Slashdot Mirror

In an attempt to curb water pollution, farmers in southern Taiwan have started to potty-train their pigs. Farmers have set up special pig toilets in the area to keep from having to pay a planned pollution fee. Pig farmer Chang Chung-tou says, "The pig toilets on my farm help me collect about 95 percent of all pig waste, making cleaning much, much easier." Now we just need them to learn how to cure and smoke each other.

jamie passes along a Newsfactor piece that begins "In a not-uncommon development for the social-networking leader, Facebook's recently released privacy controls are leaving the company a bit red-faced. As a result of a new policy that by default makes users' profiles, photos, and friends lists available on the Web, almost 300 personal photos of founder Mark Zuckerberg became publicly available, a development that had gossip sites like Gawker yukking it up."

Jbabe writes "Two men have been charged after cooking a rat and serving it with rice as a meal for fellow contestants on a reality TV show. D'Acampo, 33, and Manning, 30, were confronted by RSPCA and were both charged with animal cruelty offenses and ordered to appear in court on February 3. If found guilty, the pair face up to three years in jail. Broadcasters of the program in Britain could also face charges. RSPCA NSW chief inspector David O'Shannessy said it was unacceptable for the rat to have been killed for a TV show. The concern is this was done purely for the cameras. The show's producers were ordered by the RSPCA to hand over footage showing how the rat, which was believed to be tame, was killed."

systembug writes "After 10 years of waiting and some infighting, ECMAScript version 5 is finally out, approved by 19 of the 21 members of the ECMA Technical Committee 39. JSON is in; Intel and IBM dissented. IBM is obviously in disagreement with the decision against IEEE 754r, a floating point format for correct, but slow representation of decimal numbers, despite pleas by Yahoo's Douglas Crockford." (About 754r, Crockford says "It was rejected by ES4 and by ES3.1 — it was one of the few things that we could agree on. We all agreed that the IBM proposal should not go in.")

RiffRafff writes "Iran is at it again, pre-emptively slowing or cutting Internet access before anticipated student protests." From the article: "Seeking to deny the protesters a chance to reassert their voice, authorities slowed Internet connections to a crawl in the capital, Tehran. For some periods on Sunday, Web access was completely shut down — a tactic that was also used before last month's demonstration. The government has not publicly acknowledged it is behind the outages, but Iran's Internet service providers say the problem is not on their end and is not a technical glitch."

TopSpin writes "BMW's limited roll out of the electric version of its Mini has met with complaints from early adopters including less than advertised range, cold weather charging problems, bulky batteries and connection issues. Richard Steinburg, BMW's manager of electric vehicle operations, assures everyone that the manufacturer is 'learning quite a bit as we go.' Drivers are paying $850/month for the privilege of helping BMW learn how to build EVs, while also helping BMW meet alternative fuel mandates so that other models can continue to be sold in select markets."

Police are searching for a pair of suspects who tried to rob a funeral home that they mistook for a bank. The men assaulted a worker before another employee informed them that they weren't in a bank. It appears the pair learned from their mistake, as they are believed to have successfully robbed a nearby bank later.

The boss of an unnamed 31-year-old South Florida woman needs to give her a raise or at least pay her bail. Police say the woman called the Miami International Airport claiming there was a bomb on one of the planes so her boss would not miss his flight. The woman was being held on $7,500 bail.

bth writes "A computer with the power of a human brain is not yet near. But this week researchers from IBM Corp. are reporting that they've simulated a cat's cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer. The computer has 147,456 processors (most modern PCs have just one or two processors) and 144 terabytes of main memory — 100,000 times as much as your computer has."

Anyone eating kabobs in Moscow might want to stop right now. Police have arrested a group of homeless cannibals who have been selling bits of people to a kabob shop. "After carrying out the crime, the corpse was divided up: part was eaten and part was also sold to a kiosk selling kebabs and pies," said a statement from the Prosecutor-General's main investigative unit for the Perm region.

100 years ago, British polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton had to abandon his 1909 Antarctic expedition. Among the items left behind were two crates of McKinlay and Co. whiskey, now the company has decided it would like them back. A team from New Zealand's Antarctic Heritage Trust will try to drill down to the crates, frozen in Antarctic ice under the Nimrod Expedition hut near Cape Royds. Sounds like this would go great with some Titanic cigars.

2muchcoffeeman writes "The Associated Press tells the story of Michael Fiola, a former Massachusetts government employee who was arrested in 2007 after child porn was found on his state-issued laptop computer. He was eventually cleared of all charges after some digging by the defense found that the laptop was infected with malware that was 'programmed to visit as many as 40 child porn sites per minute — an inhuman feat. While Fiola and his wife were out to dinner one night, someone logged on to the computer and porn flowed in for an hour and a half. Prosecutors performed another test and confirmed the defense findings. The charge was dropped — 11 months after it was filed.' The article also discusses the technical aspects of how it could happen and about similar cases in the United Kingdom in 2003."

35-year-old Anthony Armatys had about the best job anyone could have. He had almost 5 years worth of paychecks deposited into his account from a New Jersey company that he didn't work for. Armatys took a job with telecommunications company Avaya Inc. in September 2002, then changed his mind. The company's computer system liked him so much however it never removed his name from the payroll. Prosecutors say that he received more than $470,000 in paychecks.

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes "A simple experiment shows that it's easy to find the IP addresses used by the UltraSurf anti-censorship program, and block traffic to all of those IP addresses, effectively stopping UltraSurf from working. But this is not a fault of UltraSurf; rather, it demonstrates that an anti-censorship software program can be successful even if it's relatively trivial to block it." Read on for Bennett's analysis.
UltraSurf is an enormously popular program used to circumvent Internet censorship in countries like China (as well as schools and workplaces in mostly-free countries like the US, with mixed success). When you run UltraSurf on your computer, it re-routes your outgoing Internet traffic to external IP addresses controlled by UltraSurf, so that it looks to observers (and network censors) as if you are connecting to UltraSurf's IP addresses, rather than a website like YouTube or Facebook that may be banned on your network.

UltraSurf uses a list of thousands of external IP addresses, to make it non-trivial for an adversary to locate all of their IP addresses and block them all. However, using a few steps that would be obvious to many programmers facing the same problem, I did find a way to detect all the IP addresses that UltraSurf connects to, and block all of them so that UltraSurf stopped working. It would not be hard for a government censor operating the filter in a country like China to do the same thing. But this does not mean that UltraSurf's network is likely to collapse any day now; on the contrary, it means that it and similar programs are likely to flourish for years to come, since the censors obviously have other priorities.

Some background information first. Most Internet censorship circumvention tools fall into one of two categories (whose names I have just invented for the purpose of this article):
(1) Self-bootstrapping. If a program is self-bootstrapping, then in a censored country you simply run a copy of the program and it will establish a connection to an IP address outside the country, one of many in a large "cloud" of IP addresses controlled by the software program's publisher. Thereafter, your Internet usage is routed through that connection in order to evade your country's filter. UltraSurf and Tor fall into this category.
(2) Non-self-bootstrapping. To use one of these programs from a censored country, first you have to get a friend in a non-censored country to install the software on their computer (or their webserver, if they have one). Then they give this location (normally in the form of a URL) to their friend in the censored country, and their friend types that URL into their browser to circumvent their country's filtering. Psiphon is the best-known program in this group.

In 2006 I wrote that even though the first category of programs was more convenient to use (not requiring you to rely on a friend in an uncensored country), any program in that category could be blocked by an adversary willing to make only a modest amount of effort: Install the program, see what IP addresses it connects to, block those, see if the program connects to any other backup IP addresses, block those, and so on, until the program runs out of IP addresses to use. There are a few simple countermeasures that designers of a program could take, but they can also be defeated easily.

(For example, if the program randomly chooses an IP address from a large internally stored list, then you just have to run the program over and over until you've found most of the IP address chosen by its random algorithm. A cleverly written program could try to evade this as follows: Pick a set of IP addresses at random from the list, and then "lock in" to that set of IP addresses, so that future runs of the program on that PC will always connect to those IP addresses, ignoring the other ones in the list. This makes it a little bit harder for the censor to pry out all of the IP addresses in the program's internal list. But then you, as the censor, can either (a) run the program repeatedly, but find where the program stores its "locked set" and erase that between each run, so that on future runs the program will keep selecting a different IP address set, or (b) if you can't figure out where the program is storing its "locked set" between each run, then just install the program repeatedly on different machines.)

One way or another, if the program knows what IP addresses to connect to when it bootstraps itself, the attacker can trick the program into revealing all of them. The attacker doesn't even need to reverse-engineer the software to see the set of instructions that it's executing internally; they only need to be able to see the IP addresses that the program is connecting to.

Much later, I was able to reduce this to practice in an experiment on my own machine, using a Perl script, the built-in Windows "netstat" tool to list connections from locally running programs to outside IP addresses, and the "ipseccmd" tool to add new firewall rules blocking those IP addresses. After the script was left running overnight, it had collected and blocked all the IP addresses that UltraSurf apparently used, and on future runs, UltraSurf would display an error message saying that it couldn't find any IPs to connect to.

