{ US Drone fleet can keep tabs on the movements of Americans, far from the battlefields. And it can hold data on them for 90 days — studying it to see if the people it accidentally spied upon are actually legitimate targets of domestic surveillance. | Wired | full story }
This system is enriching patent trolls—companies that buy patents in order to extort money from innovators. These trolls are like a modern day mafia. […]
The larger players can afford to buy patents to deter the trolls, but the smaller players—the innovative startups—can’t. Instead, they have to settle out of court. Patent trolls take advantage of this weakness. […]
In the smartphone market alone, $15-20 billion has already been spent by technology companies on building defenses, says Stanford Law School professor Mark Lemley. For example, Google bought Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion—mostly for its patents. An Apple-Microsoft-Oracle-Nokia consortium bought Nortel’s patent portfolio for $4.5 billion. Microsoft bought Novell’s patent portfolio for $450 million and some of AOL’s patents for $1 billion. Facebook bought some of Microsoft’s new AOL patents for $550 million. Lemley estimates that more than $500 million has been squandered on legal fees—and battles are just beginning. This is money that could have been spent, instead, on R&D. […]
Clearly, the laws need revision. Feld says that software patents should be completely abolished—that in the modern era of computing, the best defense is speed to market, execution, and continuous innovation.
photo { Harry Callahan }
Despite 28 years of research, there is still no vaccine that provides effective protection against HIV, and in that time around 25 million people have died of HIV-related causes. To understand why creating a vaccine is so hard, you need to understand HIV. This is no ordinary virus. […] The virus is the most diverse we know of. It mutates so rapidly that people might carry millions of different versions of it, just months after becoming infected. HIV’s constantly changing form makes it unlike any viral foe we have tried to thwart with a vaccine. […]
Vaccines train the immune system to recognise part of a virus, creating a long-term armada of antibodies that seek and destroy the invader, should it ever show its face. For HIV, the most obvious target is gp120, the surface protein that it uses to attach itself to human cells. But gp120 also constantly changes shape, making it difficult to recognise. It also comes in clusters of three that are shielded by bulky sugar molecules, hiding it from the immune system.
On top of that, HIV targets immune cells, the very agents that are meant to kill it. And it can hide for years by shoving its DNA into that of its host, creating a long-term reservoir of potential infection.
So, creating an HIV vaccine is like trying to fire a gun at millions of shielded, moving targets. Oh, and they can eat your bullets.
photo { Nan Goldin }
Forget Hannibal Lecter. The movie portrayal of serial killers as deranged loners with unusually high IQs is dangerously wrong and can hinder investigations. According to the FBI, serial killers are much different in real life. For years, law enforcement investigators, academics, mental health experts, and the media have studied serial murder, from Jack the Ripper in the late 1800s to the sniper killings in 2002, and from the “Zodiac Killer” in California to the “BTK Killer” in Kansas. These diverse groups have long attempted to understand the complex issues related to serial killers. In 2005, the FBI hosted a symposium in San Antonio, Texas. This report contains the collective insights of a team of experts on serial murder. The symposium’s focus was actually two-fold: to bridge the gap between fact and fiction and to build up our body of knowledge to generate a more effective investigative response.
Much of the general public’s knowledge concerning serial murder is a product of Hollywood productions. […] Law enforcement professionals are subject to the same misinformation from a different source: the use of circumstantial information. Professionals, such as investigators, prosecutors, and pathologists may have limited exposure to serial murder. Their experience may be based upon a single murder series, and the factors in that case are generalized to other serial killers. As a result, stereotypes take root in the police community regarding the nature and characteristics of serial murders. […]
The majority of serial killers are not reclusive, social misfits who live alone. They are not monsters and may not appear strange. Many serial killers hide in plain sight within their communities. Serial murderers often have families and homes, are gainfully employed, and appear to be normal members of the community. […]
Contrary to popular belief, serial killers span all racial groups. The racial diversification of serial killers generally mirrors that of the overall U.S. population. […] Female serial killers do exist. […]
Serial murders are not sexually-based. There are many other motivations for serial murders including anger, thrill, financial gain, and attention seeking.
