Archive for April 12th, 2008MrJones writes “In Paraguay we are at T-9 days to national elections. The ruling party has been in power for nearly 61 years (including more than 30 years of dictatorship). Now the state-run ADSL company is hijacking the DNS nationwide of a site that denounces the corruption in the celebration.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. hhavensteincw writes “The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is coming under fire for a new policy to cease the “harvesting” of a digital snapshot of all federal bureau and Congressional Web sites after each Presidential and Congressional term. NARA, which archived more than 75 million Web sites in 2004 after George Bush’s first term ended, will not harvest bureau and Congressional Web sites when his current term is over because it says agencies are supposed to be archiving Web content on their own. But NARA has been criticized by some for opting out of preserving these important historical archives on the Web.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. QuantumG writes “In a current article on The Space Review, Greg Zsidisin reveals that Barack Obama plans to delay Project Constellation for at least five years, using the redirected funds to nationalize early-education for kids under five years old to prepare them for the rigors of kindergarten and beyond, if he’s elected president. It is feared that if this happens the Vision for Space Exploration will flounder and that may be the end of human spaceflight altogether.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. YouTube has promised a commercial-free zone in the near future to help Congress deal with the problem of hosting campaign videos that were technically breaking the rule of not redirecting constituents to a commercial site. “Within a month, the one and only responder, YouTube, should have its commercial-free zone up and running, Capuano said. Republicans on the commission still fret that with only one such site, the Home could be seen as picking winners and losers on the Web. Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), another commission member, said the panel’s Republicans want to keep the new rules fluid enough to use any future Web site that comes forward with a superior plan. ‘Technology moves fast. Congress moves slow,’ he stated.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. OrochimaruVoldemort writes “In an unexpected move, Microsoft has disclosed 14,000 pages of coding secrets. According to The Register: ‘This is Microsoft’s latest effort to satisfy anti-trust concerns of the European Union, which is possibly a tougher adversary for the company than Google.’ The article mentioned that this will be done in three phases. ‘Between now and June it will garner feedback from the developer community. Then, at the end of June, Microsoft will publish the final versions of technical documentation — along with definitive patent licensing terms.’ Lets just hope those terms are pro open source.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. modemac writes “Sacramento, California Assemblyman Charles Calderon wants to expand a 75-year-old sales tax on ‘tangible personal property’ to include music downloads from iTunes and other music-download sites. The tax would specifically apply to music downloads, but the estimate used in this article for revenue generated by ‘Net downloading also “includes pornography downloads.” The measure, AB 1956, will be considered on Monday, April 14th.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Former Crypto-Analyst Analyzes the Danger of Nuclear Weapon StockpilesPosted by: in Politics NewsAn anonymous reader writes “IEEE Spectrum reports that noted encryption pioneer Prof. Martin Hellman has a new passion; estimating the risk of our current nuclear weapons policies. His web site, Defusing the Nuclear Threat, asks the question, ‘How risky are nuclear weapons? Amazingly, no one seems to know.’ Hellman therefore did a preliminary analysis and found the risk to be ‘equivalent to having your home surrounded by thousands of nuclear power plants.’ The web site and a related statement therefore urgently call for more detailed studies to either confirm or correct his startling conclusion. The statement has been signed by seven notable individuals including former NSA Director Adm. Bobby R. Inman and two Nobel Laureates.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. Lucas123 writes “Attorney General Michael Mukasey claims that terrorists sell pirated software as a way to finance their operations, without presenting a shred of evidence for his case. He’s doing it to push through a controversial piece of intellectual property legislation that would increase IP penalties, increase police power, set up a new agency to investigate IP theft, and more. ‘Criminal syndicates, and in some cases even terrorist groups, view IP crime as a lucrative business, and see it as a low-risk way to fund other activities,’ Mukasey told a crowd at the Tech Museum of Innovation last week.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. Skewz.com is not the Microsoft-funded Blews experiment that’s supposed to help detect rightness and leftness in stories based on blogs that link to them. Instead of detecting blog links, Skewz relies on readers to submit and rate stories, and even tries to pair stories that have “liberal” and “conservative” biases so that you can get multiple takes on the same event or pronouncement. The Skewz About page explains how it works. The site has drawn a fair amount of “media insider” attention, including a writeup on the Poynter Institute website. But what does all this mean? Where is it going? Can Skewz.com help us sort our news superior and make more informed decisions? We don’t know. But if you post a question here for founder Vipul Vyas, maybe he’ll have an answer for you. (Please try to follow the usual Slashdot interview rules.) Read more of this story at Slashdot. Timothy found a profile in The New Republic of Jonathan Schilling, a 53-year-old software developer from New Jersey who works to keep Hillary Clinton’s Wikipedia entry clean and fair throughout the election season. “After he started editing her page in June 2005, Schilling became consumed with trying to capture her uncomfortable place in American culture, researching and writing a whole section on how she polarizes the public… [T]he attacks on Hillary’s page mainly take the form of crude vandalism… It’s different on Obama’s page, where the fans — no surprise — are more enthusiastic, the haters are more intelligent, and the arguments reflect the fact that Obama himself is still a work under construction… The bitterness of the fights on Obama’s page could be taken as a bad sign for the candidate. But it might actually be Hillary’s page that contains the more troubling omens. Few, if any, Hillary defenders are standing watch besides Schilling. In current days, the vaguely deserted air of a de-gentrifying neighborhood has settled over her page…” Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
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