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Really, if you're going for hacker, the invitation shouldn't just do something. Recipients should be able to do something with the invitation. Check out the Defcon Ninja Party invitations:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/defcon-ninja-badge/

They were destroyed by a former WikiLeaks employee who left with them, then destroyed the key. Yes, somehow there wasn't a backup of the documents or key (or at least one of the two).

I'm not sure how much we can trust Domscheit-Berg and OpenLeaks. Check their News page (latest 26 Jan 2011, SSL cert expired months ago), Identi.ca (5 months ago), Blog (29 Jan 2011, quote: "Right now we are working on extending our infrastructure and setting it up for testing with our alpha users group. The 1.430 Euro we received as donations in December and January will help us to do so. We will spend this money to help cover infrastructure costs e.g. SSL certificates").

Also Thompson-Reuters isn't a terrific source when it comes to 'piracy'/'hacking' stories so here's an alternative to the rawstory.com link:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/tag/daniel-domscheit-berg/

If you take good care of The Cartel, they take good care of you.

what EVIDENCE do you have of Apple ever enforcing those rules. trivial for them to block or otherwise disable, but they NEVER have. Apple's never tried to "prosecute" me for re-selling "their" devices when I was upgrading.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/feds-ok-iphone-jailbreaking/
"Federal regulators lifted a cloud of uncertainty when they announced it was lawful to hack or “jailbreak” an iPhone, declaring Monday there was “no basis for copyright law to assist Apple in protecting its restrictive business model.”

meanwhile....
http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/18/motorola-locks-razr-bootloader-angers-rom-happy-lovers-of-anore/

Completely off topic... but....

$300k in damages is at least in the realm of head-not-exploding for 100,000 tracks.

The head-exploding happens when they get someone $675k in damages for 30 tracks.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/category/riaa-litigation/

Bleh..

I could have sworn that, in previous cases (not involving a US Senator), people were told that, if the scan found something odd, you could either accept the pat-down or be arrested...I wonder what would happen if a non-Congressfolk tried doing exactly what Rand Paul did. Would they be arrested for refusing the pat down? Would they be kicked out of the airport with a police escort?

You can stop wondering:
Alaska State Legislature member refuses pat-down.
John "Don't touch my junk!" Tyner refuses pat-down.
56-year old rape victim refuses pat-down.

YMMV. IIRC, TSA dropped charges against Tyner, but I don't believe the woman in Austin, TX was quite as lucky. To date, there are no politicians who have refused to allow themselves to be molested, excuse me, I mean "groped", err..."searched"...by TSA who have even had charges filed against them, much less who have actually been prosecuted. I guess the quote is true: "You know the score, Deckard. If you ain't cop, you're little people."

No it wasn't. It was 9-0 decision. There were two opinions handed down which was the split --- Alito wrote the second and was joined by Ginsberg, Beyer, and Kagan. Alito wanted to go further and say that the length of time required a second, separate warrant to cover it.

See Wired's coverage for more details.

The last I heard, the Iranians claimed to have hijacked the GPS and told it to land within their borders, and the U.S. claimed it veered off-course and crashed

I heard that also.

Something close to that explanation seems feasible, based on what I've read. Perhaps they managed to jam the control signal, but had a hard time calculating GPS interference to correctly guide the aircraft. (Maybe they learned what channels to jam using intel based on a nuisance virus?) I don't have access to the protocols that govern autonomous drone control in the event of communication failure, so I don't know. There may be some poor Iranian geek explaining to the head chopper in charge why he shot off his mouth to the press, or maybe press reports are innacurate.

I think, based on the Iranian propaganda the BBC reported, which hid the landing gear behind bunting, the drone landed hard at best, and most likely crashed. Iran has falsified images previously.

Either way, we need to get better at this stuff or terrorists win.

When CP was flagged the file is removed because CP is always CP.

That's not true. The age of consent is massively different between countries. What's CP in the US (18) is perfectly legal in Spain (13). I point this out because the US has most definitely prosecuted 16/17 year-olds for CP, for distributing nude pictures of themselves.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/01/kids/

The wired.com article has this choice quote
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/01/scada-exploits/

"I didn't want a vendor to jump out in front of the announcement with a PR campaign to convince customers that it wasn't an issue they should be concerned with," Wightman said.

I can't imagine the type of two faced dickery it would take to spin weaponized exploits as something not to be concerned with.

Best case, she improves the reliability or security of the code.

What makes you think anything she can do will improve the security of the code?
How many times have we seen software makers just sit on bugs for months or years before someone publicly shames them into fixing it, usually by releasing exploit code??

