Google offers $3.14159 MILLION in prizes for hacking Chrome OS

Google offers $3.14159 MILLION in prizes for hacking Chrome OS:

Google has announced the target for its third Pwnium hacking contest, to be held at this year's CanSecWest security conference, with $3.14159m in prize money for the researchers who can successfully crack its Chrome OS operating system.
And yes, that figure is derived from the first six digits of π.

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Antigua’s Legal “Pirate Site” Authorized by the World Trade Organization

Antigua’s Legal “Pirate Site” Authorized by the World Trade Organization:
Last week we broke the news that the island nation Antigua and Barbuda wants to start a Government run “pirate” site.
Today, this plan came a step closer to reality when the Caribbean country received authorization from the WTO to suspend U.S. copyrights during a meeting in Geneva.
This decision affirms the preliminary approval that was granted to Antigua in 2007 after the country won a gambling related trade dispute against the United States.
At the moment it’s still unclear what Antigua’s exact plans are but TorrentFreak is informed that the media portal will offer movies, TV-shows, music as well as software to customers worldwide.
Antigua’s Finance Minister Harold Lovell said in a comment that the U.S. left his Government no other option than to respond in this manner. Antigua’s gambling industry was devastated by the unfair practices of the U.S. and years of negotiations have offered no compromise.
“These aggressive efforts to shut down the remote gaming industry in Antigua has resulted in the loss of thousands of good paying jobs and seizure by the Americans of billions of dollars belonging to gaming operators and their customers in financial institutions across the world,” Lowell says.
“If the same type of actions, by another nation, caused the people and the economy of the United States to be so significantly impacted, Antigua would without hesitation support their pursuit of justice,” the Finance minister adds.
The Government has not given a time-frame for the release of the site, which has been in the works for a few months already. Ideally, Antigua hopes to settle the dispute before opening up their free media portal but there are no signs that the U.S. is going to comply with the WTO rulings.
Thus far, the U.S. has only warned Antigua that “Government-authorized piracy” would harm the ongoing settlement discussions.
“Government-authorized piracy would undermine chances for a settlement that would provide real benefits to Antigua. It also would serve as a major impediment to foreign investment in the Antiguan economy, particularly in high-tech industries,” U.S. officials said earlier.
However, these comments haven’t changed Antigua’s course. Emanuel McChesney, Chairman of the Antigua and Barbuda Investment Authority, is not impressed by this apparent scare tactic.
“We assume this is just rhetoric for public consumption, and we look forward to the United States putting aside these tactics and focusing their future efforts on thoughtful negotiation rather than on hyperbole and intimidation,” McChesney.
The Antiguan government further reiterated today that the term “piracy” doesn’t apply in this situation, as they are fully authorized to suspend U.S. copyrights. It is a legal remedy that was approved by all WTO members, including the United States.
If Antigua does indeed pull through, it will be rather interesting to see how the U.S. responds. It might add a whole new dimension to the ongoing “war on piracy.”
Source: Antigua’s Legal “Pirate Site” Authorized by the World Trade Organization

John Kiriakou Will Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Transparency Under Obama

John Kiriakou Will Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Transparency Under Obama:

When he enters a federal prison on Friday, John Kiriakou will hold the distinction of being the only former CIA agent to be prosecuted in relation to the Bush White House's torture program, not for committing torture but for helping to blow the whistle on it.
For his crime--he leaked the name of another officer connected to the torture program--Kiriakou is going to jail for 30 months. But the government's relentless pursuit of him speaks of a larger campaign that has targeted and prosecuted whistleblowers with more zeal than any other previous administration combined. Before Obama, the 1917 Espionage Act was used three times to bring cases against government officials accused of providing classified information to the media. Since he took office, Obama has prosecuted six Americans under the Espionage Act.
“I don’t think I am overstating this when I say I feel like we’re entering a second McCarthy era, “Kirkiakou told Firedoglake in an interview, “where the Justice Department uses the law as a fist or as a hammer not just to try and convict people but to ruin them personally and professionally because they don’t like where they stand on different issues.”
The Justice Department insists that Kiriakou’s views on torture had nothing to do with his prosecution, and defenders of the charges cite the fact Kirikou initially defended enhanced interrogation practices before shifting his position. But anyone who honestly believes that Kiriakou getting audited by the IRS every year since 2007 or followed into church doesn't count as intimidation, presumably also thinks that Aaron Swartz was coincidentally visited by the Secret Service two days after filing a Freedom of Information Request to obtain information on the treatment of Bradley Manning.
Last week, Kiriakou said, of Swartz’ tragic death, “I'm frankly surprised that more people haven't committed suicide because of the way the Justice Department overreaches on these cases…as bad as the Bush Justice Department was, we didn't see this kind of ... vindictive and selective prosecution of people that we see under Obama. That's really what it is, it's vindictive and it's selective."
This, despite the fact that the Obama administration has happily carried out its own leaks to the press, such as information about successful drone strikes and the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. As David Carr wrote last year, "this particular boat leaks from the top. Leaks from the decks below, especially ones that might embarrass the administration, have been dealt with very differently."
In general, Obama's promises of transparency have faltered. Consider that:

• 
  The number of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits filed against the federal government increased by 26% under the Obama administration versus the Bush administration, according to a December study by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
  
• 
  Despite a 2009 memo from Attorney General Eric Holder telling them to do so, a government-wide audit performed by the National Security Archive found 62 of 99 federal agencies still have not updated their FOIA regulations. The audit also found that 56 agencies have not updated their FOIA regulations since the passage of the OPEN Government Act of 2007, which mandated agencies retool their FOIA offices, including fee structures and reporting.
  