photo { Keizo Kitajima }
The explosive lawsuit alleges on January 16, 2012, Travolta picked up the masseur in a black Lexus SUV, which had “Trojan condoms in the console of the vehicle” and the duo went to a room at the Beverly Hills Hotel. […] The masseuse tried to complete the deep tissue massage, but the lawsuit alleges, “Travolta, had removed his draping and was masturbating. Travolta’s penis was fully erect, and was roughly 8 inches in length, and his pubic hair was wirey and unkempt. […] The documents state that Travolta said there was a Hollywood actress staying at the hotel that “wanted three way sex, and wanted to be double penetrated.” Travolta said they could have that later, but first they needed to have sex together before calling her, so this way they would be in-sync with each other sexually.
Adscend Media agreed not to spam Facebook users and pay US$100,000 in court and attorney fees, according to the settlement. […] Adscend Media’s spamming generated up to $20 million a year.
Mummies were stolen from Egyptian tombs, and skulls were taken from Irish burial sites. Gravediggers robbed and sold body parts.
“The question was not, ‘Should you eat human flesh?’ but, ‘What sort of flesh should you eat?’ ” says Sugg. […]
Blood was procured as fresh as possible, while it was still thought to contain the vitality of the body. This requirement made it challenging to acquire. The 16th century German-Swiss physician Paracelsus believed blood was good for drinking, and one of his followers even suggested taking blood from a living body. […]
As science strode forward, however, cannibal remedies died out. The practice dwindled in the 18th century, around the time Europeans began regularly using forks for eating and soap for bathing. But Sugg found some late examples of corpse medicine: In 1847, an Englishman was advised to mix the skull of a young woman with treacle (molasses) and feed it to his daughter to cure her epilepsy. (He obtained the compound and administered it, as Sugg writes, but “allegedly without effect.”)
photo { Volgareva Irina }
Poltergeists are defined as paranormal, mischievous ghostly presences that appear to a select group of people. As paranormal entities, they are beyond investigation by rational scientific means. Or are they? Odd sensations, visions, felt presences, out-of-body experiences, etc. have all been explained by unusual brain activity. Hence, neuroscientists should consider that poltergeists exist in the mind of the perceiver, not as a physical reality in the external world.
A new paper by parapsychologist William G. Roll and colleagues reported on the case of a woman who experienced paranormal phenomenon after suffering a head injury. (…)
[After the head injury,] …the relationship with her first husband deteriorated because he insisted she was not the same person. According to her reports one night he tried to kill her. The anomalous phenomena began that night and have been intermittent since that time. Their intensity and frequency have increased during the last 2–3 years.
EEG recordings revealed chronically abnormal activity at a right temporal lobe electrode.
The bear famously tranquilized on the University of Colorado campus last week, and immortalized in a viral photo by CU student Andy Duann, met a tragic death early Thursday morning in the southbound lanes of U.S. 36.
A group of computer security researchers have refined an innovative method of combatting identity theft. (…) Its method, described in the journal Information Sciences, “continuously verifies users according to characteristics of their interaction with the mouse.”
The idea of user verification through mouse monitoring is not new. As the researchers note, “a major threat to organizations is identity thefts that are committed by internal users who belong to the organization.”
To combat this, some organizations turn “physiological biometrics” to verify the identity of a computer user. But these techniques, such as fingerprint sensors or retina scanners, “are expensive and not always available,” the researchers write.
An alternative approach is the use of “behavioral biometrics.” Such a system compiles biometric data such as “characteristics of the interaction between the user and input devices such as the mouse and keyboard” and constructs a “unique user signature.”
painting { Antonio Ciseri, Ecce Homo, 1871 }
Drawing on the metaphor of ‘Prozac’, Prozac leadership encourages leaders to believe their own narratives that everything is going well and discourages followers from raising problems or admitting mistakes. Prozac is used to denote and symbolize a widespread social addiction to excessive positivity. Problems can occur, particularly if this positivity is seen to be discrepant with everyday experience. For example, if leaders repeatedly promise that ‘things can only get better’ but over time this does not happen, followers can become increasingly sceptical and cynical. This article warns that Prozac leadership, whether in corporate, political or other settings, can damage performance by eroding trust, communication, learning and preparedness.
