|
7-22-2008 - Printer dots raise privacy concerns
The affordability and growing popularity of color laser printers is raising concerns among civil liberties advocates that your privacy may not be worth the paper you're printing on.
More manufacturers are outfitting greater numbers of laser printers with technology that leaves microscopic yellow dots on each printed page to identify the printer's serial number — and ultimately, you, says the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the leading watchdogs of electronic privacy.
The technology has been around for years, but the declining price of laser printers and the increasing number of models with this feature is causing renewed concerns.
The dots, invisible to the naked eye, can be seen using a blue LED light and are used by authorities such as the Secret Service to investigate counterfeit bills made with laser printers, says Lorelei Pagano, director of the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group.
Privacy advocates worry that the little-known technology could ensnare political dissidents, whistle-blowers or anyone who prints materials that authorities want to track.
"There's nothing about this technology that limits its application to counterfeit investigations," says Seth Schoen, a computer programmer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Some people who aren't doing anything wrong may have their privacy threatened." Schoen's tests have found the dots produced by 111 color laser printers made by 13 companies including Xerox, Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Epson and Brother.
Click here to read entire story |
[Permanent Link]
|
7-17-2008 - Bolton Calls on U.S. To Back Israeli Attack on Iran
(Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu) Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton has sharply criticized the Bush administration for failing to back an Israeli attack on Iran's developing nuclear facility. In an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, Bolton wrote that although a strike on Iran may not be able to wipe out the underground reactor, it will enable Israel and the Western world "to buy time" before it is too late to act at all.
"The Bush administration's last six months [of] pursuing its limp diplomatic efforts, plus six months of a new president getting his national security team and policies together" will give Tehran another year "to proceed unhindered to 'the point of no return,'" according to Bolton.
He said that more sanctions against Iran will "simply be too little, too late." Bolton admitted that an air strike is "highly risky and deeply unattractive," but might allow enough time for a change in the regime in Iran to alter Iran's plans to become a nuclear power. He warned that "the alternative is Iran with nuclear weapons, the most deeply unattractive alternative of all."
Bolton said that the United States faces a critical decision concerning an Israeli attack on Iran. "Israel sees clearly what the next 12 months will bring, which is why ongoing U.S.-Israeli consultations could be dispositive," he wrote.
"Instead of debating how much longer to continue five years of failed diplomacy, we should be intensively considering what cooperation the U.S. will extend to Israel before, during and after a strike on Iran…. At a minimum, we should place no obstacles in Israel's path, and facilitate its efforts where we can."
Bolton, who is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, ridiculed Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama for his calls for direct diplomacy with Iran, "as if stumbling on a new idea." Bolton's only praise was for Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain, who has called for a workable defense missile system.
|
[Permanent Link]
|
6-27-2008 - U.S. Supreme Court Issues Landmark Ruling Affirming an Individual Second Amendment Right to Own a Handgun
In a 5-4 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller has affirmed that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditional lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home. The main issue before the Court was whether the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to own guns or merely sets forth the collective right of states to maintain militias.
In 2003, six residents of Washington, D.C., including Dick Heller, filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a 1976 ban on handguns that forbids the registration of any gun “originally designed to be fired by use of a single hand.” The law, allegedly aimed at preventing deaths and injuries resulting from handgun use, restricts residents from owning handguns, although it provides an exception for handguns owned by active and retired law enforcement officers. Concerned about high crime rates in his neighborhood and hoping to keep a handgun at home for self-defense, Dick Heller sought to challenge the ban. The district court dismissed the lawsuit. However, in a 2-1 ruling, a federal appeals court struck down the ban as incompatible with the Second Amendment, declaring that “the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. That right existed prior to the formation of the new government under the Constitution and was premised on the private use of arms for activities such as hunting and self-defense, the latter being understood as resistance to either private lawlessness or the depredations of a tyrannical government (or a threat from abroad).”
Declaring that “it is not the role of this Court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Heller, a copy of which is available here. |
[Permanent Link]
|
6-23-2008 - Dad grounds daughter, but court ungrounds her
(WND) A father in Canada grounded his daughter from a school trip because she disobeyed his orders to stay off the Internet, but a court overturned the punishment.
According to Agence France-Presse, Justice Suzanne Tessier in Quebec Superior Court ordered the grounding for the 12-year-old girl lifted, prompting the father's lawyer, Kim Beaudoin, to warn, "Parents are going to be walking on egg shells from now on."
The father had ordered his daughter, who was not identified by the report, to remain off the Internet. She didn't, chatting on websites her father had tried to block and then posting "inappropriate" pictures of herself online using a friend's Internet portal.
As punishment, the father refused to let her go on a scheduled school trip, so the 12-year-old went to Canada's judicial system to get her way.
Click here to read entire story
|
[Permanent Link]
|
6-21-2008 - Parents Sentenced to Three Months in Prison for Homeschooling
(Prophecy News Watch) The parents of a homeschooling family in the German state of Hesse have each been sentenced to three months in prison for the crime of homeschooling their seven children.
According to a staff attorney for the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), the sentence was issued to Juergen and Rosemarie Dudek after the federal prosecutor, Herwig Muller, said last year that he was dissatisfied with the fines the couple had already paid for homeschooling their children.