• 
  A Bloomberg investigation found that 19 of 20 cabinet-level agencies disobeyed the law requiring the disclosure of public information: “In all, just 8 of the 57 federal agencies met Bloomberg’s request for those documents within the 20-day window required by the Act."
  
• 
  An August 2012 Washington Post analysis found that early freedom of information progress by the Obama administration “stalled and, in the case of most departments, reversed in direction.” According to the Post, "the number of FOIA requests denied in full due to exemptions rose more than 10 percent last year, to 25,636 from 22,834 the previous year." (Melanie Ann Pustay, director of the Office of Information Policy at the Department of Justice, told Bloomberg News the figures may reflect an increase in the number of FOIA requests made to agencies since 2009.)
  
• 
  Holder's Justice Department has defended all agencies that choose to withhold information from the public, a report on FOIAproject.org found.
  

These details and the stories of Kiriakou, Swartz, Manning, and many others, stand in stark contrast to the image promulgated by “the most transparent administration in history”, strengthening the separation between rhetoric and reality that the President’s reign has been built upon. In his second inaugural speech, President Obama referenced, “A decade of war now ending,” no doubt an astonishing assertion to the people of Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, victims of regular drone strikes, in a program the administration will barely admit exists. This information was also, surely, a shock to the people of Iran who are beginning to see dramatic medical impacts as a result of the brutal economic sanctions, an act of war by any stretch of imagination and a policy Vice President Joe Biden referred to as, “[The] most crippling sanctions in the history of sanctions.”
However, no one could be more confounded by the statement than the people of Afghanistan, the country Obama was indirectly referencing, as the occupation reaches tragic milestone after tragic milestone. The line from the White House is that the war will end in 2014, but a closer look at the government’s actual plans reveals that the Pentagon wants 6,000-20,000 troops in the country until at least 2024.

Kiriakou on Al Jazeera, January 25

The fictions that fuel Obama’s support now crystallize in the visage of John Kiriakou; the only official to be prosecuted in connection with torture programs of the last decade. The individuals directly responsible for the descent into what Dick Cheney called, “The Dark Side,” continue to ink book deals and obtain cushy positions throughout the country. Last week, Condoleezza Rice, one of the chief architects of the Iraq War, was hired by CBS as a news contributor. Prior to that, Colin Powell, as responsible for the crimes of the Bush administration as anyone else, was lauded by liberals more passionately than usual for a making a few commonsensical comments about the weak-mindedness of the Republican party. The Tuesday before the Kiriakou sentencing, a military judge announced that Marine Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich will not face the death penalty, despite pleading guilty to killing 24 Iraqi civilians in 2005, many of whom were elderly people or children. Wuterich was the last Marine charged in the Haditha killings, 6 others had their charges dropped and one was acquitted.
Yet Bradley Manning, who didn’t participate in a war crime but allegedly leaked information about one, now faces life in prison. John Kiriakou, who didn’t participate in torture but leaked information about the practice, is going to jail for over two years. And Barack Obama, who campaigned on another round of  hope, change, and openness, is continuing a relentless war on whistleblowers-and likely signing off on another classified drone strike.
Connections
Zero Dark Thirty Made Me Write This
The Torture of Bradley Manning
The Six Names You Won't Hear at the Democratic National Convention
The White House Wants to Imprison the CIA Agent Who Blew the Whistle on Torture 

Photo: Associated Press / Cliff Owen

Iran Sent a Monkey into Space: Is It Time for Space Diplomacy?

Iran Sent a Monkey into Space: Is It Time for Space Diplomacy?:

A long-range rocket on an Iranian launch pad.

One of the big revelations following North Korea's rocket launch was that Pyonyang may have had help from Iran in developing its rocket. Iran has had a long-range rocket program for some time now, helped in turn by North Korea's Soviet-era expertise, and its rocket program has now hit a new milestone: Iranian state TV claims Tehran has successfully lifted a monkey into space.
The launched peaked at 75 miles, and the monkey reportedly landed unharmed, which Iran says is a big step toward a manned program. According to the New York Times:

Press TV quoted the director of the Iran Space Agency, Hamid Fazeli, as saying earlier this month that “because of biological similarities between humans and monkeys, the latter were selected for the space mission.”
He also forecast that Iran would send a human into space within the “next five to eight years,” and said Iran would send its Sharifsat satellite into orbit before the end of March.
There was no independent corroboration of the report, which Press TV called evidence of “yet another” scientific achievement following earlier claims that satellites and living creatures had been launched into space.
Western monitors have not announced any missiles launchings by Iran in recent days.

