Adam Harvey creates fashion items that keep Big Brother off your back. He has experimented with hairstyles and makeup that confuse facial recognition. He has a pocket that blocks all transmissions to and from your cellphone. A hijab that thwarts thermal imaging technology.
The ultimate in good looking tinfoil hats.
Anti-Drone Camouflage: What to Wear in Total Surveillance | Wired Design | Wired.com.
Apparently he invented tiny incremental improvements on paper and used a trick to delay the patent submitting process so that he could incorporate existing technologies into patents filed ages ago. He also made the patents huge, vague and filed them again and again after refusal. Then he started to sue and sue and sue.
Oracle has lost a court case, where the Dutch government asked specifically for SAP software in their tender. The judge ruled that as the Dutch .gov allready uses SAP, they can ask for it and rule out other vendors if they want. Oracle won’t dispute the ruling, as it works out well for them: the NL .gov can also specifically ask for Oracle products.
This is bad news for smaller software vendors who may want to develop alternatives, but won’t be able to get in because they don’t allready supply NL .gov. The tendering laws were implemented specifically to suppres this and give small and upcoming companies a chance. Well done Judge.
'Vonnis tegen Oracle moedigt vendor lock-in aan' | Webwereld.
A case story of a programmer employee who’d outsourced his job to China for 1/5th of his wages, allowing him to surf the web and chill out all day for at least 6 months before his employers discovered that there were regular VPN sessions coming in from Shenyang, China.
Today, when you enter a search term into Google, the company kicks off two separate but parallel searches. One runs against the traditional keyword-based Web index, bringing back matches that are ranked by statistical relevance—the familiar “ten blue links.” The other search runs against a much newer database of named entities and relationships.
This second brain is called the Knowledge Graph.
It’s based on Freebase. It’s a collaborative database—technically, a semantic graph—that grows through the contributions of volunteers, who carefully specify the properties of each new entity and how it fits into existing knowledge categories. (For example, Freebase knows that Jupiter is an entity of type Planet, that it has properties such as a mean radius of 69,911 km, and that it is the fictional setting of two Arthur C. Clarke novels.) While Freebase now hosted by Google, it’s still open to submissions from anyone, and the information in it can be freely reused under a Creative Commons license.
Metaweb had to break away from the classic relational-database model, in which data is stored in orderly tables of rows and columns, and build its own proprietary graph database. In a semantic graph, there are no rows and columns, only “nodes” and “edges,” that is, entities and relationships between them. Because it’s impossible to specify in advance what set of properties and relationships you might want to assign to a real-world entity (what’s known in database lingo as the “schema”), graph databases are far better than relational databases for representing practical knowledge.
Fascinating stuff on the future of Google Search.
Google Gets A Second Brain, Changing Everything About Search | Xconomy.
Ubuntu, a widely used and influential GNU/Linux distribution, has installed surveillance code. When the user searches her own local files for a string using the Ubuntu desktop, Ubuntu sends that string to one of Canonical’s servers. (Canonical is the company that develops Ubuntu.)
To make matters worse, they also install adware, inserting Amazon promotions in your search results.
Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do? — Free Software Foundation — working together for free software.
Incredibly the US has managed to let Apple patent this shape. The prior art is allready there for tablets, but couldn’t someone have just shown the patent examiners a table top?
Apple is granted a patent on the rectangle. No, really • The Register.
It turns out that there are pleny of studies out there that debunk the “facts and figures” the industries throw about when talking about IP theft and the costs of piracy. Here is a selection of some interesting other studies.
What Various Studies Really Reveal About File-Sharing – Slashdot.
The European Parliament has approved the controversial data transfer agreement, the bilateral PNR (passenger name register), with the US which requires European airlines to pass on passenger information, including name, contact details, payment data, itinerary, email and phone numbers to the Department of Homeland Security.
