American Buddhist Net

NBA .noos ereh taht yrt ot evah yam eW
___________

July 7, 2008 by Mark O'Neill
By Mark O’Neill

You have to hand it to Chinese bloggers - they are determined to get the truth out, no matter what. OK, they are not facing the death sentence like their fellow counterparts in Iran but nevertheless, they still face prison for their opinions. At the very least, their work will be deleted by faceless humorless bureaucrats.

So the bloggers are trying out new methods to evade Chinese government censors - the latest one is they are using tools and software to write backwards. Or write vertically instead of horizontally. This is apparently confusing the censors because they now cannot automatically track “objectionable phrases” (aw my heart bleeds for them). One such “text flipping” tool is here. Obviously the government will eventually find a way around it but the resourceful bloggers will probably have found another solution by then and will have moved on.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

BEND, Oregon (AP) -- A man flying across Oregon in a lawn chair rigged with helium-filled balloons has reached his destination in Idaho.

A reporter tracking Kent Couch for the Oregonian newspaper says he landed safely near Cambridge, Idaho, on Saturday afternoon.

The 48-year-old lifted off at dawn from his gas station in Bend, Oregon, and flew with the wind at about 20 mph.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

See also this--Lessons of a Cyber Assault--about the cyber attacks in Estonia last year. Lithuania and Estonia are both very small countries that were once occupied by the Soviet Union and still have significant Russian minorities (often former Soviet military) living within them. Hence the tension over the Soviet symbols. ABN
_____________

Hundreds of Lithuanian government and corporate Web sites were hacked and plastered with Soviet-era symbols and other digital graffiti this week in what appears to be a coordinated cyber attack launched by Russian hacker groups.

A New York Times story reports that Lithuanian officials did not directly accuse Russian hackers of initiating the attacks, but said they had come from foreign computers. However, iDefense, a security intelligence firm, based in Reston, Va., attributed the attacks to nationalistic Russian hacker groups protesting a new Lithuanian law banning the display of Soviet emblems, including honors won during World War II.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

What is happening right now is big ISPs and big content providers are merging their businesses. Soon TV and film will all come over the internet and there will be deliberate misrepresentations of basic issues--bandwidth, copyrights, appropriate content, etc.--designed to confuse consumers to ceding first amendment rights to the big corporations. Do you trust Congress or the FCC to help you? I don't. The weakness of all of the corporate arguments is the simple fact that the internet is working wonderfully well without their control. ABN
_____________

By Mike Finch

A net-neutrality activist group has uncovered plans for the demise of the free Internet by 2010 in Canada. By 2012, the group says, the trend will be global.

Bell Canada and TELUS, Canada’s two largest Internet service providers (ISPs), will begin charging per-site fees on most Internet sites, reports anonymous sources within TELUS.

...“By 2012 ISPs all over the globe will reduce Internet access to a TV-like subscription model, only offering access to a small standard amount of commercial sites and require extra fees for every other site you visit. These ‘other’ sites would then lose all their exposure and eventually shut down, resulting in what could be seen as the end of the Internet,” Leysen said.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Absolutely true. ABN
_____________

by Rep. Ron Paul

...I can assure you of this - once the government gains a foothold into regulating the internet, even for benevolent reasons, the wonders of the free internet will soon be a thing of the past. Parents, with modern day technology, are quite capable of monitoring their children's internet activity. The internet must remain a government-free zone to maintain its integrity and usefulness to modern society, and that is something for which I will continue to fight.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

June 30, 2008

VILNIUS, Lithuania (AP) -- Unidentified hackers broke into several hundred Lithuanian Web sites over the weekend, plastering them with communist symbols, government officials said Monday.
Lithuanian law prohibits the public display of the Soviet flag, military uniforms and the five-pointed Soviet star.

The hackers posted Soviet symbols -- the hammer and sickle, as well as the five-pointed star -- and scathing messages with profanities on Web sites based in the ex-Soviet nation, officials said.

"More than 300 private and official sites were attacked from so-called proxy servers located in territories east of Lithuania," said Sigitas Jurkevicius, a computer specialist at Lithuania's communications authority.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

With the full-scale rollout of Japan’s cigarette vending machine age-verification system just around the corner, a Sankei Sports news reporter has confirmed the existence of a minor flaw: magazine photos can be used to fool the age-verification cameras on some machines.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

June 23, 2008 by: Jo Hartley

(NaturalNews) The International Center for Technology Assessment (CTA) and a group of consumer, health, and environmental groups have filed a legal petition with the Environmental Protection Agency demanding the agency use its pesticide regulation authority to stop the sale of several consumer products that are now using nano-sized versions of silver. This legal action is the first challenge of the EPA's failure to regulate nanomaterials.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

What's needed is open source government. Expand Congress to include millions of informed citizens who would write and vote on legislation. With a well-designed system, we would no longer need fake "representatives" who now cause the nation so much suffering. We do not need presidential "leadership," either. The nation would be better served and better guided by a computer-operated system that defined the its goals via input from citizens. With a huge and truly representative legislative body and no president, lobbying would become nothing more than advertising and all of the corruption associated with "special interests" would disappear. ABN
________________

June 26th, 2008

Will Microsoft become more open to open source with the departure of Bill Gates?