Click here to read entire story
|
[Permanent Link]
|
6-13-2008 - Patients evacuated from Cedar Rapids hospital as waters continue to rise
(MSMBC) Officials evacuated patients from a Cedar Rapids hospital on Friday as the rising waters from the Cedar River confounded the city's best efforts to secure the downtown area.
Water was seeping into the hospital's lower levels, where the emergency generator is located, said Dustin Hinrichs of the Linn County emergency operations center. "They proactively and preventatively started evacuation basically guessing on the fact they were going to lose power," he said.
Dave Koch, a spokesman for the Cedar Rapids fire department, said the river will crest Friday at about 31.8 feet. It was at 30.9 feet early in the morning. In a 1993 flood, considered the worst flood in recent history, it was at 19.27 feet.
Click here to read entire story |
[Permanent Link]
|
6-9-2008 - Maryland Textbooks on Islamic Teachings Dumbed Down
(FOXNews.com) According to the New York Examiner, a new report issued by the American Textbook Council said that administrators who approved books for use in the Montgomery County school district caved into pressure by pro-Islamic groups seeking to present a less violent interpretation of Islam.
Gilbert Sewall, director of the council, stated that, for example, the definition of jihad has gone through "amazing cultural reorchestration" in textbooks, losing any connotation of violence, the Examiner wrote.
Other terms, such as sharia law, have been adjusted or removed from lessons to avoid what he called "inconvenient truths."
Montgomery County Public Schools defended the decision to use the books, saying in a statement that all texts used by teachers had been properly vetted and were appropriate for classroom uses. |
[Permanent Link]
|
5-23-2008 - Waging War Online
(Prophecy News Watch)The Air Force wants a suite of hacker tools, to give it "access" to -- and "full control" of -- any kind of computer there is. And once the info warriors are in, the Air Force wants them to keep tabs on their "adversaries' information infrastructure completely undetected."
The government is growing increasingly interested in waging war online. The Air Force recently put together a "Cyberspace Command," with a charter to rule networks the way its fighter jets rule the skies. The Department of Homeland Security, Darpa, and other agencies are teaming up for a five-year, $30 billion "national cybersecurity initiative." That includes an electronic test range, where federally-funded hackers can test out the latest electronic attacks. "You used to need an army to wage a war," a recent Air Force commercial notes. "Now, all you need is an Internet connection."
On Monday, the Air Force Research Laboratory introduced a two-year, $11 million effort to put together hardware and software tools for "Dominant Cyber Offensive Engagement." "Of interest are any and all techniques to enable user and/or root level access," a request for proposals notes, "to both fixed (PC) or mobile computing platforms... any and all operating systems, patch levels, applications and hardware." This isn't just some computer science study, mind you; "research efforts under this program are expected to result in complete functional capabilities."
Click here to read entire story |
[Permanent Link]
|
5-2-2008 - Asian nations begin arms race for control of world's resources
(Prophecy News Watch) Last summer, as Americans focused on the surge in Iraq, most ignored a military exercise with a potentially more far-reaching impact. In a remote location in the Ural Mountains, Russia, China, and several Central Asian nations gathered for a massive war game, ironically dubbed "Peace Mission 2007."
Thousands of troops, armored vehicles, fighter-bombers, and attack helicopters stormed a town in a mock battle that was supposed to simulate fighting a terrorist takeover. Beneath its antiterror veneer, Peace Mission 2007 was a classic display of military readiness: When it was over, the troops paraded before their assembled defense chiefs, and the whole event laid the groundwork for a closer military alliance among the participating nations.
That such an exercise was held at all might seem shocking. Despite the global war on terrorism, and a steady drumbeat of civil conflicts, no war involving a major power like Russia has occurred in decades, and no external enemy threatens any of the Central Asian nations.
But the exercise highlighted an alarming new reality. With much less fanfare than the early days of the Cold War, the world is entering a new arms race, and with it, a dangerous new web of military relationships. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks international armed forces spending, between 1997 and 2006 global military expenditures jumped by nearly 40 percent. Driven mainly by anxiety over oil and natural resources, countries are building their arsenals of conventional weapons at a rate not seen in decades, beefing up their armies and navies, and forging potential new alliances that could divide up the world in unpredictable ways.
Much of this new arms spending is concentrated among the world's biggest consumers of resources, which are trying to protect their access to energy, and the biggest producers of resources, which are taking advantage of their new wealth to build up their defenses at a rate that would have been unthinkable for a developing country until recently.
Click here to read entire story
|
[Permanent Link]
|
4-28-2008 - Muslim Leaders Want Mecca to Be Center of World Time Zones
(Prophecy News Watch) "And he shall speak great words against the Most High, and shall wear out the saints of the Most High and think to change TIMES and laws (Sharia?): and they shall be given into his hands until a time and times and the dividing of times" (Daniel 7:25).
Muslim scientists and clerics have called for the adoption of Mecca time to replace GMT, arguing that the Saudi city is the true centre of the Earth.
The call was issued at a conference held in the Gulf state of Qatar under the title: Mecca, the Centre of the Earth, Theory and Practice.
Click here to read entire story |
[Permanent Link]
|
|