Under the new agreement, PNR data will be “depersonalised” after six months and would be moved into a “dormant database” after five years. However the information would still be held for a further 15 years before being fully “anonymised”.
The US is really going a bit crazy in their totalitarian wish to know everything about everyone.
European Parliament agrees to send airline passenger data to US – ComputerworldUK.com.
A bill already passed by the Senate and set to be rubber stamped by the House would make it mandatory for all new cars in the United States to be fitted with black box data recorders from 2015 onwards.
Section 31406 of Senate Bill 1813 (known as MAP-21), calls for “Mandatory Event Data Recorders” to be installed in all new automobiles and legislates for civil penalties to be imposed against individuals for failing to do so.
“Not later than 180 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall revise part 563 of title 49, Code of Federal Regulations, to require, beginning with model year 2015, that new passenger motor vehicles sold in the United States be equipped with an event data recorder that meets the requirements under that part,” states the bill.
Way to go, land of the ummm free? Hitler would be jealous.
Not only is it inherently distasteful to try to censor the internet and force sites to shut down, it’s also very impractical, as BREIN is finding out.
After gaining court injunctions for 2 Dutch ISPs to close access to the pirate bay, hundreds of proxy sites went up and BREIN is now going after all of them.
The Dutch Pirate Party is standing up to them.
Pirate Party Refuses to Shutdown Pirate Bay Proxy, Faces Lawsuit | TorrentFreak.
Meta data, such as time, location, ip / person from and to, will be freely available without a warrant but the content will only be available with a warrant. They say. I thought Echolon allready did this, but apparently now they’re putting it out into the open. 1984 wasn’t supposed to be a manual, Big Brother!
BBC News – Email and web use 'to be monitored' under new laws.
Because there is nothing wrong with data mining innocent civilians is there?
What do you mean, surveillance society?
Feds to Keep Info on Americans With No Terror Ties | Military.com.
Gopher was the betamax of the vhs www. It was used by the military and universities and there are still a few gopher servers out there.
http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher://gopher.floodgap.com:70/1/
http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher://gopher.floodgap.com:70/1/world
http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?ss=gopher%3A%2F%2Fgopher.floodgap.com%3A70%2F7%2Fv2%2Fvishnu&sq=military
gopher://gopher.meulie.net/1/textfiles/magazines/
gopher://www.redhill.net.nz/1/us-mil-historic
gopher://sdf.lonestar.org/
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Yup, they’re going to re-copyright works for people who are long dead. To create money from thin air. Can’t people just think up new stuff?!
How to destroy project Gutenberg and all. When is someone going to take the plunge and copyright the Illiad?
Supreme Court rules Congress can re-copyright public domain works.
Incredibly these were awarded, despite this technology being in use since the 1990s!
Apple Wins Two Original iPhone Patents Regarding Rotation Heuristics – Patently Apple.
This is totally stupid, ridiculous and unecessary!
US plan to hold EU passenger data for 15 yrs ‘unlawful’ • The Register.
ICANN Approves Historic Change to Internet’s Domain Name System
Board Votes to Launch New Generic Top-Level Domains
Singapore | ICANN’s Board of Directors has approved a plan to usher in one of the biggest changes ever to the Internet’s Domain Name System. The Board vote was 13 approving, 1 opposed, and 2 abstaining.
During a special meeting, the Board approved a plan to dramatically increase the number of Internet domain name endings — called generic top-level domains (gTLDs) — from the current 22, which includes such familiar domains as .com, .org and .net.
“ICANN has opened the Internet’s naming system to unleash the global human imagination. Today’s decision respects the rights of groups to create new Top Level Domains in any language or script. We hope this allows the domain name system to better serve all of mankind,” said Rod Beckstrom, President and Chief Executive Officer of ICANN.
via ICANN | Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.
The Christian Democratic Party is the only party in the coalition government who actively wants to spy on you and block your internets. How Christian of them!
Omstreden kinderpornofilter van de baan – Emerce.