Ars Technica always does a very extensive review. Here is their work on Windows 7.

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One surprising smackdown occurred on Oct. 9 in federal bankruptcy court in the Southern District of New York. Ruling that a lender, PHH Mortgage, hadn’t proved its claim to a delinquent borrower’s home in White Plains, Judge Robert D. Drain wiped out a $461,263 mortgage debt on the property. That’s right: the mortgage debt disappeared, via a court order.

So the ruling may put a new dynamic in play in the foreclosure mess: If the lender can’t come forward with proof of ownership, and judges don’t look kindly on that, then borrowers may have a stronger hand to play in court and, apparently, may even be able to stay in their homes mortgage-free.

The reason that notes have gone missing is the huge mass of mortgage securitizations that occurred during the housing boom. Securitizations allowed for large pools of bank loans to be bundled and sold to legions of investors, but some of the nuts and bolts of the mortgage game — notes, for example — were never adequately tracked or recorded during the boom. In some cases, that means nobody truly knows who owns what.

To be sure, many legal hurdles mean that the initial outcome of the White Plains case may not be repeated elsewhere. Nevertheless, the ruling — by a federal judge, no less — is bound to bring a smile to anyone who has been subjected to rough treatment by a lender. Methinks a few of those people still exist.

More important, the case is an alert to lenders that dubious proof-of-ownership tactics may no longer be accepted practice. They may even be viewed as a fraud on the court.

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In the meantime, people who encrypt their hard drives, or partitions on their hard drives, have to realize that the encryption gives them less protection than they probably believe. It protects against someone confiscating or stealing their computer and then trying to get at the data. It does not protect against an attacker who has access to your computer over a period of time during which you use it, too.

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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was (originally) a radio series, broadcast on BBC Radio during March and April 1978. It was a success. Since then it has spawned a 5-book trilogy, additional radio broadcasts, a television adaptation, a computer game, a comic book series, a movie, and at least one minor holiday. However, subsequent releases of the original radio series were edited (in part for copyright reasons), and the original broadcasts have been unavailable, until now. A software engineer and H2G2 fan has now tracked down the recordings of the original broadcasts, analyzed the differences between them and the official CD releases, and provided patches and instructions to update the CD release to match the original broadcast. Not only that, but he has written software to automate the process.

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For more than a year, UCSniff has provided everything a hacker needs to plug a laptop into a network and within seconds begin intercepting VoIP transmissions. But until now, the program has allowed eavesdroppers to reassemble the conversations only after they were concluded, a limitation that was far from the elite bugging capabilities shown in Mission Impossible and other spy thrillers.

“As the private call is in progress, we can see and hear what is happening,” said Jason Ostrom, a developer of UCSniff and director of Viper Labs, the research arm of security firm Sipera Systems. “There’s real-time violation of confidentiality.”

[..]

With the proliferation of iPhones and other smartphones, plenty of businesses and individuals have sought to save money on roaming charges by routing calls over the internet instead of over carrier networks. Adam Boone, a vice president at Sipera, said one large, unnamed client logs more than 1 million minutes per month in such VoIP calls.

The problem, he added, is that many of the iPhone apps for VoIP calls don’t provide encryption capabilities, making the conversations ripe for eavesdropping. (Sipera plans to unveil a new product to protect such users next week).

[..]

It turns any laptop into a man-in-the-middle node. A VLAN hopper then traverses the virtual local area network until it accesses the part that carries VoIP calls. UCSniff automatically injects spoofed address resolution protocol packets into the network, allowing all voice and video traffic to be routed to the laptop.

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The EU’s new foreign minister will have sweeping powers to conduct foreign policy, propose his own budget and name his own staff independently of other EU institutions, according to the latest EU presidency blueprint.

The 10-page Swedish report – obtained by EUobserver – was submitted to EU ambassadors on Thursday (22 October) and represents a synthesis of Stockholm’s consultations with the other 26 EU capitals in recent weeks.

The post of EU foreign minister or “high representative” for foreign affairs and a new EU diplomatic corps or “European External Action Service” (EEAS) are to be created following the entry into life of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty.

The Swedish paper envisages a minister in charge of a unique “sui generis” institution with its own section in the EU budget alongside the European Commission, the EU parliament and the Council, the Brussels-based secretariat which prepares regular meetings of EU ministers.

