Posts by slfisher

Okay, this is cool -- a single screen that shows an aggregation of Google news stories, with size representing the number of stories on a topic, color representing the category, and hue representing the stories' age.

The site is designed by a company called Maramushi, headed by Marcos Weskamp, who describes himself as a San Francisco-based Design Engineer "who has a deep interest in playing with and visualizing lots of data. He is a self-taught technologist who constantly investigates the fields of Interaction Design and Information Visualization." He has studied in Argentina and Japan, and now works for an unnamed startup.

Newsmap works like this, according to the website: "A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.
Newsmap's objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media."

Users can specify which country's perspective on news they want -- more than a dozen countries are available -- and users can also choose not to receive certain types of news, such as sports or entertainment.

The site has about 15,000 registered users in November -- in fact, so …

Some industry experts are expressing concern about a proposal from the White House to develop a "National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace," now up for public comment, saying it is vague, might no longer allow online anonymity, potentially gives government too much access to personal information, and provides a single point of failure for identity thieves.

The plan postulates security tokens such as a "smart identity card," possibly from state government, or a digital certificate from a smart phone, that would contain all sorts of identity information about a person, rather than people having to remember a long string of user names and passwords for different websites. The person would need to possess the token to have access to their online information, which the plan says would make identity theft more difficult.

However, while the plan talks a lot about different security layers, and different providers, it doesn't talk much about who would actually be doing the providing. Indeed, Appendix B -- "Participants" -- is blank.

And in an era when people supposedly posting anonymously are finding out that their postings aren't anonymous after all, some people are concerned that the proposal will eliminate anonymous posting altogether. While the potential smart identity card would allow for anonymous posting, the very aspect of using an identity card makes it inherently un-anonymous, say critics.

"[A]nonymous to what extent?" wrote Lauren Weinstein on his blog. "Perhaps a blog comment would appear on …

Just weeks after Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales came under criticism for being overly zealous about removing information, particularly images, that could be considered to be child pornography from the electronic encyclopedia, the site is being accused by Fox News of harboring pedophiles.

"Wikipedia has become home base for a loose worldwide network of pedophiles who are campaigning to spin the popular online encyclopedia in their favor and are trying to lure more people into their world, an investigation by FoxNews.com confirms," according to an article on Fox News.

Eek.

In reading the article on the investigation, one learns that it is based on the fact that people who hang out in pedophile chat rooms have talked about writing Wikipedia articles in order to ensure that the subject was covered in a fair and balanced way.

"This means that students who use Wikipedia to research the academic subject of pedophilia will immediately find a page on the topic that is being targeted by the pedophiles," Fox News exclaimed. "Wikipedia's "Pedophilia" page also is the first "hit" when you search the term in Google or Bing."

Um, isn't that the idea? Assuming that a student would actually be researching "the academic subject of pedophilia"?

Fox News also accused pedophiles of "gaming" the Wikipedia system by voting against removing pedophiliac content -- in other words, using the Wikipedia system just like any number of other groups. (Including conservatives -- who set …

This year's version of the Cybersecurity Act was approved by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs after amending it to limit the president's authority in the event of a cyber emergency, reported The Hill.

The bill, sponsored by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), and Tom Carper (D-Del.), is an update to a bill from last year that was also worked on by Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) and Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine). At that time, people were concerned about reports that it would give the President a "kill switch" to shut down the Internet, though the technical details of exactly how a single switch could shut down the Internet were not specified.

"Giving government, especially the president, unprecedented control over America's trunk line of information, over electronic free speech and over business activities simply invites suspicions about whether it would be used politically to frighten people at election time—as did the color-code alerts—and to trample on constitutional rights like the Patriot Act did," wrote the Idaho Mountain Express, noting that Lieberman said he had modeled that aspect of the bill on governmental rights in Communist China.

Indeed, the President already has that authority, wrote the co-sponsors earlier this week. "Section 706 of the Communications Act of 1934 provides nearly unchecked authority to the President to “cause the closing of any facility or station for wire communication” and “authorize the use of control …

In a move that some are hailing as a new frontier for independent political candidates, the Utah Supreme Court ruled today that nominating petitions can be signed electronically as well as on paper and still be valid.

"[W]e conclude that the plain language of section 20A-9-502 is not limited to handwritten signatures," wrote the court in its decision.

"The Court’s opinion, the first of its kind nationwide, has the potential to increase significantly the ability of independent candidates to access the general election ballot, and thus to increase the opportunity for minority viewpoints to be heard and considered in election years," trumpeted the Utah chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which argued the case.

Well, yes and no.

Background first, from the Associated Press: "In March, Utah Lt. Gov. Greg Bell rejected a nominating petition from Farley Anderson, an independent gubernatorial candidate, saying state law did not allow for e-signatures. Anderson had included more than 150 e-signatures on his petition. In its unanimous ruling, the court said Bell's decision "exceeded the bounds of discretion" afforded his office and he would need specific rules in place to exempt the election process from laws that allow electronic signatures in other settings."

So what does this mean?

First of all, the court ruled narrowly, rejecting a memorandum from The Utahns for Ethical Government that suggested the court should also determine that an electronic signature satisfies the signature requirement …

Remember Richard Blumenthal? The Connecticut Attorney General who has led a pack of other state Attorneys General for more than a year chasing pedophiles (who may or may not have been there) on social networks and prostitutes on Craigslist?