LINK TO ORIGINAL

By Richard Spencer in Beijing
Last Updated: 2:01PM BST 27/06/2008

North Korea has blown up the cooling tower of the nuclear reactor that provided the plutonium for its first atomic weapons test.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

by Cory Doctorow, June 25, 2008 8:17 PM | permalink

Bell Canada has been forced by the CRTC (Canadian telco regulator) to reveal exactly how congested its network is. This follows revelations that Bell has been slowing down P2P traffic -- even traffic on its wholesale customers' networks, so no matter who you buy your DSL from, Bel gets to ruin your P2P experience.

The confidential documents show that, basically, Bell just doesn't have a substantial congestion problem -- in fact, backbone congestion has been going down.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

June 27, 2008
Mike Harvey and Jonathan Richards

Q&A: What do the new domains mean for me?

A new era in the way websites are named was ushered in yesterday when the governing body for internet domain names announced a massive liberalisation.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

A new phenomenon is sweeping China after the quake: digital witch hunts of those who dare to be outspoken or criticise

* Read a transcript of the video at the end of article

Hannah Fletcher
June 25, 2008

She looks like any other disgruntled young person. Arms tightly crossed, mouth twisted in contempt, she could be letting off steam about parents, school, or boyfriends.

...Using the vast human power behind the Chinese web, every detail of Ms Gao's life, from her home and work address in Liaoning province, north east China, to the fact that her parents were divorced, was dug up and published on hundreds of forums and chatrooms.

"Now humiliate her," ordered one internet user, Yang Zhiyan.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

By Joel Hruska | Published: June 25, 2008 - 06:35PM CT

Stopbadware.org has released its May, 2008 report (PDF) on badware hosting and the geographical locations from which badware originates. The organization drew its data from Google's "Safe Browsing" initiative, which maintains a database of websites that attempt to phish personal information from users who visit. As of May, Google had recorded some 213,575 individual websites, which StopBadware then mapped to IP addresses. This data was then cross-referenced to determine the IP block's country of origin.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

The distinctions detailed in this story seem to me to be based more on linguistic conventions than intuition. When we say a corporation "wants" or "plans" or "thinks," we mean that decision-makers are going to do something directed toward a discreet, measurable, objective outcome (more sales, new product, etc.). We do not normally say that a corporation "feels" good or bad because feelings are subjective, transitory, and rarely understood to be causes of measurable, objective outcomes. We normally say, rather, that a corporation is "disorganized" or "trying to recover from" or "confident that." We do allow the stock market to be "bearish" or "bulllish," but normally it is investors who are "elated" or "timid" or "chastened." This is because it is widely recognized that markets are very much driven by collective emotions, while corporations are generally understood to be directed by a few people at the top. We do allow crowds to be moody--"angry," "restive," festive," etc. People can fairly often be heard to say that their cars are "happy" or "grateful" after an oil change, or words to that effect. There is a good deal of literature that claims that God "loves" us or that He is "lonely" or "sad" when we turn away from Him. He surely gets "angry" with us, as He well should. As for robots or computers, the distinction may be due more to the newness of the machines and the way they look. Most all of us can and will attribute emotions to insensate game avatars or evil intent to a computer virus. I treat insects as if they feel, and believe I can objectively observe at least panic and relief when one is trapped in a room and then finds the open door. As for lobsters thrown into boiling water, if you have ever witnessed that you must have felt the animal's pain and suffering as its claws strained against the side of the vessel. Years ago, I became a vegetarian after hearing crabs struggle in boiling water. ABN
___________________

Our intuitions about consciousness in other beings and objects reveal a lot about how we think.

By Joshua Knobe
June 24, 2008

Can a lobster ever truly have any emotions? What about a beetle? Or a sophisticated computer? The only way to resolve these questions conclusively would be to engage in serious scientific inquiry—but even before studying the scientific literature, many people have pretty clear intuitions about what the answers are going to be. A person might just look at a computer and feel certain that it couldn’t possibly be feeling pleasure, pain or anything at all. That’s why we don’t mind throwing a broken computer in the trash. Likewise, most people don’t worry too much about a lobster feeling angst about its impending doom when they put one into a pot of boiling water. In the jargon of philosophy, these intuitions we have about whether a creature or thing is capable of feelings or subjective experiences—such as the experience of seeing red or tasting a peach—are called “intuitions about phenomenal consciousness.”