(Interestingly, netstat also showed that UltraSurf frequently opened connections to www.google.com over SSL -- that is, accessing URLs that would begin with "https://www.google.com/" -- so that traffic between the program and the Google website would be encrypted, and the contents would be invisible to censors in China. When I saw it was doing that, I added an exception to the script so that the Google IP addresses would not be blocked. Perhaps it was submitting search terms to Google in order to find pages that give the location of the latest UltraSurf connection points, or perhaps it was checking a GMail account created by UltraReach that stores messages containing more IP addresses; I didn't reverse-engineer UltraSurf to find out. But even if this was UltraSurf's clever means of obtaining new IP addresses, the system still runs up against the same problem: Any IPs that can be connected to by the UltraSurf client, can also be ascertained by the attacker who watches UltraSurf to see where it connects to, and then blocks those IPs as well.)

Naturally I had mixed feelings about pointing this out publicly, since I agree with UltraReach's goal of providing unfiltered access to users in China and other censored countries. But this idea is sufficiently obvious, that I don't think anything is lost by demonstrating it. There may be programmers interested in creating even more programs to help users in censored countries, and it would be counterproductive for those programmers to believe that existing programs like UltraSurf "magically" evade the censors by using some complex algorithm to hide the IP addresses that they connect to. In fact, the program doesn't conceal the IP addresses that it connects to (how could it?), and it would be straightforward to design and build a new program that did roughly the same thing. We should give UltraReach credit for the right things: they made a tool that provides unfiltered access to millions of people, they made the tool small and easy to use, and they arranged with their partners to subsidize the unfiltered Internet connections at no expense to those end users (although see some caveats, which have been pointed out the Hal Roberts at the Berkman Center, about the price of this "free" access). But the one thing UltraReach did not do is find a way to get around the problem of an attacker installing the problem to see what IP addresses it connects to. That's not a criticism of UltraReach; this is presumably an impossible problem to solve.

(Side note about counter- and counter-counter-measures: If UltraReach does think that censoring countries might try harder to block UltraSurf at some point in the future, they should start releasing different versions of the product every month that use different sets of IP addresses. Release one version for September 2009 that uses one set of IP addresses, then another version in October 2009 that uses another set, and so on. Then if the censors decide in December 2009 to start seriously trying to block all UltraSurf IP addresses, they'll be able to find and block all the IP addresses used by the Dec09 version, just by installing a copy of the program and observing it. But, users who downloaded previous months' versions of the program will be able to continue using their copies. If the Chinese censors wanted to find and block the IP addresses used by preivous months' copies of UltraSurf, they would have to either (a) figure out how to distinguish UltraSurf traffic from other Internet traffic, not an easy thing since UltraSurf uses encrypted traffic on port 443, the same port used for encrypted Web traffic, or (b) obtain copies of the program that users had downloaded in previous months, which is no longer as trivial as simply observing the current version of the program. The more often UltraReach swaps out a new version of UltraSurf that connects to a new set of IP addresses, the harder it will be for the Chinese censors to find all the sets of IPs used by previously released versions. However, once the Chinese censors start trying seriously to block UltraSurf, even though the trick just described will allow previous downloaders of the program to continue surfing freely, all new users who download the program after that point, can be easily blocked -- because the Chinese censors can just watch how often a new version of UltraSurf is made available for download, and block the IPs used by that copy.)

But I think the fact that the Chinese have not done this reveals something usually overlooked about the nature of the anti-censorship arms race. The situation is frequently cast as a battle between the evil geniuses who run the government filters and the good geniuses who write the software to get around the filters, while the grateful citizens of the censored country are the beneficiaries. But if the government censors haven't even done some simple experiments like this in order to block UltraSurf, they must not think it's a high priority to stop the program from working. This in turn suggests that the number of people using UltraSurf in a country like China, while large in absolute numbers, don't constitute a large enough proportion of the population to worry the government. Presumably either the ideas leaking in through an unfiltered Internet are not reaching a large enough proportion of the population, or the ideas are not expected to take hold in enough people's minds to reach a tipping point that causes a problem for the ruling party.

