Archive for January, 2010
How Trackable is Your Web Browser?
Enter the Panopticlick (courtesy of the Electronic Frontier Foundation):
What fingerprints does your browser leave behind as you surf the web? Traditionally, people assume they can prevent a website from identifying them by disabling cookies on their web browser.
Unfortunately, this is not the whole story.
When you visit a website, you are allowing that site to access a lot of information about your computer’s configuration. Combined, this information can create a kind of fingerprint — a signature that could be used to identify you and your computer. Some companies are already using technology to try to identify individual computers. But how effective would this kind of online tracking be?
EFF is running an experiment to find out. Panopticlick will anonymously log the configuration and version information from your operating system, your browser, and your plug-ins, and compare it to our database of many other Internet users’ configurations. Then, it will give you a uniqueness score —…
Live Stream Of Obama’s State of the Union Address + ‘The Cost of War’ With Robert Greenwald
President Obama will deliver his State of the Union address this evening and you can watch it here on disinformation®, courtesy of Hulu:
Right before the nation prepares to watch the President’s State of the Union Address, however, Brave New Foundation, CREDO Mobile, and True Majority will be launching its first online live stream action. Brave New Foundation will live stream “The Cost of War,” a segment of the critically acclaimed documentary Rethink Afghanistan, giving concerned citizens a chance to measure the President’s proposals against military spending in Afghanistan. Brave New Foundation Director Robert Greenwald and Political Associate Derrick Crowe will accompany the stream by live blogging the event.
Want To Get Into A Recession-Busting Business? Join The Mafia
From Reuters:
Italy’s mafia crime syndicates bucked the recession in 2009 to raise ‘profits’ by almost 8 percent with the financial crisis making companies and even the stock market even more vulnerable to cash-flush mobsters.
“Mafia Inc. is reinforcing its position as the number one Italian company,” said a report published on Wednesday by a body whose members bear the brunt of mafia extortion and crimes, the small business and shopkeepers’ association Confesercenti.
It estimated that the impact on business equaled about 7 percent of Italy’s economic output, enjoying healthy growth in a year when the Italian economy shrank by almost 5 percent.
Experts had predicted when the crisis began that Calabria’s ‘Ndrangheta, with its huge slice of the global drugs trade, Sicily’s Cosa Nostra, Naples’ violent Camorra and Puglia’s Sacra Corona Unita would see more demand for loan-sharking.
But the report said mobsters had also been able to launder their earnings by buying up…
The Day That Robots Drew First Blood
Humankind will never forget! David Kravets writes in Wired (there’s a uncanny coincidence in the article):
January 25, 1979: A 25-year-old Ford Motor assembly line worker is killed on the job in a Flat Rock, Michigan, casting plant. It’s the first recorded human death by robot.
Robert Williams’ death came on the 58th anniversary of the premiere of Karel Capek’s play about Rossum’s Universal Robots. R.U.R. gave the world the first use of the word robot to describe an artificial person. Capek invented the term, basing it on the Czech word for “forced labor.” (Robot entered the English language in 1923.)
Williams died instantly in 1979 when the robot’s arm slammed him as he was gathering parts in a storage facility, where the robot also retrieved parts. Williams’ family was later awarded $10 million in damages. The jury agreed the robot struck him in the head because of a lack of safety measures, including one that would…
Wisconsin Court Forbids Prison Inmates from Playing Dungeons & Dragons
Nerds behind bars.The Volokh Conspiracy illuminates this tragic first-world problem.
In a decision issued today, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a Wisconsin prison’s rule forbidding inmates to play Dungeons & Dragons or possess D&D publications and materials [HT: Josh Blackman].
The prison’s rationale for the ban is that playing D&D might stimulate “gang activity” by inmates. But the government conceded that there is no evidence that Dungeons and Dragons actually had stimulated gang activity in the past, either in this prison or elsewhere. The only evidence for the supposedly harmful effects of Dungeons and Dragons were a few cases from other states where playing the game supposedly led inmates to indulge in “escapism” and become divorced from reality, one case where two non-inmates committed a crime in which they “acted out” a D&D story-line, and one where a longtime D&D player (not an inmate) committed suicide. Obviously, almost any hobby or reading material might lead people to become divorced from reality, or in rare cases commit suicide. And disturbed individuals could potentially “act out” a crime based on a scenario in almost any film or literary work. Should prisons ban The Count of Monte Cristo on the grounds that it might encourage escape attempts? Moreover, the “escapism” rationale conflicts with the gang argument. People who become engrossed in escapism and retreat from society are presumably less likely to become active gang members.
Grad Student Uses Alien-Seeking Math to Explain Why He Can’t Find A Girlfriend
Frank Carnevale writes on news.au.com:
A student used the Drake Equation, used to calculate chances of alien life, to prove why he was single. Peter Backus, a native of Seattle and PhD candidate in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, near London, took on his own dating woes in “Why I don’t have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK.”