And who, in what is surely just a coincidence, is running for the U.S. Senate, and whose campaign is slipping following revelations that he lied about serving in Vietnam?

He's back -- and now he's jumping on the outrage bandwagon about privacy issues with Google Streetview. The company came under fire earlier this year amidst revelations that while taking pictures for the mapping service, Google cars were also collecting data from wifi networks -- not only publicly broadcast SSID information (the WiFi network name) and MAC addresses (the unique number given to a device like a WiFi router) but also payload data (information sent over the network).

Google says it was a mistake. "In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data," the company wrote in its blog. "A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars, they included that code in their software—although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data."

The company went on to outline steps it …

I didn't go into this level of detail in the story, but the guy had been investigated and cleared by the FBI before the charges were filed.

Do you believe he was making a terrorist threat?

Here's a link to the actual paper:

http://weis2010.econinfosec.org/papers/session2/weis2010_wondracek.pdf

Yes, though the actual statistics were interesting, I thought.

A study by a computer security lab has found that porn sites "harboured malware or used "shady" practices to squeeze money out of their visitors," according to an article by the BBC on the study.

(In other news, rocks are hard and water is wet.)

Researchers from the International Secure Systems Lab reportedly analyzed 269,000 websites hosted on 35,000 domains -- more than 90 percent of which were free -- to see which hosted malicious software. About 3.23 percent of these sites were booby-trapped with adware, spyware, and viruses, the study reported.

While this doesn't sound like much, it's a problem because about 40 percent of visitors to such sites have vulnerabilities in their systems, further research reported. The researchers created their own porn sites and paid to have traffic sent there, and analyzed the computers and browsers of their visitors. Analysis of the 49,000 visitors sent to their sample sites showed that 20,000 were using a computer and browser combination that was vulnerable to at least one known exploit, the BBC said. More than 5,700 visitors had multiple vulnerable components, reported the Huffington Post.

Finally, researchers found that porn sites often used "shady" practices to keep visitors onsite, including Javascript catchers that make it hard for people to leave a page, or scripts that re-direct visitors so when they click on a link they do not see the video or image they were expecting but are passed to an …

A series of angry email messages to a U.S. Senator has landed a man in jail, possibly because he didn't sign them with his correct name or location.

Bruce Shore, who is from Philadelphia, sent email to Senator Jim Bunning, of Kentucky, after the Senator complained on the Senate floor that he'd missed the Kentucky-South Carolina basketball game because of a debate on extending unemployment benefits -- a debate the Kentucky Republican himself prevented from proceeding to a vote, according to an article in the Huffington Post.

Shore was angry because he has been unemployed for two years and had recently lost his unemployment benefits, so he wrote email to Bunning. However, he signed it "Brad Shore" and said he was from Louisville, because he thought the Senator would pay more attention if he thought he was a constituent, the Huffington Post article quoted him as saying.

Bunning's office -- which reportedly received a great deal of email on the issue -- turned some of it over to Capitol Police, which charged Shore under a federal statute about harassing email and not disclosing identity. It is not clear whether he is being cited for harassment, not disclosing his identity, or both. (Shore's isn't the only Bunning case under investigation by the Capitol Police, according to an article in a Kentucky newspaper.)

The text of the email included the following, in all capital letters: "If this political grandstanding does not end today — …

As it turns out, if you give people the ability to have other people look at them anonymously via the computer, some of them do very, very nasty things.

Imagine.

Chatroulette, released in November, 2009, by a 17-year-old Russian boy, is often described as a website for voyeurs, but really, it's a website for exhibitionists. Log into the site, and one is randomly connected -- over video, audio, and text -- with another person logged into the site.

You could think of it as an opportunity for performance art, but instead, it's turning into speed-dating for wankers. An analysis of Chatroulette traffic earlier this year by RJMetrics provided the following results:

• 89% of single people were male, 11% female. In fact, you are more likely to encounter nobody at all than a single female, and twice as likely to encounter a sign requesting female nudity than you are to encounter actual female nudity
• 1 in 8 sessions result in something R-rated or worse, such as appear to not be wearing any clothes whatsoever, are displaying explicit nudity, or appear to be committing a lewd act
• The UK is, er, head and shoulders over other countries in having its residents be more likely to fall in this category -- Turkey, France, and Germany tie for second place; the U.S. is last

It is this last category that is the problem. After explosive growth for the first few months, it was reported …

Go Google the term "oil spill." I'll wait.

First item? "BP www.BP.com/OilSpillNews Info about the Gulf of Mexico Spill Learn More about How BP is Helping."

It's a "sponsored link," meaning that BP paid for it to be there and to come up as the first item when someone searched for the term.

It was first spotted by ABC News, which did a report on it Saturday, including an admission by BP that it had done so.

"We have bought search terms on search engines like Google to make it easier for people to find out more about our efforts in the Gulf and make it easier for people to find key links to information on filing claims, reporting oil on the beach and signing up to volunteer," BP spokesman Toby Odone told ABC News.

The notion isn't new; political campaigns such as John McCain's made an art out of buying sponsored links on Google (though some were more successful than others).

But the ABC News piece quoted expert Kevin Ryan saying that typical users don't see the difference between a legitimate search result and a sponsored one, and cited BP's move -- which he said was the first time it had been done in such a situation -- as an example of how the company is trying to spin the situation.

Another expert in the ABC News story estimated that BP was spending $10,000 …

At a time when Facebook users are being warned to reduce their exposure online, UK-based Skinbook is encouraging them to increase it.