photo { Erik Wåhlström }
Albert Tirrell and Mary Bickford had scandalized Boston for years, both individually and as a couple, registering, as one observer noted, “a rather high percentage of moral turpitude.” Mary, the story went, married James Bickford at 16 and settled with him in Bangor, Maine. They had one child, who died in infancy. Some family friends came to console her and invited her to travel with them to Boston. Mary found herself seduced by the big city. (…)
James came to Boston at once, found Mary working in a house of ill repute on North Margin Street and returned home without her. She moved from brothel to brothel and eventually met Tirrell, a wealthy and married father of two. He and Mary traveled together as man and wife, changing their names whenever they moved, and conducted a relationship as volatile as it was passionate; Mary once confided to a fellow boarder that she enjoyed quarreling with Tirrell because they had “such a good time making up.” (…)
Choate kept that case in mind while plotting his defense of Tirrell, and considered an even more daring tactic: contending that Tirrell was a chronic sleepwalker. If he killed Mary Bickford, he did so in a somnambulistic trance and could not be held responsible.
photo { Linus Bill }
The internet is no stranger to crime. From counterfeit and stolen products, to illegal drugs, stolen identities and weapons, nearly anything can be purchased online with a few clicks of the mouse. The online black market not only can be accessed by anyone with an Internet connection, but the whole process of ordering illicit goods and services is alarmingly easy and anonymous, with multiple marketplaces to buy or sell anything you want.
Understanding how the market thrives—unregulated and untraceable—can give you a better sense of the threats (or resources) that affect you and your business.
In our scenario we are going to legally transfer $1,000 USD out of a regular bank account and into a mathematical system of binary codes, and then enter a neighborhood of the Internet largely used by criminals. This hidden world anyone lets purchase bulk downloads of stolen credit cards, as well as a credit card writer, blank cards, some “on stage” fake identities—and maybe even a grenade launcher they’ve had their eyes on.
A journey into the darker side of the Internet starts with two open-source programs: Bitcoin and the Tor Bundle.
artwork { General Idea, Miss General Idea Glove Pattern (Form Follows Fetish), 1975 }
For eight days running, YouTube’s front page had been taken over by “botted” videos—videos whose views had been artificially inflated by software programs designed to trick YouTube’s servers—and as far as YouTubers could tell, YouTube’s owner, the mighty Google, seemed powerless to stop them.
Google did eventually stop the worst of the bots, fixing a vulnerability in how the site counts mobile views. But the botting problem is far from over. And the episode leaves a lot of lingering questions over the site’s future.
related { Hulu, which attracted 31 million unique users in March under a free-for-all model, is taking its first steps to change to a model where viewers will have to prove they are a pay-TV customer to watch their favorite shows. | NY Post }
A single-celled organism in Norway has been called “mankind’s furthest relative.” It is so far removed from the organisms we know that researchers claim it belongs to a new base group, called a kingdom, on the tree of life. (…)
The organism, a type of protozoan, was found by researchers in a lake near Oslo. (…) They found it doesn’t genetically fit into any of the previously discovered kingdoms of life. It’s an organism with membrane-bound internal structures, called a eukaryote, but genetically it isn’t an animal, plant, fungi, algae or protist (the five main groups of eukaryotes).
Google’s harvesting of e-mails, passwords and other sensitive personal information from unsuspecting households in the United States and around the world was neither a mistake nor the work of a rogue engineer, as the company long maintained, but a program that supervisors knew about, according to new details from the full text of a regulatory report.
The report, prepared by the Federal Communications Commission after a 17-month investigation of Google’s Street View project, was released, heavily redacted, two weeks ago. Although it found that Google had not violated any laws, the agency said Google had obstructed the inquiry and fined the company $25,000.
On Saturday, Google released a version of the report with only employees’ names redacted.
The full version draws a portrait of a company where an engineer can easily embark on a project to gather personal e-mails and Web searches of potentially hundreds of millions of people as part of his or her unscheduled work time, and where privacy concerns are shrugged off.
