Absolutely nothing about the royal baby....

Republicans are begging please please oh please that there be riots because of George Zimmerman.  Because it will be Obama's fault.  Because he dared talk about race or something.

We already live in a surveillance world.  What can we possibly do about it?

Goldman Sacs playing the aluminium market.

Darrel Issa's manufacturing of the IRS 'scandal'.

Defense contractor employee resigns and says why.

Poison ivy is getting more potent with climate change.

A Hyundai that will help fight off zombies in the next apocalypse.

A pregnant woman needing a life saving abortion is only a 'matter of convenience' to Missouri Republican.

YOLO.

Ain't technology great?

Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram

Hackers backdoor the human brain, successfully extract sensitive data

ANOTHER robot I'd need to beat to death when I see it...

Clock.

Cyber wars

  Security researcher: I found secret reprogramming backdoors in Chinese microprocessors

  Flame: Massive cyber-attack discovered, researchers say

Monsanto, Bank of America, Bees, and Cavemen...

Monsanto Found Guilty of Chemical Poisoning in France 

Honeybee Deaths Linked to Corn Insecticides

Corn insecticide linked to great die-off of beneficial honeybees

Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail

US e-voting system cracked in less than 48 hours

Cave Fossil Find: New Human Species or "Nothing Extraordinary"? 

Greece, Russia... it's all the same

To Fox News...

And by the way... This last week was the warmest on record for the US.  Not that it means anything to anyone except beige-wearing, latte-drinking, tree-hugging liberal islamofascistic socialists.

Quietly trying to gut public schools.

The Germans have plans to keep net neutrality...  German Hackers Are Building a DIY Space Program to Put Their Own Uncensored Internet into Space

Don't tell anybody, but Medicare is still more cost-efficient than private insurance

Climate change email scandal!!1!

Leaked emails expose the fact that scientists were complaining about bad scientific processes and how much work they had to do and stuff:

Climate change is real and man-made. Period, end of story. But recently, some emails have leaked that conclusively prove that climate scientists... are really pissed off that a well-funded industry exists that subverts and denies their work.

A "hacker" obtained a bunch of emails from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia and posted them to some website, and for some reason Matt Drudge and the right-wing media have decided that these emails are proof of a massive conspiracy to make up global warming, for fun. The emails are mostly scientists complaining about political pressures and people they dislike and things that make their job—and their job is attempting to reconstruct climates of hundreds or millions of years ago based on fucking ice floes and tree rings—harder.

Maybe if people actually READ the emails before commenting on them..... um... be right back....

Update: Scientific American and Mother Jones have replies.

Update 12/1: Via Mahakal in comments, Will Bunch of Attytood has a good overview.

Blog sprinkles

Phila of Bouphonia's Friday Hope Blog.

Prepare to be trampled in every Wal-Mart except New York?

The 401k pirates

Newspaper Narcissism

Pakistan's meltdown:

In the last few days, an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 Pakistanis have fled to North West Frontier Province, just south of the military operation, according to U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees spokesman Ron Redmond, citing provincial government data.

Another 300,000 Pakistanis are on the move or expected to flee the fighting, he said Friday.

The massive displacement is a result of "more widespread" fighting between Pakistani forces and Taliban militants as well as people taking "advantage of the partial lifting of curfews to move into safer areas," according to a UNHCR news release.

Those fleeing the recent fighting are in addition to 555,000 previously displaced civilians who have fled their homes in Pakistan's tribal region and North West Frontier Province since August, according to the U.N. agency.

Oh look, Kyrgyzstan is having problems with terrorism too...

The threat posed by Islamic militant groups in Central Asia, especially in the Kyrgyz and Tajik portions of the Ferghana Valley, appears to be growing, according to the US State Department’s recently released annual report on terrorism.

The State Department’s 2008 Country Reports on Terrorism, released April 30, suggest that the membership in Kyrgyzstan of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, a group that the State Department says advocates "the establishment of a borderless, theocratic Islamic state throughout the entire Muslim world," grew from 5,000 in 2006 to 15,000 in 2008.