The site hit the big time this past week, with an article in Time Magazine, which sent a naked horde running towards the community.

Based on Ning.com, the site emphasizes quality, non-pervy interactions among people who enjoy social nudity, citing 9,000 members. Consequently, potential members must fill out a survey asking them for how long they've been a nudist, as well as a paragraph about them, whom they'd like to meet, favorite clubs/beaches, favorite music, favorite films and television, books/magazines, and favorite quotes.

"Half-arsed one-line answers will be automatically refused," the site warns.

Registrants are also asked to submit a profile photo, again with restrictions. "No pornographic images, random body parts or headless torso shots."

Without restrictions such as these, the quality of the members would go down, the site warns. "Please understand that without this fussy screening process our network would become saturated with lurkers and sex pests."

Skinbook offers two major demographic advantages to typical nudist organizations, the Time article said. First, its members (no pun intended) have an average age between 35 and 40 years old, while the common ages of nudist clubs and associations are usually around 55 or 60. Second, Skinbook skews more female and more couples, while most nudist outlets are dominated by single men, Time reported.

The site also has …

It's astonishing to see how many of them are out there.

We've all seen them -- a user survey, often performed by Respected Independent Firm, but promoted by Vendor Y -- which just happens to come up with the result that users want the products, or the features, that vendor Y provides. Amazing how that works.

Here's the six telltale signs to take such a survey with a grain of salt.

1. Lack of detail about how the participants came to be included. For survey results to be statistically significant, the people need to be randomly chosen. Even if they're all high-powered executives, you don't want them all to be in the same geographic area or industry. (You may even find that all the users just happen to be customers of Vendor Y.) Also, to make sure there's a representative sample, a reputable survey will typically be calling or mailing the user. Surveys that are performed by having users decide to go to a website are what's called self-selected; the people who participate are either doing so because they're really happy -- or they have an ax to grind.

2. Look for the line "Respected independent firm X was commissioned by Vendor Y." That means Vendor Y paid for it. How likely is it that the results are going to be something Vendor Y doesn't like?

3. Meaningless graphs. Look for a graph measuring something impossible to quantify, such as "User satisfaction," typically with no units on the graph, and with the graph forming a perfect line …

well, thanks! glad you like it!

It sounds great in theory: Use the power of the Internet to get ideas from people, have people vote on the ideas, and then use the ideas that get the most votes.

However, it doesn't work so well for some people.

"Republicans are drafting a new plan to win back the House of Representatives," reported the Christian Broadcasting Network, in describing the American Speaking Out website. "The plan is a project known as America Speaking Out. It is similar to the Contract With America in 1994 that fueled a GOP takeover of the House that year. The new plan is not a GOP platform. Instead, they have asked Americans to go to a website and summit[sic] policy ideas."

Oh, they sure have.

Just one day later, the hundreds of ideas submitted have been such that the Washington Post saw fit to write an article about some of them.

""End Child Labor Laws," suggests one helpful participant. "We coddle children too much. They need to spend their youth in the factories,"" the Post reported.

Americans are continuing to be helpful.

"We should segregate the schools again. Then we would need twice as many schools, that's gotta make more jobs somehow," offered one suggestion.

"We could save a lot of money through product standardization. For example, it should be illegal for stores to sell hot dogs in packs of 10 and buns in packs of 8," offered another.

All of the applications for the second round of broadband stimulus funding have been posted -- sort of.

In the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus package, Congress appropriated $7.2 billion for broadband grants, loans, and loan guarantees to be administered by the USDA’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS) and the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). There are two programs: RUS Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP) and the NTIA Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP). BIP will make loans and grants for broadband infrastructure projects in rural areas, while BTOP will provide grants to fund broadband infrastructure, public computer centers and sustainable broadband adoption project.

The first phase was slated to award $4 billion, a little more than half of the total $7.2 billion. In the first round alone, $28 billion in requests was made. Awards started being announced in December and were completed recently.

The second phase had an application deadline of March 26. Applications for the NTIA BTOP program started being posted in early April but publishing the applications for the RUS BIP program was delayed.

In fact, even now -- though the applications were published on April 16 -- they were published in a separate directory, rather than being included in the searchable database as they had during the first round, and as the BTOP applications were.

The organization did not say why it published the applications in a directory …

Hewlett-Packard released this week a research paper describing how a data center could be powered by the waste from a dairy farm. (Would that make it a 'green' data center, or a 'brown' one?)

"The HP ASME paper shows how a farm of 10,000 dairy cows could generate 1MW of electricity, enough to power a typical modern data center and still support other needs on the farm," the company described. "Heat generated by a data center could also be used to more efficiently process the animal waste and thus increase methane production."

HP also described a number of other aspects of the potential project:

• "The average dairy cow produces about 55 kg (120 pounds) of manure per day, and approximately 20 metric tons per year – roughly equivalent to the weight of four adult elephants.
• The manure that one dairy cow produces in a day can generate 3.0 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electrical energy, which is enough to power television usage in three U.S. households per day.
• A medium-sized dairy farm with 10,000 cows produces about 200,000 metric tons of manure per year. Approximately 70 percent of the energy in the methane generated via anaerobic digestion could be used for data center power and cooling, thus reducing the impact on natural resources.
• Pollutants from unmanaged livestock waste degrade the environment and can lead to groundwater contamination and air pollution. Methane is 21 times more damaging to the environment than carbon dioxide, which …

Another person went on to say he'd gotten more than 1000 friend suggestions.

