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MSNBC points out that the ubiquity of sites like Facebook and Myspace have rendered password resets based on personal questions dangerously insecure:
As an experiment, Herbert Thompson, chief security strategist of People Security, recently asked a few friends for permission to hack into their bank accounts. Using only information gathered from Web sites, Thompson found his way in within minutes. How?
After clicking on the familiar "Forgot your password?" link, one can access online accounts by entering your pet's name, identifying a high school mascot, or answering some other seemingly obscure questions. But there's a problem: A criminal can do that, too. With the help of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, personal trivia is getting less obscure all the time. You’d be surprised how easily someone can uncover Fido's name or your alma mater with a little creative searching. read more
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Annalee Newitz writes on i09.com:
Why haven't we met aliens yet? And why aren't we sending rockets all over the solar system? There is only one plausible explanation. Earth is being quarantined! A combination of higher alien civilizations and our own Earth-based military forces are working together to keep the Earth contained and neutralized. The reasons why they would do this are obvious, but where is the evidence? Below, we've got enough truly true facts to get your conspiracy engines revved up to maximum.
1. We have been located in a backwater part of the galactic rim.
To keep Earth inhabitants away from the rest of the universe community, our planet was stuck way out in the boondocks at the rim of a second-rate galaxy. Obviously only a higher alien intelligence could have done this, to prevent humans from leaking out everywhere and finding all the cool shit in the universe.
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Sean Cunningham, Esquire:
As McCain decides how to counter Obama's Biden selection, they can both take solace in knowing their predecessors set the bar low:
William Rufus King: Dead Man Governing
Best known for being the only Vice President never to marry and living much of his life with future Commander-in-Chief James Buchanan (who, in what's bound to be a complete coincidence, is the only President never to marry), he has another claim to fame: he took the oath of office on foreign soil. Indeed, he took advantage of Cuba's warm, theoretically therapeutic weather for much of his 45 days in office before dying of tuberculosis, leaving behind a legacy that will not be equaled until a major political party sees fit to nominate an actual corpse.
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When Pam Spaulding heard from two contributors to her blog, Pam’s House Blend, that they couldn’t afford to attend the Democratic National Convention, she knew that historic times called for creative measures.
Getting convention credentials for her blog, a news site for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community, was the easy part. As air fare, lodging and incidentals began piling up, paying for the trip to Denver became the bigger obstacle.
For Ms. Spaulding, 45, who works full time as an IT manager at Duke University Press in Durham, N.C., blogging is her passion, an unpaid hobby she pursues at nights and on weekends. So she called on her 5,500 daily readers to help raise funds: “Send the Blend to Denver” reads the ChipIn widget on her blog’s home page that tracks donations from readers; so far they have pledged more than $5,000 to transport Ms. Spaulding and three other bloggers to the convention. read more
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Stefanie Olsen | cNet News:
Within the next 10 years, the U.S., China, Israel, and a host of private companies plan to set up camp on the moon. So if and when they plant a flag, does that give them property rights?
A NASA working group hosted a discussion this week to ask: who owns the moon? The answer, of course, is no one. The Outer Space Treaty, the international law signed by more than 100 countries, states that the moon and other celestial bodies are the province of all mankind. No doubt that would irk all of the people throughout the ages, like monks from the Middle Ages, who have tried to claim the moon was theirs.
But ownership is different from property rights. People who rent apartments, for example, don't own where they live, but they still hold rights. So with all of the upcoming missions to visit the moon and beyond, space industry thought leaders are seriously asking themselves how to deal with a potential land rush, cowboy-style.
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Jason Linkins, Huffington Post:
Because today is Catharsis Day at the convention, we figured we better do like Aristotle says in the Poetics and hit you with a double dose of pity and fear so you can purge both your raw, untamed emotion and your hope that life in America will ever get better for anybody. So, to that end, here's a video of Chris Matthews talking to a trio of PUMAs — women who love Hillary Clinton whilst simultaneously hating the policies for which Clinton has fought. They are the total hot mess of the Democratic Convention.
Watch as they level bizarre accusations at Barack Obama, and then refuse to accurately cite the source of their claims. Maybe it was Lanny Davis or something! See, I don't know, and neither do they, but I can tell you, if I had tried to apply the same sort of "reasoning" in college, my professors would have knocked me unconscious and tossed me in a ditch, far from town.
Anyway, if possible, you should burn your computer after watching this. That is all.
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Anyway, if possible, you should burn your computer after watching this. That is all.
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Looks like Jack Parsons life is being aggrandized in comic form. While skeptical at first, the comic is actually very good.
From Wikipedia: John Whiteside Parsons was an American rocket propulsion researcher at the California Institute of Technology and co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Aerojet Corporation. He was also an enthusiastic occultist, and one of the earliest American devotees of Aleister Crowley.
