Cody Taylor

Many different sources are talking about the latest scandal surrounding the warrantless wiretapping program. Incriminating evidence against California rep Jane Harman was apparently captured some time ago on a legal NSA wiretap. However, Attorney General Gonzales supposedly intervened to drop the case against her because (and this is where the irony meter explodes) Bush officials wanted her to be able to publicly defend the warrantless wiretap program. “Jane Harman, in the wake of the NSA scandal, became probably the most crucial defender of the Bush warrantless eavesdropping program, using her status as “the ranking Democratic on the House intelligence committee” to repeatedly praise the NSA program as ‘essential to U.S. national security’ and ‘both necessary and legal.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DOD are developing military software for iPods that enables soldiers to display aerial video from drones and have teleconferences with intelligence agents halfway across the globe. Snipers in Iraq and Afghanistan now use a “ballistics calculator” called BulletFlight. The Ipod is becoming the U.S. Military’s new secret weapon.

Looks like Intel isn’t slowing down. What is AMD doing, by the way???

Hugh Pickens writes “The NY Times reports that legal and operational problems surrounding the NSA’s surveillance activities have come under scrutiny from the Obama administration, Congressional intelligence committees, and a secret national security court, and that the NSA had been engaged in ‘overcollection’ of domestic communications of Americans. The practice has been described as significant and systemic, although one official said it was believed to have been unintentional. The Justice Department has acknowledged that there had been problems with the NSA surveillance operation, but said they had been resolved. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the intelligence community, did not address specific aspects of the surveillance problems, but said in a statement that ‘when inadvertent mistakes are made, we take it very seriously and work immediately to correct them.’ The intelligence officials said the problems had grown out of changes enacted by Congress last July to the law that regulates the government’s wiretapping powers, as well as the challenges posed by enacting a new framework for collecting intelligence on terrorism and spying suspects. Joe Klein at Time Magazine says the bad news is that ‘the NSA apparently has been overstepping the law,’ but the good news is that ‘one of the safeguards in the [FISA Reform] law is a review procedure that seems to have the ability to catch the NSA when it’s overstepping — and that the illegal activities have been exposed, and quickly.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

snydeq writes “Lawyer Jonathan Moskin has called into question the long-term impact last year’s Java Model Railroad Interface court ruling will have on open source adoption among corporate entities. For many, the case in question, Jacobsen v. Katzer, has represented a boon for open source, laying down a legal foundation for the protection of open source developers. But as Moskin sees it, the ruling ‘enables a set of potentially onerous monetary remedies for failures to comply with even modest license terms, and it subjects a potentially larger community of intellectual property users to liability.’ In other words, in Moskin’s eyes, Jacobsen v. Katzer could make firms wary of using open source software because they fear that someone in the food chain has violated a copyright, thus exposing them to lawsuit. It should be noted that Moskin’s firm has represented Microsoft in anti-trust litigation before the European Union.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Al writes “Two research groups have found a way to unzip carbon nanotubes to create nanoribbons of graphene — a material that has shown great promise for use as nanoscale transistors but which have proven difficult to manufacture previously. A team led by James Tour, a professor of chemistry and computer science at Rice University and another led by Hongjie Dai, a professor of chemistry at Stanford University, both figured out ways to slice carbon nanotubes open to create the nanoribbons. The Stanford team was funded by Intel and the Rice group is in talks with several companies about commercializing their approach.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Believe it or not, your terrifically fast Core i7 fresh off Intel’s assembly line contains DNA that dates back over 3 decades. The same is true if you roll with AMD’s latest, the Phenom II X4. We’re of course referring to the longstanding x86 microprocessor architecture that has dominated the computing scene since before some of you were even born