More flooding no one ever expected

by USACEpublicaffairs

Record flooding in North Dakota forces evacuation of 11,000
[Via Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog]

A 1-in-100 to 1-in-200 year flood is in progress in North Dakota along the Souris River, where flood heights never seen in recorded history are putting unprecedented pressure on the river’s levees. The Lake Darling flood control reservoir located about 15 miles upstream from Minot, North Dakota, the state’s 4th largest city, is full to overflowing. Record releases of water are occurring to prevent the lake’s dam from overtopping.

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We built levees to keep the water out. We failed.

Having a miscarraige and going to prison for life

US: women prosecuted for having miscarriages
[Via Butterflies and Wheels]

Yes really.

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Does this really seem the best use of our prisons?

Telling your age from your spit

by spettacolopuro

A Bit of Spit Could Reveal Your Biological Age—or Your Criminal Activity
[Via 80beats]

What’s the News: While you may be able to hide your age with makeup and plastic surgery, don’t think that your deception is foolproof. Researchers have now developed a technique to ascertain your age to within five years using only your saliva. The new method, published in the journal PLoS One, could someday be used by forensic experts to pinpoint the age of crime suspects.

How the Heck:

The researchers began by taking saliva samples from 34 pairs of identical, male twins between the ages of 21 and 55 years old. Eric Vilain, the lead researcher and director of the Center for Society and Genetics at UCLA, was originally interested in studying sexual orientation differences in identical twins. He wanted to see if environmental influences─diet, stress, exposure to toxins, etc.─caused any epigenetic changes that could contribute to the twins’ sexuality differences. Vilain and his team focused their attention on methylation, a …

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Pretty interesting observation. They could guess a person’s age with 5 years just from the spit. I would also expect blood would provide the same thing so that police procedurals in the near future will be able to say how old the perp was if they can find some of their blood at the scene.

Things don’t change: Part of the reason our country is broke(n)

by jasonippolito

Political Animal – Is the answer to the ‘sabotage’ question ‘obvious’?
[Via Washington Monthly]

Seven months after raising the specter of Republicans trying to hurt the economy on purpose, I can’t help but notice the “sabotage” question appears to be picking up some steam.

Just this month, some high-profile, mainstream pundits have begun exploring the issue, and just this week, two of Congress’ most powerful Democrats broached the same subject.

Yesterday, Michael Tomasky went even further, arguing that Democrats should start “saying openly what has been clear for months or even years now — that as long as economic recovery would work to the political benefit of Barack Obama, the Republicans have been, are, and will be in favor of sabotaging the economy.” Tomasky added this is “obvious.”

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Legislation that the GOP proposed last Congress is now anathema because it might help the economy in the short term. The GOP leadership says their top priority should be  to deny the President a second term.

Not jobs. Not stimulus. Not fixing a broken economy. Do anything to deny the President any success. Even now when the Democrats suggest a tax break for businesses that might create some jobs, the exact idea proposed by Republicans, the House Republicans are against it.

If they have to bring down the economy, well Obama forced them to do it.

When one side would rather bring the house down than renovate it, even if the renovations were originally their own idea, the house will not stand. One side wants the house to remain divided and hopes to increase their political power when it falls.

We have seen this before.

It used to be that the Republicans tried to keep the house from falling by healing the divides. Now they are a party that works to bring the house down.

I wonder what Lincoln thinks. Because these were exactly the same tactics done against his work. He talked about this at the Cooper Union speech in 1860  – the speech that probably sealed his Presidency.

He said of his political opponents:

Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.

[...]

 

But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!”

I hope that when this divided house falls – as it did before and as one side seems to be playing for – the consequences are not nearly so devastating.

 

 

 

An artist posting their own work on their own web site – piracy!

Drake Tells Universal Music To Stop Taking Down The Music He’s Leaking
[Via Techdirt]

It’s been an interesting week for Universal Music. The company was outed for their secret war on various hiphop blogs, including some of the sites of their own artists, such as 50 Cent, whose personal site was declared a “pirate” site on a list that Universal helped put together. Now, super popular Universal artist Drake is lashing out at Universal for issuing takedowns over his own music. Apparently, like many artists who value the promotion, he’s been leaking his own tracks to the various hiphop sites and blogs that Universal has declared evil. And Universal has been taking them down, leading Drake to tell them to stop: Now, as I’m sure people will quickly point out, he signed a contract with Universal, and that means he almost certainly handed over the rights to the music in question. To some extent, you can argue that if he was doing it for the people instead of for Universal Music, he shouldn’t have signed a deal that gave all the rights to Universal Music.