Words used to describe President Barack Obama.

Maybe we should reconsider the death penalty?:

A cyber hacker who claimed to have stolen the medical records of more than 8.3 million residents of the state of Virginia is demanding 10 million dollars for their return, the Washington Post reported Thursday. The FBI and state officials have confirmed that they are investigating the incident.

The report came a week after someone managed to take over a Virginia Department of Health website that monitors prescriptions to track the sales of controlled substances. The hacker shut down the site and posted a ransom note online, claiming to have stolen and encrypted the data and threatening to sell the data to the highest bidder if authorities did not pay him by Thursday.

"Attention Virgina," the demand read, "In my possession right now are 8,257,378 patient records and a total of 35,548,087 prescriptions. Also, I made an encrypted backup and deleted the original. Unfortunately for Virginia, their backups seem to have gone missing, too."

Abba returns!

Roland Burris doesn't leave!

Belated April Fool's?

The Conficker worm awakes!:

The Conficker worm is finally doing something--updating via peer-to-peer between infected computers and dropping a mystery payload on infected computers, Trend Micro said on Wednesday.

[snip]

The software appeared to be a .sys component hiding behind a rootkit, which is software that is designed to hide the fact that a computer has been compromised, according to Trend Micro. The software is heavily encrypted, which makes code analysis difficult, the researchers said.

[snip]

The worm disabled security software and blocks access to security Web sites. To check if your computer is infected you can use this Conficker Eye Chart or this site at the University of Bonn.

Nice of you to notice

Most electronic voting systems can be hacked, CIA expert says.

So where the hell have you guys been the last eight years?

Um.....

Google mistakes own blog for spam, deletes it
Company says normal policy procedure -- not external hack -- resulted in Custom Search Blog temporarily hosting nonsensical message

Alrighty then...

Internet security flaw

LAS VEGAS (AP) - A newly discovered flaw in the Internet's core infrastructure not only permits hackers to force people to visit Web sites they didn't want to, it also allows them to intercept e-mail messages, the researcher who discovered the bug said Wednesday.

Considering the silent nature of the attack and the sensitive nature of a lot of electronic correspondence, the potential for damage from this second security flaw is high. But there's no evidence yet that this method of targeting e-mail has been used in a successful attack.

Dan Kaminsky of Seattle-based security consultant IOActive Inc. exposed a giant vulnerability in the Internet's design that, in one case, allowed hackers to reroute some computer users in Texas to a fake Google.com site loaded with automated advertisement-clicking programs, a scam to generate profits for the hackers from those clicks.

The flaw wasn't in the site itself, it was in the back-end machines responsible for guiding computers to that site.

The vulnerability Kaminsky found is especially insidious because it allows criminals to tamper with machines whose reliability and trustworthiness is critical for the Internet to function properly.

Kaminsky, who spoke Wednesday at the Black Hat hacker conference in Las Vegas, has given few details publicly about the vulnerability he found in the Domain Name System (DNS), a network of servers used to connect computers to Web sites.

Just shut up and go eat your food and play with your toys

China has this covered:

BEIJING — China denied charges Tuesday that its military had hacked into a Pentagon computer network, the second time in a week that the nation has fended off accusations of cyber-attacks from within its borders.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said the latest charges "reflect a Cold War mentality."

Britain's Financial Times reported in its U.S. edition Tuesday that Chinese hackers had broken into a Pentagon computer network in June, leading to a shutdown of a system that serves the office of Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

The newspaper quoted an unnamed senior U.S. official as saying that the source of the attack had been traced to the People's Liberation Army. Other unnamed officials said they also were fairly certain that the attacks came from within China's military.

More than one Category 5 aiming for you

The Storm Worm commandeers millions of PCs:

Storm Worm Dwarfs World's Top Supercomputers

The network of compromised Microsoft Windows computers under the thumb of the criminals who control the Storm Worm has grown so huge that it now has more raw distributed computing power than all of the world's top supercomputers, security experts say.

