Pope John Paul II, on fire, waves from beyond the grave

the Daily Mail: "This fiery figure is being hailed as Pope John Paul II making an appearance beyond the grave. The image, said by believers to show the Holy Father with his right hand raised in blessing, was spotted during a ceremony in Poland to mark the second anniversary of his death. Details appeared on the Vatican News Service, a TV station in Rome which specialises in religious news broadcasts. "


The Vatican offered no explanation as to why the former Pope might have chosen to appear wrapped in burning, hellish flames.

RFID implants linked to animal tumors

AP: "When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved implanting microchips in humans, the manufacturer said it would save lives, letting doctors scan the tiny transponders to access patients' medical records almost instantly. The FDA found 'reasonable assurance' the device was safe, and a sub-agency even called it one of 2005's top 'innovative technologies.'

But neither the company nor the regulators publicly mentioned this: A series of veterinary and toxicology studies, dating to the mid-1990s, stated that chip implants had 'induced' malignant tumors in some lab mice and rats. 'The transponders were the cause of the tumors,' said Keith Johnson, a retired toxicologic pathologist, explaining in a phone interview the findings of a 1996 study he led at the Dow Chemical Co. in Midland, Mich."


Um. Whoops. More on the back-story, including hints of political corruption and coverup of the risks at 27bStroke6... Un-chip your pets.

NYC Trying to Regulate Photon Detection and Recording

New York Times: "Some tourists, amateur photographers, even would-be filmmakers hoping to make it big on YouTube could soon be forced to obtain a city permit and $1 million in liability insurance before taking pictures or filming on city property, including sidewalks."



..meanwhile installing their own surveillance cameras on every corner.

Now even the ads are watching us...

Wired: "The eyebox2 from xuuk is a palm-size video camera surrounded by infrared light-emitting diodes. It can record eye contact with 15-degree accuracy at a distance of up to 33 feet. A simple glance from a passerby scores an impression, providing a tally that enables new Google-like measurement metrics that real-world advertisers could only dream about until recently."


Peachy.

Jobs / RIAA SlapFight - none of it matters..

Lots of layers to the Steve Jobs / RIAA / DRM conversation..

Jobs, of course, recently called for an end to DRM. It's been speculated that this is less a genuine dislike of DRM (which has given Apple a lock on music distribution and allowed them to dictate low wholesale prices for downloads as a loss leader for iPod sales) and more of a response to the EU desire to open "FairPlay" (quotes intentional) DRM to other providers.

Blame shift to record labels - they make us use DRM.

The RIAA, in turn, has responded with a call (mirroring the EU) to open "FairPlay" DRM. This is likely less about a genuine desire to improve competition for consumers and more about bitterness at Apple's dominance and price-setting - coupled with a genuine desire to ensure that downloads are a horrible consumer experience.

Blame shift to Apple - they have a monopoly.
Blame shift to consumers - they're all thieves. (enter swat team raids and lawsuits against 13 year olds, despite an independent study showing that sharing has zero impact on record sales).

With 90% of the music industry's revenue coming from DRM-free CDs (the profitable atom-bit model of yesteryear), the consumer experience with a CD is mostly better than downloads. You can rip, mix, burn, move songs freely between devices in uncrippled form, etc.

And with 90% of tracks on iPods being DRM free and 'pirated' according to Microsoft's Ballmer, (Real's Glaser puts it at 50%, and the music industry would like to think it's all pirated), the recording industry would like nothing more than to have the Internet go away, downloads to disappear, and CDs to remain the dominant form of delivery. And entire CDs, to boot. None of this 'single track' stuff -- since there are maybe a few commercial hits at best on any given CD. It's more profitable and doesn't require any change of business model.

Ensuring that downloads are crippled with DRM keeps the old model a better experience (if more expensive).

Meanwhile, it all sucks for consumers. Who would like to be able to get the tracks they want at a reasonable price and use them in a fair manner on any device they want - without threat of expiration.

The bottom line is that the corporate slap fight in the media really doesn't matter - no one has the consumer's interest on the agenda. (and where are the aritsts in all this?)

If the two choices are either overpriced CDs with a few songs you want, or crippled downloads laden with restrictive DRM schemes, piracy remains the best overall consumer experience and will continue to flourish.

Now that AACS is utterly busted in multiple directions, the MPAA should bear this all in mind as they crawl in bed with Micro$oft.

And consumers should bear this in mind as choose vendors, services and as they vote.

House introduces bill to require ISPs to monitor, archive everything forever

CNet: "All Internet service providers would need to track their customers' online activities to aid police in future investigations under legislation introduced Tuesday as part of a Republican 'law and order agenda.'

Employees of any Internet provider who fail to store that information face fines and prison terms of up to one year, the bill says. The U.S. Justice Department could order the companies to store those records forever."

