[Quote]:

Owners of Apple’s new 11-inch MacBook Air will not have to remove the thin-and-light notebook from their bag at security checkpoints in U.S. airports, the Transportation Security Administration has announced.

MacBook Air: fine, no problem.

Nike Air: Take them off!!!!

[Quote]:

Halliburton knew weeks before the fatal explosion of the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico that the cement mixture they planned to use to seal the bottom of the well was unstable but still went ahead with the job, the presidential commission investigating the accident said on Thursday.

[..]

Jesse Gagliano, a Halliburton technical adviser, told federal investigators in Houston in August that the company was confident in the cement job. He said Halliburton initially recommended that BP use a well design with more devices called “centralizers.” But even after BP chose to use six centralizers instead of the recommended 21, Halliburton believed the cement would work properly, Mr. Gagliano said.

Imagine if these guys were cancer doctors. Gee Mr. Jones – you look great. No need to look for tumors!

[Quote]:

My opinion about iPad-based magazines is that they run counter to how people use tablets today and, unless something changes, will remain at odds with the way people will use tablets as the medium matures. They’re bloated, user-unfriendly and map to a tired pattern of mass media brands trying vainly to establish beachheads on new platforms without really understanding the platforms at all.

The fact of the matter is that the mode of reading that a magazine represents is a mode that people are decreasingly interested in, that is making less and less sense as we forge further into this century, and that makes almost no sense on a tablet. As usual, these publishers require users to dive into environments that only negligibly acknowledge the world outside of their brand, if at all — a problem that’s abetted and exacerbated by the full-screen, single-window posture of all iPad software. In a media world that looks increasingly like the busy downtown heart of a city — with innumerable activities, events and alternative sources of distraction around you — these apps demand that you confine yourself to a remote, suburban cul-de-sac.

[Quote]:

Some of the country’s largest emitters of heat-trapping gases, including businesses that publicly support efforts to curb global warming, don’t want the public knowing exactly how much they pollute.

Oil producers and refiners, along with manufacturers of steel, aluminum and even home appliances, are fighting a proposal by the Environmental Protection Agency that would make the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that companies release — and the underlying data businesses use to calculate the amounts — available online.

While gross estimates exist for such emissions from transportation and electricity production and manufacturing as a whole, the EPA is requiring companies for the first time to submit information for each individual facility.

The companies say that disclosing details beyond a facility’s total emissions to the public would reveal company secrets by letting competitors know what happens inside their factories. More importantly, they argue, when it comes to understanding global warming, the public doesn’t need to know anything more than what goes into the air.

[Quote]:

Adobe has confirmed reports that yet another unpatched vulnerability in the latest versions of its ubiquitous software is being actively exploited to infect end users with data-stealing malware.

The vulnerability exists in Adobe’s Reader document viewer and Flash Media Player for Windows, OS X and Unix operating systems, Adobe warned on Thursday. According to independent researchers, it is being exploited in the wild against Reader for Windows to install a nasty trojan known as Wisp, which according to Microsoft, steals sensitive user data and installs a backdoor on compromised systems.

The vulnerability itself resides in Adobe’s Flash Player, which is available as stand alone software and is also embedded into Reader. According to researcher Mila Parkour of the Contagio Malware Dump blog, poisoned PDF documents are circulating that drop two malicious binaries onto Windows machines that open the document files.

[Quote]:

When it comes to wasting police time, the biggest offenders appear to be…the police. That, at least, appears to be the conclusion of the Home Office. Its official statistics, published today, show that while police stopped over 100,000 individuals last year to “prevent acts of terrorism”, there was not a single arrest for a terror offence as a result of these stops.

This perhaps is the final nail in the coffin for the widely criticised section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, which gives police forces powers to stop and search individuals – in so-called “designated areas” – to prevent acts of terrorism without the need for reasonable grounds of suspicion. According to today’s report: “In 2009/10, 101,248 stops-and-searches were made under this power.

The report continues: “[This] represents a 60 per cent decrease since 2008/9. Compared with the same quarter of 2008/9, the number of searches carried out in Jan-March 2010 fell by 77 per cent, down to 14,214.”

One reason for the decline may be the fact that in July of this year – following a European Court ruling that finally established that the power granted under s44 was too wide and therefore unlawful – the Home Secretary herself required police forces to stop using it.

[Quote]:

It is all over the news, the Dutch National High Tech Crime Unit took down the Bredolab botnet. Kudos for that, bringing down a botnet with 30 million bots is not an easy task. The C&C servers were taken down and taken over. To notify owners of infected machines a small executable will be send to infected machines that will show a popup that your computer is infected. You can view the page here…

Now, this gesture is nice, but it brings in a few problems…

First, the executable is very small, 8kb only, not encrypted, not compressed, beyond all, not signed. All it will do is actually open this page.

What will prevent people from modifying the URL to point to some malicious webpage and distribute the executable? A researcher at FireEye still found a C&C server active on the Bredolab Botnet. What if this server starts to serve this modified executable to systems that are still infected? You can imagine what would happen…

Second, in the future, the same technique may be used by rogue anti-virus to tell you that your system is infected and tells you to download this super-duper solution (which of course will only continue to make the problem worse).

A third problem here is a legal one… It may not be legal at all in all countries in the world to “plant” this executable that shows the warning on infected systems. Basically you are knowingly trespassing that system…

It’s like the police breaking in and entering to tell you a burglar has been in your house and that you should replace your crappy lock. Very questionable.

[Quote]:

In seven years, New Orleans’ crime camera program has yielded six indictments: three for crimes caught on video and three for bribes and kickbacks a vendor is accused of paying a former city official to sell the cameras to City Hall.

Given that ignominious track record and the millions the city has paid for a camera network that rarely worked, Mayor Mitch Landrieu unceremoniously pulled the plug on the project Thursday.

[Quote]:

Conceding almost certain Republican gains in next month’s crucial midterm elections, Democratic lawmakers vowed Tuesday not to give up without making one final push to ensure their party runs away from every major legislative victory of the past two years.

Party leaders told reporters that regardless of the ultimate outcome, they would do everything in their power from now until the polls closed to distance themselves from their hard-won passage of a historic health care overhaul, the toughest financial regulations since the 1930s, and a stimulus package most economists now credit with preventing a second Great Depression.

"There’s a great deal on the line, and we know it isn’t going to be easy for us," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), speaking from the steps of the Capitol. "But if we suffer defeat, we will do so knowing we cowered away from absolutely anything we produced that was even remotely progressive or valuable in any way."

"And we will keep cowering right up until Election Day," Reid continued. "From Maine to Hawaii, in big cities and small towns, we will collapse into a fetal position and refuse to take credit for our successes anywhere voters could conceivably be swayed by learning what we have achieved on their behalf."

[Quote]:

Christine O’Donnell, the surprise Tea Party-backed Senate candidate in Delaware, threatened to sue a local radio station if it did not turn over a videotape of an interview it conducted with her.

O’Donnell’s campaign later apologized to the station for the threat, WDEL reports.

O’Donnell appeared on WDEL’s "The Rick Jensen Show" Tuesday, during which she fielded several questions from listeners and the host. Upon the conclusion of the interview, an O’Donnell aide demanded video of the interview be turned over to the campaign and destroyed because such videotaping had not been previously approved.

It was then, according to WDEL, that O’Donnell herself threatened to sue the station if it did not comply with the request. WDEL also says it later fielded a phone call from O’Donnell campaign manager Matt Moran, who threatened to "crush" the station with a lawsuit if it did not agree to turn over the tape.

WDEL’s attorney was soon involved and told the campaign there was nothing illegal about videotaping the interview for later use on the station’s website and added that such action is protected by the First Amendment.

Upon further investigation, WDEL says O’Donnell’s attorney called the station to apologize for the uproar and threat of litigation.

[Quote]:

Tim Profitt — the former Rand Paul volunteer who stomped on the head of a MoveOn activist — told told local CBS station WKYT that he wants an apology from the woman he stomped and that she started the whole thing.

"I don’t think it’s that big of a deal," Profitt said. "I would like for her to apologize to me to be honest with you."

[Quote]:

The entire police force of a small northern Mexican town quit after gunmen attacked their recently inaugurated headquarters, according to local reports on Wednesday.

Los Ramones Mayor Santos Salinas said nobody was injured in Monday night’s attack, during which gunmen fired more than 1,000 bullets at the building’s facade, according to Noroeste newspaper’s website. Six grenades, of which three detonated, were also flung at the building, the newspaper reported.

[Quote]:

Cheryl Eckard, the former global quality assurance manager of GlaxoSmithKline, will receive $96m of a settlement to be paid by the pharmaceutical company to settle allegations that it knowingly manufactured and sold adulterated drugs, federal prosecutors in Massachusetts say.

Carmen Ortiz, the US lawyer involved in the case, announced on Tuesday that the London-based company will pay $150m in criminal fines and $600m in civil penalties related to faulty manufacturing processes at its plant in Cidra, Puerto Rico.

As a whistle-blower under the federal False Claims Act, Eckard will receive $96m of the settlement paid by the company.

Getnick & Getnick, the New York-based law firm that represented Eckard, believes her award is the biggest US whistleblower award in history.

"This is not something I ever wanted to do, but because of patient safety issues, it was necessary,” Eckard said following news of the settlement.

[Quote]:

An Australian high school has installed “secure” fingerprint scanners for roll call for senior students, which savvy kids may be able to circumvent with sweets from their lunch box. The system replaces the school’s traditional sign-in system with biometric readers that require senior students to have their fingerprints read to verify attendance.
The school principal says the system is better than swipe cards because it stops truant kids getting their mates to sign-in for them. But using the Gummi Bear attack, students can make replicas of their own fingerprints from gelatine, the ingredient in Gummi Bears, to forge a replica finger. The attack worked against a bunch of scanners that detect electrical charges within the human body, since gelatine has virtually the same capacitance as a finger’s skin

[Quote]:

See our members posing as RepubliCorp—a fictitious merger between giant corporations and the Republican Party—to highlight that right-wing groups funded by Big Oil and Wall Street are spending $400 million to take over Congress for the Republicans.

[Quote]:

Two-year-old Gavin Tillman of Pass Christian, Mississippi, has been diagnosed with severe upper respiratory, sinus, and viral infections. His temperature has reached more than 39 degrees since September 15, yet his sicknesses continue to worsen.

His parents, some doctors, and environmental consultants believe the child’s ailments are linked to exposure to chemicals spilt by BP during its Gulf of Mexico oil disaster.

Gavin’s father, mother, and cousin, Shayleigh, are also facing serious health problems. Their symptoms are being experienced by many others living along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

[Quote]:

Indonesia was rocked by two separate disasters earlier this week – a 7.7-magnitude earthquake triggered a tsunami on Monday that swept onto the Mentawai Island chain in western Indonesia, and less than 24 hours later and a few hundred miles away, Mount Merapi erupted multiple times, unleashing searing pyroclastic flows that destroyed villages and blanketed the countryside in ash. Rescue personnel are only now reaching some of the more remote areas, but as of this writing, it is estimated that nearly 300 people were killed by the tsunami, and at least 30 died near Mount Merapi. Collected here are early photos from the dual disasters, and the rescue and recovery efforts just underway. (37 photos total)

27
Indonesian search and rescue teams explore the area after Mount Merapi volcano erupted the night before in the village of Pakem in Sleman, Yogyakarta province on October 27, 2010. (CLARA PRIMA/AFP/Getty Images) #

(I contemplated posting picture 35, but there’s a good reason it’s behind a warning link on the site, so I picked the above picture instead)

[Quote]:

An equipment failure disrupted communication between 50 nuclear missiles and the launch control center at Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming over the weekend, although the Air Force never lost the ability to launch the missiles.

Air Force spokesman Lt. Col. Todd Vician said the break occurred early Saturday and lasted less than one hour. The White House was briefed about the failure Tuesday morning.

There was no evidence of foul play, officials said Tuesday.

Windows is dying

[Quote]:

The chairman of British Airways has launched an attack on "completely redundant" airport checks and said the UK should stop "kowtowing" to US demands for increased security.

The comments by Martin Broughton reflect broader industry and passenger frustration over the steady accumulation of rules on everything from onboard liquids to hand baggage that have blossomed since the September 11 terrorist attacks.