It's Iran's second attempt at launching a monkey into orbit–the first was unsuccessful–and follows a bevy of other animal launches reported by Iran, including rodents, worms, and a turtle. Now, take it all with a grain of salt, as news outlets are mostly working off of what Iran has said. At the same time, it's no surprise that following North Korea's launch, which no one fully expected to succeed, authorities might be holding Iran's missile capabilities a little closer to the chest.
Update: Here's a photo of the monkey in question, who looks like he was packed by Ikea:

The Iranian astronaut monkey. twitter.com/MahirZeynalov/…
— Mahir Zeynalov (@MahirZeynalov) January 28, 2013

The broader implications are murky as well. Iran looking to develop a manned space program is, at surface value, not shocking in the least. As space becomes privatized and more accessible, it really is the next realm of diplomacy, even if we're only talking about arguments over orbit and the Moon, versus full-on Intergalactic Congress type stuff. Iran's likely not going to get into some Moonraker-style space piracy, but having a serious space program helps the country stay relevant on the world stage.
More importantly to Western observers, Iran's mature missile technology is worrisome if you replace that monkey with a nuclear payload. Iran doesn't have nuclear capabilities yet, but diplomatic talks have still gone nowhere, and Iran's launch definitely turns up the heat at the negotiating table.
Also, North Korea does have nukes. Each new missile report suggests that Tehran and Pyongyang are sharing a healthy flow of ideas (their buddy-buddy status quite likely born out of their reps as the bad guys) about long-range missiles. There's no evidence yet that the country's nuclear scientists are working together–and for Iran, it's more of an issue of enriching uranium than figuring out how to build a bomb–but trading ideas about missiles is more worrisome than trading tech for solar panels, even if both countries are officially just working on their space programs.
Yet even that has its own issues: Until now space hasn't been a particularly crowded space, satellites aside, and the countries sending astronauts to orbit have all been cooperative with each other. What happens if a pariah like Iran starts sending astros into space? Should the West do anything about it? And what could, say, the UN do anyway? If anything, Iran's monkey launch shows that the space age is maturing, and we're rapidly approaching the time when space diplomacy is legitimately needed.
@derektmead

Japanese Trees Show Evidence of a Massive, Medieval Gamma Ray Burst

Japanese Trees Show Evidence of a Massive, Medieval Gamma Ray Burst:

An artist's impression of a star going supernova and shooting out a gamma ray burst. Via

It’s amazing the things scientists can use to learn about the universe around us–in this case, trees. While studying trees in Japan, a team of researchers found evidence that the Earth was hit with a gamma ray burst about 1,200 years ago. 

The tree-based key, in this case, is carbon. Most of the carbon in nature is the common and stable isotope carbon-12 that has six protons and six neutrons in its nucleus. But there’s another, less common but still present carbon isotope in nature: carbon-14, a radioactive atom with eight protons and eight neutrons that decays into nitrogen.
Carbon-14 is created when cosmic rays – those high energy particles that hit the Earth from space – interact with the nitrogen in our atmosphere. It’s a regular process that keeps the levels of carbon-14 on Earth at a more or less stable level. But in the Japanese trees, researchers noted a significant spike in carbon-14. By reading the trees’ rings, they determined the spike came from an event 1,200 years ago, in the year 774 or 775.
Initial research into what this event could have been quickly ruled out the explosion of a nearby massive star – a supernova. These are bright. Some astronomer would have seen the light and noted it, but no record exists that matches the date of the carbon-14 spike found in the trees. Solar flares are another way the Earth can be hit with radiation, but these generally aren’t very powerful. A solar flare big enough to produce the levels of carbon-14 researchers found in the trees would have to be more than 20 times larger than the average flare. It would have been bright, and someone definitely would have seen it and taken a note. 

Gamma ray bursts are massive events, as suggested by this render. Via

But there’s another possible culprit: a gamma-ray burst.
Gamma ray bursts are a byproduct of a black holes’ birth, and there are a few ways we get black holes. One, and the most common way, is for a massive star to explode and collapse on itself at the end of its life. The forces involved send out beams of energy that we see as high-energy gamma rays.
Black holes can also form when two neutron stars merge. Neutron stars are failed black holes, stars that died but didn’t have the energy needed to compress into a black hole so instead became an incredibly small and dense ball of neutrons. So say there are two stars orbiting each other – a binary system – and both turn into neutron stars. Its possible that these orbiting dense balls orbiting each other would eventually fall into one another. When two things this heavy merge, it’s violent, and one of the byproducts is a short-lived twin beam of energy.
This is what scientists think happened based on their reading of the Japanese trees.

What two neutron stars might look like as they smash together. Via

Neutron star collisions and the resulting gamma ray bursts aren’t rare; we see them all the time. But we see them in distant galaxies, places too far for the radiation to hit the Earth and produce the spike of carbon-14 scientist found in Japan. So if this is the explanation behind the 774/775 radiation burst, the merging neutron stars must have been much closer to home. The event would have to have been somewhere between 3,000 and 12,000 light-years from the Sun. Any closer and the Earth would have been fried, and further and we wouldn’t be able to see any after effects.
It all works in theory, but finding the proof is another matter altogether. The short lived gamma ray burst from neutron stars merging is extremely quick, less than two seconds. Its unlikely anyone would have seen the event to record it, but double checking astronomical records is one way to go. Astronomers could also look for the likely remnant of the burst, a 1,200-year-old black hole or a neutron star 3,000 to 12,000 light-years away that lacks the characteristic gas and dust seen after a star goes supernova.
Finding the proof that merging neutron stars caused the gamma ray burst that hit the Earth with enough radiation to account for the exact rise in carbon-14 scientists found in tress in Japan will be like finding a needle in a universe-sized haystack. I guess that’s what grad students are for.