Facebook is claiming there's nothing wrong.

"This is neither a bug nor a virus. Friend suggestions are now mutual and
will appear for both users involved. That is, if I suggest that one person
become friends with another, both the person I suggested and the person to
whom I sent the suggestion will receive the notification."

Wow. One person is reporting he had 580 friend suggestions this morning.

It's not clear whether it's an application, a virus, or Facebook itself, but in the past couple of days something is sending out large numbers of friend suggestions that the original friend didn't make.

Typically, it works like this. You have a friend, B, and a friend, C, and you think B and C would be copacetic together, or you think B and C are already friends but don't know each other is in Facebook, so you suggest that B and C become friends, and B and C each receive a message from Facebook, in your name, with the suggestion.

But something's gone haywire.

Between yesterday afternoon and this morning, I received 51 friend suggestions from two friends, including family members I would have no reason of knowing or friending. I confirmed with one of these friends thus far that she was not sending out the requests.

Meanwhile, in Facebook's Help Center, under Friends -- Suggestions, are dozens of new questions on the subject. "Some of my friends got friend suggestions from me that I didn't suggest." "Is there a virus on FB re. friend suggestions?" "Is there a virus on FB that is sending out random Friend Suggestions?" and so on.

With Facebook being battered in the media lately regarding privacy issues, some people are suggesting this is the latest move by Facebook to "help" its users become more strongly connected.

To add insult to injury, the Help Center is broken, meaning that …

In response to claims from cofounder Larry Sanger that Wikimedia is harboring images of child pornography, founder Jimmy Wales has gone on a search-and-destroy mission against pornographic images in the company's family of websites, causing an outcry about his heavy handedness and resulting in his giving up some privileges to delete further content.

The images in question were not in Wikipedia per se, but in the Wikimedia Commons, an online repository of free-use images, sound and other media files.

Sanger sent a letter to the FBI earlier this month outlining his concerns and identifying two specific Wikimedia Commons categories he believed violate federal obscenity law, according to an article on Fox News. "When Sanger’s research led him to graphic images of children, he looked up the law and realized that under the obscenity statute he’d homed in on, a person who sees obscene renderings of child abuse and does not report them to authorities is as culpable as the person who actually distributes the obscene content," the Fox story said.

Fox News went on to contact some of the high profile donors to the Wikimedia Foundation, the encyclopedia’s parent company, asking if they had any knowledge about Sanger’s claims, according to an article in the Telegraph. That action has brought criticism onto Fox News, claiming that the network has crossed the line from news to advocacy.

The Wikimedia Foundation was quick to defend itself against the charges. "In …

The Washington State Supreme Court ruled earlier this month on a 6-3 decision that libraries had the right not only to use Internet blocking software, but to refuse to lift the block for a particular site even when an adult requested it.

The case was significant because it's thought that Washington's freedom of speech act is even broader than that of the First Amendment.

The suit was brought against the North Central Regional Library District, which covers Chelan, Douglas, Ferry, Grant and Okanogan counties with 28 branch libraries, some of which double as school libraries, according to the legal opinion. "In October 2006, following its earlier use of other software, NCRL implemented the "FortiGuard Web Filtering Service," a widely used filtering service," the opinion went on to say. "Using proprietary algorithms and human review, FortiGuard sorts web sites into 76 categories based upon predominant content. The database catalogues over 43 million web sites and over 2 billion individual web pages."

Certain categories of sites are forbidden, including hacking, proxy avoidance, phishing, "adult materials," gambling, nudity, pornography, web chat, instant messaging, malware, and spyware, the opinion continued. In addition, "NCRL also blocks the Image Search, Video Search, and Spam classifications, certain specific image search web sites, and the "personals" section of craigslist.org. NCRL also initially blocked but subsequently unblocked access to youtube.com, myspace.com, and craigslist.org (except for the "personals" section)."

The opinion itself is fascinating reading (no, …

IIRC, Blumenthal is running for Senate.

Perhaps it was reading that Craigslist expected to earn $36 million this year from sex ads that set him off.

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has issued a subpoena to Craigslist Inc., seeking information on whether it is fulfilling its promise to crack down on ads for prostitution in its adult-services section, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The online classified site has been fighting with state attorneys general -- particularly Blumenthal -- since at least 2008, with them claiming it promotes prostitution and with it pointing to ways it has kept that from happening and how it is hardly alone.

For example, in May of last year, when South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster contended that the continued presence of ads for "erotic services" on the site constituted a criminal violation for which Craigslist management was personally responsible, Craigslist management fired back with a list of all the other places in which such ads could be found and asked whether McMaster was prepared to arrest them all too.

In late 2008, Craigslist came to an agreement with 40 attorneys general -- including McMaster and Blumenthal -- to help reduce prostitution on the site. In March, 2008, the organization implemented a telephone verification system for the "erotic services" section of the site, requiring a working phone number for advertisers, and enabling blacklisting of phone numbers for those who post inappropriate ads. Phone verification resulted in an 80% reduction in ad …

People who are unhappy with the progress of the military actions in Iran and Afghanistan finally have something to blame: PowerPoint.

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said in an article in the New York Times this week.

The article went on to describe how the software "is deeply embedded in a military culture that has come to rely on PowerPoint’s hierarchical ordering of a confused world."

Articles in military journals on the same subject appeared in 2009: One in Small Wars Journal and another -- which actually spawned the previous one -- in Armed Forces Journal.