Someone just released a pile of metasploit plugins for SCADA systems.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/01/scada-exploits/

Wightman and Peterson said they wanted to avoid the kind of situation that Beresford ran into last year when Siemens issued statements to customers downplaying the vulnerabilities he'd found and then swooped in at the last minute before his scheduled presentation to persuade him to cancel it until the company had more time to prepare patches.

"I didn't want a vendor to jump out in front of the announcement with a PR campaign to convince customers that it wasn't an issue they should be concerned with," Wightman said.

Peterson added that "a large percentage of the vulnerabilities" the researchers found were basic vulnerabilities that were already known to the vendors, and that the vendors had simply "chosen to live with" them rather than do anything to fix them..

What good would it do to inspect the code under and NDA?

A "trap" as in going from http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/01/social-radar-sees-minds/ - been watched
to been a COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) like trap - 'lets download tools and ..."
or http://cryptome.org/0006/anonymous-wabc.htm
http://cryptome.org/0006/anonymous-mused.htm

Total Recall time!

http://www.wired.com/geekdad/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/total_recall_skeleton-scanner.jpg

Now they are taking away things already in the public domain?? Your legal system is as hilarious to watch as your government. Put the two together and it is just comedy gold.

Just out of curiosity, were they in the public domain in your country? If you read the fine article, you'll note that it says

For a variety of reasons, the works at issue, which are foreign and produced decades ago, became part of the public domain in the United States but were still copyrighted overseas. In 1994, Congress adopted legislation to move the works back into copyright, so U.S. policy would comport with an international copyright treaty known as the Berne Convention.

Read this:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/01/sopa-piracy-costs/

I haven't read the opinion, but generally speaking, my understanding is that international treaties signed by the US are on the same legal level as the Constitution.

This understanding is incorrect. Its a reasonably common misapplication of Art. VI, para 2: "This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding."

This doesn't mean that treaties (or federal statute law) is on the "same legal level" as the Constitution, it means that the Constitution itself, and any treaties or laws ratified or adopted under it, are superior to acts of state government.

The rationale in the decision in this case is basically that the Copyright Clause has no language in it which prohibits retrospective application of the exclusive rights Congress is authorized to grant under that Clause, and that, there is a long history of Congress creating copyright in existing works which were in the public domain, the whole way back to the first copyright law under the Constitution, the Copyright Act of 1790.

Each ad is NOT screened before it is whitelisted. The ad companies on the whitelist simply have an agreement with the Adblock Plus author to follow certain guidelines.

I'm sure the New York Times had a "do not infect our users" agreement in place, too...

Coca farmers in Columbia have done the same thing with their plants in an even more primitive way.

...the the fast approaching 15th Anniversary of Apple's bankruptcy bailout by Microsoft wasn't listed anywhere.

With Directed Energy Sea Mammals —even if thef Orbiting Pelican Relay Mirror (OPRM) is no longer needed to whack Osama.

The appeals courts aren't necessarily always staffed by judges that are neutral

oh yeah, Judge Jackson sure was neutral, wasn't he?

There is a real demand for an alternative platform... we think we can do that effectively because of characteristics of Ubuntu as a platform, industry dynamics, and an increased wariness around the walled gardens of Apple and to some extent Google and even Amazon, as they are increasingly in this game as well. [emphasis mine]

Oh please. I have a fondness for Linux as much as the next average Slashdotter but if the last 15 years of "X will be the year of Linux on the desktop!" has shown us, the world at large does not care about privacy, security, data robustness, or the consequences walled gardens. You buy something, you use it, and hope all goes well. If you lose your data for any reason, you rebuild.

People are already used to the possibility of losing real-life items to theft, loss, or damage, so if a picture collection or list of contacts disappears because a company went under or changed their TOS or didn't have good backups, people deal with it an move on. Is there a better way? With data, yes, there usually is. Do people care that much? No. (People have moved away from DRM a tiny bit, but that has more to do with Apple's and Amazon's music services being naturally popular than the Microsoft's "PlaysForSure" debacle.)

I'm guessing that 2012 in tablets will look a lot like 2011 did, with the one difference being the Kindle Fire. The price and prominence of that device will move a lot of units, but I'm predicting that on December 31, 2012, the market will be 60-70% iPad, 20-25% Kindle, and 10-15% everyone else combined. (Though I'm not sure how to count Windows 8 if it starts shipping on a large number of touch-based tablets that are 95% similar to the current crop of Windows-based, stylus-using tablets. I'm mainly thinking of a "tablet" as "a touch-based device that doesn't ship with a keyboard, and functions 100% as designed without one.")

