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Addiction RSS FeedsThe Great Big White House Email Scandal - Since it hasn't been getting nearly the press that it deserves, you may have missed the story about Republican White Staff members who apparently use two different email addresses: one for the people and one that was completely secret (which is illegal). Well a court subpoenaed the alternative email address emails so they could review them to signs of illegal activity and magically 5 million emails have gone missing (oops I pressed Empty Trash by mistake!). Well the story gets even more interesting since many of the "lost" emails have now been found. I'm betting that if those emails could be found and shown to the public, that it would blow the US republican government away. The Spare Change 9/11 video was very well done and brought about a lot of speculation about 9/11 that has never fully be refuted. Well if you...Feed Source: www.informationaddiction.com The US Internet is now wiretappable -
On May 11th the US internet as a whole became (or soon will become) wiretappable according to federal law. Nothing good can come of this.
A privacy watchdog group slams Google's privacy giving it the lowest possible grade.
There has been quite a bit of focus on Google's customer data histories lately and if you weren't scared before (and you have a Google account that you regularly use), you should definitely check out Your Life According to Google. It shows you a summary of everything that Google knows about you (and thats a lot!).
Speaking of Google and privacy, both the ... A Case for Never Colonizing another Planet -
Is the Milky Way's center not a huge black hole? Our galaxy's center seems to emit gamma radiation (which can not escape from a black hole) maybe this is our universe's missing mass?
According to the newest reports (and we've seen a lot of these recently), there are giant pools of frozen water found on Mars.
Some amazing pictures of the Sun and Earth from the new Hinode (Japanese for Sunrise) spacecraft.
A Space Tourism company to offer 5 minutes of weightlessness and upper atmosphere travel for a mere $200k. Cheaper but not nearly cheap enough =).
Finally a very interesting, scientific and persuasive argument for ... Seadragon -
I've had this in my basket for a while but its well worth a click, check out these awesome zooming images. Such a cool ideal. (Remember to scroll down on the page!)
The Eye of Science (which I've posted before) has been updated with even more cool science type nudies.
Some sweet pics of Saturn from the Cassini spacecraft.
A virtual exhibit of Nature Desktop Backgrounds useful if you don't have a cool background for your computer.
Cam sent me the first link to Microsoft's new Seadragon project. You have to install a plug-in to get it fully working but its pretty damn cool once you get it up and running. Check out ... 30 Days with all the major OSs - Long time IA reader and friend Travis got me super excited a year or so ago over the combined technologies of RSS, BitTorrent and portable hard drives with h.264 (HD TV) decoding. The idea being that you can sign up for an RSS feed for each of your favourite shows, the RSS reader would pass off the torrent link to your BitTorrent software and it would automatically download the show for you with basically no work on your part and downloaded immediately after the torrent is posted. If you download the torrents onto your h.264 hard drive and then hook it up to your TV, you're getting all the shows that you want, without the ads, the day after they air, in HD quality for free! Its a pretty sweet combination and very close to the panacea of TV for me. All of the pieces are coming together (see last update's post on h. 264 enclosures, so I was happy to see a link to a new RSS reader for Bi... Build your own... sex doll...? - Wow this might be the least number of Fun Stuff links I've had in years. Where did all the fun go?!
If you haven't seen it already, the trailer for Pan's Labyrinth looks great its all in Spanish but still!
Here's a relatively creepy link to How to build your own sex doll.
An interesting look at the best ways to utilize caffeine shockingly imbibbing caffeine in the morning is not recommended.
A very cool accent determiner, which pegged me as Canadian. I wonder how some of the east coast canadian accents do in this thing?