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Yep, an artist can post their own music on their own site and be called a pirate. This means that ICE could possible seize all the servers involved, including servers that have absolutely no illegal content.

IP laws are simply screwed up. And the music companies are obviously not using these laws to protect the rights of the creator of the idea.

Censoring the Internet in democracies

by david55king

Australia, Once Again, Seeks To Censor The Internet
[Via Techdirt]

For about a decade now, we’ve been talking about attempt after attempt after attempt after attempt by the Australian government to censor the internet.

It looks like they’re at it again. After much pressure from the Australian government, the country’s two largest ISPs, Telstra and Optus (along with two smaller ISPs, itExtreme and Webshield) have agreed to start censoring the internet, blocking a secret list of websites from view. The government will give them the list, and they’ll block. There’s no review or accountability, and the government can just put webpages they don’t like on the list… and too bad:

The problem with such a plan is multi-layered: First, there is no transparency in the selection of URLs to be blacklisted, and no accountability from the regulatory bodies creating the blacklists. The “reputable international organizations” providing child abuse URLs have not been named, but may include the Internet Watch Foundation, a UK-based organization that in 2008 advised UK ISPs to block a Wikipedia page containing an album cover from the 1970s that they deemed might be illegal.

The ACMA itself has run into problems with its blacklist as well. After Wikileaks published the regulator’s blacklist in 2009, it was discovered that the list contained the website of a Queensland-based dentist, as well as numerous other sites unrelated to child sexual abuse or illegal pornography.

Second, filtering does little to curb the trade of child pornography, much of which is traded across peer to peer networks and VPNs. Filtering it from the world wide web may simply push it further underground.

Third, there appears to be no appeals process in the Australian ISPs’ scheme, thereby making it difficult for sites erroneously caught up in the filter to challenge the block.

Lastly, the introduction of a filter sets precedent for the ISPs to filter more sites in the future at the behest of the ACMA. If the ACMA were to make the decision that sites deemed “indecent” or politically controversial–for example–should be off-limits, would the ISPs comply?

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It is not only totalitarian countries that do not ant their citizens to access sites on the Internet. Here we have a democracy using totalitarian tactics to create blacklists that have no transparency and no appeal.

We will see these same tactics used in other countries. Idiots.

What happens whens the FBI is in illegal possession of private information?

So The FBI Can Just Take A Copy Of All Instapaper User Data With No Recourse?
[Via Techdirt]

We recently wrote about the FBI’s server seizures in the hunt for LulzSec, noting the collateral damage that took down servers of a few different popular websites. One of the seized servers was a backup server for the very popular service Instapaper, which many people use to save web pages and other info. While Instapaper’s Marco Arment notes that the FBI did return the server relatively quickly, it’s possible that the FBI now has a copy of pretty much everyone’s Instapaper data, which could reveal a lot about some people.

Possibly most importantly, though, the FBI is now presumably in possession of a complete copy of the Instapaper database as it stood on Tuesday morning, including the complete list of users and any non-deleted bookmarks. (“Archived” bookmarks are not deleted. “Deleted” bookmarks are hard-deleted out of the database immediately.)

Instapaper stores only salted SHA-1 hashes of passwords, so those are relatively safe. But email addresses are stored in the clear, as is the saved content of each bookmark saved by the bookmarklet.

The server also contained a complete copy of the Instapaper website codebase, but not the codebase of the iOS app.

Linked Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr accounts only store their respective OAuth keys. Linked Evernote accounts only store the Evernote email-in address. Linked Pinboard accounts, however, store plaintext usernames and encrypted passwords, and the encryption keys are present in the website source code on the server.

So the FBI now has illegal possession of nearly all of Instapaper’s data and a moderate portion of its codebase, and as far as I know, this is completely out of my control.

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With the ability to data mine all sorts of stuff, the FBI or any government organization can now gets its hands on almost anything by simply ‘accidentally’ seizing a server.

There is apparently no recourse for a private citizen or any of the others who are caught in this illegal activity.

As long as we have things like the Patriot Act that makes this an OK thing to do, then we must be willing for the FBI to be able to access almost anything we store on the INternet.

Some good – and the best – reasons to go to college

I forgot the most important reason to go to college…
[Via Dave Winer's linkblog feed]

I forgot the most important reason to go to college…

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People who do not go to college can really miss out.