In describing the paper online, he wrote “the results are not encouraging”, MyFox reports. “The probability of finding love in the UK is only about 100 times better than the probability of finding intelligent life in our galaxy.”
Mr Backus, 30, found that of the 30 million women in the UK, only 26 would be suitable girlfriends for him, according to Click Liverpool.
Why The Post-9/11 Anthrax Attacks Are Still Unsolved
Microphotograph of a Gram stain the bacterium Bacillus anthracis which causes anthrax
Edward Jay Epstein reviews some questions that remain worryingly unsolved concerning the anthrax attacks that followed 9/11, for the Wall Street Journal:
The investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks ended as far as the public knew on July 29, 2008, with the death of Bruce Ivins, a senior biodefense researcher at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, Md. The cause of death was an overdose of the painkiller Tylenol. No autopsy was performed, and there was no suicide note.
Less than a week after his apparent suicide, the FBI declared Ivins to have been the sole perpetrator of the 2001 Anthrax attacks, and the person who mailed deadly anthrax spores to NBC, the New York Post, and Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. These attacks killed five people, closed down a Senate office building,…
Hello iPad!
From The Apple Blog:
Looking dapper in jeans and a black mock turtle-neck, Steve Jobs took the stage today and officially introduced his iPad to the world. As we’ve been seeing and hearing from so many rumors as of late, it appears as if the iPhone got the super-size treatment, complete with a home button.At only half an inch thin, and sporting a 9.7″ screen, the iPad weighs in at only one and a half pounds. It’s powered by Apple’s very own chip – the A4 – ans “screams” at 1GHz. Available with 16, 32, or 64GB flash storage, and has 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR. Oh, and you can run it for 10 hours (a month in standby!) while watching videos. Wow! So far, no mention of any cellular carrier connectivity. UPDATE: Carrier details below!
If you’re a current iPhone user, much of the interaction with the iPad looks…
Obama’s Subliminal Satanic Message
Subliminal Satanic messages in Obama’s speeches? Judge for yourself. He sounds creepy in reverse regardless. Found on YouTube:
Bob Herbert: Who is Barack Obama?
BOB HERBERT writes in the NY Times:
Who is Barack Obama?
Americans are still looking for the answer, and if they don’t get it soon — or if they don’t like the answer — the president’s current political problems will look like a walk in the park.
Mr. Obama may be personally very appealing, but he has positioned himself all over the political map: the anti-Iraq war candidate who escalated the war in Afghanistan; the opponent of health insurance mandates who made a mandate to buy insurance the centerpiece of his plan; the president who stocked his administration with Wall Street insiders and went to the mat for the banks and big corporations, but who is now trying to present himself as a born-again populist.
Mr. Obama is in danger of being perceived as someone whose rhetoric, however skillful, cannot always be trusted. He is creating a credibility gap for himself, and if it…
In Memoriam of Thomas Crapper: The Man Who Did NOT Invent the Flush Toilet
A man named “Thomas Crapper” invented the toilet you say? I heard this on one of those “morning zoo” shows today, they claimed it was the anniversary of his birth, but Wikipedia says it’s his death. So turns out this is a real guy, but this just seemed too much of a coincidence to me (unless there’s a secret society of plumbers that has controlled the destiny of toilet technology that I am unaware of). So I checked out the great urban legend debunking site Snopes.com:
Thomas Crapper is an elusive figure: Most people familiar with his name know him as acelebrated figure in Victorian England, an ingenious plumber who invented the modern flush toilet; others believe him to be nothing more than a hoax, the whimsical creation of a satirical writer. The truth lies somewhere in between.
Much of the confusion stems from a 1969 book by Wallace Reyburn, Flushed with Pride: The Story of Thomas Crapper. Reyburn’s “biography” of Crapper has often been dismissed as a complete fabrication, as some of his other works (most notably Bust-Up: The Uplifting Tale of Otto Titzling and the Development of the Bra) are obvious satirical fiction. Although Flushed with Pride is, like Bust-Up, a tongue-in-cheek work full of puns, jokes, and exaggerations, Reyburn did not invent the person of Thomas Crapper as he did Otto Titzling. In Flushed with Pride, Reyburn’s satire rests on the framework of a real man’s life. Thomas Crapper was not, as Reyburn wrote, the inventor of the flush toilet, a master plumber by appointment to the royals who was knighted by Queen Victoria, or an important figure whose achievements were written up in the Encyclopedia Britannica…
Ten Executions That Defined The 2000s
Executed Today, the site from which I get all of my news, has its rundown of the “ten executions that defined the 2000s.” The earliest one on the list is Timothy McVeigh, who comes in ranked only seventh:
The Gulf War veteran was the face of terrorism in the U.S. from the time of his arrest for the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City’s Murrah Federal Building, until three months after his June 11, 2001, execution.
ACORN ‘gotcha’ man arrested in attempt to bug Senator’s phones
via nola.com:
Alleging a plot to tamper with phones in Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office in the Hale Boggs Federal Building in downtown New Orleans, the FBI arrested four people Monday, including James O’Keefe, 25, a conservative filmmaker whose undercover videos at ACORN field offices severely damaged the advocacy group’s credibility.
Landrieu said: “This is a very unusual situation and somewhat unsettling for me and my staff. The individuals responsible have been charged with entering federal property under false pretenses for the purposes of committing a felony. I am as interested as everyone else about their motives and purpose, which I hope will become clear as the investigation moves forward.”
Landrieu’s Republican counterpart, Sen. David Vitter, called for a racketeering investigation against New Orleans-founded ACORN last year in the wake of O’Keefe’s videos.
Grayson Introduces ‘Business Should Mind Its Own Business Act’ In Congress
Last week the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision overturning restrictions on corporations’ political activity.
The Consumerist reports that, in response, cranky rogue Florida congressman Alan Grayson has introduced a bill before Congress called the “Business Should Mind Its Own Business Act.” The BSMOBA would tax corporate political contributions and spendings on political ads at a rate of 500%.
I’m not sure what the odds are of this getting any traction, but one can always dream.
Obama Will Axe NASA’s Moon Mission
From the Orlando Sentinel:
NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the moon are dead. So are the rockets being designed to take them there — that is, if President Barack Obama gets his way.
When the White House releases his budget proposal Monday, there will be no money for the Constellation program that was supposed to return humans to the moon by 2020. The troubled and expensive Ares I rocket that was to replace the space shuttle to ferry humans to space will be gone, along with money for its bigger brother, the Ares V cargo rocket that was to launch the fuel and supplies needed to take humans back to the moon.
There will be no lunar landers, no moon bases, no Constellation program at all.
In their place, according to White House insiders, agency officials, industry executives and congressional sources familiar with Obama’s long-awaited plans for the space agency, NASA will look…
Head Of Security At World Economic Forum Found Dead In Davos
There must be a conspiracy theory attached to this story, surely? There isn’t much news coming out of the 
World Economic Forum currently underway in Davos, so this item in the New York Times really stood out for me:
Unpleasant news hit the World Economic Forum on Tuesday, after local authorities aid they had found the police commander heading security dead, in what looked like a suicide.
The head of the police in the Swiss canton of Graubuenden, Markus Reinhardt, was found dead in his hotel in Davos, the police of the south-eastern canton said in a media release on its Web site, according to Reuters.
“All indications point to a suicide,” it added…
Digital Revolution Makes Us Invisible To Aliens
The Telegraph is reporting that satellite television and the digital revolution is making humanity more and more invisible to inquisitive aliens on other planets:
That might be good news for anyone who fears an “Independence Day” – style invasion by little green men. But it is also likely to make the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence by Earthly scientists harder, Dr Frank Drake believes.
Dr Drake, who founded the
SETI (Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence) organisation in the US 50 years ago, said the digital age was effectively gagging the Earth by cutting the transmission of TV and radio signals into space.
At present, the Earth was surrounded by a 50 light year-wide “shell” of radiation from analogue TV, radio and radar transmissions, he said.
But although the signals had spread far enough to reach many nearby star systems, they were rapidly vanishing before the march of digital technology.
To a race of observing aliens, digital TV signals…
AI Researcher To Build…AI Researcher
Artificial Intelligence researcher Jurgen Schmidhuber says his main scientific ambition “is to build an optimal scientist, then retire!”
The Cognitive Robotics professor has worked on problems including artificial ants and even robots that are taught how to tie shoelaces using reinforcement learning, but he believes algorithms can be written that allow the programming of curiosity itself. And he offers a fascinating metaphor for life after the development of AI.”It’s a bit like asking an ant of 10 million years ago: If humans were created tomorrow, what sort of implications do you think that would have for all the ant colonies?
Jürgen Schmidhuber at Singularity Summit 2009 – Compression Progress: The Algorithmic Principle Behind Curiosity and Creativity from Michael Anissimov on Vimeo.
“In hindsight we know that many ant colonies are still doing fine, but some of them (for example, those in my house) have goal conflicts with humans, and live dangerously.”
He’s also created art using algorithmic information theory, and describes the simple algorithmic principle that underlies subjective beauty and creativity…
John Stewart: ‘Corporations Now Have More Rights Than Gay People.’
Congress needs to challenge this ruling now. It seems like the most important things that presidents have done for the last forty-five years is appoint Supreme Court judges (notwithstanding declaring unlawful wars). Via the Daily Show:
