Legal War For WA State Sunshine Law

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/10/20/0012203/Legal-War-For-WA-State-Sunshine-Law?art_pos=12

"In a major battle in Washington State, anti-gay rights groups created and got R-71 on the 2009 election ballot. This is a public initiative to put same-sex civil unions up for public vote. The real legal war then erupted: activists created WhoSigned.org to take advantage of WA state's Public Records Act, and put the names of all people who publicly endorsed R-71 on a public, SEO-optimized website. Lawsuits quickly followed, and today it reached the United States Supreme Court, in a matter of months. The records appear to have always been public, but have only been available in digital form since 2006. An assault on civil rights, an assault on marriage, or an assault on sunshine laws and freedom of information?"

Helpful Hint for Fugitives: Don't Update Your Location on Facebook

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/10/helpful_hint_fo.html

Investigators scoured social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace but initially could find no trace of him and were unable to pin down his location in Mexico.

Several months later, a secret service agent, Seth Reeg, checked Facebook again and up popped MaxiSopo. His photo showed him partying in front of a backdrop featuring logos of BMW and Courvoisier cognac, sporting a black jacket adorned with a not-so-subtle white lion.

Although Sopo's profile was set to private, his list of friends was not. Scoville started combing through it and was surprised to see that one friend listed an affiliation with the justice department. He sent a message requesting a phone call.

"We figured this was a person we could probably trust to keep our inquiry discreet," Scoville said.

Proving the 2.0 adage that a friend on Facebook is rarely a friend indeed, the former official said he had met Sopo in Cancun's nightclubs a few times, but did not really know him and had no idea he was a fugitive. The official learned where Sopo was living and passed that information back to Scoville, who provided it to Mexican authorities. They arrested Sopo last month.

Rhode Island

http://www.projo.com/news/content/teen_dancers_07-21-09_Q6F39ID_v80.3985e27.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Rhode_Island

Rhode Island is looking better and better.

Turn a Radish into a Power-Up Mushroom in Seconds

http://www.annathered.com/2009/06/21/how-to-make-a-radish-mushroom/

Time-lapse astrophotography of the Milky Way

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/05/18/time-lapse-astrophotography-of-the-milky-way/

The Commercial Speech Arms Race

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/10/the_commercial.html

I was reminded of this recently when a group of Israeli scientists demonstrated that it's possible to fabricate DNA evidence. So now, instead of leaving your own DNA at a crime scene, you can leave fabricated DNA. And it isn't even necessary to fabricate. In Charlie Stross's novel Halting State, the bad guys foul a crime scene by blowing around the contents of a vacuum cleaner bag, containing the DNA of dozens, if not hundreds, of people.

Secret ACTA Treaty May Sport "Internet Enforcement" Procedures After All

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/10/16/165256/Secret-ACTA-Treaty-May-Sport-Internet-Enforcement-Procedures-After-All?from=rss

"Ars Technica writes about the recent work on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, and reveals that while the public does not have access to the text of the agreement, a handful of lawyers representing Big Content and numerous companies and organizations do. 'Turns out that... ACTA will include a section on Internet "enforcement procedures" after all. And how many people have had input on these procedures? Forty-two. ... Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) found out in September that the US Trade Representative's office had actually been secretly canvassing opinions on the Internet section of the agreement from 42 people, all of whom had signed a nondisclosure agreement before being shown the ACTA draft text.'"

9 Examples Why Google Search Is Better Than Yahoo!

http://www.maxim.com/humor/stupid-fun/84573/9-reasons-why-google-search-suggest-is-better-than-yahoo.html

Search suggestions are always great.

Computer-Assisted Witness Identification

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327275.500-virtual-cop-to-run-identity-parades.html

A major cause of miscarriages of justice could be avoided if computers, rather than detectives, guided witnesses through the identification of suspects. That's according to Brent Daugherty at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte and colleagues, who say that too often officers influence witnesses' choices.

The problem was highlighted in 2003 when the Innocence Project in New York analysed the case histories of 130 wrongly imprisoned people later freed by DNA evidence. Mistaken eyewitness identification was a factor in 77 per cent of the cases examined.

The Futility of Defending the Targets

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/10/the_futility_of.html

Defending individual targets only makes sense if the number of potential targets is few. If there are seven terrorist targets and you defend five of them, you seriously reduce the terrorists' ability to do damage. But if there are a million terrorist targets and you defend five of them, the terrorists won't even notice. I tend to dislike security measures that merely cause the bad guys to make a minor change in their plans.

And the expense would be enormous. Add up these secondary terrorist targets -- stadiums, theaters, churches, schools, malls, office buildings, anyplace where a lot of people are packed together -- and the number is probably around 200,000, including Beaver Stadium. Full-time police protection requires people, so that's 1,000,000 policemen. At an encumbered cost of $100,000 per policeman per year, probably a low estimate, that's a total annual cost of $100B. (That's about what we're spending each year in Iraq.) On the other hand, hiring one out of every 300 Americans to guard our nation's infrastructure would solve our unemployment problem. And since policemen get health care, our health care problem as well. Just make sure you don't accidentally hire a terrorist to guard against terrorists -- that would be embarrassing.