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Cory Doctorow, June 24, 2008 10:37 PM

David Weinberger writes, "The FCC is suggesting that it will make a slice of spectrum available for free Internet access to users, so long as the providers filter out all the porn...and, if the filters don't work, then the providers have to use 'other means,' which presumably might include blocking entire application types or protocols, or blocking encrypted data. It includes filtering p2p traffic. The idea is now open for public comment.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Kind of funny, he sounds like everyone else. ABN
______________

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM
To: Jim Allchin
Cc: Chris Jones (WINDOWS); Bharat Shah (NT); Joe Peterson; Will Poole; Brian Valentine; Anoop Gupta (RESEARCH)
Subject: Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame

I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don't drive usability issues.

Let me give you my experience from yesterday.

I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack ... so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.

The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up.

This site is so slow it is unusable....

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Well-worth reading. ABN
______________

By Chris Anderson

"All models are wrong, but some are useful."

So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don't have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don't have to settle for models at all.

Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Remember this the next time ISPs in the US claim that a "broadband crunch" is reason to quash net neutrality and give them exclusive control of the internet. ABN
______________

by Grant Gross, IDG News Service
Jun 23, 2008 3:33 pm

The U.S. should aim for 100M bps (bits per second) of broadband available to all U.S. residents by 2012 and 1Gbps by 2015 in order to catch up to other countries that are moving forward with broadband rollouts, recommends a study released Monday.

...The average download speed among consumer broadband services in the U.S. is 8.9M bps, slower than average speeds in 18 other OECD countries, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Japan’s average download speed is more than 10 times faster, at 93.7Mbps, while France’s is 44.2Mbps and South Korea’s is 43.3Mbps, according to OECD numbers.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

19 June 2008 11:17 BST

Holographic mobile handsets capable of projecting, capturing and sending 3D images have been developed by an Indian tech company.

By 2010 the devices will routinely beam 3D films, games and virtual goods into our laps according to Indian technology giant Infosys, which has patented the handset.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

By JOHN F. BURNS
Published: June 23, 2008

DOUGLAS, Isle of Man — Halfway down the suburban road that descends Bray Hill, past the traffic lights, between the elementary school and rows of homes with families relaxing in their front yards, there is a barely perceptible bump.

Crouching on their 1,000-cubic-centimeter Honda, Suzuki and Yamaha motorcycles, the race leaders hit the bump at 185 miles an hour, their machines rearing up like prancing horses before settling back onto the asphalt and continuing down the hill at full throttle, engines shrieking. Near the bottom they pass a 30-miles-per-hour speed-limit sign at 195 m.p.h., then sweep through a right curve and out of sight.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Seems strange no one can keep these computers safe. This story does not give good information about how they know what was stolen or how they know that it was stolen. I suppose the FBI told them, but the FBI also told them to keep quiet, but they have not. So what's with that? Since when do these guys go against the FBI? Smith says he knows data was stolen because his computer crashed, but stealing info would not make his machine crash. And the fact that it crashed does not mean China was stealing anything. Is he using Vista? The problem of cyber attacks is very real, but this story leaves me with more questions than answers.

Rohrabacher says "...when they start to begin to extend their oppressive tactics to our country in order to maintain the security there, that’s when they’ve gone way too far.” Now that is a real statement.Can the reporter go back and ask Rohrabacher what the hell he means by that? There is way more to this story than what we have seen so far, as usual. ABN
________________

By Jordy Yager
Posted: 06/21/08 03:37 PM [ET]

More Members of Congress have had their computers infiltrated by hackers within China than initially suspected, a lawmaker has revealed.

Reps. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), Chris Smith (R-N.J.), and Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) admitted to having data removed from their Capitol Hill computers last week, but Wolf says there are more.

“I’m not at liberty to say who they are, but there are other members,” said Wolf, ranking member on the Appropriations Committee’s State and Foreign Operations subcommittee.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Jun 20

It is unacceptable for China to block Internet content, a European Commissioner said Friday, calling the Internet a free and open medium.

"We say for instance to the Chinese, very clearly so, that their blocking of certain Internet content is absolutely unacceptable," said Viviane Reding, the European Commissioner for Information Society and Media.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

By KENNETH CHANG
Published: June 20, 2008

After a decade of shouting, “Follow the water!” in its exploration of Mars, NASA can finally say that one of its spacecraft has reached out, touched water ice and scooped it up.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Jacqui Cheng | Published: June 19, 2008 - 01:49PM CT

China has only continued to tighten censorship of the Internet as the Olympics draw near, not loosen up as expected. That's the conclusion of activists who monitor the state of censorship in China. They say that a number of China-related that events, such as the unrest in Tibet and the recent earthquakes, have caused authorities to clamp down even further on what can be published online within the country, and what information can be accessed by citizens.

LINK TO ORIGINAL