The so-called payload data was secretly collected between 2007 and 2010 as part of Street View, a project to photograph streetscapes over much of the civilized world. When the program was being designed, the report says, it included the following “to do” item: “Discuss privacy considerations with Product Counsel.”
“That never occurred,” the report says.
Google says the data collection was legal. But when regulators asked to see what had been collected, Google refused, the report says, saying it might break privacy and wiretapping laws if it shared the material. (…)
Ever since information about the secret data collection first began to emerge two years ago, Google has portrayed it as the mistakes of an unauthorized engineer operating on his own and stressed that the data was never used in any Google product.
The report, quoting the engineer’s original proposal, gives a somewhat different impression. The data, the engineer wrote, would “be analyzed offline for use in other initiatives.” Google says this was never done. (…)
The Street View program used special cars outfitted with cameras. Google first said it was just photographing streets and did not disclose that it was collecting Internet communications called payload data, transmitted over Wi-Fi networks, until May 2010, when it was confronted by German regulators.
Eventually, it was forced to reveal that the information it had collected could include the full text of e-mails, sites visited and other data.
On March 23, 1994 a medical examiner viewed the body of Ronald Opus and concluded that he died from a gunshot wound of the head caused by a shotgun. Investigation to that point had revealed that the decedent had jumped from the top of a ten-story building with the intent to commit suicide. (He left a note indicating his despondency.) As he passed the 9th floor on the way down, his life was interrupted by a shotgun blast through a window, killing him instantly. Neither the shooter nor the decedent was aware that a safety net had been erected at the 8th floor level to protect some window washers, and that the decedent would most likely not have been able to complete his intent to commit suicide because of this.
Ordinarily, a person who starts into motion the events with a suicide intent ultimately commits suicide even though the mechanism might be not what he intended. That he was shot on the way to certain death nine stories below probably would not change his mode of death from suicide to homicide, but the fact that his suicide intent would not have been achieved under any circumstance caused the medical examiner to feel that he had homicide on his hands.
Further investigation led to the discovery that the room on the 9th floor from whence the shotgun blast emanated was occupied by an elderly man and his wife. He was threatening her with the shotgun because of an interspousal spat and became so upset that he could not hold the shotgun straight. Therefore, when he pulled the trigger, he completely missed his wife, and the pellets went through the window, striking the decedent.
When one intends to kill subject A, but kills subject B in the attempt, one is guilty of the murder of subject B. The old man was confronted with this conclusion, but both he and his wife were adamant in stating that neither knew that the shotgun was loaded. It was the longtime habit of the old man to threaten his wife with an unloaded shotgun. He had no intent to murder her; therefore, the killing of the decedent appeared then to be accident. That is, the gun had been accidentally loaded.
But further investigation turned up a witness that their son was seen loading the shotgun approximately six weeks prior to the fatal accident. That investigation showed that the mother (the old lady) had cut off her son’s financial support, and her son, knowing the propensity of his father to use the shotgun threateningly, loaded the gun with the expectation that the father would shoot his mother. The case now becomes one of murder on the part of the son for the death of Ronald Opus.
Now comes the exquisite twist. Further investigation revealed that the son, one Ronald Opus, had become increasingly despondent over the failure of his attempt to get his mother murdered. This led him to jump off the ten-story building on March 23, only to be killed by a shotgun blast through a 9th story window.
The medical examiner closed the case as a suicide.
{ Snopes | Continue reading | thanks Caitie }
Many crimes are generally performed by using language. Among them are solicitation, conspiracy, perjury, threatening, and bribery. In this chapter, we look at these crimes as acts of speech, and find that they have much in common – and a few interesting differences. For one thing, they involve different acts of speech, ranging from promises to orders. For another, most language crimes can be committed through indirect speech. Few criminals will say, “I hereby offer you a bribe,” or “I hereby engage you to kill my spouse.” Thus, many of the legal battles involve the extent to which courts may draw inferences of communicative intent from language that does not literally appear to be criminal. Yet the legal system draws a line in the sand when it comes to perjury, a crime that can only be committed through a direct fabrication. We provide a structured discussion of these various crimes that should serve to explain the similarities and difference among them.
