Cody Taylor

Two of The Pirate Bay defendants took the stand today in Sweden, saying that they don’t read contracts they sign, don’t write speeches they read, and don’t really have a “top-down” organization. But prosecutors say that it’s all a sophisticated money-making operation.

I need a new computer. Badly. My old iMac, which I’m using to write this now, has seen better days. My Windows machines, strewn across the house, are old and tired.

What’s Wikileaks, the net’s foremost document leaking site, supposed to do when a whistle-blower submits a list email addresses of the site’s confidential donors as a leaked document? The amateur slip-up isn’t likely to be soothing to those who have or are thinking about slipping docs to the fearless site.

If you recall BristleBots on MAKE back in 2007 it was from our friends and MAKE advisory board members Evil Mad Scientists. Windell and Lenore are tireless makers always sharing and creating – unfortunately it seems that Klutz and Scholastic decided to take the idea and invention without contacting or crediting the makers. So far – no comment.

KentuckyFC writes “The human eye is a good photon detector–it’s sensitive enough to spot photons in handfuls. So what if you swapped a standard photon detector with a human eye in the ongoing experiments to measure spooky-action-at-a-distance? (That’s the ability of entangled photons to influence each other, no matter how far apart they might be.) A team of physicists in Switzerland have worked out the details and say that in principle there is no reason why human eyes couldn’t do this kind of experiment. That would be cool because it would ensure that the two human observers involved in the test would become entangled, albeit for a short period time. The team, lead by Nic Gisin., a world leader on entanglement, says it is actively pursuing this goal (abstract) so we could have the first humans to experience entanglement within months.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BobB-nw writes “Dan Kaminsky, who for years was ambivalent about securing DNS, has become an ardent supporter of DNS Security Extensions. Speaking at the Black Hat DC 2009 conference Thursday, the prominent security researcher told the audience that the lack of DNS security not only makes the Internet vulnerable, but is also crippling the scalability of important security technologies. “DNS is pretty much our only way to scale systems across organizational boundaries, and because it is insecure it’s infecting everything else that uses” DNS, the fundamental Internet protocol that provides an IP address for a given domain name, said Kaminsky, director of penetration testing at IOActive. ‘The only group that has actually avoided DNS because it’s insecure are security technologies, and therefore those technologies aren’t scaling.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jamie stumbled upon a writeup for all you astronomy and photography buffs out there (Perhaps my Dad or Uncle Jim are reading ;). From the writeup “The “blind astrometry server” is a program which monitors the Astrometry group on Flickr, looking for new photos of the night sky. It then analyzes each photo, and from the unique star positions shown it figures out what part of the sky was photographed and what interesting planets, galaxies or nebulae are contained within. Not only does the photographer get a high-quality description of what’s in their photo, but the main Astrometry.net project gets a new image to add to its storehouse of knowledge.” Check out the Astrometry.net site for many cool pictures.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CWmike writes “The blogosphere regularly excoriates Microsoft for being a monopoly, but Google may be in the cross-hairs of the nation’s next anti-trust chief for monopolistic behavior, writes Preston Gralla. Last June, Christine A. Varney, President Obama’s nominee to be the next antitrust chief, warned that Google already had a monopoly in online advertising. ‘For me, Microsoft is so last century. They are not the problem,’ Varney said at a June 19 panel discussion sponsored by the American Antitrust Institute, according to a Bloomberg report. The US economy will ‘continually see a problem — potentially with Google’ because it already ‘has acquired a monopoly in Internet online advertising.’ Varney has yet to be confirmed as antitrust chief, and she said all this before she was nominated. Still, it spells potentially bad news for Google. It may be time for the company to start adding to its legal staff.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.