Read moreThe Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) sets up a system through which the US government can blacklist a pirate website from the Domain Name System, ban credit card companies from processing US payments to the site, and forbid online ad networks from working with the site. This morning, COICA unanimously passed the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“We are disappointed that the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning chose to disregard the concerns of public-interest groups, Internet engineers, Internet companies, human-rights groups and law professors in approving a bill that could do great harm to the public and to the Internet,” said Public Knowledge president Gigi Sohn, who pledged to craft a “more narrowly tailored bill” next year to deal with “rogue websites.”
Quotes
Read moreThe only way to be a Post Digital business is to be a thoroughly, deeply, massively digital one. To be digital in culture not just in capabilities. To know how to iterate in public, to do experiments not research, to recognise that it’s quicker and better to code something than it is to describe it in meetings. You need to be part of the wider digital culture, to have good sharing habits, to give credit where it’s due, and at the very least to know how to do ellipses in Processing.
Post Digital was supposed, if anything, to be a shout against complacency, to make people realise that we’re not at the end of a digital revolution, we’re at the start of one. The end game was not making a website to go with your TV commercial and it’s not now about making a newspaper out of your website. Post Digital was supposed to be the next exciting phase, not a return to the old order. It’s the bit where the Digital people start to engage in the world beyond the screen, not where the old guard reasserts itself.
Read more“You would send a little bit older folks, around 60 or something like that,” Schulze-Makuch said, bringing to mind the aging heroes who saved the day in the movie “Space Cowboys.”
That’s because the mission would undoubtedly reduce a person’s lifespan, from a lack of medical care and exposure to radiation. Radiation could also damage reproductive organs, so sending people of childbearing age is not a good idea, Schulze-Makuch said.
Mars is a six-month flight away, and it has surface gravity, a thin atmosphere, frozen water, carbon dioxide and essential minerals. The two scientists propose the missions begin with two two-person teams, in separate ships that would serve as living quarters on the planet. More colonists and regular supply ships would follow.
The technology already exists, or is within easy reach, they wrote. By not taking the extra fuel and provisions necessary for a return trip to Earth, the mission could cut costs by 80 percent.
Davies and Schulze-Makuch say it’s important to realize they’re not proposing a “suicide mission.”
“The astronauts would go to Mars with the intention of staying for the rest of their lives, as trailblazers of a permanent human Mars colony,” they wrote.
Read moreFollowing the take-down, infected computers were redirected to a Web page with instructions on removing the Bredolab Trojan. (((They actually COMMUNICATED with the victims of the botnet by using the seized botnet. That’s a first.)))
Read more“In five years’ time or so, I doubt websites will exist and I expect the vast majority of sites from the first twenty years of the web to be gone forever,” says Jim Boulton, curator of Digital Archaeology.
How does a platform powering 9 million new devices every month have almost no credibility with developers, analysts and press alike? This is the story of one of the most successful failures in tech history.
Dead Media Beat: Symbian OS, one of the most successful failures in tech history | Beyond The Beyond
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Read moreIt’s starting to bother me now when I see conventional, classic video, with narratives, and credits, and sets, and proper lighting and shooting. It’s like watching an oration in Latin.
It was a mission any fan of first-person shooters would accept: fly to Los Angeles and be transported to an undisclosed location to play Call of Duty: Black Ops two weeks before its release.
Whisked from LAX first via black SUV and then five helicopters – mine a now-civilian Huey chopper, a stalwart of the Vietnam War – three dozen of us arrived at the Ojai (Calif.) Valley Inn & Spa. In each of our rooms: a 55-inch Samsung 3D LED display, a Panasonic surround sound system, an Xbox 360 system and a customized Mad Catz gaming headphone setup.
– it’s true, I would so accept this mission.
Read moreOnce upon a time, the Fab Four—having slain the pop charts—decided to set their sights on the Dark Lord Sauron by making a Lord of the Rings feature, starring themselves. One man dared stand in their way: J.R.R. Tolkien.
According to Peter Jackson, who knows a little something about making Lord of the Rings movies, John Lennon was the Beatle most keen on LOTR back in the ‘60s—and he wanted to play Gollum, while Paul McCartney would play Frodo, Ringo Starr would take on Sam and George Harrison would beard it up for Gandalf. And he approached a pre-2001 Stanley Kubrick to direct.
Read more“Preliminary analysis shows that there is no threat posed to Russia by Julian Assange’s resource. You have to understand that if there is the desire and the right team, it’s possible to shut it down forever,” an expert from the FSB’s Center for Information Security was quoted by Life News as saying on Tuesday.
Links between hacker cells and the FSB made in the past lend credence to this thinly veiled secret services threat. In his recent book on Russia’s secret services, investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov details how the Russian FSB “maintain a sophisticated alliance with unofficial hackers, such as those who carry out cyber attacks on the Web sites of enemies of the state,” drawing attention to hacker forums such as Informacia.ru.
Given Russia’s notoriously malleable extremism legislation, which Wikimedia (despite its name, not affiliated to WikiLeaks) recently fell foul of, it is hard to imagine that classified information on Russia from WikiLeaks could pass as anything short of “extreme.” Indeed, a Gazeta.Ru editorial yesterday pointed out precisely this contradiction in the claim that WikiLeaks is “no threat posed to Russia.”
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According to Assange, “the despotic regimes of Russia, China and Central Asia” were the original focus of his project when he was pitching it to potential investors four years ago.
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Speaking to The Christian Science Monitor yesterday, Andrei Soldatov said that the problem for WikiLeaks would not be actually leaking information on Russia, but rather that leaking that information would not stimulate any public discussion in Russia’s muzzled media.
Soldatov drew attention to a Web site that in June published what it claimed was leaked FSB correspondence detailing intelligence operations in the CIS, including in Turkmenistan and Ukraine. The site called Lubyankapravda.com, hosted in the United States, has since gone offline, but during its three-week existence won no media attention. Because of what Soldatov blamed on the lack of media freedom in Russia, the FSB correspondence was never authenticated through public discussion, precluding the possibility of analyzing its claims. “It is no accident that I am not quoting details from these documents. The point is that there is one big difference between these documents and the WikiLeaks collection. Unlike the American reports, the FSB correspondence, although it was put out on the Internet, never did land in the public sphere,” Andrei Soldatov wrote in an August article posted on his Agentura.ru Web site.
Lieven said that discussion in the mass media of WikiLeaks dossiers on Russia was unrealistic, although it was more possible in the print media, which has comparative freedom within certain boundaries. “The problem has always been direct attacks on Vladimir Putin or Dmitry Medvedev, or those directly compromising state security. I’m sure if you started leaking stuff about the Russian armed forces similar to what’s been leaked about the American armed forces, I think something very nasty might happen to you,” said Lieven.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 