"PowerPoint can be highly effective if used purely to convey information — as in a classroom or general background brief," noted the AFJ article. "It is particularly good if strong pictures or charts accompany the discussion of the material. But it is poorly suited to be an effective decision aid."

Criticisms of the software include both oversimplification and including too much information, taking too much time, and reducing everything to a series of disconnected bullet points, with no explanation. (One of the canonical PowerPoint spoofs shows what would have happened had Lincoln done the Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint.)

The blogosphere, however, was quick to jump on the article. In one case, criticism focused on the author, Elizabeth Bumiller, for things such as refusing to cite design expert …

It took two years, but Terry Childs, former network administrator for the city of San Francisco, has finally been convicted of one felony count of computer tampering.

In 2008, Childs changed the system's router passwords and then for more than a week refused to give them to anyone, even after being arrested. He finally revealed them to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, and was charged with four felony counts, basically of variations on hacking.

Last, August, San Francisco Superior Court judge Kevin McCarthy dropped three of the four charges, related to his attaching three modems to the network. The charge associated with his refusing to reveal the passwords stayed.

This week, after three days of deliberation, Childs was found guilty of the charge and is now facing from two to five years in prison, according to an article in the San Jose Mercury News. Sentencing is scheduled for June 14.

Because the crime cost more than $200,000, Childs is eligible for the full five-year penalty, according to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle.

However, the article continued, it is expected that Childs will receive credit for the two years he has already served, and is likely to receive only a few more additional months.

Jurors included a network engineer, who was quoted criticizing the city for ineffective management. The jury also deadlocked until one juror was removed for an undisclosed reason.

Childs' attorney contended …

The case of a Philadelphia school allegedly spying on students through webcams in their laptop computers continues to wend its way through the legal system, with more recently filed court documents alleging that as many as 56,000 pictures were taken.

While attorneys for the school system insist none of the images were inappropriate, some of the images depicted students sleeping and partially undressed, with the school administrator in question being called in some documents a "voyeur" -- which she denied.

Lawyers for the family of the student who first filed legal cases released a picture of the student sleeping, allegedly taken by his computer's webcam. (However, the judge in the case has forbidden the release of any other photographs.)

District officials said they have activated the theft-tracking software on school-issued laptops 42 times since September, but did not say how many students may have been photographed and monitored, or how often, according to an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The school district will reportedly release the results of its own investigation within a few weeks.

Sen. Arlen Specter (D., Pa.) has said that the Judiciary subcommittee on crime and drugs, which he chairs, is going to be researching the situation with an eye toward potential legislation against similar monitoring actions in the future.

It's enough to make anyone froth at the mouth: Film parodies making use of a ranting Hitler, with added subtitles explaining what current event he was ranting about -- which have grown increasingly popular on YouTube -- are gradually disappearing after a request from the company that owns the film.

Though the spoofs -- which run the gamut from political issues to the loss of the next-generation iPhone -- are parodies and protected by fair use, the technology that YouTube is reportedly using to detect them can't tell the difference, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"Because the Content I.D. filter permits a copyright owner to disable any video that contains its copyrighted content -- whether or not that video contains other elements that make the use a noninfringing fair use -- a content owner can take down a broad swath of fair uses with the flick of a switch," writes senior staff attorney Corynne McSherry in the EFF's blog.

"This is hardly the first time that Content I.D., has led to overbroad takedowns of legal content," McSherry adds. "Copyright owners have used the system to take down (or silence) everything from home videos of a teenager singing Winter Wonderland and a toddler lip-syncing to Foreigner’s Juke Box Hero to (and we’re not making this up) a lecture by Prof. Larry Lessig on the cultural importance of remix creativity."

The original source material is the 2004 German-made, Academy Award-nominated film The Downfall: Hitler and …

33 of the 4,000 people who worked for the Securities and Exchange Commission in the last five years -- 31 of them within the past three years -- were busted viewing pornography on the job, including 17 senior employees earning between $99,000 and $222,000 a year, according to a report from the SEC's Office of the Inspector General.

The SEC has further increased penalties for misusing government resources in recent months, meaning that some of the employees have been suspended or fired, according to CNN. In addition, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro said she “will not tolerate” employees viewing pornography in the workplace, according to an article in Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

Some of the most egregious examples included an accountant in a regional office who was denied access by the government firewall 16,000 times when he tried to access Web pages containing pornography, a regional office staff accountant who not only tried to access pornographic websites nearly 1,800 times during a two-week period, but also had about 600 pornographic images saved on her laptop hard drive, and an attorney in Washington, D.C. who spent up to eight hours a day watching pornography, according to the OIG's report.

"In fact, this attorney downloaded so much pornography to his government computer that he exhausted the available space on the computer hard drive and downloaded pornography to CDs or DVDs that he accumulated in boxes in his office," the inspector general's report …

Among those stranded by last week's new eruption of an Icelandic volcano was Jens Stoltenberg, prime minister of Norway, who on Friday found himself stuck in JFK, according to news reports.

Fortunately, he'd just bought an iPad, and proceeded to conduct the daily business of the country in the airport lounge.

"It's interesting. Here you have a brand-new technology and a head of state actually using the technology to manage the country," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, as quoted in a report by Newsfactor.com. "It either says an awful lot about the device or an awful lot about what he needs to do to manage the country." He went on to discuss the potential security liabilities in Stoltenberg's action.