Finally, Microsoft has patented doing ... More reason to despise Microsoft - Seems Microsoft has a hankering for selling election voting systems based on their operating system. Fair enough - I have no problem with a free market of products.The catch is, though, that they are trying to sneak in changes to the law so that they won't have to disclose their source code for the product - despite this being fought for and put into law:
"Now the software giant has gone a step further, not just saying “we won't comply with your law” but actively trying to change state law to serve their corporate interests. Microsoft's attorneys drafted an amendment which would add a paragraph to Section 1-104 of NYS Election Law defining “election-dedicated voting system technology”. Microsoft’s proposed change to state law would effectively render our current requirements for escrow and the ability for independent review of source code in the event of disputes completely meaningless - and with it the pro... Canadian Environmental Plan a ''Total Fraud'' - Al Gore (one of the more intelligent people I've seen talk on the issue recently where the hell was this when you were in power?!) calls Canada's new environmental plan "total fraud". I just don't understand how Canada isn't a leading force in the environmental movement we have sooo much to loose!!
Food labeling (or the lack of it) has always been a major issue for me. Selma passes on some information about what the various labels really mean is Organic really organic?
After some serious pressure from Greenpeace, Apple has announced that it will go Green(er) by 2008.
A radical new engine design promises... Censorship is Growing on the Internet - I think I wrote about this before but I can't remember so here it is again: many people don't know that there is a Simple version of Wikipedia. Check out the simple version of the Bible entry. Wacky.
The EFF has uncovered a special Army unit called the Army Censorship Unit. Nice. The news get from US warzones is some of the most censored information in our world and this censorship has no rules so its not just tactically sensitive stuff we're not seeing.
A US Federal court re-affirms that blog owners are not responsible for their commenters now if I could only get the IA comment system back up and running! ... The first good patent news in ages - The US Supreme court has finally done something useful to do with patents, they have made a ruling that makes it harder to defend "obvious" patents (think hyperlinks and Amazon's one-click ordering). Its a small step but also a big one!
Rumour has it that Canada will see the introduction of a Canadian DMCA this Spring. Get your fighting fingers ready we're going to need to send some emails to government on this one!
Brazil bypasses Merck copyrights on AIDS drugs (because Merck refused to cut them a deal on the important drugs) and will now be buying the expensive medication from Indian knock-off factories.
The CTO of HBO says DRM would be more user friendly if it was named ... Drive Enclosures that play Video - Long time IA reader and friend Travis turned me on to hard drive enclosures that do more than just well enclosure your hard drive. Some of the new enclosures have very cool features. I just bought this Vantec enclosure which has eSATA support (which means that you can plug it directly into your motherboard's SATA ports thus giving you full speed transfers to the enclosure (and you don't have to wait for the slower USB 2.0 connection)). But there are other even cooler Enclosures to be found, check out TVIX's line of enclosures: this one plays both full Divx and the new (and commonly used for HDTV downloads) h.264 video standard. Simply hook the enclosure up to your computer (or network) transfer the shows across and then hook the enclosure up to your TV and bam! you've got access to any video your computer can play ... Time for a much needed Update! - No excuses this time. I'm -still- not working much, so no real time to surf the net but I'm finally caught up so buckle up this update is going to be John Holmes in size!
I actually saw the (uncensored!) video for this song on much music, I was shocked! The song is awesome and in fact these guys have a cartoon show about themselves as well. Perhaps even more funny is the censored version of the video: "yeaaaah!".
Selma found this great site (and as we've found out, its terrific at parties!) that lets you upload a facial picture of yourself and then compares your picture with common celebrities. I ended up with Alex Baldwin, Patrick Swayze, Bob Saget Katie Holmes ?!?! WTF? The only big downside is that you have to create an account (and navigate the really annoying UI in order to pu... Singularity Summit - Ran across this on boingboing. It's some videos of a conference held at Stanford about the coming singularity. That is, the singularity when AI surpasses human intelligence creating a defining moment in the human species. I haven't actually checked it out but it just HAS to be good.... The Internet's Savior: He's here. - For those living under a rock and missed the story that is erupting all over the Internet, here it is:
Ron Paul is a congressman from Texas who's been getting a lot of blog/internet news coverage for having the kahunas to speak truth to the American people. After the first and only 2 debates Ron Paul has been first or second. Granted these are not scientific - but neither are the polls conducted over the phone: a significant number of them don't even have his name on their list.
