] The CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology is
] celebrating its 40th anniversary by revealing a few dozen
] of its secrets for a new museum inside its headquarters
] near Washington.
]
] Keith Melton, a leading historian of intelligence, calls
] it "the finest spy musuem you'll never see." It is
] accessible only to CIA employees and guests admitted to
] those closed quarters

I'll bet Elonka gets to see this! I'm insanely jealous!! Take some pics with a "Mark IV Microdot" and post 'em, will ya? ;)

Laughing Boy

USATODAY.com - CIA gadgets: robot fish, pigeon camera, jungle microphones

] A federal appeals court on Friday rejected efforts by the
] recording industry to compel the nation's Internet
] providers to identify subscribers accused of illegally
] distributing music online.
]
] In a substantial setback for the industry's controversial
] anti-piracy campaign, the three-judge panel from the U.S.
] Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia overturned
] a ruling by the trial judge to enforce a copyright
] subpoena from a law that predates the music downloading
] trend.
]
] The ruling does not make it legal to distribute music
] over the Internet, but it removes one of the most
] effective tools used by the recording industry to track
] such activity and sue downloaders.
]
] The appeals court said the 1998 law doesn't cover the
] popular file-sharing networks currently used by tens of
] millions of Americans to download songs. The Digital
] Millennium Copyright Act "betrays no awareness whatsoever
] that Internet users might be able directly to exchange
] files containing copyrighted works," the court wrote.
]
] The appeals judges said they sympathized with the
] recording industry, noting that "stakes are large." But
] the judges said it was not the role of courts to rewrite
] the 1998 copyright law, "no matter how damaging that
] development has been to the music industry or threatens
] being to the motion picture and software industries."

HA HA HA! Stick *THAT* in your pipe and smoke it, RIAA! :p

Laughing Boy

USATODAY.com - Appeals court: RIAA can't use copyright subpoenas

] STERLING, Va. %u2014 Using the nation's toughest
] anti-spam law for the first time, Virginia prosecutors
] have gained felony indictments against two men accused of
] sending thousands of unsolicited e-mail pitches for
] investments, software and other products.
]
] Prosecutors said Thursday that an alias of one of the
] defendants, Jeremy Jaynes, is listed as one of the
] world's 10 biggest spammers by spamhaus.org, a group that
] tabulates complaints reported to Internet service
] providers.
]
] The indictments, returned Monday by a grand jury in
] Loudoun County, Va., are based on Virginia's anti-spam
] law, which took effect July 1. Prosecutors said it's the
] first time spamming has brought felony charges.
]
] Jaynes, 29, who uses the aliases of Jeremy James and
] Gaven Stubberfield, and Richard Rutowski each face four
] counts of transmission of unsolicited bulk electronic
] mail. Each count carries up to five years in prison.

GOTTA LOVE IT!!! Been a long time coming, but some spammers gonna become "Bubbas girl friends" in da Big House!! Good luck impaneling an impartial jury sympathetic to your "cause" guys. I can just hear their lawyers arguing for a mistrial - "Everyone gets and is annoyed by spam your honor..." And the judge replies "Precisely the reason your client is in court today, counsel." :D

LB

Virginia charges two under new anti-spam law

] NEW YORK %u2014 Researchers at IBM claim they have made
] an important breakthrough in the race to design circuitry
] at the molecular level: a system that works with existing
] methods of electronics manufacturing.
]
] In a paper being released Monday at an industry
] conference in Washington, D.C., IBM researchers Chuck
] Black and Kathyrn Guarini say they used a naturally
] occurring pattern of molecules as a stencil to etch flash
] memory circuitry into silicon.
]
] Other researchers are experimenting with using
] self-assembling, or naturally forming, patterns of
] molecules to build very tiny circuitry. Doing so is
] believed to be necessary if the high-tech industry can
] continue to pack more transistors into smaller spaces
] %u2014 the process that continually makes computing
] faster and less expensive.

USATODAY.com - IBM claims nanotech-circuit breakthrough

] China's first manned space flight in October and its talk
] of a future landing on the Moon within the next two
] decades may end up being the spark to re-ignite the U.S.
] space program.

Thank GOD for Chinas space program.

U.S. eyes return to the Moon

] Like the Segway, Bombardier's Embrio concept--a prototype
] that may or may not make production--uses gyroscope
] technology to balance riders but adds a dash of flair
] absent in the Segway, which we as car nuts find slightly
] nerdy.

KICK ASS, 'eh?