"Because there is no limit on how broad the rules can be, Gonzales would be permitted to force Internet providers to keep logs of Web browsing, instant message exchanges, or e-mail conversations indefinitely."

"That broad wording also would permit the records to be obtained by private litigants in noncriminal cases, such as divorces and employment disputes. That raises additional privacy concerns, civil libertarians say."


It's a given that this is a bad idea for several reasons - from 'this completely guts the notion of personal privacy' to 'the law of unintended consequences'. While surely a boon for storage companies, it pretty much sucks for everyone else.

1. Tremendous privacy implications for individuals, small business, anyone using an ISP for any reason.

2. Giant cyber-criminal target (crack, mine, build profiles for spearphishing, compromise unencrypted passwords, find legal but extortable information, etc)

3. Will trap data of normal people and do exactly zero to trap info on criminals (who are using encryption, other people's connections, blah blah)

4. IP and behavioral data doesn't prove identity or intent. Functionally useless. (see Splunk'd AOL Search Info, wardriving, RIAA/MPAA dragnets, log poisoning and rewriting, etc.)

So how do people (law enforcement, divorce lawyers, lawyers) access the traffic? where is it stored? how is it secured? how does one review the data for accuracy? will slightly different system-times wrongly implicate individuals based on timestamps and IPs ? (See 'DHCP for Dummies). How do we treat wifi hotspots? Open home and business wifi access points? Rogue ISP employees? Worms, botnets and malware infected computers (and whatever they might do)? Compromised law enforcement logins? We could do this all night.

It's retarded, impractical, an abhorrent breach of privacy, and dangerous for everyone.

On the plus side, maybe this will finally negate the 'net neutrality' argument (treating different bits differently) as users start using Tor, anonymizers, tunneling to Russian VPNs, etc. to encrypt all traffic - leaving nothing for ISP logs to grab or interpret. Maybe this is a good thing.

This is the litmus test for "do everyday people value their own privacy - and is the government still of, by, and for the people"...

U.S. Set to Begin a Vast Expansion of DNA Sampling

New York Times: "The Justice Department is completing rules to allow the collection of DNA from most people arrested or detained by federal authorities, a vast expansion of DNA gathering"

"The goal, justice officials said, is to make the practice of DNA sampling as routine as fingerprinting for anyone detained by federal agents, including illegal immigrants. Until now, federal authorities have taken DNA samples only from convicted felons."

"While the proposed rules have not been finished, justice officials said they were certain to bring a huge new workload for the F.B.I. laboratory that logs, analyzes and stores federal DNA samples. Federal Bureau of Investigation officials said they anticipated an increase ranging from 250,000 to as many as 1 million samples a year. The laboratory currently receives about 96,000 samples a year, said Robert Fram, chief of the agency’s Scientific Analysis Section."


All your DNA are belong to us. Forever.
And still doesn't address the issue of the millions of chimeric twins out there. One body - multiple versions of DNA.

Face search engine will let anyone find every picture of you on the Internets...

New Scientist: "A search engine that uses sophisticated facial recognition to allow users to identify and find people in online images will launch next month. But civil liberties groups say the biometric-style tool could compromise the privacy of anyone who has their picture online."


Yikes. And people have called us paranoid for years because we chose not to be in photographs or put our mugs on the Internets... Nice search tool for stalkers, ID thieves and governments.. Not to mention blackmailers. Or employers who want to pre-screen candidates for 'youthful indiscretions'..

Come to think of it, this is a huge risk to undercover officers, CIA or other covert operatives... Take a picture of someone who's past or loyalty or identity may be suspect, post it to the web, then run a cross index for every photo of this person -- turning up any family photos (and in the process, identifying family members), further leveraging any surrounding ID or metadata to suss out the real identity of the individual in question... This could go very dark very quickly.

It's like a huge internet-wide social network that you can't opt out of.

The idea's out there now (and was originally developed for governments), but it should still die a fiery death on principal.

Microsoft wants robots to run Windows

CNet: "Microsoft on Wednesday took the wraps off its first commercial operating system for robots, with hopes of paving the way for a broader robotics industry and taking a central role in its development. "


What could possibly go wrong?

USA Today invents 'Thirdhand Smoke'

USATODAY: "As any parent knows, crawling babies explore the world by touching — and tasting — anything they can get their wet little hands on.

If their parents use tobacco, that curiosity may expose babies to what some doctors are calling 'thirdhand' smoke — particles and gases given off by cigarettes that cling to walls, clothes and even hair and skin... ...But his work suggests that babies may take in nicotine and other chemicals just by hugging their mothers — even if their mothers never light up next to them..."


Would someone please panic? We're surprised they didn't use 'hug of death' as the headline...