Honestly, does it take a lot of skill to copy a list of candidates from the official list to another 'polling' list? No. The MSM is clearly stifling this man's message.
ABC, MSNBC, FOX, Yahoo! News, and others failed in their fiduciary responsibility to report the news and instead covered the other "front runners". Only after thousands of Internet -ians called them on their stunt did they acknowledge the truth: resulting on them simply reporting the results on their own polls with Ron P... The Conundrum of Being an Eco-geek - Being an Eco-geek is a tough job. You'd love to run down to Best Buy and pick up the hottest new TV or Slingbox or whatever but you know that buying electronics its one of the worst things you can do for the environment (they use scads of power, their parts come from all over the world (and from many sketchy economies) and what's in the electronics is generally bad if not toxic for the environment. So this weeks Ecology topic focuses on being as green as you can with your technology (and some other stuff too!):
Treehugger has a nice guide on: how to go green with your electronics.
And Extremetech also has an good article on: how to build a green PC.
Google continues its delicate balancing act in my The Best... Real Datahaven created... in North Korean Embassy??? - I've written about datahaven's before, basically they secure connected data warehouses that can house any information without fear that the data storage will be compromised. Haven Co. created their own version on an oil platform on the coast of britain but I've always thought that a communist country would be the ideal place for a datahaven because its the ultimate equalizer imagine a world in which any copyrighted idea or information could be housed securely and easily accessible to anyone who wanted it? I think it would chance the worlds economy in a huge way. The Pirate Bay bittorrent tracker site isn't anywhere close to as anarchistic as my ideal but it is a cool idea: a fully legal uncensored torrent site. After pressure from Big Content in the US, the Swedish government cracked down on the Pirate Bay and since then they have b... GM Food Increasingly Causing Health Problems -
Our food labeling laws are such a joke. All genetically modified food should be labeled. How hard is it to do? Check out this suppressed report that shows a cancer link to GM potatoes.
Meanwhile, a new US law would enforce labeling of cloned meats are these really on the market already?!? Don't we need to test this stuff?
A GM version of Maze has been shown to be toxic to the liver and kidneys. Worse, Monsanto (the maker) knew about it and attempted to conceal it in publications.
And Organic fruit has been shown to be healthier for the body than GM fruit.
In other news, a scary drug is being worked on that can ... Yay! My least favourite topic recently! -
The current head of the CIA is looking to -expand- the US's spying powers both at home and abroad. Must be more police-statey.
A huge US conglomerate that owns stores such as TJ Maxx admits (2 years later) to the largest loss of consumer data -ever-. A mere 45.7 million names, addresses and credit/debit card numbers. So when are you getting the money you deserve for the "slight" inconvenience of identity theft? Ummm, never.
Canadian Bill C-416 requires wiretapping by ISPs. Fight against this bill and write your local MPs!!!
An interesting article on how passwords get cracked and why longer passwords are -way- bett... Leopard, iPhone and AppleTV - Apple has been in the news a -lot- lately. I've gotta say, I'm pretty annoyed that Apple's new OS X Leopard won't be out until at least September. I bought my new laptop looking forward to a real 64bit operating system and its certainly not going to be Vista. This news that there will be no 3rd Party software on the iPhone didn't help my mood either. Plus the early reviews of Apple TV have been pretty mediocre (lack of support for common video formats being the reason I'll never get one).
In other hardware news:
PC World continues its series of Top Lists (which I'm convinced is the only hits they actually get) with a ... SnoopFree - I talk about computer security a fair bit on this site. Why? Because its -extremely- difficult to keep your computer completely secure (especially if you run Windows). I think that while a virus could be really bad spyware is a much more insidious and potentially crushing breach. I'm amazed at the number of people that -still- don't use Spyware Search & Destroy or Ad-aware regularly (in my opinion -way- more important that a virus scanner). One of the biggest problems with spyware scanners is that they can only protect against programs they know about. That's where SnoopFree comes in. It protects you against -any- program that tries to read your screen and you'll be shocked by the programs that attempt to do so! Just like Search & Destroy, its easy to install and takes up few resources. Why not have the added protection?
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