Canadian Segway

] Startup MagiQ Technologies Inc. yesterday announced it's
] shipping what appears to be the first security system
] based on quantum cryptography.
]
] Quantum cryptography goes a step further than electronic
] cryptography through its employment of a stream of
] photons, the quantum properties of which determine the
] key. The fun part is that if an intruder observes or
] intercepts the transmission, those properties get changed
] -- an unavoidable principle of quantum mechanics --
] meaning the sender and receiver can tell if anyone is
] eavesdropping. Perhaps more important, the key can't be
] copied or faked (see Optical Science Gets Spookier and
] Quantum Cipher Sent by Fiber ).
]
] It's a potential breaththrough, though working with
] photons has never been easy, and, as the optical
] networking bubble has shown, it can be an expensive way
] to build technology.
]
] MagiQ's Navajo system, a box made to fit in a standard
] telecom rack, was unveiled in February and began beta
] trials in March.

Startup Says Quantum Crypto Is Real

] A Princeton graduate student said Monday that he has
] figured out a way to defeat new software intended to keep
] music CDs from being copied on a computer %u2014 simply
] by pressing the Shift-key.
]
] In a paper posted on his Web site late Monday, John
] Halderman said the MediaMax CD3 software developed by
] SunnComm Technologies could be defeated on computers
] running the Windows operating system by holding down the
] Shift key, disabling a Windows feature that automatically
] launches the encryption software on the disc.
]
] Halderman said the protection could also be disabled by
] stopping the driver the CD installs when it is first
] inserted into a computer's drive.

LMFAO!!!

USATODAY.com - CD-copy protection system said to have simple flaw

] This is a significant test for the entire community
] because if the community can't find a way to introduce
] new services while reaching a resolution on technical
] matters that might arise, then the Internet
] infrastructure will never improve. It's tantamount to
] saying that the Internet world is flat and therefore
] there is no need for further exploration.

Look asshole, if you were interested in reaching resolution on the technical matters that might arise, you would have proposed your change to the community rather then making a unilateral decision. You would have pre-announced a date for the cutover so that people would be prepared to make any changes that they needed to make beforehand. The only people who are buying into your bullshit are people who own stock in your company and have a vested interest in beleiving in you. The rest of us are simply more and more sure that we are never going to do business with you for any reason. The rest of us aren't your shareholders. We're your customers. And you can rest assured that we are quite capable of continuing to deploy innovative services on the Internet without you.

Tell me why I should do business with a company that was not just forced to settle in a fraudulent marketing scheme, but also made significant, unannounced changes in a critical infrastructure service in violation of your contract without prior notification? Your business is about TRUST, and I'd be CRAZY to TRUST you after pulling a stunt like this!

Innovation and the Internet | Verisign Speaks to the technical community

(U: BTW, the section of this article that deals with prisons is worth the price of admission, but I'll focus on something else...)

] 4. Incandescent Light Bulbs
]
] In reality, these sad devices are heat bulbs.
] Supposedly a lighting technology, they produce nine times
] more raw heat than they do illumination. The light they
] do give, admittedly, is still prettier than the eerie
] glow of compact fluorescents and light-emitting diodes.
] But it's still a far cry from the glories of natural
] daylight.
]
] Plus there's the cost of light bulbs, their
] fragility, the replacement overhead, the vast waste of
] energy, glass, and tungsten, the goofy hassle of running
] air conditioners to do battle with the blazing heat of
] all these round little glass stoves let's face
] it, these gizmos deserve to vanish.
]
] They will be replaced by a superior technology, something
] cheap, cool, and precisely engineered, that emits visible
] wavelengths genuinely suited to a consumer's human
] eyeball. Our descendants will stare at those
] vacuum-shrouded wires as if they were whale-oil lanterns.

So, they are slowly replacing traffic lights with LED lights in atlanta. If LEDs are bright enough for this purpose, one must imagine that you could create a suitable light bulb replacement that:

A. Screws into a socket.
B. Essentially consists of a stick covered in white leds.
C. Has a translucent plastic filter covering it which only emits "lightbulb" wavelengths.

Why is this hard?

(U: Maybe the power transformer you'll need to convert your whopping 120 volts of AC power into 5VDC will create just as much waste heat as your lights did. As almost every device in your house now has an AC to DC power converter, maybe it makes sense to start talking about putting a centralized AC to DC converter in your house and running two circuits, an AC cicuit for major appliances, and a DC circuit for basically everything else. It would reduce a lot of costs, and improve the safety of most home wiring. Of course, cutting over to something like this would be a huge effort that would require widespread coordination from several industries. (For those of you who aren't electronics savvy, basically what I'm saying is that your house ought to have the "power supply" rather then your computer.)

Ten Technologies That Deserve to Die