Smartphone NEC Medias W: quando um ecrã não chega

Smartphone NEC Medias W: quando um ecrã não chega: E sem em vez de um ecrã com diagonais generosas o seu smartphone tivesse… dois ecrãs com diagonais generosas? É precisamente o que propõe a NEC com o novo Medias W, mostrado em forma de protótipo há cerca de um ano, com lançamento previsto para abril próximo no mercado nipónico.







É um dispositivo Android 4.1 Jelly Bean que pode ser usado como um smartphone convencional ou num formato duplo ecrã, graças ao formato do tipo slide, a partir do qual os ecrãs se sobrepõem ou juntam lateralmente.



De acordo com o site Engadget, que se socorreu do catálogo de novos modelos a disponibilizar pelo operador de telecomunicações NTT DoCoMo, quando usado com os dois ecrãs o Medias W disponibiliza uma diagonal total de ecrã de 5,6", que pode ser aproveitada como um único ecrã, ou individualmente para diferentes tipos de conteúdos.



O conceito inovador do novo smartphone da NEC é acompanhado por um leque de características que acompanha a tendência dos modelos de topo: processador de dois núcleos a 1,5GHz, 1GB de memória RAM, armazenamento interno de 16GB, ranhura para cartões microSDHC e uma câmara com sensor de 8 Megapixéis.



O fabricante não divulgou oficialmente o preço a que será comercializado o Medias W nem a possibilidade da comercialização ser alargada a outros países.



Escrito ao abrigo do novo Acordo Ortográfico

The most secure Android EVERTechnolust since 2005

The most secure Android EVERTechnolust since 2005

Somebody Whose Name Rhymes With Ronald Frump Will Pay You $20 to Pretend You Hate Wind Turbines in Public

Somebody Whose Name Rhymes With Ronald Frump Will Pay You $20 to Pretend You Hate Wind Turbines in Public:

So I don't have enough evidence to technically confirm that Donald Trump is personally willing to pay you $20 to attend a midtown Manhattan protest against the construction of wind turbines in Scotland, but someone is. And it's probably Donald Trump. There's only one man who's rich, dumb, and pompous enough to pay people to stand outside in January and pretend they hate clean energy.
Here's the mysterious Craigslist posting that outlines the job offer:

Remember, Donald Trump hates wind turbines more than he hates Rosie O'Donnell. Here's a compendium of his most gloriously insane anti-wind power tweets over the years. Trump's base of operations is in Manhattan, and, really, this has got to be a Trump-affiliated entity. There's no other valid explanation.
Trump hates wind turbines because Scotland has approved the construction of a new wind farm in the general vicinity of one of Trump's towering flatulent monuments to obscene wealth. You can see the turbines from the golf course, which bothers Trump, probably because he fears it might remind the kind of rich people that stay in Trump hotels that there are problems in the world that less rich people are trying to solve while they are on vacation.
Regardless, if you want to make a quick $20 bucks and maybe photobomb the world's biggest windbag as he stages an incomprehensible opposition to clean energy, here's your ticket.

A Nuclear Power Plant Made Snow Fallout in Pennsylvania

A Nuclear Power Plant Made Snow Fallout in Pennsylvania:

If you live in Pennsylvania, some of the snow that gently fell upon your town last night was probably made by a nuclear power plant.
You're looking at Doppler radar catching a Pennsylvania nuclear power plant in the act of making snow--that's a band of snow being created by steam let off of the Beaver Valley generating station. It's a pretty rare event, evidently, but easily explained by science.
Over at the Capitol City Weather Gang, meteorologist Jason Samenow explains why it happens:
"The ultra cold air streaming in from the northwest interacted with the hot steam emitted from the plant resulting in condensation, cloud formation and precipitation. I’ve never seen this particular phenomenon observed before but it makes physical sense."
He also points us to this video of the principle in action, in which a Siberian man tosses boiling water out of his window--and it's cold enough that he instantly makes snow:

That was happening on a scale of nuclear-powered proportions. To me, the incident illustrates the massive amount of energy we're losing as heat in the nuclear process--ideally, we should be capturing and bottling that stuff up, especially in the winter. And some cities already do--Copenhagen's district heating system is a great example.

Facebook Search Exposes Hypocrites, Your Private Data to Strangers

Facebook Search Exposes Hypocrites, Your Private Data to Strangers:


Eyebrows were raised across the techsphere when Facebook announced it was launching a new search feature—which was to be expected, seeing as how such eyebrows are raised every time Facebook announces anything.
The concept earned some rave reviews and some privacy concerns—again, par for the course—and now a group of beta users are trying out the feature. Often to humorous and sometimes disturbing results.
Tom Scott, web tinkerer extraordinaire, is one of the beta testers, and he’s sharing some of the strange results of the testing process. Namely, that Facebook search reveals human beings across the world to be massive hypocrites. In the process, he's demonstrating how feature will make all the weird stuff you're into publicly searchable.
He whipped up a Tumbler, natch, called Actual Facebook Searches, and proceeded to lay bare, as the search feature allows you to do with ease, people who ‘Like’ both the ‘I Love My Wife’ group and the ‘Prostitutes’ page.

