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Beneath the digital face lies a .22-caliber pistol — a phone gun capable of firing four rounds in quick succession with a touch of the otherwise standard keypad. European law enforcement officials — stunned by the discovery of these deadly decoys — say phone guns are changing the rules of engagement in Europe.
Clearly we'll have to outlaw all possessions since just about anything can be stuffed with explosives.
Copy-control Senator sleeps while fair-use rights burn
Picture a future where distributing Linux is a crime punishable by a hefty fine and a prison sentence. If that sounds ridiculous, then you haven't run into the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act. It's the very latest - and most bizarre - word in political back-scratching from one of South Carolina's U.S. senators. And he'd rather not talk about it, thank you very much. It is unlawful to manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide or otherwise traffic in any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies that adhere to the security systems standards adopted under section 104. This is the heart of the new Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA), a draft of legislation proposed by U.S. Senator Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, a Democrat from South Carolina.
Hours after American cruise missiles demolished a chemical plant in Sudan this past August, U.S. officials found themselves addressing Sudanese claims that the factory manufactured only pharmaceuticals and other beneficial compounds. The U.S., attempting to lend credence to its contention that the facility was producing chemical weapons, cited a soil sample obtained clandestinely a few yards from the plant this past June. The sample contained a chemical known by the acronym EMPTA, whose only practical, large-scale industrial use is in the manufacture of an extremely deadly nerve agent known as VX. The officials also insisted that Iraqi scientists had helped set up the VX operation at the Sudanese plant, a claim they said they confirmed by means of intercepted telephone conversations. Beyond those disclosures, however, the U.S. revealed little of the large, fragmented and incomplete mosaic of intelligence information that in all likelihood precipitated the site's selection for bombing. This reticence may have been partly linked to an embarrassing fact: the heart of Iraq's recipe for VX may very well have come from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
If This Is Patriotism, Keep It
We've been treated to some astonishingly vile images over the last two weeks: office workers hurling themselves into a hundred-floor-high abyss. A gaping, smouldering hole in the financial center of our greatest city. George W. Bush passing himself off as a patriot, even as he disassembles the Constitution with the voracious glee of piranha skeletonizing a cow.
Bush Seeks to Coax Americans to Fly
"Just flap your arms and rise up," he said in an earnest if unsuccessful attempt to lift off.
Hackers face life imprisonment under 'Anti-Terrorism' Act
Hackers, virus-writers and web site defacers would face life imprisonment without the possibility of parole under legislation proposed by the Bush Administration that would classify most computer crimes as acts of terrorism. The Justice Department is urging Congress to quickly approve its Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA), a twenty-five page proposal that would expand the government's legal powers to conduct electronic surveillance, access business records, and detain suspected terrorists.
So hacking a Web site merits a harsher punishment that rape or murder? We'd be better off living under the shariah.
Atom Experiment Brings Teleportation a Step Closer
Physicists in Denmark have made two samples of trillions of atoms interact at a distance in an experiment which may bring Star Trek-style teleportation and rapid quantum computing closer to reality. Eugene Polzik and his colleagues at the University of Aarhus are not about to beam anyone up to the Starship Enterprise, but their research reported in the science journal Nature on Wednesday makes the idea of instantly transporting an object from one place to another less far fetched.
Not that anyone reading this will be alive if scientists ever do figure out how to teleport people.
Beware Scientologists Claiming To Be Mental Health Professionals
The National Mental Health Association (NMHA) today is warning the public and media to beware of representatives of the Church of Scientology who are claiming to be mental health professionals assisting individuals in New York City. “This is a very important and sensitive time,” said Michael M. Faenza, President and CEO of NMHA. “I urge the Church of Scientology to stay out of mental health. The public needs to understand that the Scientologists are using this tragedy to recruit new members. They are not providing mental health assistance.”
Fellowship of The Ring: A new trailer.
Massive search reveals no secret code in web images
New research indicates that terrorists are not using advanced computer tools to hide messages in innocuous-looking web images. In February 2001, US agents suggested that terror groups, including Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaida organisation, were hiding messages in web images. The FBI has suggested that recent terrorist atrocities in the US could even have been co-ordinated using images uploaded to ordinary internet sites such as eBay. Now Niels Provos and Peter Honeyman of the University of Michigan have found strong evidence suggesting such steganography - the science of obfuscating communications - is not used. They used detection software and brute force computing power to scan millions of images posted to the internet and found no hidden messages.
Real-Life Cyborg Challenges Reality With Technology
Dr. Mann fights technology with technology, wearing computers on his body and cameras in his glasses so he can "shoot back" by recording everything he sees. The billboards and advertisements posted on every public surface are a form of "attention theft," he says, so he has invented technology that replaces these messages with whatever he would like to see. When he is wearing his "eyetap" glasses, which project an image onto the retina of his eye, a condom ad in a bathroom becomes a picture of a waterfall.
