

How about some Slashdot love for the reporter who broke the story?

A few years ago there were reports of far more advanced methods of dealing with cam pirates.

They apparently can encode info such as theatre location into audio watermarks, photograph relevant areas/people where characteristic reflections from lenses focused towards the screen are detected, and degrade recordings through light pulses that are not (very?) noticeable to viewers.

Camera image sensors generally are sensitive to IR, but have it blocked by filtering (which likely would increase reflections in that spectrum). Some have modified webcams for IR use by removing internal filtering. Ironically exposed film apparently works as a filter to pass IR while blocking the visible spectrum pretty well. The link includes a graph indicating that the sensors in cameras, before filtering is added, are actually more sensitive to IR than the visible spectrum.

Taking a camcorder into a theatre is a bad idea. It's too bad we've got people being searched, and apparently photographed too. Seems like there's no privacy anywhere. It reminds me of that PC virus that turned on peoples webcams without them knowing it. Kinda makes one laugh and then groan.

Probably polygenesis, not plagiarism.

If you want, you can read more about this here on wired:

Wired magazine article

But grad school is often all about things like this. Never mind that it would take 8000 years to recoup the initial investment, IT IS CLEVER (sort of).

I know Nokia is Finnish. I believe you brought up Asia at some point and I was responding to that. India does in fact have Apple retailers my mistake but several tariffs make the products ridiculously expensive. Here's the article I was referencing: "iPod Gray Market Booms in India" http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/news/2006/08/7163 9

Also here is the NYTimes article about asian manufacturers being worried about the iPhone: "Rival Manufacturers Chase the iPhone: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/technology/02cel lphone.html?ex=1185940800&en=692ba75438328700&ei=5 070

If you can't log in I'll just C&P the entire article for you here:

Rival Manufacturers Chasing the iPhone

By MARTIN FACKLER
SEOUL, South Korea, June 29 -- While Americans have been blitzed with news about the iPhone's debut, many in South Korea's and Japan's technology industries initially greeted Apple's flashy new handset with yawns.

Cellphones in these technology-saturated countries can already play digital songs and video games and receive satellite television. But now that analysts and industry executives are getting their first good look at the iPhone, many here are concerned that Asian manufacturers may have underestimated the Apple threat.

Analysts and executives in South Korea say that the iPhone, with its full-scale Internet browser and distinctive touch screen with colorful icons, is more than just another souped-up cellphone. They fear this Silicon Valley challenger could leap past Asian makers into the age of digital convergence by combining personal computing and mobile technologies as no device has before.

"Apple's impact will be bigger than Asian handset makers think," said Kim Yoon-ho, an analyst in Seoul at Prudential Securities. "The iPhone is different from previous mobile phones. It is the prototype of the future of mobile phones."

The fear now is that Apple may repeat in wireless communications what it accomplished in portable music with the iPod: changing the industry. And just as when the iPod came out six years ago, big Asian manufacturers like Samsung Electronics and Sony could find themselves wondering what hit them, say analysts and industry executives.

Here in South Korea, manufacturers are taking the threat seriously, and are rushing out their own iPhone-like handsets. By the end of the year, Samsung, South Korea's biggest cellphone maker, will unveil its Ultra Smart F700, with a large touch-controlled screen displaying rows of icons, much as the iPhone does.

LG Electronics, another large Korean handset maker, has begun selling a smartphone in Italy that can view full-size Web pages. Pantech, which sells most of its phones in the United States under the carriers' brand names, will also unveil its first touch-screen smartphone this fall.

Sony Ericsson plans this fall to introduce its latest Walkman phone, the W960i, which will feature a touch screen and memory space for 8,000 songs. Nokia of Finland, whose N95 is probably the closest competitor to the iPhone in the United States, said it also plans a touch-screen cellphone called the Aeon, though the company has not said when it will go on sale.

Motorola, based in Schaumburg, Ill., plans to sell this summer the Razr 2, the successor to its once-popular Razr upgraded with a Linux operating system and full-scale Web browser.

"If the iPhone changes the rules in the cellphone market, then we have to adapt as soon as possible," said Yi Seung-soo, a cellphone designer at Pantech. "We can take advantage of being a follower," he said.

It's the same method Korean manufacturers have used before -- quickly developing similar products that are cheaper but which contain a few more features than Apple, he said. That strategy has not diminishe

I think it was a article by Edward Tufte that decried the use of PowerPoint in education. Instead of having to write 500 word essays, kids write presentations that only end up having maybe 100 words, and instead of real content, lots of "junk".

PowerPoint Is Evil Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html

Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides -a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work.

I know that when I was working on a group project in my MBA program my group about came unglued when I suggest we do a "forum" for our presentation and totally abandon a PPT presentation. They liked the forum idea as it worked well with our project but a couple of them really struggled with the idea of not having a PowerPoint.

Now, where I work... it's ALL PowerPoint, even my boss, who is otherwise pretty brilliant, is enamored with them and feels he cannot give a presentation without a PowerPoint "deck".

I personally think less PowerPoint (or PPT-like) work in schools is probably a good idea.

Haha- so this is the sort of article that I miss when I sleep? Anyway, I have collected some links that somebody might find useful to go start some more research. Maybe setup a basement lab or something.

-- General
* Irazoqui's neurotransceiver [pdf] [2003] The problem with Irazoqui's device is that it is maybe 1% power efficient, so maybe some electronicists can come around and make some suggestions to improve the coil design and so on. He did his testing on rats, not humans.
* Direct brain interface bibliography from the University of Michigan
* Gleamed from an article below: wireless visual cortex implant publications
-- EEG
* Controlling computers with EEG signals
* EEG via soundcard from OpenEEG
* Wireless EEG
-- Slashdot goodness
* Scientists couple nerve tissue with semiconductors
* Post re: neurosilicon junction with PDF
* Thinkware
* Good post w/ links on neurocomputation
* Brain slice experiments
* Neuroscientists at MIT doing direct neural interfaces- but this post sets things into perpsective as well as this one
* Single neuron recordings w/ ref
* Sorry to dash your hopes, but ...
* Autonomously adjusting electrodes? and more
* Artificial hippocampus and stimulating neuron growth / neurogenesis ... with Prozac?
* Implant a chip inside your head- though it does not discuss the specific surgery skills you would need
* Working nerve chip of silicon and snail neurons
* Re: Kevin Warwick- interview- the so-called "Captain Cyborg" since '98 or something
* BrainPort
* Fusing neurons with computers
-- More
* Artificial vision
* The vision quest
*

On Day 3, it realized it did not have a nuclear weapons or robots...

Poker bots have been deployed at major online poker sites for years now. There was media coverage of this trend back in 2004 and 2005. The real issue is that the online poker sites have to ensure they aren't American poker bots, lest they run afoul of Bush administration policy.

Hmm, I need some help with this one, since my networking kungfu sucks... When I login to Gmail, I am in a https mode, and this persists through my whole session. I was under the impression, perhaps naively, that this meant my session to Gmail was encrypted and that only I and the Gmail server could decipher the contents of my mail, that is until I click send, and it goes from the Gmail server to wherever I send to. So if this is true, how would someone be able to reassemble my email as I type?

What about before your email gets to Google? Carnivore/Eschelon doesn't care where the email is sent from, it will see it when it goes through AT&T's secret rooms. Use gpg if you actually care about secure email.