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This changes the game in my living room. Completely. My media center’s remote is now more powerful than any computer I bought in the 1990s.

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The team behind the popular torrent site The Pirate Bay has started to work on a new encryption technology that could potentially protect all Internet traffic from prying eyes. The project, which is still in its initial stages, goes by the name “Transparent end-to-end encryption for the Internets,” or IPETEE for short. It tackles encryption not on the application level, but on the network level, the aim being that all data exchanged on your PC would be encrypted, regardless of its nature — be it a web browser streaming video files or an instant messaging client. As Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij (a.k.a. Tiamo) told me, “Even applications that don’t supporting encryption will be encrypted where possible.”

Neij came up with the idea for IPETEE back when European politicians were starting to debate a Europe-wide move to DMCA-like copyright enforcement efforts, which were eventually authorized in the form of the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive in the spring of 2007. “I wanted to come up with something to make it harder for data retention,” said Neij. But he didn’t publish the initial draft proposal until early this month, when the discussion about privacy and surveillance online suddenly became urgent again. The Swedish parliament passed a new law in June that allows a local government agency to snoop on “the telephony, emails, and web traffic of millions of innocent individuals,” as the EFF’s Danny O’Brien put it. Neij promises that his new encryption scheme will be ready before the law takes effect next January.

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U.S. foreclosure filings rose 53 percent in June from a year earlier and bank repossessions almost tripled as deteriorating property values and higher payments on adjustable mortgages forced more people to give up their homes.

More than 252,000 properties, or one in every 501 U.S. households, were in some stage of foreclosure, RealtyTrac Inc., an Irvine, California-based seller of default data, said today in a statement. Nevada, California and Arizona had the highest foreclosure rates.

After giving in on FISA, now it’s time to surrender on offshore drilling.

Keep in mind that the “senior Democratic lawmakers” like Richard Durbin, who yesterday declared himself open to drilling, are fully aware that:

• Oil companies already hold over 7,000 leases for offshore drilling that stretch over 68 million acres.
• US Oil Production peaked in 1974 and no amount of drilling will reverse that trend or eliminate imports of oil.
• Drilling close to US shores has been the source of environmental disaster and that drilling the areas proposed this time threatens both scenic and environmentally sensitive areas.
• Drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge won’t affect oil prices at all in the short term, and will have very little impact in the long term.

So they know that they’re giving away vast swathes of ocean and land, putting our waters, beaches, and wildlife in danger, and doing it all for no reason other than show.

By november, the only people left supporting the Bush administration will be in Congress and the Senate.

source

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“One of the things I’ve never tried to do is exploit my Vietnam service to my country because it would be totally inappropriate to do,” McCain once said.

And now for a totally inappropriate advertisement:

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In a bid to understand the impact of the wind produced by cows on global warming, scientists collected gas from their stomachs in plastic tanks attached to their backs.

The Argentine researchers discovered methane from cows accounts for more than 30 per cent of the country’s total greenhouse emissions.

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Believe it or not, that headline is not a typo. John Coyne, Systems Engineer in the OEM Embedded Devices group at Microsoft, has posted a quick blog entry that broke the bad news: as of November 1, 2008, Microsoft will no longer allow OEMs to license Windows for Workgroups 3.11 in the embedded channel. That’s exactly 15 years after it shipped in November 1993! Poor OEMs have so much to put up with these days; first Windows XP, and now this!

Windows for Workgroups 3.11 has of course been unavailable in retail and via client OEMs for years, but the embedded industry wanted to keep this ancient operating system around for much, much longer.

Well at least they can’t complain they haven’t had enough time to test their software on Windows 95 Embedded.

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With minutes left in the last shift of his 35-year New Orleans police career, Sgt. Bobby Guidry received a call from a supervisor telling him he had been suspended for wearing the wrong uniform shirt, the veteran officer said.

[..]