The Room 641A wiretapping (recall the AT&T San Francisco office and internet traffic been split to the NSA?) went to court, with paper work and the US gov had to offer retroactive immunity to make it all go away in July 2008.
Then the US gov had to use its state secrets privilege.
In Dec 2011 the case came back http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/dragnet-surveillance-case/
All we know is every packet from Asia and within the US that fed a west coast telco office where split and collected.
The collection point was not near the landing of the Asia link, the split was at point where US domestic and the Asia link could be split. The idea that your US or international cell phone data/voice/VOIP would be left out seems rather strange...

This is a distraction to get media focus back on Twitter because of the Google search plus announcement. Honestly Twitter shows me the Fail Whale about once a week and their service record is poor for such a large site - so what will they be complaining about next?

Google has been amassing tons of data and is now planning to use that to have personalized search - that is the story. I don't see how they will get around the filter bubble issue. (Never mind personal data protection and other issues.)

As a side I am still trying to wrap my head around Wolfram's blog today about using a TLD .data in relation to the Google announcement.

Bad day for the internet?

I am surprised it didn't hit Twitfail

Is it? What ever happened to that process Sandia was researching for converting CO2 and Water to Syngas using solar concentrators?

You could run Netflix quite comfortably on 1/100th of that!

That's 500 megabytes per second, or roughly 4x the bandwidth of a GigE connection! Sounds to me like they're doing something seriously wrong, even if you assume they're receiving multiple hi-res live video streams simultaneously from the drones. Maybe the video isn't compressed at all?

Compressed? The video feeds weren't even encrypted at one point.

I've read about similar results from fecal transplants to replace colon flora. If I understand it correctly, there are actually doctors that will "reset" your colon flora by giving you a high dose of antibiotics and then basically stick someone else's poop up your butt. I'm sure it's more scientific than that, but it supposedly repopulates your colon with different flora and the people that have undergone the procedure swear it made them lose weight or recover from other problems, etc.

Wired wrote about it too, but I haven't read that specific article yet: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/12/fecal-transplants-work/

Tiny kamikaze drones!

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/tiny-kamikaze-drone/

Yeah, Wired, what gives?

(Hint: the summary is a direct quote from the enterprise-y TFA.)

http://helenathegreat.hubpages.com/hub/Prius

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2008/05/the-ultimate-pr/

http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/16-06/ff_heresies_09usedcars

That's because each Prius consumes the equivalent of 1,000 gallons of fuel before its odometer clicks to 1.

The referenced article expands on my point about the environmental cost in the article and referenced study the article is based on. You will note that I am not anti-hybrid. It is technology that I have followed out of interest since I first heard about it's use some 20 years ago in the large dump trucks that are used in strip mines.

My point is that you need to consider your usage scenario. For most people they are going to better benefit themselves and the environment by buying a very efficient gas or diesel car. For certain people the hybrid is the better car, but for most it is nothing more than the green dick equivalent of driving a Hummer.

My secondary point is that people are letting politics try to dictate science and that is wrong. Science should always be free of politics. I'm not trolling, I drive a low emission vehicle and have driven small cars for years before it was the politically correct thing to do.

http://helenathegreat.hubpages.com/hub/Prius

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2008/05/the-ultimate-pr/

http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/16-06/ff_heresies_09usedcars

That's because each Prius consumes the equivalent of 1,000 gallons of fuel before its odometer clicks to 1.

The referenced article expands on my point about the environmental cost in the article and referenced study the article is based on. You will note that I am not anti-hybrid. It is technology that I have followed out of interest since I first heard about it's use some 20 years ago in the large dump trucks that are used in strip mines.

My point is that you need to consider your usage scenario. For most people they are going to better benefit themselves and the environment by buying a very efficient gas or diesel car. For certain people the hybrid is the better car, but for most it is nothing more than the green dick equivalent of driving a Hummer.

My secondary point is that people are letting politics try to dictate science and that is wrong. Science should always be free of politics. I'm not trolling, I drive a low emission vehicle and have driven small cars for years before it was the politically correct thing to do.

I think he hasn't read anything automotive since 1965. There have been leaps and bounds in efficiency increases but we haven't seen the impressive MPG increase that would be expected as cars have gotten heavier and larger. Just the other day I saw an article stating that from 1980 to today there have been impressive gains in engine efficiency and if our entire automotive fleet were to be the same sized vehicles as in 1980 with modern engines the US average MPG would be about 37MPG.

