All Things News

When the world record holder for race walking is under life threatening danger, will he walk away or run?

Straight from The Australian: “Meanwhile, horrifying new details emerged last night of the attempt by suicide bombers to kill Ms Bhutto on her return home from exile last month.

Investigators from Ms Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party said yesterday they believed the bomb, which killed 170 people and left hundreds more wounded, was strapped to a one-year-old child carried by its jihadist father.

They said the suicide bomber tried repeatedly to carry the baby to Ms Bhutto’s vehicle as she drove in a late-night cavalcade through the streets of Karachi.

“At the point where the bombs exploded, Benazir Bhutto herself saw the man with the child and asked him to come closer so that she could hug or kiss the infant,” investigators were reported as saying. “But someone came in between and a guard felt that the man with the child was not behaving normally. So the child was not allowed to come aboard Benazir’s vehicle.”

Ms Bhutto is said to have told investigators she recalls the face of the man who was carrying the infant. She has asked to see recordings made by television news channels to try to identify the man.”

Straight from News 24: “Kabul – Taliban militants have shot dead a teenage boy for teaching English in eastern Afghanistan, while several Taliban were killed and seven detained in a clash with coalition forces, officials said on Thursday.

Armed militants entered a school in Sayed Karam district of Paktika province and dragged the schoolboy out of his class and shot him dead, Esmatuallh Alizai, provincial police chief said.

“The boy, who was teaching English to other students after school hours, had been warned by the militants to stop teaching,” Alizai said.

Police in the area arrived at the scene and two policemen and two militants were killed in the ensuing gun battle, he said.

Taliban militants have killed several teachers and students in the past for attending the government-run schools, which they regard as un-Islamic.

US-led coalition forces meanwhile killed several Taliban militants and arrested seven in a clash in Garmsir district of southern Helmand province, the US military said in a statement.”

Straight from Fox News: “KHARTOUM, Sudan — Thousands of Sudanese, many armed with clubs and knives, protested Friday outside the presidential palace in Khartoum, demanding the execution of a British teacher convicted of insulting Islam for allowing her students to name a teddy bear Muhammad.

The protesters streamed out of mosques after Friday sermons, as pick-up trucks with loudspeakers blared messages against Gillian Gibbons, the teacher who was sentenced Thursday to 15 days in prison and deportation.

They massed in central Martyrs Square, outside the palace, for about an hour, while hundreds of riot police deployed nearby to keep control, though they did not attempt to disrupt the rally. “Shame, shame on the U.K.,” protesters chanted.

They burned pictures of Gibbons and called for her execution, saying, “No tolerance: Execution,” and “Kill her, kill her by firing squad.”

Calls by FOXNews.com to Sudan’s permanent mission to the United Nations were not returned Friday.

Several hundred protesters, not openly carrying weapons, marched to Unity High School, where Gibbons worked, about 1.2 miles from the square. They stood chanting slogans outside the school, which is closed and under heavy security, then marched toward the nearby British Embassy. They were stopped by security forces two blocks away from the embassy.

The women’s prison where Gibbons is being held is far from the site, across the Nile in Khartoum’s sister city Oumdurman.

The protest arose despite vows by Sudanese security officials the day before, during Gibbons’ trial, that threatened demonstrations after Friday prayers would not take place. Some of the protesters carried green banners with the name of the Society for Support of the Prophet Muhammad, a previously unknown group.

Some of the protesters, carried clubs, knives and axes — but not automatic weapons, which some have carried at past government-condoned demonstrations, suggesting Friday’s rally was not organized by the government. The protesters in the square dispersed in about an hour.

During Friday sermons, the Muslim cleric at Khartoum’s main Martyrs Mosque denounced Gibbons, saying she intentionally insulted Islam but he did not call for protests.

“Imprisoning this lady does not satisfy the thirst of Muslims in Sudan. But we welcome imprisonment and expulsion,” the cleric, Abdul-Jalil Nazeer al-Karouri, a well-known hard-liner, told worshippers.

“This is an arrogant woman who came to our country, cashing her salary in dollars, teaching our children hatred of our Prophet Muhammad,” he said.”

The Brett Favre Career Interception Record Watch page has been updated! The great Lorenzo is now Mr. 283!

Straight from Gizmodo: “The MPAA is such a kind and giving organization. After compiling a list of the top 25 schools for piracy, it sent them a letter last month offering the free, super-helpful University Toolkit to track naughty file-sharing on their networks. It “can produce a report that is strictly internal and therefore confidential to illustrate the level of file sharing on [your school's] network. In addition, we will send a hard copy in the near future to your university’s Chief Information Officer.” Of course, the first thing it does is call home. That’s before the security holes.The toolkit’s actually a modified version of xubuntu rolled up with some network monitoring tools like Snort, which “captures detailed information about all traffic flowing across a network” and ntop, which makes pretty graphs from the data produced by Snort.

After you install it, it sets up an Apache Web server that uploads all of the data and graphs to a web page that displays “not only bandwidth usage generated by each user on the network, but also the Internet address of every Web site each user has visited.” The kicker is that unless it’s properly firewalled, the page is open to anyone and easily Googlable if you know the kit’s URL conventions. Yet the MPAA’s overview explicitly promises “No privacy issues—the content of traffic is never examined or displayed.”