It's not that the Chinese censors don't care about controlling the Internet and the effect that it has on their citizens' thinking. The Chinese have reported fielded a droid army of about 50,000 cubicle drones to help fight Internet propaganda battles, such as drowning out anti-government posts on public forums. Why would they spend such enormous efforts to generate forum posts, but not make the effort to find and block all UltraSurf IP addresses? Because the battlefront is about defaults. If the user tries to access a site and it's blocked, then only a tiny proportion will make a significant effort to circumvent the block. (The exception would be when an extremely popular site like YouTube is blocked; operators of Web proxy sites report that during these periods, they get so much traffic from Chinese users trying to view YouTube videos, that the servers often crash.) Similarly, if users see that 90% of the posts on a given forum are on one side of the issue, then they're more likely to think that's the majority viewpoint (whether they agree with it or not). Hence the usefulness of the army of 50,000 to invade forum threads. Defaults matter; would Internet Explorer have ever displaced Netscape's browser (kids, ask your parents) if it hadn't been the default browser in all versions of Windows?

So the moral for any would-be designers of new anti-Internet-censorship tools, is not to worry too much about whether there's a theoretical way (or even a practical way) that the censors could shut the tool down. UltraSurf became enormously popular without solving that problem, and perhaps another tool could as well.

Australian police were able to use blood DNA from a leech to convict a man of a 2001 armed robbery. Peter Alec Cannon had picked up a leech near a safe at the scene of the crime. Forensic scientists took a sample of blood from the leech and that DNA profile was found to be a match to Cannon's after he was arrested and charged for another crime. And he would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those meddling scientists and that mangy Annelida.

mi tips us that software intended to help essay graders detect plagiarism has been used to attribute to Shakespeare — with high probability — a hitherto unattributed play, 'The Reign of Edward III.' It seems that the work was co-authored by Shakespeare and another playwright of the time, Thomas Kyd. "With a program called Pl@giarism, Vickers detected 200 strings of three or more words in 'Edward III' that matched phrases in Shakespeare's other works. Usually, works by two different authors will only have about 20 matching strings."

German police are investigating the kebab sauce from a stand in Bremen's central train station to determine if it is so spicy that it is capable of causing grievous bodily harm. The kebab salesman threw some of the sauce into the eyes of a customer during a fight over napkins. "Legally, the question of whether the spiciness of the kebab sauce constituted 'normal' or grievous bodily harm must be addressed," local police said. Sounds like everyone can skip this week's CSI Bremen.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Yahoo Tech outlining a system currently being researched: "Card counting is perfectly legal — all a counter does is attempt to keep track of whether the cards remaining in a deck are favorable to his winning a hand (mainly if there are lots of tens and aces remaining in the deck) — but it's deeply frowned upon by Vegas casinos. Those caught counting cards are regularly expelled from casinos on the spot and are often permanently banned from returning. But given the slim house odds on Blackjack, it's often said that a good card counter can actually tip the odds in his favor by carefully controlling the way he bets his hands. And Vegas really doesn't care for that. The anti-card-counter system uses cameras to watch players and keep track of the actual 'count' of the cards, the same way a player would. It also measures how much each player is betting on each hand, and it syncs up the two data points to look for patterns in the action. If a player is betting big when the count is indeed favorable, and keeping his chips to himself when it's not, he's fingered by the computer... and, in the real world, he'd probably receive a visit from a burly dude in a bad suit, too. The system reportedly works even if the gambler intentionally attempts to mislead it with high bets at unfavorable times." It's not developed in Vegas, though, according to the brief description (the other projects are also interesting) from the University of Dundee's release, but rather in conjunction with the Dundee Casino.

Philips Electronics, a Netherlands-based company, has come up with a device designed to protect day traders from emotionally based trading decisions. The Rationalizer measures your galvanic skin response and lets you know when you are under stress. An online trader can then take a "time-out, wind down and re-consider their actions," according to the company. This may have come too late for us, but at least future generations won't have to live through the horror of angry day trading.

physburn writes "Somewhere in a triangle between Roswell (UFO) NM, Albuquerque (Left Turn) NM, and Amarillo (Do you know the way?) TX, a 22.5 square mile triangle of High Temperature Superconductor pipeline is to be built. Each leg of the triangle can carry 5GW of electricity. The purpose to load-balance and sell electricity between America's three power grids. Previously the Eastern Grid, Western Grid and Texan Grid have been separate, preventing cheap electricity being sold from one end of America to the other. The Tres Amiga Superstation, as it is to be called, will finally connect the three grids. The superstation is also designed to link renewable solar and wind power in the grids, and is to use HTS wire from American Superconductor. Some 23 years after its invention, today HTS comes of age. "

