[Quote]:

For developers, the weakness in Microsoft’s DRM for Windows Phone 7 applications has been well known for quite some time, and there have been calls for Microsoft to address these concerns.

Since then, a "white hat" developer has provided WPCentral with a proof-of-concept program that can successfully pull any application from the Marketplace, remove the security and deploy to an unlocked Windows Phone with literally a push of a button. Alternatively, you could just save the cracked XAP file to your hard drive. Neither the app nor the methodology is public, and it will NOT be released (please don’t ask).

That’s kind of selfish, why should the only other owner of a Windows Phone 7 have to pay for their apps?

[Quote]:

For millions of Americans the economic recovery can’t get here soon enough. In 2010 a record 40.3 million Americans received food stamps. That’s a 20 percent jump from 2009.

[..]

This Oklahoma family of five saw no choice but to apply for food stamps. Their $500 benefit lasts two to three weeks but hardly four.

Just before midnight on the last day of every month, Sheri and her husband make a trip to the grocery store to beat the midnight rush.

“We get excited,” says Sheri. “Like, ‘Oh, we’re going to go shopping tonight!’”

On the first of the month food stamp debit cards are automatically refilled with benefit money from the government. On an average night between midnight and 3 a.m., a store could bring in about $3000. On the first of the month that number is 10 times as much with almost everyone using food stamps.

[Quote]:

Hard times can be good times — for the aggressively avaricious. Where others see pain, they see opportunity. In desperation, they delight. The grimmer the economic outlook, the more ghastly their grabbing.

And who grabbed the most outrageously in 2010? We offer below our annual take on America’s ten greediest of the year.

[Quote]:

“Microfinance was supposed to empower women,” he says. “Microfinance guys reversed the social and economic progress, and these women ended up becoming slaves.”

[Quote]:

The Queen is "delighted" with the birth of her first great-grandchild, Buckingham Palace has said.

The baby girl, the first child for the Queen’s eldest grandson Peter Phillips and his wife, Autumn, weighed 8lbs 8oz.

The newborn, who is 12th in line to the throne, was born in Gloucestershire Royal Hospital on Wednesday. Her name has not yet been confirmed.

First great grandchild, right? All the earlier ones were assholes, apparently…

[Quote]:

All through the dark years of the Bush Administration, progressives watched in horror as Constitutional protections vanished, nativist rhetoric ratcheted up, hate speech turned into intimidation and violence, and the president of the United States seized for himself powers only demanded by history’s worst dictators. With each new outrage, the small handful of us who’d made ourselves experts on right-wing culture and politics would hear once again from worried readers: Is this it? Have we finally become a fascist state? Are we there yet?

And every time this question got asked, people like Chip Berlet and Dave Neiwert and Fred Clarkson and yours truly would look up from our maps like a parent on a long drive, and smile a wan smile of reassurance. "Wellll…we’re on a bad road, and if we don’t change course, we could end up there soon enough. But there’s also still plenty of time and opportunity to turn back. Watch, but don’t worry. As bad as this looks: no — we are not there yet."

In tracking the mileage on this trip to perdition, many of us relied on the work of historian Robert Paxton, who is probably the world’s pre-eminent scholar on the subject of how countries turn fascist. In a 1998 paper published in The Journal of Modern History, Paxton argued that the best way to recognize emerging fascist movements isn’t by their rhetoric, their politics, or their aesthetics. Rather, he said, mature democracies turn fascist by a recognizable process, a set of five stages that may be the most important family resemblance that links all the whole motley collection of 20th Century fascisms together. According to our reading of Paxton’s stages, we weren’t there yet. There were certain signs — one in particular — we were keeping an eye out for, and we just weren’t seeing it.

And now we are.

[Quote]:

Amazon.com has been awarded a patent for an online system that would give users the ability to exchange unwanted gifts before receiving them.

The technology could prevent the shipment of thousands of superfluous ties to fathers, ugly sweaters to grandchildren and various other lackluster presents that are currently being bought and shipped through the online retail giant.

Officials at Amazon were unavailable Wednesday to comment on how far along in development the gift exchange system is, or if and when its users could expect the technology to be available for use.

Amazon extends its tradition of unselling you books by additionally making sure things never arrive in the first place. Amazon, retailer and anti-retailer; the Amazon giveth and the Amazon taketh away.

[Quote]:

A mother decided to pray over her sick son instead of bringing him to the doctor and now she faces criminal charges, police said.

The mother, Susan Grady, is a member of The Church of the First Born, a religious group that often practiced faith-based healing methods rather than relying on medicine.

The group’s website said, “If any be sick, call for the elders of the Church. Let them pray over him.”

[..]

Officers said they are now trying to find Susan Grady’s whereabouts to serve her arrest warrant. Reports said she has already left Broken Arrow.

Why didn’t she just pray that she would not be arrested?

[Quote]:

As fellow author, Will Belegon, noted, if Amazon is going to start pulling books with incest in them: "I just re-read Genesis 19: 30-38 and realized that Lot’s daughters got him drunk, had sex with him and bore sons. I demand you follow your clear precedent and remove The Bible from Kindle."

Or perhaps Amazon should create a new television ad after they follow their clear precedent and ban the book the woman is reading in the advertisement on her Kindle ("Sleepwalking" by Amy Bloom) which tells the story of a 19-year-old boy who has a sexual encounter with his stepmother, which, in some states, is legally incest.

You could argue that Amazon is free to sell – or not sell – whatever books they want, and you’d have a point.

The problem I have with this story is that the remove the books from Kindle archives as well.

So any book you buy on the Kindle may be taken away again by Amazon later.

I guess I won’t be buying any Kindle books any time soon.

[Quote]:

The French government has come up with a wizard wheeze which seems to be entirely designed to back the software giant Microsoft.

In a Franco-American alliance, the likes of which has not been seen since the French backed a campaign by anti-democratic terrorists against its lawful government, the French are going to tax every tablet which does not come out with Windows software on-board.

[Quote]:

“It appears that Sony’s PS3 has been fatally compromised. At the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, a team named ‘fail0verflow’ revealed that they had calculated the Private Keys, which would let them or anyone else, generate signed software for the PS3. Additionally, they also claim to have a method of jailbreaking the PS3 without the use of a Dongle, which is the current method. If all these statements are true, this opens the door to custom firmware, and homebrew software. Assuming that Sony doesn’t take radical action and invalidate their private keys, this could mean that Jailbreaking is viable on all PS3, regardless of their firmware! From the article: ‘Approximately a half hour in, the team revealed their new PS3 secrets, the moment we all were waiting for. One of the major highlights here was, dongle-less jailbreaking by overflowing the bootup NOR flash, giving complete control over the system. The other major feat, was calculating the public private keys (due to botched security), giving users the ability to sign their own SELFs Following this, the team declared Sony’s security to be EPIC FAIL!’”

Note that, would Sony revoke their private keys, every single game you have would stop working. Also, since the PS3 has now no way to talk to the update servers without knowing for sure it’s Sony, there’s really no way to get new keys on the device securely. From the comments:

[Quote]:

The “epic” part really came about due to the completely inexcusable ECDSA signature screwup. We were left speechless by that one. However, as a whole, the entire PS3 architecture is terrible. Especially after breaking it open and properly analyzing it and finding a ton of screwups (many critical), there is absolutely no doubt in our mind that the sole reason why the PS3 lasted this far is because OtherOS kept all the competent people happy enough not to try to break into the system (that, and maybe hype around their hypervisor and isolated SPE security, both of which turned out to be terribly bad). If you watch the talk you’ll actually see that we make this point clear and address the time-to-hack of the PS3. Given our experience and what we’ve learned from people who work on console hacks, almost nobody tried until OtherOS was removed, so the only valid measurement for “time to hack”, as a strength-of-security measure, is the time since OtherOS was removed (9-12 months or so).

OtherOS was Sony’s single best security feature.

Good security is hard. Very hard.

[Quote]:

A Belgian priest has confessed to a child sex-abuse accusation that came to light during a campaign to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work fighting globalization’s impact on developing countries.