Yeah, okay, that was a cheap shot. But I couldn't resist. And while the U.S. is certainly no Iran when it comes to repression, it is good to keep in mind that there is a slippery slope that's all too easy to slide down into once you get going. Right now the government/coporatocracy in the U.S. doesn't face any real threats, so it's easy to be generous with freedoms. But what would happen if something like the Occupy movement really started to gain ground and actually started shutting down cities and firebombing corporate HQ's? Would the powers-that-be hesitate to start using some of that power we've given them to start suppressing internet access here? It's already happened here at least once, on a smaller scale.

Just hope they didn't get any more sensitive data

From a 1996 Wired Magazine interview. ( http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html ):

Wired:
Could technology help by improving education?

Steve Jobs:
I used to think that technology could help education. I've probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I've had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What's wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.

It's a political problem. The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are unions. You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and the dropping of SAT scores, and they're inversely proportional. The problems are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy. I'm one of these people who believes the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system.

I have a 17-year-old daughter who went to a private school for a few years before high school. This private school is the best school I've seen in my life. It was judged one of the 100 best schools in America. It was phenomenal. The tuition was $5,500 a year, which is a lot of money for most parents. But the teachers were paid less than public school teachers - so it's not about money at the teacher level. I asked the state treasurer that year what California pays on average to send kids to school, and I believe it was $4,400. While there are not many parents who could come up with $5,500 a year, there are many who could come up with $1,000 a year.

If we gave vouchers to parents for $4,400 a year, schools would be starting right and left. People would get out of college and say, "Let's start a school." You could have a track at Stanford within the MBA program on how to be the businessperson of a school. And that MBA would get together with somebody else, and they'd start schools. And you'd have these young, idealistic people starting schools, working for pennies.

They'd do it because they'd be able to set the curriculum. When you have kids you think, What exactly do I want them to learn? Most of the stuff they study in school is completely useless. But some incredibly valuable things you don't learn until you're older - yet you could learn them when you're younger. And you start to think, What would I do if I set a curriculum for a school?

God, how exciting that could be! But you can't do it today. You'd be crazy to work in a school today. You don't get to do what you want. You don't get to pick your books, your curriculum. You get to teach one narrow specialization. Who would ever want to do that?

These are the solutions to our problems in education. Unfortunately, technology isn't it. You're not going to solve the problems by putting all knowledge onto CD-ROMs. We can put a Web site in every school - none of this is bad. It's bad only if it lulls us into thinking we're doing something to solve the problem with education.

Lincoln did not have a Web site at the log cabin where his parents home-schooled him, and he turned out pretty interesting. Historical precedent shows that we can turn out amazing human beings without technology. Precedent also shows that we can turn out very uninteresting human beings with technology.

It's not as simple as you think when you're in your 20s - that technology's going to change the world. In some ways it will, in some ways it won't.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/11/android-cotton-candy-fxi/

I went into it feeling the same way, but reading the judge's reasoning in the PDF (linked to in the original post, but also here for your convenience -- search for "tracking" to get to the relevant section), I can see that he gave it serious and fair consideration, including citing similar cases that predate GPS. I still feel that the way I'd deal with such a tracking device, should I ever find one, would be to attach it to another vehicle -- preferably a boat trailer or a garbage truck.

(1) counts all iOS devices, not just phones and (2) speaks about in-app purchases stats.

So when you talk about "OS share" for computers do you exclude either desktops, laptops, or servers? If not, why are Android proponents so interested in only counting phones? Third party developers could usually care less whether someone is running iOS on a phone or a Touch.

As far as app purchases....

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/12/ios-revenues-vs-android/

http://blog.flurry.com/bid/79061/App-Developers-Bet-on-iOS-over-Android-this-Holiday-Season

Not to mention piracy rates are higher on Android....
http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/app-security/231601064

They can also copy some ideas from Facebook (or others):
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/12/facebook-data-center/all/1
http://opencompute.org/
http://opencompute.org/2011/11/17/learning-lessons-at-the-prineville-data-center/

They'd probably have to modify the air filter/intake sections since in many places the air there is rather dirty. And sometimes it's not just "conventional" pollution but dust/sand blown in from the desert areas

Yeah, after all Edison showed how this dangerous AC electricity killed an elephant. The government knew this and chose AC anyway! We're all doomed!

As it takes less fuel to get to space then it does from the usa for satellites and satellites can only hold so much fuel and more fuel they have = more time in space as they need fuel to keep them in there orbit.

Here, have some physics.

tl;dr - The earth spins, the spin imparts energy, you get the most boost from spin at the equator. That's why everybody else's launch pads are in the tropics. Baikonur, the Russian launch site is most useful for Pole to Pole orbits but that's a different topic.

You say Deniability. I say Reasonable Doubt.