Officials in Malaysia are trying to slow down the divorce rate by offering feuding couples a three-day honeymoon package to help bring that spark back into their marriages. After all, what could be more romantic than three days of talking about your faults over a lovely fruit plate, and three drunken nights at the hotel bar watching the love of your life flirt with some random guy on a business trip? Terengganu Welfare Community Development and Women Affairs committee chairman, Ashaari Idris says, "We can understand newlyweds having problems understanding one another, where a slight skirmish could lead to a separation but it is unacceptable for those married more than two decades to file for divorce."

caffiend666 writes "'Marge Simpson is posing for Playboy . The magazine is giving the star of The Simpsons the star treatment, complete with a data sheet, an interview and a 2-page centerfold. 'We knew that this would really appeal to the 20-something crowd,' said Playboy spokeswoman Theresa Hennessey. Playboy even convinced 7-Eleven to carry the magazine in its 1,200 corporate-owned stores, something the company has only done once before in more than 20 years." Worst issue ever!

caffiend666 writes with news that scientists using the Spitzer Space Telescope have discovered a very large, previously unknown ring around the planet Saturn. According to NASA, if the ring were visible to the naked eye from Earth, it would cover a patch of sky roughly twice the angular diameter of the Moon. "The new belt lies at the far reaches of the Saturnian system, with an orbit tilted 27 degrees from the main ring plane. The bulk of its material starts about six million kilometers away from the planet and extends outward roughly another 12 million kilometers. One of Saturn's farthest moons, Phoebe, circles within the newfound ring, and is likely the source of its material. Saturn's newest halo is thick, too — its vertical height is about 20 times the diameter of the planet. It would take about one billion Earths stacked together to fill the ring. ... The ring itself is tenuous, made up of a thin array of ice and dust particles. Spitzer's infrared eyes were able to spot the glow of the band's cool dust. The telescope, launched in 2003, is currently 107 million kilometers from Earth in orbit around the sun."

chrb writes to tell us that Dell's new Latitude Z has finally been delivered as promised, complete with ARM processor. Codenamed BlackTop, the device runs a modified version of Suse Linux, and is capable of near-instant bootup. Dell's research has apparently found that some early users spend 70% of their time in the Linux environment." Relatedly snydeq writes "Colombian computer maker Haleron has designed a netbook that combines Atom processors in an effort to provide the performance of a standard laptop at a price more affordable to Latin Americans. The Swordfish Net N102 includes two Atom N270 processors running at 1.6GHz. Haleron worked for six months to modify Intel's 945 chipset to run the two processors. The processors divide the workload, much like a dual-core processor does, the company said. The netbook, which begs the question, when does a netbook stop being a netbook, comes with Windows XP Home Edition. 'We found that it works best on the Windows XP operating system. Both Windows Vista and the new Windows 7 performed below Windows XP in the load sharing department,' the company said."

SpuriousLogic spotted this story on the BBC, from which he excerpts: "The High Court has given permission for an injunction to be served via social-networking site Twitter. The order is to be served against an unknown Twitter user who anonymously posts to the site using the same name as a right-wing political blogger. The order demands the anonymous Twitter user reveal their identity and stop posing as Donal Blaney, who blogs at a site called Blaney's Blarney. The order says the Twitter user is breaching the copyright of Mr. Blaney. He told BBC News that the content being posted to Twitter in his name was 'mildly objectionable.' Mr. Blaney turned to Twitter to serve the injunction rather than go through the potentially lengthy process of contacting Twitter headquarters in California and asking it to deal with the matter. UK law states that an injunction does not have to be served in person and can be delivered by several different means including fax or e-mail."

Omomyid writes "I wasn't actually aware that Dr. Tim White of UC Berkeley had been 'sitting' on A. ramidus but apparently he has (I remember the original flurry of interest back in the '90s when it was announced), but now Dr. White and others have assembled a nearly complete skeleton of the 4.4mya specimen and the descriptions being carried by the NY Times and the AP are intriguing. Ramidus is clearly differentiated from the other Great Apes and also more primitive than A. afarensis (Lucy), providing a nice linkage backwards to the last shared ancestor between humans and chimpanzees. According to the NY Times, a whole passel of papers will be published in tomorrow's Science magazine describing A. ramidus." Update — 10/01 at 22:05 GMT by SS: Reader John Hawks provided a link to his detailed blog post about Ardipithecus, which contains a ton of additional details not covered in the above articles.

ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Rogue or bogus programs passing themselves off as real antivirus software have been one of the malware themes of 2009, but the APWG's numbers for the first half of the year show that the organisation's members detected 485,000 samples, more than five times the total for the whole of 2008."

slak11 quotes from a Globe and Mail article on the jump in corporate and government security breaches year-over-year. (The reporting is from Canada but the picture is probably much the same in the US.) "This does not seem to be all that newsworthy these days, since stories like this are appearing on a regular basis. The one detail I did like — that seems to break from the traditional 'hackers cause all the bad stuff' reporting — is the mention that everyday employees are a major cause of breaches. The recent Rocky Mountain Bank/Google story is a perfect example. As stated in the article: 'But lower security budgets aren't the only reason breaches tend to soar during tough economic times — employees themselves can often be the cause of such problems.' I figure this will be an ongoing problem until company management and employees accept their role in keeping company information safe. And IT people need to understand that regular employees are not propeller-heads like Slashdot readers, and to begin to implement technology and processes that average people can understand and use."

BuzzSkyline writes "Last month, math students published a model of a zombie infestation that explained how the disease might spread. A new physics paper offers help for the more immediate problem — how to avoid being eaten. The paper, which recently appeared in the journal Physical Review E, considers where best to hide when being pursued by zombie-like predatory 'random walkers.' Although the researchers weren't thinking of zombies when they wrote the paper, the abstract describes the research as focusing on 'the survival probability of immobile targets annihilated by a population of random walkers.' (Sounds like a zombie movie premise to me.) The bottom line is you're better off the more labyrinth-like your hiding place is. So take a lesson from Dawn of the Dead, and hunker down in the mall, not in a farmhouse (as in Night of the Living Dead)."

Phurge writes "When Princeton announced its Kindle e-reader pilot program last May, administrators seemed cautiously optimistic that the e-readers would both be sustainable and serve as a valuable academic tool. But less than two weeks after 50 students received the free Kindle DX e-readers, many of them said they were dissatisfied and uncomfortable with the devices. 'I hate to sound like a Luddite, but this technology is a poor excuse of an academic tool,' said Aaron Horvath, a student in Civil Society and Public Policy. 'It's clunky, slow and a real pain to operate.' 'Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,' he explained. 'All these things have been lost, and if not lost they're too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the "features" have been rendered useless.'"

ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Cygnus founder Michael Tiemann estimates IT customers globally could save a trillion a year with open source or free source software." Not that a guy with a title like "VP of Open Source Affairs" at Red Hat would have a reason to be biased, but it's an interesting little read about a guy who's been doing this longer than you. Well, most of you anyway.

RobinH writes "StackOverflow, the successful question-and-answer website for programmers, is now over a year old and its top user has just passed 100,000 reputation points. Now one of the creators of StackOverflow, Joel Spolsky, and his company Fog Creek, are developing a software-as-a-service form of the StackOverflow engine called StackExchange to support any topic you want. The software is currently in private beta, but the first few beta sites have surfaced. Topics include business travel, the home, parenthood, the environment, finance, and iPhone game development."

NotBornYesterday writes "AT&T is accusing Google of being a hypocrite when it comes to Net neutrality because it blocks certain phone calls on its Google Voice service. 'By openly flaunting the call-blocking prohibition that applies to its competitors, Google is acting in a manner inconsistent with the spirit, if not the letter, of the FCC's fourth principle contained in its Internet Policy Statement,' Robert Quinn, AT&T's senior vice president focusing on federal regulation, said in a statement. Google blocks certain calls to avoid high costs due to a practice known as traffic pumping. Rural carriers can charge connection fees that are about 100 times higher than the rates that large local phone companies can charge. In traffic pumping, they share this revenue with adult chat services, conference-calling centers, party lines, and others that are able to attract lots of incoming phone calls to their networks. Google responded by saying that the rules AT&T refers to don't apply to Google Voice for several reasons. Google Voice is a software application that offers a service on top of the existing telco infrastructure, it is a free service, and it is not intended to be a replacement for traditional telephone service. In fact, the service requires that users have a landline phone or a wireless phone."

ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Early tests with Google's Chrome Frame found IE8 runs 9.6 times faster than usual. The testers ran the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark suite." The other question is what is the performance hit of using the Frame plug-in instead of running the browser natively.

IamSmee writes "Russian Billionaire Roman Abramovich's 557 ft yacht, Eclipse, now boasts a paparrazi-foiling shield of laser beams. From the article: 'Infrared lasers detect the electronic light sensors in nearby cameras, known as charge-coupled devices. When the system detects such a device, it fires a focused beam of light at the camera, disrupting its ability to record a digital image. The beams can also be activated manually by security guards if they spot a photographer loitering.'"

antdude sends along an AP piece on the decline of the teaching of cursive writing in schools — ramifications of which we've discussed a few times before. "The decline of cursive is happening as students are doing more and more work on computers, including writing. In 2011, the writing test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress will require 8th and 11th graders to compose on computers, with 4th graders following in 2019. ... Handwriting is increasingly something people do only when they need to make a note to themselves rather than communicate with others, [an educator] said. Students accustomed to using computers to write at home have a hard time seeing the relevance of hours of practicing cursive handwriting. 'I am not sure students have a sense of any reason why they should vest their time and effort in writing a message out manually when it can be sent electronically in seconds.'"

AthanasiusKircher sends in a Wired writeup on what should surely be a contender in the next Improbable Research competition: wiring a dead salmon into an fMRI machine and showing it pictures of humans designed to evoke various emotions. "When they got around to analyzing the voxel... data, the voxels representing the area where the salmon's tiny brain sat showed evidence of activity. In the fMRI scan, it looked like the dead salmon was actually thinking about the pictures it had been shown. ... The result is completely nuts — but that's actually exactly the point. [Neuroscientist Craig] Bennett... and his adviser, George Wolford, wrote up the work as a warning about the dangers of false positives in fMRI data. They wanted to call attention to ways the field could improve its statistical methods. ... Bennett notes: 'We could set our threshold [of significance] so high that we have no false positives, but we have no legitimate results.... We could also set it so low that we end up getting voxels in the fish's brain. It's the fine line that we walk.'" The research has been turned down by several publications, according to Wired, but a poster is available (PDF).

sterlingda writes to tell us that scientists have built a mouse-levitating superconducting magnet, working on behalf of NASA to study variable levels of gravity. The group hopes to ascertain what physiological impacts prolonged exposure to microgravity might have. "Repeated levitation tests showed the mice, even when not sedated, could quickly acclimate to levitation inside the cage. After three or four hours, the mice acted normally, including eating and drinking. The strong magnetic fields did not seem to have any negative impacts on the mice in the short term, and past studies have shown that rats did not suffer from adverse effects after 10 weeks of strong, non-levitating magnetic fields."

inject_hotmail.com writes "The results are in: it's faster to send your data via an airborne carrier than it is through the pipes. As discussed Tuesday, a company in South Africa called Unlimited IT, frustrated by terribly slow Internet speeds, decided to prove their point by sending an actual homing pigeon with a "data card" strapped to its leg from one of their offices to another while at the same time uploading the same amount of data to the same destination via their ISPs data lines. The media outlet reporting this triumph said that it took the pigeon just over 1 hour to make the 80km/50mile flight, whereas it took over 2 hours to transfer just 4% of that data."

mnmlst notes a Wall Street Journal story (picked up at Total Telecom) on the move of some patents originally held by Microsoft to the Open Invention Network, where they will join a portfolio whose purpose is to inoculate open source companies against patent trolls. OIN is near a deal to buy 22 patents from another patent-protective group, Allied Security Trust, whose members include Verizon, Cisco, and HP. AST won the patents in a private auction Microsoft put on earlier. An AST executive says that "Microsoft presented the patents to potential bidders in its auction as relating to Linux." While OIN's acquisition of the patents will act to protect the Linux community, AST, by contrast, exists to protect only its corporate members, not the community as a whole. But by selling the patents to OIN, they are cooperating in the protection of Linux. And by allowing the patents to go to AST in the first place, Microsoft may (the article implies) be signaling at least their lack of active intent to disrupt the Linux marketplace.

NeverVotedBush writes with an update to a story we discussed early this month about an enormous accumulation of garbage and plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean, a thousand miles off the coast of California. The team of scientists has now returned from their expedition to examine the area and say they "found much more debris than they expected." The team will start running tests on the samples they retrieved, and they are preparing to visit another section of ocean they suspect will be full of trash. "The Scripps team hopes the samples they gathered during the trip nail down answers to questions of the trash's environmental impact. Does eating plastic poison plankton? Is the ecosystem in trouble when new sea creatures hitchhike on the side of a water bottle? Plastics have entangled birds and turned up in the bellies of fish, and one paper cited by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates 100,000 marine mammals die trash-related deaths each year. The scientists hope their data gives clues as to the density and extent of marine debris, especially since the Great Pacific Garbage Patch may have company in the Southern Hemisphere, where scientists say the gyre is four times bigger. 'We're afraid at what we're going to find in the South Gyre, but we've got to go there,' said Tony Haymet, director of the Scripps Institution."

