A collaborative mapping project to build a database of bloggers who have been threatened, arrested or killed for speaking out online and to draw attention to the campaigns to free them.
Finally something the on the Internet Congress doesn’t want to control. Probably because they realize this would put most of the Huffington Post Bloggers in jail.
From: Threat Level
Proposed legislation demanding up to two years in prison for electronic speech meant to “coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person†was met with little enthusiasm by a House subcommittee on Wednesday.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/07/eff-defends-wikipedi
Legal Analysis by Fred von Lohmann
As has been widely reported, the National Portrait Gallery of London (NPG) recently sent a legal threat to an American Wikipedian, Derrick Coetzee, over his posting approximately 3,000 photos of public domain paintings to Wikipedia. Because of the importance of this issue for the public domain and the Internet generally, EFF has taken Mr. Coetzee as a client.
From: Threat Level
Is hacking a real threat to the United States or is it just the latest overblown threat to national security, whose magnitude is being exaggerated to expand government budgets and power?
That’s the question asked by Threat Level editor Kevin Poulsen at a panel in Computers, Freedom and Privacy in Washington, D.C., Wednesday. And it’s important because the government is spending billions of dollars on computer security, and President Obama is elevating cybersecurity to a national priority, using language that makes even security experts wince.
From: Treat Level
By Ryan Singel
You may not know it, but if you have a wireless router, a cordless phone, remote car-door opener, baby monitor or cellphone in your house, the FCC claims the right to enter your home without a warrant at any time of the day or night in order to inspect it.
Introduced by Rep. Linda Sanchez, Democrat from Los Angeles
From: H.R. 1966
(a) Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.
(b) As used in this section —
(1) the term ‘communication’ means the electronic transmission, between or among points specified by the user, of information of the user’s choosing, without change in the form or content of the information as sent and received; and
(2) the term ‘electronic means’ means any equipment dependent on electrical power to access an information service, including e-mail, instant messaging, blogs, websites, telephones and text messages.
Look out users of OSs other than the “regular” operating systems. You may be asking for trouble.
From: EFF
A BOSTON COLLEGE STUDENT’S COMPUTER, CELL PHONE, AND OTHER PROPERTY WERE SEIZED as part of an investigation into who sent an e-mail to a school mailing list identifying another student as gay. Not only is there no indication that any crime was committed, the support for the search warrant is at times laughable. Some of the supposedly suspicious activities listed include: the student being seen with “unknown laptop computers,” which he “says” he was fixing for other students; the student uses multiple names to log on to his computer; and the student uses two different operating systems, including one that is not the “regular B.C. operating system” but instead has “a black screen with white font which he uses prompt commands on.”
Search Warrant Excerpt
According to The Huffington Post, a Japanese company called Cyberdyne has just built a working human exoskeleton called “HAL” that assists the wearer in movement and strength.
Apparently no one in Japan watches any American science fiction movies because that company has to have chosen the worst possible names… Cyberdyne and HAL? Wow.
From: Danger Room
Aided by social networking tools like Twitter, LiveJournal and Facebook, demonstrators in the former-Soviet republic of Moldova are gearing for another round of protests. Just yesterday, activists seized the president’s office and the country’s parliament — only to have the government take the buildings back. More crowds, however, are converging on the main square. And they are Tweeting, posting, and uploading.
From: Wired
Southwest customers over the next few months onboard the Wi-Fi enabled aircrafts will be offered on board instruction sheets on how to log on. And it will be free during the test period. Cellular technology will not work with the Wi-Fi service, says Southwest.
A new website was just launched to keep an eye on all the projects proposed in the new “stimulus” bill. The website www.stimuluswatch.org is designed to allow people to comment on whether or not a local project is worthy of the money and if the project is being managed adequately. People can vote for or against certain projects.
Scary Cool
wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.
From: London Times
THE Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain routinely to hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant.
The move, which follows a decision by the European Union’s council of ministers in Brussels, has angered civil liberties groups and opposition MPs. They described it as a sinister extension of the surveillance state which drives “a coach and horses†through privacy laws.
The hacking is known as “remote searchingâ€. It allows police or MI5 officers who may be hundreds of miles away to examine covertly the hard drive of someone’s PC at his home, office or hotel room.
Material gathered in this way includes the content of all e-mails, web-browsing habits and instant messaging.
I just finished reading a very interesting article at Ars Technica in which the author discusses the the way we view history through the eyes of video games. In the new Call of Duty game the “bad guys” are the Nazis. When referring to World War II we separate Nazis and Germans. The author takes issue with this separation stating:
Saying there is a huge gulf between the German people and the Nazi characters would would be like saying it’s okay to kill Republicans in a game, but you have issues with Americans being the bad guys.
The reason we separate the two is because of what the Nazis represented: the Holocaust and their dangerous ideas of fascism.
Sony, like Comedy Central and the Danish newspapers before it, has bowed to the threat of terrorism. A few verses from the Koran were combined with music in a new game that was to be released this week. Instead the game will be delayed while Sony removes the “offensive” lyrics and music after receiving a letter from a muslim demanding it be taken out of the game. Everyone in this country says we are for freedom, but when no one is willing to stand up and defend it, the words we speak are simply that and nothing more. Our ideas mean absolutely nothing unless people are willing to defend them, with their life if it must come to that. I am sick of people cherry-picking what causes to defend and which ones to let fall and die. If we are for freedom then we are ALWAYS for freedom everywhere for everyone. I fear that we are no longer producing the type of people willing to take a stand and fight back against the forces that would run us over. If you think this is trivial, you are in denial.
The first private company has successfully launched a rocket and achieved orbital velocity. The company is called SpaceX, which was started by the founder of PayPal. This along with the suborbital flights of SpaceShipOne and the creation of Virgin Galactic could signal the beginning of a new era in space flight.
I am usually on top of events like this, but I did not know about the launch until after it occurred. I fault the regular news media for failing to let lay people know what is actually going on in the world, besides how many bombs went off in Iraq.
For something a little more on the lighter side, here is something that is just plain cool.
Via Wired:
One thing environmentalists failed to acknowledge when supporting new CFL light bulbs was the fact that CFLs contain mercury. Mercury is a toxin that has been proven to cause birth defects and is the reason people should not eat certain types of fish. When it comes to the environment I guess the cause is more important than the environment itself. This video shows what the environmentalism mind-set has forced on everyone: Transcript courtesy of TomCat.
Mozilla has just released a new application for Firefox called Ubiquity. Its main goal is to make all the stuff on the web easier to use and combine. Check out the video:
Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
The usefulness and power of the web continues to amaze me.
From Yahoo
Attacks by Russian hackers against Georgian Web sites, including one hosted in the United States, continued Tuesday even as Russian President Dmitri Medvedev ordered a halt to hostilities against Georgia.