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German minister wants access to private computers
[Quote:]
German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble has confirmed plans to seek a change to the constitution to allow the state secret access to the computers of private individuals, in an interview published Thursday.
“Under certain conditions it must be possible for the Federal Criminal Police Office to search computers in secret,” Schaeuble told the Handelsblatt newspaper.
Schaeuble’s attempts to gain greater powers for police and other state authorities, including storing the fingerprints of all Germans, have run into opposition within the ruling broad-based coalition.
This will probably spread to other European countries. But as they say “under certain conditions it must be possible” – I guess having a non-encrypted windows file system is one of the conditions, so it’s easy to protect against overzealous governments in this case. But I’m getting quite fed up with the power grab.
Ex-contractor sentenced for sabotaging Navy subs
[Quote:]
A former government contractor whose top-secret security clearance enabled him to sabotage Navy 6th Fleet computers was sentenced Wednesday to a year in prison.
Richard F. Sylvestre of Boylston, Mass., pleaded guilty to one count of damaging protected computers and could have faced as much as 10 years in prison.
U.S. District Judge Rebecca B. Smith cited Sylvestre’s clean criminal record and other favorable factors in sentencing him to the low end of federal sentencing guidelines. The guidelines, which consider numerous factors that can increase or decrease penalties, recommended a 12- to 18-month prison term in this case.
“If we can’t trust people with top-security clearance, where are we?” the judge said toward the end of a lecture to Sylvestre.
Fuck, even Microsoft has a better process in place to protect their software from this kind of crap. It really isn’t that difficult.
niet.com
For the second time now I’ve received an attempt to scam me out of a domain name. Sure, it’s a four-letter dot-com, so pretty rare, but you’d expect more sophisticated attempts than an e-mail with a yahoo.ie return address sent from a consumer dsl account in turkey, signed by an “international group” company name that no search engine ever heard of.
Are people really that stupid?
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Van Hulten ongelukkig met loon Kok
[Quote:]
PvdA-voorzitter Michiel van Hulten is “ongelukkig” met de salarisverhogingen die oud-premier Wim Kok heeft gekregen voor zijn commissariaten. Vorig jaar kreeg Kok 18 procent meer voor zijn commissariaten bij ING, Shell en TNT.
In het TROS-programma Kamerbreed zei Van Hulten dat hij zich de boosheid van mensen hierover goed kan voorstellen.
Hij wilde niet ingaan op de vraag of Kok zijn salarisverhogingen had moeten weigeren.
Van Hulten is simpelweg boos omdat hij zelf nog niet de nodige commissariaten heeft bemachtigd, en is bang dat het zakkenvullen van de politici te zichtbaar wordt..
Global Air Pollution
[Quote:]
The only way to get a complete picture of air pollution around the globe is to measure it from space. This new image compiles data from 18 months of observations by the European Space Agency’s Envisat satellite.
It shows concentrations of nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a mostly man-made gas that comes from power plants, heavy industry, trucks and the burning of biomass. Lightning in the air and microbial activity in soil also produce NO2, which can cause respiratory problems.
For a large view of the image, click here.
Steffen Beirle of the University of Heidelberg’s Institute for Environmental Physics, responsible for the map, discussed what he sees in the image, which was released this week:
“High vertical column distributions of nitrogen dioxide are associated with major cities across North America and Europe, along with other sites such as Mexico City in Central America and South African coal-fired power plants located close together in the eastern Highveld plateau of that country.
“Then a very high concentration is found above north eastern China. Also across South East Asia and much of Africa can be seen nitrogen dioxide produced by biomass burning. Ship tracks are visible in some locations: look at the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean between the southern tip of India and Indonesia. The smoke stacks of ships crossing these routes send a large amount of NO2 into the troposphere. “
This map is average of the data over time, which smoothes out seasonal variations in biomass burning and also those due to human activity changes due to the time of year.
Cartoons
Impacts of Four Abstinence Education Programs
[Quote:]
A recent study of four abstinence education programs, conducted by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., finds that the programs had no effect on the sexual abstinence of youth. But it also finds that youth in these programs were no more likely to have unprotected sex, a concern that has been raised by some critics of these programs.
The study, conducted for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, was authorized by Congress in 1997 to evaluate the effectiveness of programs funded under Title V, Section 510 of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Nationwide, more than 700 Title V, Section 510 programs receive up to $50 million annually from the federal government in order to teach youth about abstinence from sexual activity outside of marriage. Additional funding from state matching block grants brings annual spending for Title V, Section 510 sexual abstinence education programs to $87.5 million.
The study found that youth in the four evaluated programs were no more likely than youth not in the programs to have abstained from sex in the four to six years after they began participating in the study. Youth in both groups who reported having had sex also had similar numbers of sexual partners and had initiated sex at the same average age.
These are faith-based initiatives, judging them on evidence is completely unfair.
The full study is here.
The full study is also irrelevant. To many of the Right-Wing/Republican programs their point is not to achieve anything other than help Republicans win elections.
The message to the voters is: Do you support us and modest sexuality, or our opponents who encourage rampant teenage promiscuity.
Google Buys DoubleClick for $3.1 Billion
[Quote:]
Google reached an agreement today to acquire DoubleClick, the online advertising company, from two private equity firms for $3.1 billion in cash, the companies announced, an amount that was almost double the $1.65 billion in stock that Google paid for YouTube late last year.
The sale offers Google access to DoubleClick’s advertisement software and, more importantly, its relationships with Web publishers, advertisers and advertising agencies.
For months, Google has been trying to expand its foothold in online advertising into display ads, the area where DoubleClick is strongest.
[..]
The sale brings to an end weeks of a bidding battle between Microsoft and Google. Microsoft has been trying to catch Google in the online advertising business, and the loss of DoubleClick would be a a major setback.
Good news for Explorer users – now Microsoft’s anti-spyware will absolutely flag DoubleClick!
On the other hand, I wasn’t aware DoubleClick was still in business, I haven’t seen one of the ads in 6 or 7 years or so…
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I always wondered why you had to double click something… (off toppic sorry.)
It is odd how this kind of power grab is being accepted in so many countries. I expect it in the US because people here are trained not to think for themselves or question anything from very young (hell, you can even get a ticket for crossing a street without waiting for “permission” from a traffic light).
To see it happen in Europe is more disappointing. Most European countries have been exposed to terrorists who were far more persistent than these muslim upstarts, and should know that these extra measures are essentially futile. All they do is play right into the hands of the criminals attacking them by further restricting the freedoms that they hate us for. The terrorists will just find alternative ways to attack, and keep attacking until they are either stopped or they get what they want (in this case, the rest of the world living by their intolerant, barbaric rules).