Scott explains his reasons for airing Facebook Search’s dirty laundry on the Tumblr’s FAQ:
I got invited to Graph Search today, started playing about with it, and got some… well, some interesting results.
I’m not sure I’m making any deeper point about privacy: I think, at this point, we’re basically all just rubbernecking - myself included. Facebook does have good privacy settings: but there are many, many people who don’t know how to use them!

So, while it’s humorous to gawk at the ‘Catholic Mothers in Italy’ who also ‘Like’ Durex condoms, Scott is actually revealing just how much of the average user’s private data is available for easy perusal online. The examples he highlights are extreme ones, and more likely to get you rooting for the exposers than the exposed—see “People in committed relationships who also ‘Like’ Ashley Madison,” the dating website for pro cheaters.

I emailed Scott to get some more of his thoughts on the potential impact of Facebook search, and he told me that his experience so far was that it may serve as a major wakeup call to folks who haven’t set their privacy settings.
“Graph Search jokes are a good way of startling people into checking their privacy settings – but most people will never actually be affected by accidentally making data ‘public’,” he said.
“Most of the danger online comes not from strangers making half-assed joke searches: it comes from people who know you. A lot of the public data fails what I call the ‘bitter ex test’: can someone who hates you ruin your life with that information?”
Scott says that some of the search data he’s stumbled across is downright “unsettling.” He says the sheer amount of private information now easily available could prove problematic—even dangerous—in some cases.

“There’s at least one search I’ve come across that could be used by sociopathic web users to cause immediate harm,” he says. When pressed, he wouldn’t provide further details in the interest of keeping said data private.
Many Facebook users have long been wary of privacy issues—to this day, Zuckerberg and company remain rather oblique about how public your data is and what rules govern its use—but few have been wary enough to log off. And many others continue to pay those settings no heed at all, treating Facebook like a friendly communal journal
It’s that kind of casual user that may be in for a surprise when Facebook Graph Search leaves beta, and suddenly makes all of their preferences, interests, and location data open to be sifted through by strangers.

We Can Now Store Data on Single Strands of DNA

We Can Now Store Data on Single Strands of DNA:

Remember iPods? I do, and I remember them well. I remember the time I first I saw one. It was in Switzerland, of all places, and I was at a high school dance, of all things. I was dressed up as Lance Armstrong and bumped into another American guy who was about my age. He was a cyclist and was lauding Lance — those were the days! — when I noticed a shiny thing in his hand with wires coming out of it.
"It's an iPod," he replied. "What's an iPod?" I wondered, innocently. "It's a music player, for mp3s and stuff," he explained. "Oh, so how many songs can you jam on that thing? Like 20?" was my next question. He laughed, "More like 2,000 — It's got ten gigabytes." And then my head exploded.
It's easy to forget how far we've come with technology, especially data storage. Science is here to remind you, however, that we're only beginning to realize full extent of the possibilities technology provides. And this week, the prize for the most impressive leap forward blow-your-mind science goes to a team from the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) who've developed a technique to store data on individual strands of synthetic DNA. Considering that a conventional hard drive encodes data on a physical disk that's typically the size of, well, an iPod, just imagine how small these devices could become if we started storing data on a microscopic level.
DNA, by the way, is very, very small. To be exact, it's between two and four nanometers, depending on how you measure it. The team from EBI developed their synthetic DNA data storage technique on a number of different data formats, by encoding the text from all 154 of Shakespeare's sonnets, a 26-second clip from Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, a copy of James Watson and Francis Crick’s classic paper on the structure of DNA, a photo of their institute, and a file describing how the new process works.
In the end, they found that a single strand of DNA could store about 739 kilobytes of data. Some back of the napkin math shows that a centimeter worth of encoded DNA strands can store some 7,050 gigabytes. So if you imagine stuffing data-enabled DNA into the size of the current iPod Classic, it would be able to hold roughly 42,000 gigabytes of data, or, like, a bajillion songs.
These are all rough estimates, but you get the point. Besides the unbelievable storage capacity, the other nice thing about data encoded on DNA is that it's virtually indestructible. Consider that we've found cells from wooly mammoths that have been trapped in ice for tens out thousands of years and were still able to extract the DNA information. It's hard to say if the same would be true for this synthetic data, but researchers are confident that it's pretty damn durable.
As one of those on the team put it, "Stick the DNA in a cave in Norway for a thousand years and we’ll still be able to read it." This would be even more helpful in the event of an apocalyptic event which, researchers say, the DNA could survive. "[Future generations would] quickly notice that this isn’t DNA like anything they’ve seen,” says Nick Goldman, leader of the research team. “There are no repeats, and everything is the same length. It’s obviously not from a bacterium or a human. Maybe it’s worth investigating.”
Now for the bad news. This technique is really expensive. I mean really expensive. To encode just a megabyte worth of data onto a strand of synthetic DNA would cost an estimated $12,400 and to read it would cost another $220. So listening to the Jimmy Buffett box set on your new DNA-powered iPod would cost, to put it bluntly, a shitload of money.
As Nature points out, the cost of encoding and reading DNA has been dropping exponentially in recent years, and the process should be affordable in the next 50 years. In the meantime, we face another challenge: finding a way to hook it up to a processor. About six months ago, scientist developed a way to encode data onto a single molecule, but the amount of wiring and circuitry required to make the data useful, practically erased all of the space saved by the tiny, molecule-sized storage units.
Let's focus on the good news though. If a decade ago the arrival of the 10 gigabyte iPods made your face melt like it did mine, you're going to love the 10 petabyte iPod. Now it's up to the recording industry to make enough decent music to justify the space.
Image via Flickr