Uncle Alex writes "My niece just turned one year old and her parents have asked that, instead of the usual gifts, we each contribute something to a time capsule to be opened on her 17th birthday. Multiple members of my family want to contribute digital data — text, video, music files. They came to me (the closest thing to a geek our family has) wondering: what's the best way to save the data to ensure she'll actually be able to see it in 16 years? Software might be out of date, hardware may no longer be used... any suggestions?"

A 58-year-old, North Queensland man didn't find the humor in the prank that left him stuck to a shopping center toilet seat. The man had to be taken to the hospital with the seat still attached after he found himself caught by a fast-acting adhesive that had been smeared on the toilet. Hospital staff were able to remove the seat with the help of some industrial strength solvents. Cairns City Council community safety committee chair Di Forsyth said, "I'm disgusted that a gentlemen has had to go through that because someone thinks it's funny — it's a sick joke. I think the community would be outraged and quite rightly so ... it's quite a dangerous prank." Police have a few leads in the case, but nothing that will stick.

caffiend666 writes "A newly found deep ocean worm 'can cast off green glowing body parts, a move scientists think may be a defensive effort to confuse attackers. Researchers have dubbed the newly discovered critters "green bombers." ... The first of the new species has been given the scientific name Swima bombiviridis. ... [T]he worms are able to regenerate the body parts.' So, it's a naturally occurring animal that rips off its arms and throws them, and we're not talking about a game from ID Software?"

Knowing that a bad economy is immune to sneak attacks, a group of ex-rogues are creeping around London tourist sites and slipping money into peoples pockets. The "Putpockets" were hired by a broadband company and will be stalking tourist spots until the end of the month. Unsuspecting tourist can find anything from 5 pound to 20 pound notes slipped into pockets or unguarded handbags. "It feels good to give something back for a change -- and Britons certainly need it in the current economic climate. Every time I put money back in someone's pocket, I feel less guilty about the fact I spent many years taking it out," said Chris Fitch, a former pickpocket.

dasButcher writes "We often hear that businesses risk their corporate reputations if they don't have adequate security. It's been a common refrain among those selling security technologies: protect your data or suffer the reputational consequences. But, as Larry Walsh points out, the evidence is against this notion. Even companies that have suffered major security breaches — TJX, Hannaford, etc. — have suffered little lasting damage to their reputation. So, does this mean that reputational concerns are simply bunk?"

olddotter points out a story up at Yahoo Tech on companies' decisions to distance themselves from the GPL. "Before deciding to pull away from GPL, Haynie says Appcelerator surveyed some two dozen software vendors working within the same general market space. To his surprise, Haynie saw that only one was using a GPL variant. 'Everybody else, hands down, was MIT, Apache, or New BSD,' he says. 'The proponents of GPL like to tell people that the world only needs one open source license, and I think that's actually, frankly, just a flat-out dumb position,' says Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, one of the many organizations now offering an open source license with more generous commercial terms than GPL."

Several readers including carpenter37 let us know that FriendFeed has sold itself to Facebook. Nobody who knows is talking about the terms of the deal. Here is Facebook's announcement, and here is FriendFeed's, which elaborates: "As my mom explained to me, when two companies love each other very much, they form a structured investment vehicle." FriendFeed was founded in 2007 by four ex-Googlers, including Paul Buchheit — the engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google's "Don't be evil" motto — and Bret Taylor, a former group product manager who launched Google Maps.

Cuba has suffered through many shortages through the years but is now faced with the worst possible scenario. If the government doesn't get some kind of help, Cubans will run out of toilet paper and have no way of getting more until the end of the year. Cuba makes some of its own paper but lacks sufficient natural resources to meet its own demand. In addition to the lack of resources, the government has had to reduce imports by 20% because of the poor financial climate. It sounds like the Cubans are going to end up with quite a mess on their hands.

mrchaotica writes "I'm in the market for a new HDTV (in the $1200-or-slightly-more range, as I won the extended-service-plan lottery and have a Sears store credit). Several of the TVs I've looked at have various 'Internet TV' features (here are Samsung's and Panasonic's). Some manufacturers appear to be rolling their own, while others are partnering with Yahoo (maybe in an attempt to create a 'standard?'). Moreover, these TVs also tend to run Linux under the hood (although their GPL compliance, such as in Panasonic's case, may leave something to be desired). Finally, it's easy to imagine these TVs being able to support video streaming services (YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, etc.) without a set-top box, but I don't know the extent to which that support actually exists. Here are my questions: 1) Is this 'Internet TV' thing going to be a big deal going forward, or just a gimmick? 2) Which manufacturers are most [open standard|Linux|hacker]-friendly? 3) Which TV models have the best support (or best potential and community backing) for this sort of thing?"