The confession was published in a Belgian newspaper Wednesday and confirmed by the organization the priest founded, deepening a sex-abuse scandal that has rocked the Catholic Church in the country. After a spate of accusations this year, the church in September published the harrowing accounts of more than 100 victims of clerical sex abuse, some as young as 2 when they were assaulted.

In October, after supporters of 85-year-old Francois Houtart began working to nominate him for the Nobel, a woman contacted the nonprofit organization he founded and said the priest had abused her brother 40 years ago, according to its director, Bernard Duterme.

[Quote]:

A year after a Nigerian man allegedly tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner, officials say they have made it easier to add individuals’ names to a terrorist watch list and improved the government’s ability to thwart an attack in the United States.

[..]

Since then, senior counterterrorism officials say they have altered their criteria so that a single-source tip, as long as it is deemed credible, can lead to a name being placed on the watch list.

So, if there’s somebody you don’t like, you know what to do…

[Quote]:

Federal prosecutors are refusing to reveal customers from Oakland County and the 248 area code who hired hookers from a high-priced escort service but are willing to out clients from Detroit, according to federal court records.

The legal tactic was unveiled in records filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Detroit involving the Miami Companions escort service.

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The U.S. Attorney’s Office and FBI busted the international escort service in July, indicted the owners and three employees on prostitution or money-laundering charges and seized a black book bulging with tens of thousands of customer names, job details and contact information.

Paul DeCailly, the attorney for Miami Companions co-owner Greg Carr, flew to Detroit last week to review the black book. He wanted to see the names of clients from Michigan and Ohio, but the U.S. Attorney’s Office said he could see only the names from the 313 and 734 area codes, he said.

"There must be something there they don’t want anybody to see," DeCailly said Tuesday. "In the 248 area code, a lot of influential people live there: musicians, Detroit’s sports elite, politicians. … It’s the center of a lot of activity in the business community."

[Quote]:

There is no redemption in the land of Google. Hardly anyone ever gets back on the scheme.

It seems likely that at no time was human involved in my relationship with Google. Just a computer algorithm.

It was quite literally therefore an inhuman act to sack me two weeks before Christmas and seize £3,700 back.

Is God A Conservative? from Phil Heimlich on Vimeo.

[Quote]:

A Michigan man has been charged under anti-hacking legislation designed to protect trade secrets after logging on to his wife’s emailaccount and discovering she was having an affair.

Leon Walker, 33, faces a trial lawyers say could have significant repercussions given that nearly half of US divorce cases involve some form of snooping, such as reading emails, text messages or social networking.

Greenwald wrote an article about these interviews;

[Quote]:

Over the last month, I’ve done many television and radio segments about WikiLeaks and what always strikes me is how indistinguishable — identical — are the political figures and the journalists.  There’s just no difference in how they think, what their values and priorities are, how completely they’ve ingested and how eagerly they recite the same anti-WikiLeaks, “Assange = Saddam” script.  So absolute is the WikiLeaks-is-Evil bipartisan orthodoxy among the Beltway political and media class (forever cemented by the joint Biden/McConnell decree that Assange is a “high-tech Terrorist,”) that you’re viewed as being from another planet if you don’t spout it.  It’s the equivalent of questioning Saddam’s WMD stockpile in early 2003.

[Quote]:

As business models go, there are currently two dominant ones: either people like your product enough to purchase it or they don’t care enough to buy it but will overlook its deficiencies if it’s “free” in exchange for their personal browsing and purchasing info sold to advertisers. The former model is Apple’s, the latter is Google’s.

Apple sells emotional experiences. The price is what users pay to be delighted by Apple’s stream of innovations and to be free of the lowest common denominator burdens and the pervasive harvesting of their personal info.

Google sells eyeballs. To be more precise, the clickstream attached to those eyeballs. Thus scale, indeed dominance, is absolutely crucial to Google’s model.

[Quote]:

A New Orleans law firm is challenging government assurances that Gulf Coast seafood is safe to eat in the wake of the BP oil spill, saying it poses “a significant danger to public health.”

