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http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/01/dayintech_0104

Yeah, no kidding. The "bury brigade" problem is inherent to almost all "community modding" systems. Digg had it the worst because every account has a point to give, and users can trivially make a large number of accounts. Slashdot has the "higher percentage chance" for high-karma posters, but that's not really helpful for two reasons. First, because most high-karma posters would rather post something insightful on a particular topic of interest, and aren't allowed to mod on the same discussion where they comment - thus, most high-karma posters either never use their mod points, or wind up canceling their mods when they see something that makes them want to post instead. Second, because even if you run only one high-karma account, you mathematically have less chance of mod points and less modpoint-holding capacity than the bury-troll who's mining a couple hundred "default karma" accounts that never post (so never get downmodded to troll and lose the ability to receive modpoints) but simply mine for modpoints.

The underlying problem is that downmodding is simply not a useful tool. No matter what you call it, it's an attack on another poster. In the karma system, you do real damage to their future posts (in the term of "all future posts by this user are at -1 or -2 the previous threshold) if you can gather enough bury-brigadiers drive them from Excellent down to Good or below. Even absent a karma system, gathering a bury brigade allows you to do the equivalent of a shout-down attack, forcing anything you don't agree with below the viewing threshold of most people.

Zuckerberg holds all of Facebook's users in open,. sneering contempt (in the same way that many ./ commenters do)

The difference between the average /.er's contempt for FB users and Zuckerberg's is that he uses that contempt to justify exploiting them as a means to his own end. It's no different than writing malware - there are plenty of nerds out there that do it and make a living from it - but I have yet to hear them try to justify their actions on /. or hear anyone stick up for that type of behavior. It's not a sin to hold a person in contempt, but it's the greatest sin to use another as merely a means to one's end.

Also, this is not the first research to create genetically engineered flu with higher virulence, see wired Virulent Bird-Human Flu Hybrid Made in Lab

I think wireless viruses are more dangerous than wired ones. :-)

you might want to read this: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/03/ff_anthrax_fbi/all/1

there's serious doubt, even among his colleagues that pointed the FBI in his direction, that he did it. Was it him? Was he a patsy? Was he even involved or did he just have a guilty look and happen to be in the right place at the wrong time.

Really interesting read, and plenty of the facts can be found from other sources, I'm just too lazy tonite to find more links. mmm beer good. Read it, whether you still think he's guilty or not, you may learn some interesting stuff.

Also, this is not the first research to create genetically engineered flu with higher virulence, see wired Virulent Bird-Human Flu Hybrid Made in Lab

When information was requested about some people associated with Wikileaks they didn't just hand it over silently to the feds, and maybe increment their statistics by one later like Google. They notified the users in question ASAP, and held back the information until the final court order forced them to hand it over.

Well, then I have just the thing to keep the ants away from my next picnic. Behold, the golden orb weaver picnic blanket!

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/spider-silk/

VGChartz' numbers are notoriously unreliable, unsourced, some say fabricated. We don't know how many copies of Skyrim have sold for the PC, and the game has sold 7 Million total by now, not 3.4. Likewise I'm pretty sure Activision hasn't said how many copies MW3 has sold for each individual platform.

Maybe it's time to start rolling out Thorium reactors.

If we ran out of fossil fuels when we ran out of oil, global warming wouldn't be much of a problem. The problem is coal.

Wired still seems to think it was a hack, or at least something fishy is going on. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/11/scada-hack-report-wrong/

If it isn't a hack, it's boring and won't give page views. It just has to be something nefarious.

they're cool. check out barlow speaking at eG8 : http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/barlow/

he's like the only person there who isn't a greedy fucking bastard... spot how they all are surprised and if i recall correctly, it was the host who went like "oh, usually everybody agrees here on these things..."

Wired still seems to think it was a hack, or at least something fishy is going on. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/11/scada-hack-report-wrong/

People, I am amazed that when Apple makes a fumble on location services there is huge media attention on Apple "spying" on people. Where is the noise on Carrier IQ? A real root kit installed on all devices (not confirmed on iOS though) http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/11/rootkit-brouhaha/

In the US, the Consumer Products Safety Commission has been waging a war fireworks precursors for over half a decade now.