The foreign minister is to propose how much money he needs each year, authorise spending, appoint his own staff and take charge of the European Commission’s existing delegations across the world.

I’m so glad to see how well the European Union is doing with transparency, nepotism, accountability, tight spending policies and corruption.

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An amendment that would prevent the government from working with contractors who denied victims of assault the right to bring their case to court is in danger of being watered down or stripped entirely from a larger defense appropriations bill.

Inouye’s office, sources say, has been lobbied by defense contractors adamant that the language of the Franken amendment would leave them overly exposed to lawsuits and at constant risk of having contracts dry up. The Senate is considering taking out a provision known as the Title VII claim, which (if removed) would allow victims of assault or rape to bring suit against the individual perpetrator but not the contractor who employed him or her.

“The defense contractors have been storming his office,” said a source with knowledge of the situation. “Inouye either will get the amendment taken out altogether, or water it down significantly. If they water it down, they will take out the Title VII claims. This means that in discrimination cases, they will still force you into a secret forced arbitration on KBR’s (or other contractors’) own terms — with your chances of prevailing practically zero. The House seems to be very supportive of the original Franken amendment and all in line, but their hands are tied since it originated in the Senate. And since Inouye runs the show on this bill, he can easily take it out to get Republicans and the defense contractors off his back, which looks increasingly likely.”

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/22/frankens-anti-rape-amendm_n_329896.html

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• JP Morgan’s “cash position” was analyzed by a writer who published on SCRIBD, which showed that actual cash held has deteriorated radically.  By more than half in the last year.  The deterioration is continuing, not slowing.

• I am hearing repeated anecdotes from multiple areas that foreclosed property held by banks with multiple full-price offers that include a financing requirement are being sold instead to people with actual cash at radical reductions from that price.  This implies that these financing contingencies are regarded as not only potentially no good but factually no good, as if the banks know for a fact that the credit pipeline will (not might), within weeks or months (in the time required to close), disappear.  There is no other rational explanation for this behavior.

• Citibank’s credit-card terms change implies a willingness to accept and even provoke a complete and intentional destruction of their credit card business as a very high probability outcome, given that nobody in their right mind will accept a 30% interest rate who has an alternative.  The obvious implication is that only those who can’t transfer balances out will remain and if your credit is that impaired there’s a good chance you will default – either intentionally or otherwise.  This too implies foreknowledge of a near-complete impending freeze in the credit markets.

• The change in terms on credit accounts is NOT confined to Citibank.  I have received a fax from a customer of Infibank with substantially identical terms, in which both the standard and penalty rate was adjusted to 29.99%.  This strongly implies that whatever Citibank smells the problem is not confined to them.

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C.R. England, a nationwide trucking company, needed an administrative assistant for its bustling driver training school here. Responsibilities included data entry, assembling paperwork and making copies.

It was a bona-fide opening at a decent wage, making it the rarest of commodities here in northwest Indiana, where steel industry layoffs have helped drive unemployment to about 10 percent.

When Stacey Ross, C. R. England’s head of corporate recruiting, arrived at her desk at the company’s Salt Lake City headquarters the next Monday, she found about 300 applications in the company’s e-mail inbox. And the fax machine had spit out an inch-and-a-half thick stack of résumés before running out of paper. By the time she pulled the posting off Careerbuilder.com later in the day, she guessed nearly 500 people had applied for the $13-an-hour job. “It was just shocking,” she said. “I had never seen anything so big.”

[..]

Among them was a former I.B.M. business analyst with 18 years experience; a former director of human resources; and someone with a master’s degree and 12 years at Deloitte & Touche, the accounting firm.

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Since whites set at 155 degrees and yolks set at 158, you have a tolerance of three degrees to work with, which translates to about 15 seconds in either direction. Use a timer!

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Lu Guang, a freelance photographer, took disturbing photos of the effects of pollution in China.
Birth defects and other problems affect heavily polluted villages, leading some to be called “cancer villages”. Industrial polluters are often protected by a lack of transparency. Zhang Jingjing, one of the few environmental lawyers in China, has difficulty encouraging pollution victims to exercise their rights. Hu Jingtao has promised to “curb the rise in CO2 emissions”, but whether or not any actual change has been enacted is yet to be seen.