The Norwegian PM story was just one of many to hit the Internet regarding Eyjafjallajokull, ranging from photos and videos of the eruption to the implications on animal husbandry to guides on pronouncing its name. There were also metastories, such as how people were using the Internet to deal with the incident.

Pre-existing Twitter feeds from Iceland, such as the Laughing Puffin and This Is Iceland, continued their usual posts. "I must admit, my eruption is a bit dramatic," stated the latter yesterday, which is always written in first-person form from the island itself. Currently, it is taking suggestions for the volcano's theme song, such …

Awards from the first round of broadband stimulus grants are coming under criticism for duplicating existing infrastructure.

"Now as the government awards the money, some phone and cable companies complain that not all of it is being used to bring broadband to places that lack it," said Joelle Tessler in a story for the Associated Press. "Instead, these companies say, much of the money will fund new networks in places where they already offer service."

The criticisms arose during a March 4 hearing on Oversight of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: Broadband, by Congressman Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.). "In addition to driving away the companies most likely to help us achieve ubiquitous broadband deployment, NTIA is now actually subsidizing broadband competition rather than extending coverage to unserved areas," he told the committee.

However, one industry expert called the testimony a partisan attack promulgated by industry lobbyists. "The underlying point of such criticism, and all three alleged instances of the program’s waste in the field, are based wholly on talking points recently lobbed against the federal effort by congressional Republicans," said Peter Pratt in a piece on the Stimulating Broadband website. "The Republican points of attack are, in turn, based solely on input from the two largest trade groups representing the cable TV and telecom industries." The two groups have been against the broadband stimulus program from the beginning, he added.

Pratt went on to criticize the AP for not saying …

In response to criticism of the way it was testing broadband Internet speeds, the Federal Communications Commission, following up a promise it made last month, announced it had hired a vendor to help it perform more accurate tests.

"In a couple of weeks, we will be asking for consumers from across the country to voluntarily install hardware in their homes (on an opt-in basis) that is capable of measuring broadband performance," said the FCC's Dave Vorhaus, an expert advisor in economic opportunity, on the FCC's blog. "The measurements will give us results across a broad swath of providers, service tiers and geographic areas."

The FCC is working with a UK company called SamKnows that has recently performed similar testing there, Vorhaus said. "The FCC will also release a Public Notice in the coming days with details on SamKnows’ technical approach and methodology to allow for comment and new ideas," he added. The company will receive about $600,000 for the work, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal.

Other companies that bid on the contract, which will create five to 10 U.S. jobs, included the Nielson Co., the Wall Street Journal said. SamKnows UK said it would be licensing its technology without charge to a new American company that will be set-up, and based in Washington, specifically for this project.

Approximately 10,000 people are expected to volunteer for the speed test. "The specially developed ‘White Box’ does not monitor …

Applications for the second round of U.S. broadband stimulus funding are starting to become publicly available on a federal website.

Approximately 870 applications had been posted to the database as of Saturday, according to Stimulating Broadband, a website dedicated to tracking broadband stimulus funding.

In the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus package, Congress appropriated $7.2 billion for broadband grants, loans, and loan guarantees to be administered by the USDA’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS) and the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). There are two programs: RUS Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP) and the NTIA Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP). BIP will make loans and grants for broadband infrastructure projects in rural areas, while BTOP will provide grants to fund broadband infrastructure, public computer centers and sustainable broadband adoption project.

The first phase was slated to award $4 billion, a little more than half of the total $7.2 billion. In the first round alone, $28 billion in requests was made. Awards started being announced in December.

Until all the applications are posted -- for example, none of the RUS applications have been posted yet -- analysis can't be performed, according to an article in Stimulating Broadband. However, the number of NTIA applications is a significant decrease from the 1,789 received in the first round, the article said.

Interestingly, U.S West (Qwest), which sat out the first round, issued a press

So, did anybody hear tonight's mysterious southeast Portland explosion?

Apparently a lot of people, like my Portland friend, did. ("Tonight" was Sunday.)

What's interesting is how they used Internet tools to track down the location. As described in an article in the New York Times, people immediately started using Twitter to send did-you-hear-that messages, and within five minutes had agreed to use the hashtag #pdxboom for messages about the phenomenon.

Within an hour, a person had set up a Google Maps application to let people note their location, which triangulated on a particular location -- where, the next morning, police found evidence of a pipe bomb, and credited the map for helping them find it.

This sort of on-the-ground reporting isn't unusual; in August, 2008, not only was Twitter used to help pinpoint an earthquake, but a study showed that such reports were nearly as accurate as seismographs. But the it-takes-a-village nature of locating the scene of the crime made this one newsworthy.

Now, according to the Times article, there's talk of using the open source community to develop more robust tools for use in future situations. Granted, this sort of thing works best in tech-heavy communities such as Portland and the 2008 earthquake's Southern California.

A news article was making the Facebook rounds today, warning about a site called Spokeo.com that aggregates publicly available information.

"It can list your address, a picture of your home, how much it cost, how long you have lived there, your approximate age and income, your relationship status and more," the article warned. "And it is online for anyone to see."

Well, sort of.

Around a year ago, Spokeo.com was encouraging people to sign up and link their address books to the site, ostensibly so someone who had friends on multiple social media sites could track them down.

"Enter any single email address, and Spokeo will search across 41 social networks for all related online profiles," the company said, in an email message from January, 2009. "If you import an entire address book, Spokeo will show you all your friends' photos, videos, and blogs."