I remember the days as a child playing with my electronics project kit from RadioShack. It seemed that it could do everything - burglar alarms, sirens, even simple radios. Even let you accidentally wire things up in a short and cause some batteries to burst...

It's been interesting to watch RadioShack. They morphed from the good place to get connectors, resistors, and fun things into a run of the mill phone and TV shop. Or did they?

Wired ran an interesting article called The Lost Tribes of RadioShack talking about a potential revival of the maker hobbies. I blogged about it too (Once, We Were Makers). There is one local franchise RadioShack that has a huge amateur section in the back, complete with cable by the foot, antennas, hams on staff, amazing service, etc.

What I'm trying to say is: You're exactly right. I used to love to tinker. I thought I didn't anymore, outside of programming. I learned last year, when I got my ham radio license, that I was wrong. Amateur radio is just Open Source in hardware.

There is no accomplishment in being in Kansas and talking to someone in Japan via the Internet or telephone. I'm sure I do this without even realizing it frequently. How about doing the same using only a $7 antenna and no third-party infrastructure at all? No satellites, no buried cables, no telephone or cable companies -- just my rig and the one in Japan?

I realize it's not at all unique to be able to do this among the amateur radio crowd, but it still gives me a thrill. I love it.

Hushmail lost a lot of credibility a few years ago when it turned out that its most commonly-used encryption method that ran server-side was delivered in a modified state at the request of government agencies. Yes, there are issues with trusting anything server-side, but its promises started sounding hollow when the CTO openly admitted it.

If you built your own applet from the public source code, the interception was not an issue, but if you used the easier mechanism hosted by Hushmail, you were at risk of your mail being decrypted and turned over.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/11/encrypted-e-mai/

I was actually impressed with the idea of automatic spending cuts, especially with Republicans putting their sacred cow of Defense spending on the table. I was certain the committee wouldn't reach a deal since they previously rejected the Democrat's offer of 3 to 1 spending cuts to revenue increases and with Obama finally showing some backbone, so I was really curious to see how the automatic cuts would go into effect legislatively.

Turns out the next step will be making sure those cuts don't happen. Because, while Congess can't agree on how to cut spending, they can apparently agree on how to keep spending in place.

I wish America had a system that allowed viable third party candidates... but, as it stands now,Americans will have to choose between corrupt and corrupter in 2012. We are so screwed.

The point is that AMD went to great lengths in designing a new architecture and in advertising it as the Next Big Thing yet there is no benefit anywhere to be seen

And never before has the Next Big Thing entered the world with a whimper rather than a bang?

9 Gadgets That Prove You(slashcode fuckup)re a Hard-Core Early Adopter

What was your opinion on the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X back in the day? Did you bitch slap Motorola for wasting your time? Not the Next Big Thing after all?

My perspective is that this architecture is exposing weakness in AMD's process technology, and that it was designed on the premise that their process technology would be much further ahead. One of AMD's goals behind the scenes is to come up with a process technology equally well suited for the CPU and the GPU. The main problem here is that AMD is not a strong enough company to survive continued weakness. Obviously they had different ideas about where this would be at this point in time or it would not have been designed this way in the first place (or survived the massive pre-silicon performance simulation).

Here's why I sometimes what to punch the "What have you done for me lately?" crowd flat on the nose:

Performance improvements aimed at improving scalability started heavily with [Postgres] version 8.1, and running simple benchmarks version 8.4 has been shown to be more than 10 times faster on read only workloads and at least 7.5 times faster on both read and write workloads compared with version 8.0.

ACID first, performance second. Unless an early version is soundly trounced by MySQL in a page view benchmark, resulting in a giant lemming exodus.

The fixation on surface metrics also worked wonders in the race to the bottom at your local grocery store. "Organic" is actually just a synonym for "what used to be the default back in 1970 until we optimized out all the nutrition, nickle by nickle".

Oh? I have only seen one such story. Something about a store in China? Then there are these:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/06/android-malware-angry-birds/
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/03/malware-in-android-market-highlights-googles-vulnerability.ars

Then again, Windows Phone 7 doesn't allow sideloading of applications, IIRC. Which would make it more secure, at the cost of your liberty.

It is if just one document demonstrates evidence of criminal malfeasance that was being ignored. Apparently there were many more documents that demonstrated criminality and collusions to hide and commit more crimes.

That the administration that purposefully hid existing and ongoing crimes was all to self evident. What is even worse is after the legitimate release of those documents and the evidence of criminal activity they disclose, virtually nothing has been done to prosecute those individuals breaking laws.

The person who released those documents is entitled to make claim that they were adhering to the principle of law and the requirements of their oath to ensure justice was pursued. No one is ever a slave to the criminality of the temporary supervisor, every individual is always bound by their own sense of justice and morality.

Also it is abundantly clear in this case that the US military did purposefully and wilfully deny Bradley Manning his rights as a citizen, did knowingly and with intent physically and mentally abuse him in order to criminally extend the case against others and made only token attempts to adhere to the law months after the arrest and detention of Bradley Manning during which time they attempted to manufacture a case. Based apparently on the unsubstantiated betrayal of "Wired Magazine" whose focus was on profits not justice and Adrian Lamo and known criminal employed by "Wired Magazine" for dubious reasons.

So was Wired Magazine involved in a for profit attempt at entrapment. Did Adrian Lamo himself actual conspire to obtain and release the records (already having a record for criminal computer hacking. Did "Wired Magazine" and Adrian Lamo conspire to shift the charges from themselves to Brian Manning. So was Wired Magazine the betrayer of the worst order or did they collude in criminal activity and then seek to shift the blame to a pasty, either way "Wired" sucks ass' let them know what you think of them http://www.wired.com/about/feedback/.

Of course, by the looks of it, he leaked everything he could get his hands on and so had no particular motive in mind except to undermine the classification system, but wittingly or not, the man's a hero. I wish him the best of luck.

If you read his chat logs or other public statements, he has repeatedly said he did it because he saw violations of the law being discussed in the diplomatic cables.

He knew there was incriminating information in the cables and had a specific motive in releasing them.
Everyone who says otherwise is either ignorant or actively lying.

“DHS and the FBI are gathering facts surrounding the report of a water pump failure in Springfield, Illinois,” according to a statement released by DHS spokesman Peter Boogaard. “At this time there is no credible corroborated data that indicates a risk to critical infrastructure entities or a threat to public safety.”

So...in the instance of a single shoe bomber, stopped by his own stupidity and the efforts of other airline passengers, TSA (a section of DHS) responds by calling it a systemic risk to air travel, and we must all take off our shoes. In the instance of a plot to use liquid explosives, which probably wouldn't have worked and was stopped in the planning stages, TSA responds by calling it a systemic risk and we must all limit ourselves to 3oz bottles of liquids that fit in a quart size bag. In the instance of a single underwear bomber, stopped by his own stupidity, TSA responds by calling it a systemic risk to air travel, and we must all be subject to X-ray/millimeter wave scanners and/or the big Grope.

In the instance of SCADA hacking, which could conceivably harm our infrastructure on a significant and systemic level from afar, with little/no risk of the perpetrators being caught, DHS responds by saying, "No big deal."

There's something very...wrong here.

Perhaps you haven't heard. That is in the pipeline.

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2011/05/automotive-black-boxes/

And it's not just GPS, its GPS and event data.

According to a Wired article: "At most, a prolonged solar minimum would temporarily offset rising global temperatures for a few years, perhaps a couple decades, said NASA climatologist David Rind, who has also studied Maunder Minimum dynamics. But “when the sunspots return, the additional energy will cause additional warming,” he said. “To point to this as something that could in any way ameliorate greenhouse gas warming is folly,” said Mann." http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/06/solar-minimum-climate/

Wired says it will be less than $200:

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

I think I'll stick with the $25 Pi, thanks.

Wired says it will be less than $200:

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

An update: I just discovered that it's my own city, Illinois' capital, Cartoon City. From the State Journal-Register:

CWLP denies reports it was victim of cyber attack

By DEANA STROISCH (deana.stroisch@sj-r.com)
The State Journal-Register
Posted Nov 18, 2011 @ 11:05 AM
Last update Nov 18, 2011 @ 11:31 AM

City Water, Light and Power officials are denying reports that the utility was a victim of a cyber attack that may have been responsible for the failure of a water pump.

âoeCWLP has not had any breach of its Water or Electric Department Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems,â the utility said in a statement issued this morning.