He viewed it as a simple statement, not an affront to rules or department leadership.

“Eighteen people died in the line of duty in that powder-blue shirt while I was with the department,” Guidry said. “I went to each of those funerals. I wore that shirt on a Saturday, on my last day, out of respect for them.”

(oh, and on an unrelated note, today a police officer died in the line of duty in the Netherlands. The most recent occurrence of a fatal shooting killing a police officer was in 2004. It’s hard to find a police officer here who went to 18 funerals, let alone 18 in his or her own district. The second amendment comes at a very high cost)

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A group calling itself the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco this week submitted a proposal to rename a sewage treatment plant after the outgoing chief executive in recognition of the political and environmental “mess” they say will be his legacy.

Supporters submitted 12,000 signatures with San Francisco election officials, hoping to place on the ballot an initiative that would rechristen the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant as the George W. Bush Sewage Plant.

“We think this is a fitting tribute to this president,” said Brian McConnell, a member of the group, whose insignia shows the presidential seal with a bald eagle holding two plungers. “It’s fair to say that we’re going to be cleaning up a substantial mess over the next decade or more, thanks to Bush. Environmental degradation. A war in Iraq that cost $1 trillion- plus. It’s going to be a big job.”

Republicans aren’t amused by the gesture.

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In this photo released by the official Xinhua news agency, members of China’s armed police demonstrate a rapid deployment during an anti-terrorist drill held in Jinan, east China, on Wednesday July 2, 2008, roughly one month ahead of the Beijing Olympic Games. (AP Photo/Xinhua/Fan Changguo)

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In a handout picture released on the news website of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, four long and medium range missiles rise into the air after being test-fired at an undisclosed location in the Iranian desert on July 9, 2008. Iran today test-fired a missile it said is capable of reaching Israel, angering the United States amid growing fears that the standoff over the contested Iranian nuclear drive could lead to war.

The problem is, it’s fake:

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This image, part of a framegrab from an Al Alam television broadcast of the launch (apparently taken at approximately the same time from a slightly higher elevation) makes it pretty clear which missile was conjured from borrowed pixels.

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Popular new social networking services like Twitter, where users write extremely short messages about whatever’s on their minds, present a challenge: How can you intelligently get across a complex thought in just 140 characters without needing to use ugly abbreviations (e.g. “w/o needing 2 use ugly abbrev’s”)?

If only there were a service that helps with the struggle of rewriting a 146-letter message to fit in a 140 character limit. Well now there is: Thsrs, the thesaurus that only gives you synonyms shorter than the word you’re looking up. Just enter one of the longer words in your message, and Thsrs will suggest shorter words to use instead.

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a house with tentacular cancer
inflatable sculpture in partnership with Pedro Estrellas

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The Senate gave final approval on Wednesday to a major expansion of the government’s surveillance powers, handing President Bush one more victory in a series of hard-fought clashes with Democrats over national security issues.

The measure, approved by a vote of 69 to 28, is the biggest revamping of federal surveillance law in 30 years. It includes a divisive element that Mr. Bush had deemed essential: legal immunity for the phone companies that cooperated in the National Security Agency wiretapping program he approved after the Sept. 11 attacks.

69 Senators broke their oaths to protect and defend the Constitution, and it wasn’t even politically expedient. The Democrats in particular who voted for it caved out of either cowardice, ignorance, or avarice. None of those options are acceptable.

That includes Obama. Clinton, however, voted not on both cloture and passing.

In better news, Senator Ted Kennedy made his first appearance on the Senate floor today since being diagnosed with brain cancer, receiving a standing ovation from his colleagues. He returned to the Senate to provide the crucial vote on a Medicare bill that Republicans had been blocking. With news of Kennedy’s return, a number of Republicans changed sides, and the measure passed 69-30 (the previous attempt to pass it failed by one vote). If only every Senator was as committed and principled as Senator Kennedy, the USA might still have the 4th amendment.