Apparently, the site did a little more with the information than that.

The article warned that some users had found that the information on the site was incorrect, and so it was for me -- it listed me as married to someone ten years older than his actual age whom I divorced in 2002, that my house was worth $1 million (let me tell you, my *town* is hardly worth that much), that I played hockey and football, and that my 60+ year-old house was built in 2003.

On the other hand, it …

Just six weeks after Google announced its plan to build a gigabit fiber network for a city, more than 1,100 cities have applied, the company said on Friday.

In addition, more than 194,000 individuals responded, Google said. The company has put a map up on its corporate blog showing which cities have the most response. Unfortunately, the company appears to be looking primarily at raw numbers and not responses per capita; with such a scoring system, large cities will certainly have an advantage over smaller ones.

Google said that for the rest of the year, it will be looking at the responses, then conducting site visits, meeting with local officials and consulting with third-party organizations, with the goal of announcing its "Google community" by the end of this year. It isn't clear when the network will be built.

Ironically, the announcement is coming just as the first phase of federal government stimulus grant funding is ending. It will be interesting to see how Google's chosen community's results compared with those of the cities that receive stimulus funding.

"If one message has come through loud and clear, it's this: people across the country are hungry for better and faster Internet access," the Mountain View, Calif., company said.

Cities have been competing to show which of them has the most motivated populace. "We've seen cities rename themselves, great YouTube videos, public rallies and hundreds of grassroots Facebook groups come to life, all with …

About a year ago, three girls fought charges of child pornography -- of themselves -- for refusing to attend 10-hour class on pornography and sexual violence after they were arrested for taking pictures of themselves en deshabille.

Now, the district court not only barred the district attorney from initiating any criminal charges against the girls, but criticized the district attorney’s reliance on the girls’ presence in the photographs as a basis for the potential charges, noting that their presence did not prove they possessed or transmitted the photo, according to an article in the New York Times.

However, the Third Circuit Court did not address the issue of whether taking and transmitting the pictures could be considered free speech, according to an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The case was the first appeals case to address whether free-speech law protected "sexting" -- sending sexually explicit messages or photos to cell phones.

The district attorney had told a group of parents and students that he had the authority to prosecute girls photographed in underwear, like the three girls, or even in a bikini on the beach, because the photos were "provocative," according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the girls and their mothers before the appeals court.

In general, however, states are starting to move away from such draconian laws, according to a different article in the New York Times. "Last year, Nebraska, Utah and Vermont …

As the saying goes, a man (and presumably a woman) is known by the company he keeps. In fact, last fall some MIT students did a study where they demonstrated that they could tell someone's sexual orientation by the sexual orientation of their friends on Facebook and other social networking sites.

Now it's going one step further: In May, at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in Oakland, Calif., students are presenting a paper showing how they can determine someone's identity by the social networking groups to which they belong.

Using a German social networking site called Xing, researchers at three universities determined using their technique that they could identify someone 42 percent of the time.

Criminals could use the technique for phishing and targeted attacks, particularly because it requires only that users have to visit a particular site, not that they have to download any code, said Kelly Jackson Higgins, of the security blog Dark Reading.

The system works like this. First, someone visits a particular site, which uses a technique to examine their browser history to see which social networking groups they visit. Then, after downloaded group membership information using crawlers, they look at the users who belong to all of those groups -- which typically triangulates down to a few or, often, a single user.

Unlike some other triangulation techniques, this one uses just a single social networking site, the researchers …

In preparation for releasing its national broadband plan tomorrow (which is already coming under criticism), the Federal Communications Commission has started collecting data from users on their broadband performance -- a test that is also coming under criticism.

Like similar testing a couple of years ago, the broadband.gov testing suffers from one glaring flaw: it is self-selected. It's reporting the results from a self-selected group who knew about the speed test, had the time and interest and ability to take it -- and who had Internet access in the first place so that they could. But the people most likely to fall into that group are the Neterati -- the very people who might be 'busting the curve' by having better access than most other Americans.

Most notably, of course, it doesn't test the people who don't have broadband access in the first place -- the people who most need to be identified so they can be served.

People are also chiming in on the broadband.gov blog with other criticisms of the test, which went up March 11. Biggest of the criticisms is that the FCC is not yet releasing the results of the data it's collected (80,000 as of March 12, according to Jordan Usdan, identified as Attorney-Advisor, Broadband Task Force).

Karl Auerbach, former North American at-large representative for ICANN, published an extensive criticism of the FCC testing in his …

The issue of teens taking naked pictures of themselves with their cell phones and sending them to other teens has been an issue of increasing concern, with teens being slapped with child pornography charges, simply by virtue of the fact that the subject of the picture was under 18 -- even if the photographer took the picture him- or herself.

However, now there's a case where the pornography charge may be justified: An 8th grade boy in Massachussets allegedly sold nude "sexts" of his 8th-grade (presumably, now, former) girlfriend to his classmates for $5 apiece, according to press reports.

The picture may have been forwarded to as many as 40 or 50 students, according to the Boston Globe.

While there have been sexting incidents at the middle-school level in the same town, those pictures went to just a couple of students and were dealt with through a cyber-education program and community service, according to the Belmont Citizen-Herald, which broke the story.

A study by the Associated Press and MTV found that about 10 percent of students reported that they had sent nude photos on their cell phone.

Craig Newmark, the man that newspaper editors love to hate, celebrated the 15th anniversary of Craigslist -- the garage sale listing of the Internet -- this month.

In Newmark's blog, he posted a copy of a message from March 28, 1995, from the seminal online service The WElL.

"My focus, on this page, is on events around San Francisco that involve arts and technology, privacy rights, local writers and artists, and any other item that strikes my fancy. This includes stuff like the Anon Salon, Spoonman's TeleCircus, Joe's Digital Diner, Eric's Jacking In series, the upcoming conference on Feminist Activism and Art, etc." Newmark described in the 1995 posting.

And, showing that Craigslist hasn't changed much since then, "The approach is as minimalist as I could make, with the exception of the Cole Valley stuff, where I display maps of its location, and a photo of parking hell overlooked by Sutro Tower. I'd really appreciate any feedback..."

A 2005 BBC report predicted that newspaper classified advertisements could be shut down entirely because of Craigslist. And a Wired article from last summer said 47 million people -- a fifth of the adult population -- used the service every month.

Alternative newsweeklies, which are given away, were particularly hard hit. "The poster of a smiling man's face in a red circle with a diagonal no-parking-style slash through it hung on walls at the most recent convention of the Association of Alternative …

Announcements for the first round of broadband stimulus grants and loans have slipped a bit; while all the announcements were supposed to be made by March 1, they are now expected to be made by March 15, according to an article on the Stimulating Broadband website.

In the first round alone, $28 billion in requests was made for $7.2 billion in funding. Awards started being announced in December.

In the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus package, Congress appropriated $7.2 billion for broadband grants, loans, and loan guarantees to be administered by the USDA’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS) and the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). There are two programs: RUS Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP) and the NTIA Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP). BIP will make loans and grants for broadband infrastructure projects in rural areas, while BTOP will provide grants to fund broadband infrastructure, public computer centers and sustainable broadband adoption project.

These awards were for the first round of funding, the deadline for which was August of this year. The first phase awards $4 billion, a little more than half of the total $7.2 billion.

Additional mass awards were made on March 4 and March 2; individual awards have also been made several times and are summarized on the broadbandusa.gov page.

In addition, deadlines for the second round have also changed. While …

Federal magistrate Barry Garber has ruled that a lawsuit can proceed for what a student said was a violation of her First Amendment rights after she was suspended for setting up a Facebook page that criticized her teacher.

Katherine Evans was a junior in Pembroke Pines Charter High School in 2007 when she created a web page about her Advanced Placement English teacher.

"At home on her computer, Ms. Evans created a Facebook page titled “Ms. Sarah Phelps is the worst teacher I’ve ever had” and invited past and current students of Ms. Phelps to post their own comments," described an article in the New York Times. Not everyone agreed with her, and after a couple of days, she took the page down, but a couple of months later, she was suspended.

Evans sued the principal, arguing that her comments were protected under the First Amendment, and asking for nominal monetary damages, legal fees, and the removal of the suspension from her academic record. Because it was written off-campus, and "was not lewd, vulgar, threatening, or advocating illegal or dangerous behavior," Garber ruled the lawsuit could go forward.

But her case is hardly alone, writes Jonathan Zimmerman in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "Evans’ actions seem downright tame next to two recent cases here in Pennsylvania, where students created fake MySpace profiles to ridicule their principals. On one of the fake pages, a student depicted his principal boasting of steroid and marijuana use; on …

Those of us who still read newspapers have seen them -- the pages and pages of teeny type describing changes in zoning, foreclosure notices, and all sorts of other arcane information. Most of us just turn the page.

But in publishing, it's big money, and newspapers that have already lost such lucrative revenue sources as want ads to Craiglist are fighting attempts in a number of states to change the law requiring such legal notices to be printed in the newspaper and instead allow them to be posted online.

Websites say that few people read the paper any more and that the legal notice requirements cost municipalities much more than an online source. Newspapers say it gives people interested in the legal notices a single source for the information.

Such fights are going on in a number of states, including Connecticut, Michigan, and Tennessee.

"The legislation will allow public notices to appear exclusively on government websites, despite the fact that less than 10% of the U.S. population views a local, state or federal government
website daily and more than 25% of adults don’t even have access to the Internet," said a press release from the Connecticut Daily Newspaper Association. "In comparison, 83% of adults read a community newspaper at least once per week, according to the National Newspaper Association (NNA)."

On the other hand, placers of such advertisements, such as attorneys, are pointing out that Connecticut newspapers such as the …

One of the biggest security stories so far this year is that of the high school that remotely triggered webcams in laptops given to students -- which the school said it only did to help track stolen laptops, and which some students and families said was a violation of their privacy, with the student in question filing a class-action lawsuit.

The school, Harriton in the Lower Merion School District, in a suburb of Philadelphia, said it has activated the cameras -- which parents reportedly didn't know about -- on 42 of the laptops.

An extremely detailed post in a security blog includes links to high school administrators talking about the technology collects student reports about the camera randomly blinking on, and lists requirements that the school had for students with the laptops.

"Possession of a monitored Macbook was required for classes

Possession of an unmonitored personal computer was forbidden and would be confiscated

Disabling the camera was impossible

Jailbreaking a school laptop in order to secure it or monitor it against intrusion was an offense which merited expulsion"

Parents have also posted online, with some of them -- including one who posted on the Facebook page of Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, saying that some parents were aware of the feature, that students weren't upset, and that the student who filed the lawsuit -- who was made aware of the program when …