SCADA is the computer control network that operates various systems at the utility.

In a story that has since been picked up by CNN, Joe Weiss, a cyber security expert, says he obtained a state government report dated Nov. 10, which allegedly gave details of a computer hacking that led to the âoeburn out of a water pump.â

The Department of Homeland Security identified the water system as being located in Springfield, Ill.

"DHS and the FBI are gathering facts surrounding the report of a water pump failure in Springfield Illinois, said Peter Boogaard, DHS spokesman. âoeAt this time there is no credible corroborated data that indicates a risk to critical infrastructure entities or a threat to public safety.

âoeIf DHS ICS-CERT identifies any information about possible impacts to additional entities, it will disseminate timely mitigation information as it becomes available."

Amber Sabin, CWLPâ(TM)s public information officer, said there have not been any water pump failures of any kind in the last month.

Links to the reports:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/18/us/cyber-attack-investigation/index.html

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/11/hackers-destroy-water-pump/?utm_source=co2hog

Copyright 2011 The State Journal-Register. Some rights reserved

This was a different design with an easier test objective. It's explained here: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/11/2400-miles-in-minutes-hypersonic-weapon-passes-easy-test/

There was a wired article a while back about the amount of antibiotics used by farm animals in the US:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/news-update-farm-animals-get-80-of-antibiotics-sold-in-us/

I would imagine this is a potentially good place to start reducing the amount of antibiotics being used. I'm no biologist, but prophylactic antibiotic use on this scale is probably unnecessary. Don't count on the farming industry to do this on their own though....

-ted

I don't think he's lying. According to Wired, apparently the guy behind the company is very good at inventing underwater machinery that brings dead people home. Now never mind that the dead person he wanted to bring home is a close friend who died while wearing his re-breather, another invention of his, but that's besides the point. If this incident proves anything, it's that at least he's serious about exploration (serious enough to put other people's lives on the line, which is what you'd need for space exploration).

"Too hard for computers, let's turk it out for 50 cents per person." Guess what, Fraunhofer have been doing this for years.

This is a must read article on the subject. Electric cars fail because batteries are too expensive, and because they required infrastructure of charging stations. This company however solves both these problems. You make an electric car without the battery, which is cheaper than a standard car and more reliable to boot. Then this company leases you a battery, which costs less per month than gas. And they handle the infrastructure, which includes stations that swap your battery out for a fully charged one. You never wait to charge your battery, and they can swap it out since you don't own it.

http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/magazine/16-09/ff_agassi?currentPage=all

Part of this model is the assumption that battery technology still moves along rapidly. So the company can phase in newer, better batteries and you aren't tied to a battery you purchased when you bought your car.

They use this for geolocation. If the data wasn't useful to them, they wouldn't collect it, no? They are using data from uses personal AP's for their personal gain.

The courts would seem to disagree with you about this. Google went beyond simple SSID/MAC collection. They used packet sniffing.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/06/google-wiretap-breach/

“The court finds that plaintiffs plead facts sufficient to state a claim for violation of the Wiretap Act. In particular, plaintiffs plead that defendant intentionally created, approved of, and installed specially-designed software and technology into its Google Street View vehicles and used this technology to intercept plaintiffs’ data packets, arguably electronic communications, from plaintiffs’ personal Wi-Fi networks,” U.S. District Judge James Ware ruled. “Further, plaintiffs plead that the data packets were transmitted over Wi-Fi networks that were configured such that the packets were not readable by the general public without the use of sophisticated packet-sniffer technology.”

According to the Wiretap Act, amended in 1986, it’s not considered wiretapping “to intercept or access an electronic communication made through an electronic communication system that is configured so that such electronic communication is readily accessible to the general public,” according to the text of the federal wiretapping statute.

But Judge Ware said that interpretation did not apply to open, unencrypted Wi-Fi networks and instead applied only to “traditional radio services.”

Essentially a radio broadcast is setup in such a way that they intend and desire for people to tune in and pick it up and actively consume it's contents. A persons household WiFi would be hard to argue that same case since opening your personal WiFi spot is legally risky to the owner, and those that do so are most likely not aware of the fact that their WiFi is open or even what that means.