Stupidest Headline of the Day: Gravity Helped Terrorists Destroy Twin Towers. Next we'll be treated to revelations that oxygen fueled the fires that brought the towers down (never forgetting the sinister role of gravity in all this).
The soldier of the future will prowl around a tropical danger-zone as noiselessly as a butterfly landing on a leaf, if the expectations of researchers at the US Army Soldier System Center are realized. The scientists say that by 2025, combat gear will have evolved so that soldiers will be able to sense an oncoming attack, change chameleon-like to blend in with their surroundings and make temperature adjustments.
Business jets pose a little-regulated attack opportunity
Passengers on the estimated 8,000 business jets operating in the United States are not checked to see whether they are carrying a knife or a gun. They generally board directly off the tarmac. Their bags aren't screened before going in the cargo hold. And there's little to prevent a wealthy terrorist from buying or chartering a fully fueled corporate jet - most of which lack the safety buffer of a cockpit door - and pointing it at Quincy Market, Fenway Park, or any of the National Football League stadiums that will be filled next weekend.
Who did it? Foreign Report presents an alternative view
Israel’s military intelligence service, Aman, suspects that Iraq is the state that sponsored the suicide attacks on the New York Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington. Directing the mission, Aman officers believe, were two of the world’s foremost terrorist masterminds: the Lebanese Imad Mughniyeh, head of the special overseas operations for Hizbullah, and the Egyptian Dr Ayman Al Zawahiri, senior member of Al-Qaeda and possible successor of the ailing Osama Bin Laden. The two men have not been seen for some time. Mughniyeh is probably the world’s most wanted outlaw. Unconfirmed reports in Beirut say he has undergone plastic surgery and is unrecognisable. Zawahiri is thought to be based in Egypt. He could be Bin Laden’s chief representative outside Afghanistan.
In a development that exposes grave risks of news manipulation in a time of crisis, a hacker demonstrated Tuesday that he could rewrite the text of Yahoo! News articles at will, apparently using nothing more than a web browser and an easily-obtained Internet address. Yahoo! News, which learned of the hack from SecurityFocus, says it has closed the security hole that allowed 20-year-old hacker Adrian Lamo to access the portal's web-based production tools Tuesday morning, and modify an August 23rd news story about Dmitry Sklyarov, a Russian computer programmer facing federal criminal charges under the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). ... Lamo tampered with Yahoo!'s copy of a Reuters story that described a delay in Sklyarov's court proceedings, so that the text reported, incorrectly, that the Russian was facing the death penalty. The modified story warned sardonically that Sklyarov's work raised "the haunting specter of inner-city minorities with unrestricted access to literature, and through literature, hope."
Airports Seize Tweezers, Scissors by Thousands
Tweezers, pencil sharpeners, manicure sets -- items that a week ago seemed innocuous -- have been seized by the thousand from airline passengers amid heightened security at U.S. airports following hijacked suicide plane attacks in New York and Washington. Airlines have replaced metal cutlery with plastic knives and forks, and in some airports bartenders can no longer slice a lemon after reports that hijackers last week used knives and cardboard cutters to take over four planes and turn them into deadly missiles.
Tweezers? Wouldn't it just be easier to refit cockpit cabin doors with some material stronger than balsa wood?
Surgeons in New York have used a remote-controlled robot to operate on a patient in France in what is believed to be the first surgery of its kind. The surgical team removed the gall bladder of a 68-year-old woman at the European Institute for TeleSurgery in Strasbourg, over 4,000 miles away. "For surgeons, it's a defining moment. We've never been able to operate remotely like this," said Michel Gagner, the chief of laparoscopic surgery at Mount Sinai and one of the participating doctors. "It's going to take some time to realize the impact of this."
After hundreds of years of killing people at a distance, we've finally figured out how to heal them from afar.
Paradise Gained, Paradise Re-lost
How the Internet is being Changed from a Means of Liberation to a Tool of Authoritarianism
Hedgers or terrorists behind pre-attack stock selling?
In what sounds like a plot from the latest James Bond movie, financial authorities around the world are investigating stock exchange data for strange share price movements in the days and hours previous to the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. The suspicion is that whoever was responsible for the attacks - most likely Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden - tried to profit from them by short selling stocks. This basically means selling loads of shares before the attacks and then buying them back once the share price had slumped. The most obvious shares for this would be airlines stocks, those companies based in the World Trade Center and insurance companies - and these are where investigations are likely to begin.
Wired News is running an intriguing interview with Stephen Sloan, a professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma, about What Future War Looks Like
Stephen Sloan: The Civil War period saw what was called a constitutional dictatorship. There was a suspension of civil liberties, including habeas corpus. World War II saw a crisis government. When under massive assault, a democracy will recognize the fact it will have to take measures it would not ordinarily use in peace times, lessening civil rights and suspension of due process. When the crisis is over, the liberties are returned. The problem with this is: Who decides when the crisis is over, or will it be over?
Did bin Laden Kill Afghan Rebel?
The suicide bombing attack on a charismatic Afghan guerrilla leader Sept. 9 appears to have been a preemptive strike by Osama bin Laden and his supporters to eliminate a CIA-backed opponent who could have been a powerful ally on the ground in any U.S. retaliation for the terrorist assaults two days later on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, intelligence sources said over the weekend.
A cure for optimism: The Coming Anarchy
How scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet.
From what I can tell, the Twin Towers Orphan Fund seems like a legitimate and worthy cause.
A national and local grass roots fund raising program for the surviving children of parents who were killed in the Twin Towers and Pentagon disasters was launched September 12, 2001. Called the Twin Towers Orphan Fund, the endowment is being created for the sole purpose of providing long-term care and support for kids whose parents were lost in the blasts, the ensuing building collapses and onboard the several hijacked airliners. Still unknown is exactly how many children lost a parent, or were orphaned. The fund is officially called the Twin Towers Orphan Fund and will be administered by the Family-to-Family Mentoring program, of Bakersfield, Calif., a 501c3 non-profit program. Monies collected will be used to provide long-term educational and housing assistance, daily necessities, and mental and physical health care for the affected children. Prior to disbursement, donations will be held in a bank-supervised trust fund.
Phil Agre, an associate professor at UCLA, has posted an excellent essay called Imagining the Next War. The paragraph below struck me as being particularly astute:
The almost inherent crisis of democracy, and the actual nature of conservatism, become clearest in conditions of war. The conditions of war are almost identical with the social vision of conservatism, and it is no surprise that conservatives are so eloquent when the possibility of war arises. Conservatism has always been profoundly opposed to the popular exercise of reason, supposing it to lead inevitably to tyranny, and wartime is ideally suited for the absolute, polarized, us-and-them forms of thinking that are the opposite of rational thought. In this sense, democracy as such is profoundly threatened by an absolute evil such as Stalin's regime in the Soviet Union or the attack on the World Trade Center -- not because of the military danger it poses, real as that may be, but because of the danger that it poses to the collective reason of a democratic polity. Indeed, the depth of the danger was already clear before the attack, for example in Rush Limbaugh's astonishing argument that the leader of the democratic opposition, Tom Daschle, resembled Satan simply because he opposed all of George W. Bush's policies. And it has become clearer since the attack in the argument by many prominent conservatives that the coming wartime condition will require a diminution of civil liberties.
On Doomed Flight, Passengers Vowed to Perish Fighting
They told the people they loved that they would die fighting. In a series of cellular telephone calls to their wives, two passengers aboard the plane that crashed into a Pennsylvania field instead of possibly toppling a national landmark learned about the horror of the World Trade Center. From 35,000 feet, they relayed harrowing details about the hijacking in progress to the police. And they vowed to try to thwart the enemy, to prevent others from dying even if they could not save themselves.
Novel Auction Offers Chance to Buy Immortality
Best-selling novelists Robert Harris (''Enigma''), Ken Follett (''Eye of the Needle''), Pat Barker (''The Ghost Road'') and Zadie Smith (''White Teeth'') are among the authors agreeing to name a character in forthcoming books after those prepared to pay up for the privilege. The second "Immortality Auction'' takes place on Oct. 16 in London at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, with all proceeds going to charity.
I'm surprised author Fay Weldon isn't participating.
A former CIA operative explains why the terrorist Usama bin Ladin has little to fear from American intelligence
Fascinating stuff, despite the jarring rendering of a name usually spelled Osama bin Laden
Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund
$1,237,184.85 collected as of this moment.
On the evening of Sept. 10, I went to bed expecting to take a 5:30 a.m. Amtrak train to New York for a 9 a.m. event at the Millennium Hotel in the World Trade Center -- the hotel that had been heavily damaged, then rebuilt, after terrorists tried to blow up the twin towers in 1993. Never have I been so glad to have overslept. By the time I awoke at 6 a.m., the train had gone, and I decided to remain at my home office in Philadelphia. Three hours later, the buildings where I should have been were in flames. It was impossible for me to feel lucky, knowing as I watched the surreal disaster on TV that dozens of my acquaintances on the higher floors of both buildings might die.
Anti-Attack Feds Push Carnivore
Federal police are reportedly increasing Internet surveillance after Tuesday's deadly attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Just hours after three airplanes smashed into the buildings in what some U.S. legislators have dubbed a second Pearl Harbor, FBI agents began to visit Web-based, e-mail firms and network providers, according to engineers at those companies who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Beyond the tragic loss of life, the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon may well succeed in destroying our freedom. Perhaps there's no other option in a world where a handful of fanatics can kill thousands. At the same time, our missiles will likely see more freedom.
World Trade Center Towers Collapse After Apparent Terrorist Attack
In parallel attacks in New York City and Washington, planes crashed into each of the twin towers of the World Trade Center around 9 this morning and a plane later crashed into the Pentagon, causing smoke, fire and a sense of near panic in the streets. Later, after a number of explosions, both 110-story towers of the World Trade Center collapsed. An enormous loss of life was feared.
Words fail.
An essay by Phil Agre: Your Face Is Not a Bar Code: Arguments Against Automatic Face Recognition in Public Places
I believe that automatic face recognition in public places, including commercial spaces such as shopping malls that are open to the public, should be outlawed. The dangers outweigh the benefits. The necessary laws will not be passed, however, without overwhelming pressure of public opinion and organizing. To that end, this article presents the arguments against automatic face recognition in public places, followed by responses to the most common arguments in favor.
New Copyright Bill Heading to DC
Music and record industry lobbyists are quietly readying an all-out assault on Congress this fall in hopes of dramatically rewriting copyright laws. With the help of Fritz Hollings (D-S.C.), the powerful chairman of the Senate Commerce committee, they hope to embed copy-protection controls in nearly all consumer electronic devices and PCs. All types of digital content, including music, video and e-books, are covered. The Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA), scheduled to be introduced by Hollings, backs up this requirement with teeth: It would be a civil offense to create or sell any kind of computer equipment that "does not include and utilize certified security technologies" approved by the federal government.
That's one way to boost the price of old computers.
Leader of the Free World: A simple but apropos jab at our Glorious Leader.
Microsoft's new twist in error messages
The Web's once common "page not found" errors are themselves going missing, stripped from recent versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer in favor of a search tool provided by--you guessed it--Microsoft. The software behemoth quietly introduced the change two weeks ago, updating Internet Explorer's autosearch function to launch whenever someone types a misspelled or nonexistent domain name into the browser's address bar.
"All Your Mistake Are Belong to Us."
Microsoft Corp. has 40,000 employees, $30 billion in the bank and a lock on the personal computer market. Miguel de Icaza has a couple of hundred volunteer programmers, a windowless office just outside of downtown Boston and a vision. His goal is to rewrite the rules of the software business by creating and giving away word processors, spreadsheets, e-mail readers and other programs that mimic the look and feel of Microsoft Corp.'s signature products. Some independent observers give him a fair shot. And so does Microsoft.
‘Green weapons’ for future battles
They're just as deadly for people, but friendlier to the environment.
'Just Say No to H20' (Unless It's Coke's Own Brew)
In this age of branding, even plain old milk needs a big ad campaign and celebrity endorsements. But another popular beverage, tap water, has no such support ? a tactical misstep that has left it vulnerable to aggressive competitors like the Coca-Cola Company. Coca-Cola offered a glimpse of its battle plan against tap water in an article on one of its Web sites headlined "The Olive Garden Targets Tap Water & WINS." Aimed at restaurants selling the company's fountain drinks, the article laid out Coke's antiwater program for the Olive Garden chain as a "success story" for others to emulate.
See also this page for a copy of Coke's crusade against tap water.
Words From Our Sponsor: A Jeweler Commissions a Novel
One of the first scenes in the British writer Fay Weldon's new novel takes place amid "the peaches and cream d?cor" of the Bulgari jewelry store on Sloane Street in London. There, attended to by "charming girls, and men too," the real estate mogul Barley Salt pays ?18,000 to buy his scheming second wife, Doris Dubois, "a sleek modern piece, a necklace, stripes of white and yellow gold, but encasing three ancient coins, the mount following the irregular contours of the thin worn bronze." Readers may not know that Bulgari, the Italian jewelry company, paid Ms. Weldon an undisclosed sum for a prominent place in the book, fittingly entitled "The Bulgari Connection." It is scheduled for distribution by the small publisher Grove/ Atlantic in the United States in November.
The world's oldest profession: selling out.
Hawking's plan to offset computer threat to humans
Stephen Hawking says genetic engineering could be used to prevent human intelligence being overtaken by that of computers. Targeted genetic changes could increase the complexity of DNA and "improve" humans, the physicist says.