In remarks at the annual conference of the UK Airport Operators Association in London, he said that the practice of forcing people to take off their shoes and have their laptops checked separately in security lines should be ditched.

Mr Broughton said there was no need to "kowtow to the Americans every time they wanted something done" to beef up security on US-bound flights, especially when this involved checks the US did not impose on its own domestic routes.

"America does not do internally a lot of the things they demand that we do," he said. "We shouldn’t stand for that. We should say, ‘we’ll only do things which we consider to be essential and that you Americans also consider essential’."

[Quote]:

Tim Profitt, the Rand Paul campaign’s Bourbon County coordinator, admitted today to stomping on the head of activist Lauren Valle outside Monday’s debate between Paul and Jack Conway. The Lexington Police have issued a criminal summons for the head-stomper.

And he was found by the Tea-Party blog-o-sphere.

[Quote]:

Maybe some more tea partiers will be moved to tell the Lexington police what they saw that night. I’m heartened to realize that it’s entirely possible, to see that there are people on the other side of the ideological spectrum who are as sickened and horrified by this incident as are we on the left. A small measure of my faith in my fellow Americans has been restored with this knowledge. May we all strive to keep in mind that we are all, indeed, countrymen.

[Quote]:

As your Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, I’m grateful to have this opportunity to reach out to the people of Wisconsin and draw some distinctions between myself—a D.C. outsider—and Russ Feingold. The incumbent is a classic tax-and-spend liberal who, if elected, will increase the deficit even further. But most importantly, Russ Feingold is a career politician who knows exactly where to find our nation’s capital on a map.

Me? I don’t have the slightest idea. If somebody asked me right now where Washington, D.C. is, I would say north, but that’s really just a shot in the dark. I am literally clueless.

I’m finishing up my time machine. I’m bolting down the flux capacitor right now. I’ll start small, go back just 5 minutes… I’ll let you know how things work out..

It worked!

inter // states from Samuel Cockedey on Vimeo.

Because you should!

[Quote]:

The reason isn’t that complicated: Apple no longer needs Java. If you make a list of what Steve Jobs sees as the critical objectives for Apple, it becomes immediately obvious that maintaining a Mac port of Java is not helping to advance any of them. Of course, neither does maintaining, say, Apple’s port of Python. But Python takes very little effort to port and maintain. The Java port requires a team of engineers permanently dedicated to it. Also, the huge success of iOS has given Apple the confidence that their approach to working with third-party developers is working out great for everyone. The prospect of Java developers and applications abandoning the Mac is no longer remotely scary for them. Apple have decided they’d rather pay the costs of dropping Java than keep maintaining it.

[..]

So Apple sees the iPad as the future. But while it might be a “pure” experience, there’s obviously a large number of important things that the iPad simply cannot do1. So Macs aren’t going anywhere, but Jobs wants to make them more iPad-like. In the Mac event, Jobs called out what this meant: curated App Store, full screen apps, app “Launchpad”, autosave/resume. What is equally interesting is what this implies they are leaving behind. During Craig Federighi’s demo of Lion on the 20th, he showed the use of swipe to switch between a) full screen apps b) dashboard c) “the desktop”. Perhaps I’m reading too much into this, but what today constitutes “the Mac Desktop experience” seems, in Lion, to be just another full-screen app you can switch to. A Rosetta-like box to run “the legacy stuff”. I think Lion could be Apple’s first step in really redesigning the Mac from first principles.

[..]

Will Oracle Provide Java on Mac?

I’m not sure, but I think yes

And I think no. The only reason Oracle cares about Java is that it is a great “Enterprise” tool to connect to their database. They don’t give a rats ass about client software.

[Quote]:

Newly released documents show the Diocese of San Diego long knew about abusive priests, some of whom were shuffled from parish to parish despite credible complaints against them.

Attorneys for 144 people claiming sex abuse made the papers public Sunday, after a retired San Diego Superior Court judge ruled last week that the previously sealed documents could be released.

The nearly 10,000 pages of records were from the personnel files of 48 priests who were either credibly accused or convicted of sexual abuse, or were named in a civil lawsuit.

The documents detailed one decades-old case in which a priest under police investigation was allowed to leave the U.S. after the diocese intervened.