Take high powered Mic's as another example. Would you consider it an invasion of privacy if someone sat in front of your house and used one of these to record conversations in your household? Your conversations aren't encrypted, and most people wouldn't even think about this because they have an expectation of privacy. Now contrast that to packet sniffing an unencrypted WiFi network. You cannot assume that people have left an AP unencrypted with the intent to 'share' whatever communications travel on it. You also can't consider packet sniffing, or even SSID/MAC sniffing easily accessible to the public without stretching credulity quite a bit. Hell I'm a geek and I can't even tell you the names of the WiFi networks around my home. I don't care. I don't use them, I use my own. I certainly would never consider logging into one intentionally.

It's a practical vs. idealist question. Ideally free speech should not have to be anonymous. Practically it does, because the idealists who use their real names end up ruined or in jail. Also ideally protests should change things. Practically, not so much.

It is widely rumored that siri's speech-to-text is performed by Nuance's Dragon Dictation, which has been available (for free) on iOS for a few years now. That, plus Dragon's presence on the market for over a decade, would have provided a substantial database of colloquial english (and other languages) to get started. Plus, Siri was available as its own standalone app for a while on iOS before Apple bought the company. The technology behind Siri has been in development for quite a few years and had ,DARPA backing. Siri didn't just spring out of nothing in Cupertino. I think they've got enough of a database of colloquial english to get going with.

No, I think limiting it to the iPhone 4S is mostly to drive sales to the new device. Limiting the rollout to avoid crushing their servers, as you suggest, is another very plausible reason. I don't buy the argument that Siri requires the extra processing power of the 4S.

I understand that this guy has gone to commemorative dot com but I'm sure the networks will continue. Plug-ins are mindful, 'tors' are merely weblinks and the twil network will be a good party for the lot of them. If an RSS feed : http://feeds.wired.com/howtowiki can be used then all the better for manuals.im to be created aswell. As my friend Aaron Robinson in California says: " It's alright, people die and companies rarely do. The real test will be to see how the company weathers the coming years. It'll be interesting to see of they can avoid the pitfalls of the past when ya man wasn't at the helm. " END

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/06/top-5-ways-that/

As close i got get on short notice. I posted this two years ago IIRC

Also Apple is very unlikely to agree to make custom military units with whatever requirements the military has. It's just not their thing.

Well, not saying you're wrong about them being willing to do special builds now, but there's the Black Mac, which may have been made by Apple (although last time I heard, nobody was completely sure).

Every single attempt the Army has made to give its soldiers the same capabilities as a 13 year-old girl with an iPhone in 2007 has produced hilarious results. There was Future Force Warrior, Future Soldier, a dozen versions of Land Warrior, which were rolled into half a dozen versions of Nett Warrior. Nett Warrior -- the most recent attempt to waste gobs of taxpayer money -- is notable for producing this marvel of design elegance.

I give you, the Nett Warrior End User Device :

Believe it or not, that's the smallest, lightest, and most elegant system the Army has come up with yet. It's the first device to break with their tradition of attaching as many awkwardly shaped objects as possible to the soldier's head.

I can't wait to see how our brilliant and effective military contracting system interprets the smartphone.

I'm a bit concerned about all of this advancement to support extended population growth. My gut feeling is that we are just setting up ourselves for a big fall the more we detach ourselves from nature. Like a house of cards. It can only go so high before the entire system collapses. It's just a matter of when. For example, a high-altitude nuclear warhead my never cause bodily harm. But the EMP it releases is enough to shutdown entire nations with all microchips fried. That means no transportation and running water. Within weeks, people start dieing and bodies decomposing where they last crawled for survival. Truly scary stuff.

Agreed. Only recently did I become aware (2006) of how fragile the entire "system" is, how dependent we are on fossil fuels and oil for food, and how decrepit our infrastructure has become from negelect. There is no redundancy of critical infrastructure, no checks-and-balance on system resources, nothing. The number of humans existing today are already extended waaay past the carry capacity of the planet, and we're looking to push even further. We've created this house of cards, instead of a garden of paradise. The fall will be hard, it will happen in our lifetime (as we are already seeing/feeling the first phase of resource contention) and our children and grandchildren will pay for our wanton foolishness.

