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01 Dec 2011 23:38

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U.S.: Weather weirdness: Snow in the south, winds in the west.

  • Intense wind storms over the west this morning: Strong Santa Ana winds began Wednesday night; they caused damage (as seen above in home footage near Pasadena) and major power outages. Around 25,000 were without power under Southern California Edison’s jurisdiction. The National Weather Service said that the winds will likely continue through Friday, causing more flight delays. As you might imagine, Winds of this strength are causing some concern. Let’s hope that (on top of all this other stuff) one of California’s four seasons doesn’t start soon: Fire, landslides, earthquakes and riots. source
Posted by samimain • 0 Comments • Permalink

01 Dec 2011 23:13

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World: Egyptian elections: Muslim Brotherhood lead, Salafis surprise

  • The Salafis have been underestimated from day one, because it is hard to imagine how this guy with a long beard and some aggressive ideas can actually gain much support.
  • Shadi Hamid, a researcher at the Brookings Institution in Doha, Qatar • Discussing the elections in Egypt. So far, the Muslim Brotherhood’s party has received 40 percent of the Egyptian Parliament’s votes. Meanwhile, the Al Nour party, formed by ultra-conservative Salafis, has secured 25 percent. The Islamist party began re-entering politics after Mubarak was ousted, and rallied around millions of Egyptians who were already organized politically. That’s at least double the members of the Muslim Brotherhood. While they may not have pulled ahead in this election, the Salafi sect has become a prominent political force nonetheless. (EDIT: Modified wording based on reader suggestion.) source
Posted by samimain • 0 Comments • Permalink

01 Dec 2011 22:57

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U.S.: One year later, “Craigslist Ripper” case leaves dark impression

  • A mystery with hard-to-come-by answers: One year ago, police began their search for Shannan Gilbert, a 24 year-old prostitute. During that search, they found the remains of Melissa Barthlemy, another prostitute. In the following days, they found three more bodies along the shores of Long Island. They nicknamed the killer the “Craigslist Ripper” because some of the victims had advertised online. Ten bodies have been discovered over the past year; seemingly all of them worked in the sex industry, though one of the bodies found was the two-year-old daughter of one of the victims.
  • past Officials used to think that this was the work of multiple serial killers. The oldest body was killed way back in 1996. They thought they were looking for “a number of killers who all favored the remote scrub land for dumping bodies.”
  • present According to Suffolk County Police Commissioner Richard Dormer, the police’s view of the events has changed: “It appears that one person, comfortable with the area, comfortable with Long Island, is involved in these crimes.” source
Posted by samimain • 0 Comments • Permalink

01 Dec 2011 21:07

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Tech: SOPA could be pushed aside for more-sane bipartisan alternative

  • current SOPA and PROTECT-IP, the bills getting pushed in the House and Senate respectively, have faced heavy criticism over their heavy-handed approaches to stopping piracy — effectively giving rightsholders the ability to shut down a site at will and preventing sites from receiving ad revenue. Cue the internet freaking out en masse over a poor implementation.
  • alternative With popular support for the bill on the skids, legislators are now pushing a low-key alternative which would focus on international sites “primarily” and “willfully” involved in piracy. The International Trade Commission, not the Attorney General, the would handle these claims — a better, more logical fit, as they already handle physical counterfeiting claims. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

01 Dec 2011 20:38

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World: Hillary Clinton offers Myanmar incentive to reform itself

The Secretary of State has been in Myanmar for the past day or so. “I came to assess whether the time is right for a new chapter in our shared history,” she says. The U.S. is willing to reward Myanmar for implementing reforms. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

01 Dec 2011 20:04

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Tech: Apple admits they used Carrier IQ too, but only if it was enabled

  • We stopped supporting CarrierIQ with iOS 5 in most of our products and will remove it completely in a future software update. With any diagnostic data sent to Apple, customers must actively opt-in to share this information, and if they do, the data is sent in an anonymous and encrypted form and does not include any personal information. We never recorded keystrokes, messages or any other personal information for diagnostic data and have no plans to ever do so.
  • A statement from Apple • Discussing the quickly-becoming-a-big-deal Carrier IQ situation, in which an obscure diagnostic company allegedly had its data-tracking app on a millions of phones — without consumers knowing. At first, was unclear if the software was on Apple’s tightly-locked phones, but last night, it became clear that it was — although, unlike in the case of many Android phones, it wasn’t enabled by default and otherwise difficult to enable. And with the next iOS update, it’ll be gone entirely. Still, though. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