It’s a high-stakes tug-of-war that will almost certainly end up in the courts, with two armies of scientists arguing over technical findings that could have real-world impact for seafood consumers and producers.

Citing what the law firm calls a state-of-the-art laboratory analysis, toxicologists, chemists and marine biologists retained by the firm of environmental attorney Stuart Smith contend that the government seafood testing program, which has focused on ensuring the seafood was free of the cancer-causing components of crude oil, has overlooked other harmful elements. And they say that their own testing — examining fewer samples but more comprehensively — shows high levels of hydrocarbons from the BP spill that are associated with liver damage.

[Quote]:

These days, Casal Ventoso is an ordinary blue-collar community – mothers push baby strollers, men smoke outside cafes, buses chug up and down the cobbled main street.

Ten years ago, the Lisbon neighborhood was a hellhole, a "drug supermarket" where some 5,000 users lined up every day to buy heroin and sneaked into a hillside honeycomb of derelict housing to shoot up. In dark, stinking corners, addicts – some with maggots squirming under track marks – staggered between the occasional corpse, scavenging used, bloody needles.

—

Now, the United States, which has waged a 40-year, $1 trillion war on drugs, is looking for answers in tiny Portugal, which is reaping the benefits of what once looked like a dangerous gamble. White House drug czar Gil Kerlikowske visited Portugal in September to learn about its drug reforms, and other countries – including Norway, Denmark, Australia and Peru – have taken interest, too.

“The disasters that were predicted by critics didn’t happen,” said University of Kent professor Alex Stevens, who has studied Portugal’s program. “The answer was simple: Provide treatment.”

—

Drugs in Portugal are still illegal. But here’s what Portugal did: It changed the law so that users are sent to counseling and sometimes treatment instead of criminal courts and prison. The switch from drugs as a criminal issue to a public health one was aimed at preventing users from going underground.

Other European countries treat drugs as a public health problem, too, but Portugal stands out as the only one that has written that approach into law. The result: More people tried drugs, but fewer ended up addicted.

[Quote]:

The corporate state does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader. It is defined by the anonymity and facelessness of the corporation. Corporations, who hire attractive spokespeople like Barack Obama, control the uses of science, technology, education and mass communication. They control the messages in movies and television. And, as in “Brave New World,” they use these tools of communication to bolster tyranny. Our systems of mass communication, as Wolin writes, “block out, eliminate whatever might introduce qualification, ambiguity, or dialogue, anything that might weaken or complicate the holistic force of their creation, to its total impression.”

[Quote]:

A prototype solar device has been unveiled which mimics plant life, turning the Sun’s energy into fuel.

The machine uses the Sun’s rays and a metal oxide called ceria to break down carbon dioxide or water into fuels which can be stored and transported.

Conventional photovoltaic panels must use the electricity they generate in situ, and cannot deliver power at night.

Details are published in the journal Science.

[Quote]:

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US Drug Enforcement Administration has grown into a global intelligence organization whose reach extends far beyond international drug trafficking, The New York Times reported.

Citing documents from the whistleblower website WikiLeaks, the newspaper said the DEA’s operations had become so expansive the agency has had to fend off foreign politicians who want to use it against their political enemies.

One August 2009 cable reported Panamanian President RicardoMartinelli as having sent an urgent BlackBerry message to the US ambassador asking the DEA go after his political enemies.

“I need help with tapping phones,” the paper quoted the president as saying.

[Quote]:

“Representatives of the UK banking industry have sent a take-down notice (PDF link) to Cambridge University, demanding that they censor a student’s webpage as well as his masters thesis (PDF) . The banks’ objection is that the information contained in the report might be used to exploit a vulnerability in the Chip and PIN system, used throughout Europe and Canada for credit and debit card payments. The system was revealed to be fundamentally flawed earlier this year, as it allowed criminals to use a stolen card with any PIN. Cambridge University has resisted the demands and has sent a response to the bankers explaining why they will keep the page online.”

"President Obama signed into law the repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’ What does it say about us that we think gay men can handle armed combat, but can’t handle marriage?"

—Jay Leno