Yes, there will be people, survivors, that will carry on...presuming that the handful of idiot superpowers that exist didn't build "spoilers" (aka hardended systems that were designed to auto-retaliate against a nuclear first strike). There's already evidence that the former Soviets had built such a system and had nearly activated it several times. If we can get past these stoooopid slate-wipers that we decided to build because of our primate-driven political posturing to each other, then, yeah, an agrarian society might emerge from the ashes, although it will be much poorer for our petty sins against ourselves.

But these dark clouds are not all without a silver lining. First and foremost, educate yourself in the "old ways" of living, learn how to do things with handtools and muscle power, learn about basic intensive agriculture in your backyard (or if in a flat/apartment/condo, set up a small table-based greenhouse on your deck or window), etc. Education, you know, that thing that we keep cutting and neglecting in the United States every year, will go a long ways toward mitigating disaster for yourself. Once you achieve a basic proficiency with a given project, begin a new one and learn something, while teaching any close family members that are willing to listen.

The time to do this is growing short. The current economic meltdown is not the same as the one from the 1930's; back then we had fewer people, more natural resources, and not nearly the stupidity of today. Even if the US manages to crawl out of the hole it's created, it won't last for long, as peak resource production has already occurred for oil, and many resources are due to be depleted right around the "several decades it will take to get out of this".

In other words, this is the tip of the iceburg. The time to act is now, not tomorrow.

The Wired article from last month has better pictures and more information

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/10/el-hierro-eruption-continues-but-not-likely-to-form-new-island/

Just wondering, why does your 3D model's bodywork look like it was shaped with a sledgehammer?

Also, a few cars you might want to check out:

http://i.mitsubishicars.com/miev/features/compare

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2011/10/meet-the-one-modular-ev-created-by-fifty-companies/

You've almost certainly seen this one:

http://gordonmurraydesign.com/press-T27-unveiled.php

Wired updated their story with an important caveat

Our original report named “Rascatripas” as a forum moderator for Nuevo Laredo in Vivo. That’s now appears to be off-base. At least one local reporter says there’s “no proof” yet that the decapitated man found Wednesday was actually murdered for his online activity. And administrators for Nuevo Laredo en Vivo now say that “Rascatripas” wasn’t one of theirs. “Negative,” they tweet (thanks to Xeni Jardin for the translation, and for the tip). “He was not our partner, he is confirmed to have been a scapegoat to scare others. The person executed is not a collaborator with our site, but this was without doubt an attempt to silence the voices of Nuevo Laredo.”

Which raises a very important and much lower-tech question: why would cartels be deterred by technical obstacles keeping them from identifying the real bloggers? Grab some random techy-looking guy off the street and kill him, and pin a note to him claiming he's a blogger with a warning to others not to report on cartel activities, and who'll know the difference locally? (And even if the actual bloggers are so thoroughly anonymized as to be undetectable .. that's got to make anyone on the street nervous about whether or not they're really anonymous..)

Because there's more to real life than tech ..

Our original report named “Rascatripas” as a forum moderator for Nuevo Laredo in Vivo. That’s now appears to be off-base. At least one local reporter says there’s “no proof” yet that the decapitated man found Wednesday was actually murdered for his online activity. And administrators for Nuevo Laredo en Vivo now say that “Rascatripas” wasn’t one of theirs. “Negative,” they tweet (thanks to Xeni Jardin for the translation, and for the tip). “He was not our partner, he is confirmed to have been a scapegoat to scare others. The person executed is not a collaborator with our site, but this was without doubt an attempt to silence the voices of Nuevo Laredo.”

If a government employee is talking about something unclassified then it's already something China can probably get its hands on without too much difficulty. And people discussing research and work already have that problem-cell phone calls can be snooped without too much difficulty.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/intercepting-cell-phone-calls/

Seriously, this was released to the media about 3 years or so ago, and touted as "scientists create blackest material ever".

Here is a link to a wired magazine article from march 2009:

http://m.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/ultrablack/

Must be a slow news week.

I can answer this one quite easily.
Both of the pay the bills by being college professors. I have had several classes with "Mike Bonannno" here at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy NY. "Andy Bichlbaum" is a lecturer at Parsons in NYC and formerly worked for Maxis

So, neither of the Yes Men are really planning to get rich from this.

Slashdot ate the link. here:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/prison-plc-vulnerabilities/