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Unfortunately for Republicans and fortunately for Roger Ailes, a feedback loop has been created: As disaffected conservatives turn increasingly to Fox News, Fox News caters its programming to keep them coming back, turning, for instance, the Tea Parties into a daylong televised festival of rage. But given Fox’s well-earned brand identification with the Republican Party, and vice versa, that programming serves to promote a view of Republicans as angry white people who hate Puerto Rican judges. Which turns off independent voters, which further isolates the diehard rejectionist wing of the party, which increases the importance of Fox News in their lives as a reassuring voice telling them to be strong in the face of the barbarian hordes—or, as Glenn Beck puts it, “We surround them.”

The more viewers Fox attracts, the more voters the GOP repels. And the more voters the GOP repels, the more viewers Fox attracts. The most important part of the dynamic is that Fox News has no interest in doing anything other than attracting viewers. It will continue to ride this wave of anger and resentment irrespective of what impact it has on the Republican Party until it stops making them money. And yes, Barack Obama’s popularity is dropping, and the bloom is beginning to come off the rose. But the GOP hasn’t seen a concomitant rise in popularity: Just yesterday it hit the lowest approval rating it has seen in a quarter century, according to the New York Times.

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You know how in every movie, there’s a moment where the cast basically stops and says, okay, let me break it down for you: He’s actually her brother, and they don’t have a kid …

And you go, wait, wait, I got that! I didn’t need the exposition! I can follow a plot! But then somebody behind you goes “Ooooh!,” like they’ve just figured it out, and then they turn and explain it to their spouse, who still sounds bewildered.

The bewildered spouse represents about 40 percent of America, and a lot of them watch FOX. They’re never going to understand that Fox is not news, that what is being passed off as news is partisan spin, that Glenn Beck uses his status as a commenter, rather than a reporter, to just make shit up, and that the whole function of the station is propagandistic. You can show them documentary after documentary, piece of evidence upon piece of evidence that Fox relentlessly distorts, misstates and misrepresents the news to support a partisan agenda, and they won’t get it. Even if they concede you have a point, they’ll say that it just balances out the liberal media, because, in their world in which the most inane movie plot makes no sense, a conservative lie provides balance to a liberal truth.

The White House is right. But I’m right that most movies would be better if they didn’t drag the pacing to a screeching halt to explaint the story to the idiots. And, if movies did that, they would have an audience about 1/20th their current size.

The best way to make yourself unpopular is to take a moral stance that fools will never understand.

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The inside matters. Ok, a raise of hands, who amongst you pro-programmers has had trouble in the past explaining this to some manager? Ok, ok, just what I thought. Next time explain “vorm en kleur” and draw them this:

Tell them: “This is what we have. This is what we need.” and draw them:

If they don’t understand, just quit, seriously, run while you still can.

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A report released Monday by the Omaha-based public-interest group Aurora indicates that increasing numbers of Americans are being defrauded by schemes that offer financial reward for a lifetime of hard work. “People don’t realize that long-term savings and loyalty to one company don’t pan out,” said Sylvia Girouard, the study’s author. Girouard added that steady employment which claims to offer long-term financial gain in the form of a pension plan is nothing more than an elaborate Ponzi scheme.

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Financial products, and they are products, just like toasters, are sold today with the most dangerous features embedded in them because that’s what drives profitability. What’s astonishing is that we let this happen. You can’t buy a toaster in America that has a one in five chance of exploding. But you can buy a mortgage that has a one in five chance of exploding, and they don’t even have to tell you about it… We have consumer protection for everything you touch, taste, smell, feel… But there is no equivalent for credit cards, for mortgages; there’s nothing.

The instructions said remove cap and push up bottom. I can barely walk, but whenever I fart the room smells awesome.

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I get the impression that the Windows 7 launch is a lot like seeing an old girlfriend suddenly show up on your doorstep wanting to get back together. She’s had some work done, apparently: stomach stapling to take off some of the weight, breast augmentation, and a radical nosejob to make her look as much like your current girlfriend as medical science will allow.

She’s pretty, of course, almost too pretty. She still wears far too much makeup and carries that desperate look in her eyes. The fragrant haze around her is the perfume she overuses to mask the scent of failure.

But standing there in that low-cut top, you’d almost forget for a moment what a psycho she was- how she used to shut down in the middle of a date and forget everything you were talking about and how she was only happy when you were buying her things. You’d almost forget about carrying around her legacy baggage or those nights when, for seemingly no reason at all, she would simply stop speaking to you and when you asked what was wrong she’d just spit a string of hex code at you and expect you to figure it out.

You complained about her for years before finally deciding to get rid of her, and here she is again. Though, somehow she seems like a completely different person now.

“I’m up here,” she says when she catches you staring at her chest.

Tempted though you may be, you know that over time she’ll get bored and slow down on you just like she always does. And then you’ll be right back where you started: trapped. She keeps you by convincing you that you don’t have a choice. You’re just not smart enough for one option or rich enough to afford the other.

“But I’m different now,” she says, batting her eyes innocently. “I’ve changed.”

Indeed she has. Apparently, she’s really into Cabala now or something like that. It’s helped her discover loads of untapped potential in herself. But it also means that you’ll have to buy all new furniture to fit with her understanding of feng shui. That’s not the only change she has in store for you. The minute you let her move in, she’ll have a new alarm system put in that succeeds only in preventing your friends from coming over on poker night.

She doesn’t love you, but she doesn’t hate you, either. The truth is that she couldn’t care less one way or the other. She’s here because she doesn’t want to be alone. Like all human beings, especially those well past their prime, she wants to feel wanted and, after a string of lost jobs and bad investments, she needs a place to stay.

But all in all, she’s OK. She’s a seven. She’ll do, I guess.

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The European Parliament appears to have surrendered to pressure from Member States by abandoning amendment 138, a provision adopted on two occasions by an 88% majority of the plenary assembly, and which aimed to protect citizens’ right to Internet access. The move paves the way for an EU wide policy supporting arbitrary restrictions of Internet access, such as customers being cut-off from the Internet by their ISP.

Under the original amendment 138 text any restriction of an individual could only be taken following a prior judicial ruling. The new update has completely removed this, meaning that governments and Rights Holders could now have grounds to force UK ISPs into disconnecting their customers from the Internet (i.e. such as when “suspected” of illegal downloading).

Imagine if you weren’t allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times…

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This is how the Borg does marketing. A seven-burger Whopper promo at Burger King in Japan. Much love to the many readers who have alerted us to this. But is this for real? Even the Borg couldn’t be that bad at marketing, could they?

On the other hand, it’s kinda sorta poetically perfect isn’t it? I mean as a visual image of what Windows is — a big giant pile of grease and fat, served up cheap.

.. but the iPhone must really be getting on his nerves.

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“Let’s face it, the Internet was designed for the PC. The Internet is not designed for the iPhone,” Ballmer said. “That’s why they’ve got 75,000 applications — they’re all trying to make the Internet look decent on the iPhone.”

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Nokia announced that it has today filed a complaint against Apple with the Federal District Court in Delaware, alleging that Apple’s iPhone infringes Nokia patents for GSM, UMTS and wireless LAN (WLAN) standards.

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A Dallas police officer who fatally struck a child last October received a one-day suspension during a disciplinary hearing this afternoon.

Senior Cpl. Michael Vaughn appeared before Assistant Chief Floyd Simpson, who oversees the city’s seven patrol stations.

The punishment was for “for violating the emergency vehicle operations policy when he drove over the speed limit without activating the lights and sirens,” police officials said.

[UK:]

A traffic policeman who killed a schoolgirl after reaching speeds of 94mph in a 30mph zone was jailed for three years yesterday.

PC John Dougal was not using the blue lights and siren on his patrol car when he hit Hayley Adamson, 16, as she crossed a road at night last May.

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Study author Alistair McIlgorm of the National Marine Science Center in Coffs Harbor said 6.4 million tons of debris reaches the world’s oceans each year.

Of that, 80 percent is thought to come from land based sources, he said.

More than half of the rubbish is believed to be plastic, but McIlgrom said rubber, wood and sanitary products also add to the problem.

“Poor landfill practices are big contributors to marine debris, especially in Asia,” said McIlgrom.