Wi-Fi–Hacking Neighbor From Hell Sentenced to 18 Years

A Minnesota hacker prosecutors described as a “depraved criminal” was handed an 18-year prison term Tuesday for unleashing a vendetta of cyberterror that turned his neighbors’ lives into a living nightmare.

Barry Ardolf, 46, repeatedly hacked into his next-door neighbors’ Wi-Fi network in 2009, and used it to try and frame them for child pornography, sexual harassment, various kinds of professional misconduct and to send threatening e-mail to politicians, including Vice President Joe Biden.

Awesome - FINALLY a vet.

Talk to us about zoological transfer in the context of using human sewage sludge (class B or worse) on farm pasture land and allowing your cows graze immediately after application.

Talk about rebloom/growth of ecoli and other bacteria on farm fields.

Talk about molybdenum poisoning (as witnessed in Augusta GA).

Talk about the lack of source tracking when contamination does become a problem (livestock auction breaks chain of custody of poisoned/contaminated cattle).

Talk about ecoli in cookie dough and if that could be linked to sewage sludge.

Talk about bio-aersols and if the wind can carry sludge particulates off site for miles.

Talk about vector transmission of MRSA and ECOLI by birds that feast on our waste and poop on our beach.

Talk about the issue of RCRA regulations of accepting toxic waste and the potential for clean up liability to the farmer who accepts this material.

Talk about the mrsa and ecoli showing up in meat.

This is just a warm up - i've got tons more.

I usually like NewYorkCountryLawyer, but I'm going to have to ask him for some proof for the statement "antibiotic use in livestock and antibiotic resistance have continued to rise throughout the entire period". I would offer the alternative that antibiotic use peaked, and then declined because overuse led to antibiotic resistance. Currently I believe that livestock antibiotic use is minimal, simply because frequent heavy use doesn't work well. And the livestock antibiotics is only a minor cause for the rise in antibiotic resistance. That resistance, which predates livestock use, is primarily caused by overuse in humans.

I hope you didn't stop liking me. I was relying on the knowledgeable folks at Grist for the statement that the practice of feeding antibiotics to livestock not for treating disease, but for the purposes of promoting growth and enabling the use of more dangerous living conditions, has increased. I know that the total amount was estimated at 29,000,000 pounds per year, and that 80% of that is estimated to be for non-therapeutic uses.

Your statements about increased resistance and use of antibiotics actually miss the point; no one is complaining about use of antibiotics to treat disease. What we are talking about is the 80% of antibiotics which go into two nefarious uses for antibiotics in livestock: (1) to increase growth [for reasons still unknown, agribusiness discovered at some point that antibiotics promote growth] and (2) disease prevention.

While "disease prevention" sounds like an ok thing, it is really a code word for "enabling the animals to be kept in such inhumane and unlivable conditions that it is assumed that antibiotics are needed to prevent the diseases they would otherwise be given by such living conditions".

So while I can't put my fingers on the data regarding growth of these uses for antibiotics in animals, I can say with certainty that the use is about 10 times the amount of antibiotics used on humans, and that 80% of it is used for purposes other than medical treatment.

RoundUp ist pretty old, and there are much more interesting resistance stories around RoundUp than this one.

My favorite is the RoundUp resistant strain of the coca plant that gets grown in Columbia: Boliviana negra.

Any conmpany which makes its purchasing recommendations on the basis of "My Little Pony" will probably go out of business before it pays for the product.

I see your overall point, but I couldn't help pointing out that you appear to misunderestimate the overlap between My Little Pony fans and geeks. See this story in Wired about geeky fans of the animated series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.

What I am getting that these Amish-like sheep brains are all over. The Amish, the Hasidic and now some Moslems. I am sure that there has been symbolic burning amongst "peace-loving" Buddhist too...

Why can't people get over their religion. Sigh...

Amish use cell phones.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.01/amish.html

Why contrast between two unrelated things?

The USA arrested and jailed a man for directing obscene pornography between consenting parties.
Now I'm sure some would argue what he did was manipulative and destroyed the lives of several people and liken his abuse to rape. Well the USA also arrested and jailed a man for possessing obscene comics, where no adults or children were harmed in the making.

Let's discuss related facts shall we?

Might as well, I've seen a few hacker projects do similar things over the last year:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/12/electric-skates-for-sci-fi-roller-diners/

Of course this is a sad little foot-segway compared to the sweet foot-R6 I had in mind.

Double post but this one is from 2002

That one appears to be an external fuel cell that acts as a power supply - you plug the DC power plug directly into it, as if it was the AC-DC adapter power brick. The Apple patent claims require a bidirectional communication between the computer and a controller of the fuel cell, and that implementation doesn't include one.