Pirate Bay Documentary First Ever to Premiere Online and at a Major Festival

Pirate Bay Documentary First Ever to Premiere Online and at a Major Festival:
Hollywood often hears that they force people into pirating films by failing to make their content widely available.
It often takes months before a blockbuster movie appears online after it premieres in theaters, while the public demands instant access.
So, when a documentary is made about the founders of The Pirate Bay, things have to be done differently. And this is exactly what’s going to happen with the upcoming release of TPB-AFK.
Today it was officially announced that the documentary will premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) on February 8th. This offline premiere coincides with the free online release, making it the first ever to have such a double release.
“I’m so thrilled to open the ‘Panorama Dokumente’ section of the Berlinale with the first film ever to be released for free online from an A-festival,” TPB-AFK director Simon Klose tells TorrentFreak in a comment.
“The Pirate Bay changed the film industry from the outside, I’m trying to change it from within,” he adds, hinting that it might be wise for others to follow this trend.
After seeing the TPB-AFK trailer many users and followers of the notorious BitTorrent site are excited to see the documentary. However, the film doesn’t have the classic Hollywood ending most are used to.
TorrentFreak talked to several people who’ve seen a private screener and the overall impression we got is that it’s not the most uplifting story. That doesn’t come as a surprise of course, as most of the material covers how the three founders fought their legal battles in Sweden, and lost.
Peter Sunde, one of the three founders followed in the documentary, has mixed feelings about the end result.
“It tells an important story,” Sunde tells TorrentFreak.
“I don’t want to tell too much about it because people should see it and make up their own minds. After seeing the full movie for the first time I was thinking about it for about two weeks without having an opinion or words to describe it.”
TPB-AFK highlights a lot of the negative events the three founders went through, ending with the final guilty verdict early last year. Needless to say these events had quite an impact on their lives.
“It’s still a fucked up story and the film makes me think about the past years of my life quite a lot,” Sunde says.
The Pirate Bay founder adds that he might have chosen other material to include and that many of the good parts are left out.
“It’s Simon’s decision what to include and it’s his view of our story. I like that he’s independent from us and that he’s promised to release lots of extra material for some of the things that I might have wanted to have included,” Sunde says.
Sunde concludes, however, that the director did a great job and that TPB-AFK is a must watch.

TPB-AFK coming soon.

Source: Pirate Bay Documentary First Ever to Premiere Online and at a Major Festival

Web Activists Are Waging a Guerrilla War to Free Martin Luther King from Copyright

Web Activists Are Waging a Guerrilla War to Free Martin Luther King from Copyright:

Last Friday was the one year anniversary of the massive online and real-world protests that helped bring down Congress' Stop Online Piracy Act, but the celebration online was bittersweet. The death of information freedom activist Aaron Swartz highlighted the perils of protesting an outdated scramble of copyright laws, and raised the ire of activists, some of whom blame aggressive government prosecutors for Aaron's demise. But one Internet activism group used the day to launch a small protest against copyright law, and to honor another champion of freedom: they took to video websites to upload footage of Martin Luther King, Jr's famous "I Have a Dream" speech, which remains, curiously, locked up under copyright.
On what Twitter dubbed #InternetFreedomDay, Fight for the Future began tweeting a link to a Vimeo version of the speech that it had uploaded under the title "MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech is copyrighted. Share it anyway." The link spread fast, but within 12 hours it was dead, deleted by Vimeo for what appeared to be copyright reasons. Soon, another version was up at YouTube under Fight for the Future's name; as of this afternoon it had 30,584 views. On Friday, Douglas Schatz of Fight for the Future said the group was working to get the video uploaded to other video sites.
"Had SOPA and PIPA passed last year," the group writes on YouTube, "you could have gone to jail for sharing this video, and entire websites could have been shut down just for linking to it. This speech is too important to be censored by a broken copyright system." Echoing the civil disobedience of King, the group quoted the civil rights leader: "...one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."
In a story last year, I described the saga over King's copyright--the bitter tussles that have erupted over decades between family members, educators, online archivists, documentary filmmakers, and Britain's EMI, which, as of 2009, controls the copyright of King's landmark speech and all of his other intellectual property, on behalf of the King estate. The copyright claim is annoying to historians but legally understandable: King himself established a copyright over "I Have a Dream" in the days after his speech, allowing him and, presumably, his family and successors, to protect his intellectual property and prevent others from profitting from his work. As a result, finding a good complete video version on the web is difficult; it’s not even to be found in the digital archive of the King Center’s website, a new endeavor sponsored by JP Morgan Chase. To legally view the "I Have a Dream Speech," you'll need to pay twenty dollars for the official DVD.
After his death, the King family would copyright all of his other works. As a statement published on one King fan website reads,

The writings, documents and recordings of Martin Luther King, Jr. are protected by copyright. None of the documents may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotation embodied in critical articles and reviews. All rights reserved.