01 Dec 2011 15:38

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Tech: Carrier IQ CEO tries to tamp down privacy criticisms

  • Do you trust them? That’s sort of the principal question at the heart of the Carrier IQ debate, since it’s been revealed that the company’s eponymous software is pervasive (they claim to be running on 140,000,000 mobile devices), largely impossible to detect or disable, and equipped to record nearly everything you do on your device, down to logging keystrokes. Whether or not this software has the power to be used for gross invasions of privacy seems obvious enough — it definitely can. Carrier IQ’s argument, however, is that their data collection is at the behest of the client companies who run the software on their phones, and functions to help companies improve customer experience with the mobile devices in question. However, operating secretly with no security options or ability to easily turn it off, Carrier IQ is courting serious controversy. source
Posted by Chris Tognotti • 0 Comments • Permalink
 

01 Dec 2011 14:54

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Tech: Apple denies Siri is anti-abortion, promises improvements

  • Our customers want to use Siri to find out all types of information, and while it can find a lot, it doesn’t always find what you want. These are not intentional omissions meant to offend anyone. It simply means that as we bring Siri from beta to a final product, we find places where we can do better, and we will in the coming weeks.
  • Natalie Kerris, spokeswoman for Apple • Denying that there’s any sort of intent behind Siri, the computerized iPhone 4S helper that’s taken America by storm, being extremely unproductive at helping users find local abortion clinics. That the program understands the question is clear enough — when asked “where can I get an abortion,” Siri replies “I don’t see any abortion clinics. Sorry about that.” There have also been reports of Siri directing people seeking abortion services to “crisis pregnancy centers,” which often present themselves as outlets for abortion services information but are actually pro-life organizations that try to talk women out of the procedure. Apple’s response to this is more or less precisely what we’d expect, and given the attention on this we’d imagine a fix will be coming soon. source
Posted by Chris Tognotti • 0 Comments • Permalink

01 Dec 2011 14:36

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Biz: Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley moves on foreclosures

  • 5 major banks sued by Massachusetts over unlawful home foreclosures source
  • » The deluge of home foreclosures that the U.S. has suffered since the financial crisis has been a crippling blow to the general economy, land value rates in high-foreclosure areas, and most of all the families who’ve found themselves unceremoniously cast out. A notable amount of these foreclosures appear to have been fraudulently engineered, rife with examples of flat-out false documentation, as well as “robo-signing,” a practice in which foreclosure documents are fast-tracked with (in some cases) fraudulent signatures and without the signee ever having read them. This was the impetus for Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley filing suit against five major banks — BofA, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citi, and Ally Financial.
Posted by Chris Tognotti • 0 Comments • Permalink

01 Dec 2011 14:11

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Politics: Gingrich says lack of border fence due to lack of “seriousness”

  • We haven’t been able to build a fence on the border because we have not been a serious country.
  • Newt Gingrich • Speaking on immigration policy to a group of Nationwide Insurance employees in Des Moines, Iowa, after signing a pledge to erect a Mexican border fence by the end of 2013. It should be said that this stance is in no way incompatible with Gingrich’s softer tone on long-term immigrants from the last GOP debate, in which he argued that undocumented people who’ve lived here 25 years, paid taxes, and raised a family shouldn’t be booted out of the U.S. It’s entirely possible to earnestly hold both of these positions at once. However, this is Newt Gingrich, he of the most dynamic and politically calculated flops and reversals this side of Mitt Romney (here’s a recent and unflinching one to whet your appetite). As such, it’s hard not to view this as a cynical, purely political calculation; take a general election-friendly stance in a nationally televised debate, then feed the base some red meat when less people are watching. source
Posted by Chris Tognotti • 0 Comments • Permalink
 
 
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