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Consumers should be warned about intrusive and misleading new advertising techniques such as internet ads tailored to fit individuals, says a resolution approved by the European Parliament on December 15 2010.

The resolution also calls for better protection of vulnerable consumers and emphasises the role of advertising in challenging stereotypes, a European Parliament media statement said.

[..]

The resolution voices concern about “the routine use of behavioural advertising and the development of intrusive advertising practices”, such as third parties who read private emails or use social networks and geolocation techniques to tailor advertising to individual consumers’ interests.

If you listen to the advertisers, you’d think the economy will collapse if they can’t read your private mail:

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The report takes a critical view of online advertising and suggests a number of measures that would not only harm Europe’s advertising sector, but also impact the financial viability of advertising-funded free online services, used by millions of Europeans on a daily basis.

Boo fucking hoo. People were perfectly happy paying for their email account before gmail existed.

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These are the Ishihara test plates.  You might be familiar with them.

If you can read the numbers on the left, you’re not color blind.

If you can read the numbers on the right, you might very well be color blind, but it doesn’t matter.  You can read them anyway. The goggles, they do something!

Welcome to DanKam, a $3 app being released today on iPhone and Android (the latter as soon as some mild issue with Checkout are resolved).  DanKam is an augmented reality application, designed to one of several unique and configurable filters to images and video such that colors — and differences between colors — are more visible to the color blind.

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A Huge Solar Filament Erupts

Credit: NASA‘sGSFC, SDO AIA Team

Explanation: Click the arrow and watch an unusually long filament explode out from the Sun. The filament had been seen hovering over the Sun’s surface for over a week before it erupted earlier this month. The image sequence was taken by the Earth-orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in a color of ultraviolet light specifically emitted by helium. The explosion created Coronal Mass Ejections which dispersed high energy plasma into the Solar System. This plasma cloud, though, missed the Earth and so did not cause auroras. The above eruption and an unusually expansive eruption that occurred in August are showing how widely separated areas of the Sun can sometimes act in unison. Explosions like this will likely become more common over the next few years as our Sun moves toward Solar Maximum activity.

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The politics at play in Cancun has been more attune to children in a playground than countries serious about averting a climate crisis. First, the Mexican government handpicked 25 heads of state, like sides in a lunchtime football game. Most refused the invite.

In yet another bold move from the Bolivian government, Evo Morales, one of the champions of a strong just deal amongst the developing country groupings, decided to come to the party anyway, without having an invite, breaking the usual diplomatic protocols.

Before the talks had even started, the United States had already threatened they would walk out if they didn’t get their own way, like the spoilt child. Japan stated that they didn’t not want to sign a new commitment period under their native Kyoto Protocol, shortly followed by other countries like Russia who, said that if Japan didn’t agree to the second commitment period then neither would they. So there.

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I will state clearly that I did not add backdoors to the OpenBSD operating system or the OpenBSD crypto framework (OCF). The code I touched during that work relates mostly to device drivers to support the framework. I don’t believe I ever touched isakmpd or photurisd (userland key management programs), and I rarely touched the ipsec internals (cryptodev and cryptosoft, yes). However, I welcome an audit of everything I committed to OpenBSD’s tree. I demand an apology from Greg Perry (cc’d) for this accusation. Do not use my name to add credibility to your cloak and dagger fairy tales.

Share government’s secrets, go to jail. Share normal people’s secrets, TIME man of the year!

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Swedish prosecutor’s office says it has ‘not got a view at all on bail’ and that Britain made decision to oppose it

The decision to have Julian Assange sent to a London jail and kept there was taken by the British authorities and not by prosecutors in Sweden, as previously thought, the Guardian has learned.

The Crown Prosecution Service will go to the high court tomorrow to seek the reversal of a decision to free the WikiLeaks founder on bail, made yesterday by a judge at City of Westminster magistrates court.

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When Amazon took down the WikiLeaks site from its EC2 cloud, it opened a whole new can of worms as to what can be put in the cloud and what cannot. But for some, there will be a collective sigh of "I told you so", and the loser in this, again, might well be the United States, while the winner… well, that would be whoever moves quickly enough to take advantage of the upcoming exodus.

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According to cables released Wednesday by WikiLeaks and obtained by the Guardian, BP experienced a blowout in Azerbaijan in September, 2008, that had “striking resemblances” to the Gulf oil spill.

Eighteen months before the Deepwater Horizon exploded, killing 11 workers and sending millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, BP scrambled to keep a similar explosion at an Azerbaijan oil field a secret.

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<Happyjew> So why was Jesus given gold when he was born? Wouldn’t diapers or clothing make more sense?

<Caig4> Not really, as they kingly gifts.

<Happyjew> Kingly gifts? For Jesus?

<Caig4> He is King.

<Happyjew> Oh, King, eh. Very nice. And how d’he get that? By exploiting the workers! By hanging on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society! If there’s ever going to be any progress…

<Caig4> What?

<Happyjew> Anyway…who exactly is he King of?

<Caig4> …the jews.

<Happyjew> Who are the jews?

<Caig4> Are you joking? The jewish people, you’re name states you’re jewish.

<Happyjew> Well, I didn’t vote for him.

<Caig4> You don’t vote for Kings.

<Happyjew> How did he become King then?

<Caig4> It was foretold that the messiah (king) would come, and he was the son of God.

<Happyjew> Listen, being the son of a deity is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not having a god as a father. You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just because daddy is a divine being. I mean if I went around saying I was emperor because my papa is Thor, they’d lock me away.

<Caig4> Are you f***ing serious???

<Happyjew> I’m just trying to clarify…

Quick, someone accuse Al Jazeera’s chief editor of rape in Sweden.

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Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has never been convicted of that crime, nor of any other crime. Despite that, he has been detained at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia for five months — and for two months before that in a military jail in Kuwait — under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture. Interviews with several people directly familiar with the conditions of Manning’s detention, ultimately including a Quantico brig official (Lt. Brian Villiard) who confirmed much of what they conveyed, establishes that the accused leaker is subjected to detention conditions likely to create long-term psychological injuries.

Since his arrest in May, Manning has been a model detainee, without any episodes of violence or disciplinary problems. He nonetheless was declared from the start to be a "Maximum Custody Detainee," the highest and most repressive level of military detention, which then became the basis for the series of inhumane measures imposed on him.

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BBC interview wheelchair user and cerebal palsy sufferer Jody McIntryre after he was dragged from his wheelchair by police on two seperate occasions at the anti-tuition fees protest on the 9th December 2010 in London. The presenter is Ben Brown. I apologise for some glitches in the video, this is because of a bad signal and dodgy aerial cable.

If you wish to complain about the conduct of the presenter the BBC complaints form is here http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/ This was shown on the 8 o’clock news on BBC News channel on the 13th December. BBC response: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors…