“How are you?” someone asks. Your head is pounding, your nose is running and you feel miserable; “fine.” You answer. You have just lied. I know; that person did not want to ...

ANAHEIM -- For whatever reason, the road is a cold and forbidding place in baseball these days. Just six teams of 30 in the majors have winning records away from their own friendly ...

STRATFORD -- This may be your parents' Cabaret -- but chances are, it's going to take them a while to recognize it. In her Stratford debut, director Amanda Dehnert tackles one of ...

Suddenly, hockey just doesn't seem very important to Pittsburgh Penguins defenceman Kris Letang. Letang's best friend, Vancouver Canucks defenceman Luc Bourdon, died in a ...

Today we walk aimlessly about our day while we are on the train or bus or even in our cars. We just take one minute from our day to ask why? Why these amazing people are not here ...

Taylor Allan's father is haunted by the realization that he might have saved his daughter's life. Taylor, a Grade 11 student at La Salle Secondary School, dropped dead five weeks ...

Among a certain demographic (urban, male, heterosexual, 18-to-35 years), Claudia Dey isn't Claudia Dey, Playwright and, as of last month, Novelist. She's Bebe O'Shea, Sex Columnist ...

PITTSBURGH -- Suddenly, hockey just doesn't seem very important to Pittsburgh Penguins defenceman Kris Letang. Letang's best friend, Vancouver Canucks defenceman Luc Bourdon, died ...

VANCOUVER - Aeron Hall admits he'd had a few drinks before setting off on the walk home one spring night four years ago. But Hall, who is disabled, said it was his limp and not ...

Natalie Green has watched Nathaniel Abraham grow up as so many of us have. In the newspapers. On the evening news. For the last month or two, she's known him another way -- as the ...

An anonymous reader writes "This video shows a method by which a user can use a Linux distro called BackTrack to gain system access to Windows Vista without logging into Windows or knowing the username or password for any accounts. To accomplish this, the user renames cmd.exe to Utilman.exe — this is the program that brings up the Accessibility options for users without sight or with limited vision. The attack takes advantage of the fact that the Utility Manager can be invoked before the user logs into the system. The user gains System access, which is a level higher than Administrator. The person who discovered this security hole claims that XP, 2000, 2003 and NT are not vulnerable to it; only Windows Vista is."

Greg Walton brings us a lengthy story from Rolling Stone which describes China's comprehensive surveillance project, dubbed Golden Shield. The 'Great Firewall of China,' which we've discussed in the past, is but one aspect of Golden Shield. It also includes national ID cards, CCTV networks, and face-recognition software. This investigation showcases just how massive an undertaking it truly is. When finished, it will dwarf London's surveillance system. Quoting: "Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range -- a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment. Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world. (Security-crazy London boasts only half a million surveillance cameras.) ... This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces."

Roland Piquepaille writes "The St. Petersburg Times, Florida, reports that a well-known robot designer, Robin Murphy, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of South Florida (USF), 'plans to add a heart to robot rescuers.' As says USF, the goal is to develop 'a robot that will be a companion to a person who may be trapped after a car crash or in building ruins following an earthquake, or someone pinned down by sniper fire.' As said Murphy, 'robots can provide not only a sense of being a 'buddy' by playing soothing music or providing other entertainment, the robot also can be the audio and video link between survivor and family.' Murphy will develop this robot with some money coming from Microsoft. But read more for additional references and a picture of Murphy with her robot rescuers."

or_is_it writes "The company I work for has been growing dramatically and I've been charged with the task of being the gatekeeper for our GFI Spam filters. This involves manually inspecting the subject line/to/from for all caught messages in each filter rule folder. For a company of about 50 people, in one day the number of spam messages can exceed 2,000. Neglect it for a day and you end up with quite a task on your hands. I've made the rules lax enough so important messages can go through, along with a few stray spams, for which I get bitched at. Tighten the rules up and then maybe an important time-sensitive email never gets to its intended recipient, and I get bitched at. Manually reading through all those subject lines is supposed to prevent that, but I'm only human and genuine messages can easily get overlooked. How do larger organizations deal with the spam issue? I can't imagine having one centralized person manually inspecting everyone's junk-mail header is the optimal solution. Purchasing a different commercial mail filter product is a possibility, but I'd like to hear some anecdotal evidence before jumping ship."

It seems that Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow may not have been completely off the mark. According to Venture Beat, Airship Ventures has raised capital sufficient to build their first Zeppelin NT (Microsoft Windows reference purely coincidental). The airship will offer rides for up to 12 passengers out of the old Navy Blimp hangars at Moffett Field in Silicon Valley. Airship Ventures notes that airships are already flying safely in Japan and Germany, so now the US will have its chance. Rides will cost from $250 to $500 per person. Esther Dyson is one of the investors.

An anonymous reader writes "A Seattle Times editorial notes that the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal will put author Mark Steyn on trial for his book 'America Alone,' which has angered Muslims in Canada. Steyn is a columnist for the Canadian magazine Maclean's. According to the editorial, British Columbia bans all words and images 'likely to expose a person... to hatred or contempt because of race, religion, age, disability, sex, marital status or sexual orientation.' Steyn is unapologetic, and is advertising his book as a 'Canadian Hate Crime' and daring the tribunal to 'pronounce him bad.'" The Canadian tabloid the National Post has coverage of what it calls "a media storm."

Science News reports on recent research indicating that any kind of multitasking while driving is dangerous. Not just the obvious distraction of juggling a cell phone, but even talking to a passenger or listening to a book on tape. The researchers used a driving simulator inside an MRI machine to measure brain activations. "Attending to what someone says galvanizes language-related brain areas while simultaneously reducing activity in spatial regions that coordinate driving behavior. This finding suggests that people who combine relatively automatic tasks, such as speech comprehension and car driving, exceed a biological limit on the amount of systematic brain activity they can accommodate at one time, the researchers propose. As a result, the less-ingrained skill — in this case, driving, which is learned long after a person grasps a native language — takes a neural hit."

evanbd writes "After over 3 years of work, the Freenet Project has announced the release of Freenet 0.7. 'Freenet is software designed to allow the free exchange of information over the Internet without fear of censorship, or reprisal. To achieve this Freenet makes it very difficult for adversaries to reveal the identity, either of the person publishing, or downloading content' ... 'The journey towards Freenet 0.7 began in 2005 with the realization that some of Freenet's most vulnerable users needed to hide the fact that they were using Freenet, not just what they were doing with it. The result of this realization was a ground-up redesign and rewrite of Freenet, adding a "darknet" capability, allowing users to limit who their Freenet software would communicate with to trusted friends.'"

tracer818 writes "In order to study a person as if they were in space without gravity, NASA scientists are paying subjects $17,000 to stay in bed for 90 straight days. The study will follow the Bed Rest Project standard model and be conducted at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas. Participants will live in a special research unit for the entire study and be fed a carefully controlled diet."

Airw0lf writes with a claim that appears too implausible to credit, at first glance: "If anyone remembers 'Fairlight' — one of the great groups on the warez scene, you may be interested to know that one of their leaders, Tony Krvaric, is now the chairman of the San Diego Republican Party." A similar report (on which the TorrentFreak story above draws heavily, and which is cited for the same claim about Krvaric made in the above-linked Wikipedia entry) showed up last week in The Raw Story. According to these reports, Krvaric is the same person known as "strider" in the Warez scene. I called Krvaric seeking comment; though he was unavailable, I hope he chooses to comment by email to help inform any followup coverage. A telephone receptionist at the office of the San Diego Republican Party acknowledged that she knew of the claims, but refused further comment, citing workplace rules. While she would not directly acknowledge or deny the truth of the allegations, she asked me to "remember, these are things that happened more than 20 years ago." Since some people have been penalized quite harshly (and some have been jailed) for the sort of large-scale software piracy that Fairlight enabled, it's interesting that Krvaric has enjoyed instead a meteoric rise in conservative politics.