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ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON | Wall Street Journal:
The 110th Congress, whose term officially ends in January, hasn't passed any spending bills or attacked high gasoline prices. But it has used its powers to celebrate watermelons and to decree the origins of the word "baseball."
Barring a burst of legislative activity after Labor Day, this group of 535 men and women will have accomplished a rare feat. In two decades of record keeping, no sitting Congress has passed fewer public laws at this point in the session — 294 so far — than this one. That's not to say they've been idle. On the flip side, no Congress in the same 20 years has been so prolific when it comes to proposing resolutions — more than 1,900, according to a tally by the nonpartisan Taxpayers for Common Sense.
With the mostly symbolic measures, Congress has saluted such milestones as the Idaho Potato Commission's 70th anniversary and recognized soil as an "essential natural resource." As legislation on gasoline prices, tax fixes and predatory lending languish, Congress has designated May 5-9 as National Substitute Teacher Recognition Week, and set July 28 as the Day of the American Cowboy. read more
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Barring a burst of legislative activity after Labor Day, this group of 535 men and women will have accomplished a rare feat. In two decades of record keeping, no sitting Congress has passed fewer public laws at this point in the session — 294 so far — than this one. That's not to say they've been idle. On the flip side, no Congress in the same 20 years has been so prolific when it comes to proposing resolutions — more than 1,900, according to a tally by the nonpartisan Taxpayers for Common Sense.
With the mostly symbolic measures, Congress has saluted such milestones as the Idaho Potato Commission's 70th anniversary and recognized soil as an "essential natural resource." As legislation on gasoline prices, tax fixes and predatory lending languish, Congress has designated May 5-9 as National Substitute Teacher Recognition Week, and set July 28 as the Day of the American Cowboy.">
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TechDirt reports:
Consider me to be in a state of shock. For nearly half a decade Diebold has always responded in the identical way to every single report of a problem or security vulnerability with its e-voting machines: attacking those who pointed out the problem and claiming it really wasn't a problem at all. This has happened time and time again that I'm not even sure how to react when the company (renamed Premier to get away from the Diebold name stigma) has finally admitted that its machines have a flaw that drops votes. Oops. It's warning 34 states that use the machines of the problem which was highlighted in the lawsuit Ohio filed against Premiere/Diebold. Not only that, but it's admitting the flaw in the software has been in the software for the past decade.
So, uh, why was the company blaming anti-virus software just a couple months ago?
It should also make us question Premier/Diebold's longstanding claim that independent outsiders should not be allowed to inspect its machines for problems.
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Michelle Goodman | CNN.com:
While she was studying in Brazil during college, the one thing Stephanie Gerson longed to do before leaving was spend time in the thick of the Amazon rain forest. Unfortunately, she couldn't find a tour that would take her past the forest's edge.
So, when a college-aged busboy at a resort she was visiting began flirting with her, she asked him if he thought a tourist could survive alone in the jungle. "He laughed and told me I was nuts," says Gerson, 27, who works part-time in online marketing for a chocolate company in San Francisco.
Then he told her that he'd grown up in the jungle in a nearby indigenous community. That was all Gerson needed to hear. Although she wasn't attracted to the guy, Gerson flirted right back in the hopes that he would be her jungle tour guide. It worked. The busboy wormed his way out of work, and the two headed into the rain forest. "It was amazing," Gerson says of her adventure in 2000. "We built our homes out of palm leaves, I saw animals I'd never seen before, he taught me the medicinal properties of all the plants, we picked fruit off the trees, we swam with and ate piranhas. And, of course, we had sex ... for almost two weeks." read more
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Then he told her that he'd grown up in the jungle in a nearby indigenous community. That was all Gerson needed to hear. Although she wasn't attracted to the guy, Gerson flirted right back in the hopes that he would be her jungle tour guide. It worked. The busboy wormed his way out of work, and the two headed into the rain forest. "It was amazing," Gerson says of her adventure in 2000. "We built our homes out of palm leaves, I saw animals I'd never seen before, he taught me the medicinal properties of all the plants, we picked fruit off the trees, we swam with and ate piranhas. And, of course, we had sex ... for almost two weeks."">
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Scientists and scholars in Jerusalem have begun a programme to take the first high-resolution, digital photographs of the Dead Sea Scrolls so they can be made available to the public on the internet.
The Israel Antiquities Authority this week ends a pilot project that prepares the way for a much larger operation to photograph the 15–20,000 fragments that make up the 900 scrolls which were discovered 60 years ago by shepherds in caves close to the Dead Sea.
The scrolls were first photographed in the 1950s, after their discovery, and have since then been kept in specially monitored conditions in a vault in Jerusalem. Only four specially-trained curators are allowed to handle them.
Now, in a project that could take five years and will cost millions of dollars, the fragments will be photographed first by a 39-megapixel colour digital camera, then by another digital camera in infra-red light and finally some will be photographed using a sophisticated multi-spectral imaging camera, which can distinguish the ink from the parchment and papyrus on which the scrolls were written. read more
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