IT Director for a non-profit in Washington, DC. Man About Internet.
Video from cameras attached to the booster rockets of the Space Shuttle with this minor exception: it is high definition and the audio has been remastered by Skywalker Sound. Watch it all the way to the end with your headphones on - the audio is great. Also, at the end, you can see the other booster splashing down in the ocean nearby.
via Jason Kottke. ∗
Sharyl Attkisson, at CBS:
In 2010, many freshmen Republicans were swept into Congress on the promise of doing things differently. But fast-forward to 2012, and the Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo, Fla. -- an exclusive seaside resort and home to 54 holes of championship golf and a private marina full of luxury yachts. That's where we caught up with a select group of Republican freshmen, engaged in business as usual. But they didn't come alone. They invited big campaign donors and lobbyists to join them - for a price. And we secretly sent our cameras along for a unique inside look at their first joint fundraiser, where special interests got the kind of access ordinary Americans can only dream of: on the golf course; over drinks at the resort bar; at a private beach lagoon. "Book your Key Largo getaway now," reads the invitation, obtained by CBS News. The hosts are veteran congressmen Spencer Bachus, of Alabama, Pete Sessions, of Texas, "and 12 of your favorite Republican freshmen!" Not surprised.∗
Cristina Cordova, at her blog::
When Oink shut down yesterday, I used their export tool so that I could do something useful with the information I gave them. In requesting my data, which I did simply by filling out a form with only my username, I received the email below. In looking at the link, it seemed that my publicly available username (cristina) called for the download. The screenshot shows a simple link ending in "cristina-export.zip". So, curiously, I tried replacing my username with Kevin Rose’s: http://oink-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/kevinrose-export.zip (go ahead, click it). You’ll get a zip file of every item he has ever added, rated or reviewed. You’ll also get every photo he has ever uploaded to Oink. I began thinking about what access I gave to Oink – did I somehow allow them to make all of my data publicly available without my consent? Well, I tried exploring their privacy page, but it seems to conveniently redirect to their data export page. I hope in the Milk team’s next steps at Google, they place a higher value on user data and privacy. Next steps at Google placing higher value on data and privacy? HA!
This American Life is retracting their popular episode about Apple and their Foxconn factories, claiming that part of the story was fabricated. Ira Glass, writing about the reiteration, on the This American Life blog (Andy Baio has a mirror up as the site is getting hammered.):
I have difficult news. We've learned that Mike Daisey's story about Apple in China - which we broadcast in January - contained significant fabrications. We're retracting the story because we can't vouch for its truth. This is not a story we commissioned. It was an excerpt of Mike Daisey's acclaimed one-man show "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," in which he talks about visiting a factory in China that makes iPhones and other Apple products. The show airs later today at 8:00 pm EST, and then again nationally, this coming Sunday. The audio for the retracted show is no longer available on their site, but the transcript is still available. The description of their retraction show, which has not aired yet: Ira also talks with Mike Daisey about why he misled This American Life during the fact-checking process. And we end the show separating fact from fiction, when it comes to Apple's manufacturing practices in China. This is huge.
James Bamford, at Wired's Threat Level:
Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy. But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.” For the NSA, overflowing with tens of billions of dollars in post-9/11 budget awards, the cryptanalysis breakthrough came at a time of explosive growth, in size as well as in power. Established as an arm of the Department of Defense following Pearl Harbor, with the primary purpose of preventing another surprise assault, the NSA suffered a series of humiliations in the post-Cold War years. Caught offguard by an escalating series of terrorist attacks—the first World Trade Center bombing, the blowing up of US embassies in East Africa, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, and finally the devastation of 9/11—some began questioning the agency’s very reason for being. In response, the NSA has quietly been reborn. And while there is little indication that its actual effectiveness has improved—after all, despite numerous pieces of evidence and intelligence-gathering opportunities, it missed the near-disastrous attempted attacks by the underwear bomber on a flight to Detroit in 2009 and by the car bomber in Times Square in 2010—there is no doubt that it has transformed itself into the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created. In the process—and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever. It may look like I quoted a lot above, but, when you see the length of the article, you'll realize it is just a small section of a huge piece. Go read it. One piece of the above quote really stood out to me though:
Does this not sound like something significant - like they're able to break standard SSL traffic, or some other common security tool that most believe is uncrackable? Perhaps they've done it?∗
Jason Kottke, at Kottke.org:
The people who shot this video claim the iceberg exploded but it looks more like the collapsing ice caused the air and water to shoot out of that hole suddenly. Still cool though.
From the TED Talks video page:
Adam Savage walks through two spectacular examples of profound scientific discoveries that came from simple, creative methods anyone could have followed -- Eratosthenes' calculation of the Earth's circumference around 200 BC and Hippolyte Fizeau's measurement of the speed of light in 1849.