What's more frustrating to Internet freedom activists, and to students and educators, is that the law also extends to footage of King's speech, an address delivered on the Washington Mall that became one of the 20th century's most precious rhetorical artifacts. Legally, footage of the full speech cannot be broadcast or published without the permission of EMI, a restriction that extends to YouTube.

The Vimeo version of Fight for the Future's upload was removed on Friday

The music publisher has aggressivley protected its copyrights on YouTube, mostly blocking unauthorized videos of its pop stars but also of King, who remains EMI's most prominant non-musical "asset." While some versions of the speech have persisted through YouTube takedowns, they tend to be of poor quality: the most-viewed YouTube version of the speech is choppy and hard to watch, encoded at the very lossy resolution of 240p. The version uploaded by Fight for the Future (see below) appears to be derived from the same choppy footage.
The copyright dilemma over "I Have a Dream" began in December 1963, when King sued Mister Maestro, Inc., and Twentieth Century Fox Records Company to stop the unauthorized sale of records of the 17-minute oration. It was picked up by the courts again in 1999: in Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. v. CBS, Inc., the television network argued that because King had not claimed copyright before giving his speech but instead a month afterwards, the speech had, under the copyright law of the time, entered the public domain as soon as it was performed. But the King family argued that King's copyright claim stood, as the performance of the speech was not, by law, the same as a "publication." In its ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit sided with the Kings:

A performance, no matter how broad the audience, is not a publication; to hold otherwise would be to upset a long line of precedent. This conclusion is not altered by the fact that the Speech was broadcast live to a broad radio and television audience and was the subject of extensive contemporaneous news coverage. We follow the above cited case law indicating that release to the news media for contemporary coverage of a newsworthy event is only a limited publication.

The speech was a copywritten performance distributed to the news media and not to the public, making it a “limited” as opposed to a “general” publication. Like other performances that appear on CBS, "I Have a Dream" was thus not in the public domain, giving the King estate grounds to sue CBS, which had used a portion of the speech in a 1994 documentary, The 20th Century with Mike Wallace. Because the case was ultimately settled by the two sides for an undisclosed sum, lingering questions about the speech's copyright protection have never been brought to court.

The YouTube upload by Fight for the Future

In the U.S., new wrangling over copyrights is due this year, as a 35 year old revision to copyright law enables artists who recorded music in 1978 to begin to reclaim their copyrights from the publishing companies that own them. That's in order, says copyright lawyer Lita Rosario, to "give artists an opportunity to negotiate after the value of the work has been realized."
The value of a recording by Simon and Garfunkel or George Clinton--or of a viral cartoon cat--may be a matter of culture, but it is mostly the domain of legal and business negotiations. The value of performances like Kings--and of the academic work that activists like Aaron Swartz struggled to distribute--extend beyond profit, and, it can be more reasonably argued, into issues of historical documentation, public memory and education. But barring any legal challenges, a quality video document of "I Have a Dream" will remain limited in distribution, at least until 2038, which is when its copyright expires.
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How Red October went undetected for 5 years

How Red October went undetected for 5 years:

The beginning of the week brought us a major incident in the world of Internet security, as Kaspersky Lab announced the discovery of a cyber-espionage network that could have ramifications as significant as last year’s notorious Flame virus.
Red October may have been reported for the first time on Monday, and uncovered for the first time in October 2012, but its operatives had been hacking into workstations and stealing highly sensitive data from governments, diplomatic bodies, research centres, oil companies, military organisations and more, since 2007.

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US anti-hacking law questioned

US anti-hacking law questioned:

 Lie about your identity on Facebook or delete files from your work laptop before you quit and you could run afoul of a 29-year-old US computer security law that some experts say has been changed so often it no longer makes sense.
The US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act has come under renewed criticism after last week's suicide of internet activist Aaron Swartz, who could have faced prison time for alleged hacking to download millions of academic articles from a private database through a network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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The "Red October" Campaign - An Advanced Cyber Espionage Network Targeting Diplomatic and Government Agencies - Securelist

The "Red October" Campaign - An Advanced Cyber Espionage Network Targeting Diplomatic and Government Agencies - Securelist

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Welp, Here's the First Awesome Science Meme of 2013

Welp, Here's the First Awesome Science Meme of 2013:

I know, I know. Hashtags. But it's not too often that science research-related hashtags go viral on Twitter, which is why we're extra amused by #OverlyHonestMethods, a hilarious, refreshing, and brutally honest take on the (somewhat flawed?) scientific methodology.

Because scientists is people, too. And sometimes people take long lunch breaks.

So whether you're a jaded post-doc, teach high school chemistry, or just a recovering science major, this meme will bring a moment of joyous snarkery to your day. Some highlights:

Even better, there's an Instagram feed of non-inspirational imagery for your class, mailing list or lab. Thanks, Internet! 

Top / bottom via

Welp, Here's the First Awesome Science Meme of 2013

Welp, Here's the First Awesome Science Meme of 2013:

I know, I know. Hashtags. But it's not too often that science research-related hashtags go viral on Twitter, which is why we're extra amused by #OverlyHonestMethods, a hilarious, refreshing, and brutally honest take on the (somewhat flawed?) scientific methodology.