Estimates on the number of machines infected by Storm range from one million to 10 million, depending upon which security sources you believe. But hardly anyone would argue that many thousands of new PCs are being stricken by the worm each day, largely because the worm authors are continuously changing their tactics to trick people into installing it.

Massive pools of virus or worm-infected PCs, known as "botnets," are principally used to blast out spam, host scam Web sites, or to flood targeted Web sites with so much junk traffic all at once that they simply crash and are rendered unreachable by legitimate visitors. But the criminals who control these infected machines could just as easily use them to do some serious number-crunching, the kind of computational analysis typically left to the world's fastest supercomputers.

Blogger virus

Be careful. Via Bryan at Why Now?, BBC News:

Google's Blogger site is being used by malicious hackers who are posting fake entries to some blogs.

The fake entries contain weblinks that lead to booby-trapped downloads that could infect a Windows PC.

Infected computers are being hijacked by the gang behind the attacks and either mined for saleable data or used for other attacks.

The Blogger attack is the latest in a series by a gang that has managed to hijack hundreds of thousands of PCs.

[snip]

STORM WORM SUBJECT LINES

are you kidding me? lol

Dude dont send that stuff to my home email...

Dude your gonna get caught, lol

HAHAHAHAHAHA, man your insane!

I cant belive you did this

LMAO, your crazy man

LOL, dude what are you doing

man, who filmed this thing?

oh man your nutz

OMG, what are you thinking

Your votes will not count

If you are in a blue state. Greg Palast's video on NOW 'investigates a secret Republican plan designed to disqualify voters.'

Update: In California:

State-sanctioned teams of computer hackers were able to break through the security of virtually every model of California’s voting machines and change results or take control of some of the systems’ electronic functions, according to a University of California study released Friday.

The researchers “were able to bypass physical and software security in every machine they tested,” said Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who authorized the “top to bottom review” of every voting system certified by the state.

Neither Bowen nor the investigators were willing to say exactly how vulnerable California elections are to computer hackers, especially because the team of computer experts from the UC system had top-of-the-line security information plus more time and better access to the voting machines than would-be vote thieves likely would have.

“All information available to the secretary of state was made available to the testers,” including operating manuals, software and source codes usually kept secret by the voting machine companies, Matt Bishop, UC Davis computer science professor who led the “red team” hacking effort, said in his summary of the results.

Shakesville

Under DOS attack and temporarily silenced. The blogosphere takes notice:

Bryan of Why Now? and whig of Cannablog explain.

Mustang Bobby of Bark Bark Woof Woof keeps track of the bloggers.

The police in Los Angeles have begun to impound people's cars who drag race on streets. They then FLATTEN the cars. Maybe when (not if) they catch the hacker responsible, they take his computer out on to the street and drive over it a few times....

We're number one!

Um... then again...

According to the report, Symantec identified more than 6 million "bot-infected" computers globally during the second half of 2006 - this represents a 26 percent increase from the previous period.

A more startling finding was that theft or loss of computer or data storage paraphernalia like USB memory keys, accounted for 54 percent of all identity-theft related breaches.

[snip]

Symantec identified the U.S. as having the highest level of malicious activity with 31 percent, while China took a distant second with 10 percent and Germany was close in third place with 7 percent.

Arthur Wong, senior vice president, Symantec Security Response and Managed Services said in a statement, "As cyber criminals become increasingly malicious, they continue to evolve their attack methods to become more complex and sophisticated in order to prevent detection."

Unpatched holes in Firefox, IE

Firefox and Internet Explorer users beware: There are serious, unpatched flaws in both browsers that could allow the manipulation of authentication cookies and the hijacking of files from your Windows machine.

Flaw in Firefox.

"A flaw in Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox browser makes it easy for cybercriminals to steal user information on Web sites where users create their own pages, such as MySpace.com."