Because scientists is people, too. And sometimes people take long lunch breaks.

So whether you're a jaded post-doc, teach high school chemistry, or just a recovering science major, this meme will bring a moment of joyous snarkery to your day. Some highlights:

Even better, there's an Instagram feed of non-inspirational imagery for your class, mailing list or lab. Thanks, Internet! 

Top / bottom via

Student Suspended for Refusing to Wear RFID Tracker Loses Lawsuit

Student Suspended for Refusing to Wear RFID Tracker Loses Lawsuit:

A Texas high school student who claimed her student identification was the “Mark of the Beast” because it was implanted with a radio-frequency identification chip has lost her federal court bid Tuesday challenging her suspension for refusing to wear the card around her neck.
Radio-frequency identification devices are a daily part of the electronic age — found in passports, and library and payment cards. Eventually they’re expected to replace bar-code labels on consumer goods. Now schools across the nation are slowly adopting them as well.

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Privacy

Law and Order

Governo trava ação judicial da SPA sobre Cópia Privada

Governo trava ação judicial da SPA sobre Cópia Privada: A renovação iminente da Lei da Cópia Privada levou a Sociedade Portuguesa de Autores a suspender o processo judicial que pretendia apresentar contra o Estado português.



A intenção da SPA foi revelada na passada sexta-feira, o mesmo dia em que o secretário de Estado da cultura, Barreto Xavier, terá contactado José Jorge Letria, presidente da organização.



Na reunião o representante do Governo indicou que até final do mês haverá desenvolvimentos sobre a matéria. "O secretário de Estado entrou em contacto comigo e garantiu-me que, até ao final de janeiro, está pronta a seguir a tramitação parlamentar a lei da cópia privada", afirmou José Jorge Letria em declarações à Lusa.



Na sequência do contacto, e da intenção do Governo, a SPA decidiu aguardar até final do prazo estimado pelo Governo, suspendendo para já uma ação judicial em sinal de protesto pela demora do processo.



"Esta questão é fundamental, porque nenhuma das leis anunciadas pelo governo neste domínio foi concretizada", disse o mesmo responsável à Lusa.



Recorde-se que, como o TeK já tinha escrito, a SPA defende que a taxa aplicada a alguns dispositivos eletrónicos, como forma de compensar os autores pela cópia privada de conteúdos protegidos por direitos de autor, deve ser estendida a todos os dispositivos que permitem a gravação, incluindo telemóveis, entre outros.



Atualmente a lei aplica-se apenas a cassetes áudio, cassetes vídeo, CRDs, CDRWs, DVDRs e DVDRWs, o que na perspetiva da SPA está desfazado da realidade e não tem em conta toda a evolução ao nível dos conteúdos digital, fazendo os autores perderem milhões de euros.



A organização defende ainda que o tema da cópia privada está resolvido em todos os países da União Europeia, com exceção de Portugal.


Escrito ao abrigo do novo Acordo Ortográfico

Conditioning

Conditioning:

The Silent Dish | Motherboard | VICE

The Silent Dish | Motherboard | VICE

BBC-Backed Pirate Bay Documentary Ready for Premiere

BBC-Backed Pirate Bay Documentary Ready for Premiere:
In the summer of 2003 a group of computer fanatics came up with the idea of starting a new file-sharing site using the then relatively new BitTorrent protocol.
The Pirate Bay was born, and nearly a decade and numerous court cases later it is still the most-visited torrent site of all time.
But how did Anakata, Brokep and TiAMO – three guys from Scandinavia – become Hollywood’s worst nightmare? What drove them to mock copyright holders, how did they deal with the private investigators who were watching them, and what makes The Pirate Bay so special?
These and other questions will be answered in the soon-to-be-released documentary TBP-AFK. The film shows the three founders looking back at how it all started, and also follows them during the Pirate Bay trials in Stockholm.
The film has been in the making for four years and Swedish filmmaker and producer Simon Klose has now finally announced that it’s ready to premiere. Once a film festival picks it up TBP-AFK will be made available for download on The Pirate Bay as well, and everyone will be allowed to share it.
To get funding for the film Simon Klose initially started a Kickstarter campaign during the summer of 2010, and not without success. The goal of $25,000 was met in just three days and $51,424 was raised in total during the month-long fundraiser.
However, TBP-AFK also received financial backing from several major broadcasters in Europe, including the BBC, the German ARTE, Swedish SVT, Norwegian NRK, Danish DR and the Dutch VPRO. This is quite remarkable, considering that the documentary will be shared online for free.
To keep close followers of the project happy, Klose has previously released a few short clips of the footage he shot. One clip features Pirate Bay founder Fredrik Neij (TiAMO) drinking a beer and chatting about the early days of The Pirate Bay.

TiAMO

In the clip below Gottfrid Svartholm (Anakata), who’s currently serving his sentence in a Swedish prison, discusses in court how The Pirate Bay came about.

Anakata

Klose told TorrentFreak that he hopes to release more details on the premiere during the coming weeks, as well as some other big news.
Stay tuned.
Source: BBC-Backed Pirate Bay Documentary Ready for Premiere