It gets better. The person who installs the toolkit isn’t prompted to setup a user/pass to block access to the site, and the default setting is to not log outsider views of the page. Like, say, the MPAA’s people. And even with the firewall blocking outsiders, tech-savvy university students can still sneak peaks.”

Straight from Liberty for Life: “The following video is of a FEMA ‘railway repair facility’ – the only problem is that the barbed wire fences are designed not to keep people out, they face inwards.  While there is no use or need for the facility, the government has been spending millions of dollars converting this facility into an ideal concentration camp along with gassing equipment.  Most people by now know that George W. Bush’s grand father funded Hitler See Bushes.  Most are not aware that the primary share holders of ‘our’ Federal Reserve Bank, the Rothschild’s, also funded both Stalin and Hitler.  Their goals and methodologies have not changed.  Fascists Socialist Nations terrified by “unseen terrorists” make ideal breeding grounds for massive financial profit.  It is also worth looking into the FBI’s programs to prepare children for living in this U.S.S.A. Police State.”

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Straight from Joystiq: “Having opened a new studio in Montreal earlier this year and released the Diablo-clone Loki, French developer Cyanide has what we call ‘a lot of irons in the fire.’ The studio also announced today that it has waded waist-deep into the murky waters of middleware development, creating its own “dynamic 3D animation engine,” which Cyanide interestingly describes as a tool that “integrates physical and biomechanical laws under the control of a powerful artificial intelligence system.” Skynet, can you hear us?

While the company hopes to license the engine to other “small and medium sized” game developers, Cyanide is not above eating its own dog food, and will utilize the technology in its own projects, the first of which will be a title based on Games Workshop’s fantasy tabletop game Blood Bowl. First announced briefly last year, the real news here is that the game, which is an unofficial follow up to the unlicensed PC title Chaos League, has been confirmed as in development for the Xbox 360, PSP, and Nintendo DS, as well as the PC. Few details are known at present beyond that the studio calls the project a “faithful representation” of the tabletop game, and adds that Blood Bowl should be released sometime in late 2008. In the absence of a new Mutant League Football, we will take what we can get.”

Straight from Flight Global: “A 400,000kg (880,000lb) Marship would be assembled in orbit using the Ares V cargo launch vehicle for a 900-day mission to the red planet, according to details that have emerged about NASA’s new Constellation programme’s manned Mars mission.The spacecraft would take a “minimal crew” to Mars in six to seven months, with the crew spending up to 550 days on the surface, according to the programme’s design reference architecture 5.0, currently in development.

Each of the three to four Ares V rockets used to launch the Marship elements into low Earth orbit would need a 125,000kg payload capacity and use a 10m (32.7ft) fairing.

Crews would be sent every 26 months, will need up to 50,000kg of cargo, use an aerodynamic and powered descent method and the 40min communications delay between Earth and Mars would require autonomy or at least asynchronous operation with mission control.

Notionally launched in February 2031, the first crew’s flight would be preceded by the cargo lander and surface habitat being sent in December 2028 and January 2029, respectively using two Ares V launches.

The lander will arrive around October 2029 and the habitat November the same year. Nuclear power is the preferred surface energy source. The crew will arrive in August 2031.

A second mission’s habitat and lander will be launched by two Ares Vs in late 2030/early 2031 to reach Mars at the same time as the first crew. In the first quarter of 2033, the second mission’s crew will leave Earth to arrive at Mars by December, while the first crew leaves Mars in January 2033 after a 17-month stay, to reach Earth by September.

The details were included in a presentation at “Enabling Exploration: The Lunar Outpost and Beyond“, the October meeting of NASA’s Lunar exploration analysis group.

It also states, “Conjunction class missions (long-stay) [have] fast inter-planetary transits. Successive missions provide functional overlap of mission assets,” referring to the presence of a following mission’s habitat and cargo lander being on Mars when its preceding mission’s crew are there already.”

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Straight from Ars Technica: “As the RIAA’s legal battle against suspected file-sharers has unfolded, one of the arguments put forth by some defendants is that the statutory damages sought by the RIAA are unconstitutionally excessive. That’s one of the defenses articulated by Ray Beckerman, attorney for the defendant in UMG v. Lindor. In a ruling issued yesterday, Judge Robert M. Levy ordered the record labels to provide Marie Lindor with the expenses incurred for each of the 38 songs at issue in the case, writing that Lindor’s request may “lead to the discovery of admissible evidence.” The request by Lindor seems innocuous enough. “(A) Set forth all expenses incurred by plaintiffs, per authorized song file download, in connection with the thirty eight (38) songs…, and (B) annex copies of all documents kept in the ordinary course of business of plaintiffs sufficient to support said statement of expenses.”

In a court filing last month, the RIAA argued that Lindor’s request was unclear and that she already had information sufficient to make a defense that the statutory damages sought by the labels ($750-150,000) are unconstitutional. Most tellingly, the RIAA also says that “they do not have the analysis requested” and could not perform it without “enormous expense” requiring “lengthy and complex analysis.”

In Capitol v. Thomas, the only file-sharing case to go to trial so far, Sony BMG head of litigation Jennifer Pariser testified that she had no idea about the extent of the actual damages suffered by the recording industry. “We haven’t stopped to calculate the amount of damages we’ve suffered due to downloading, but that’s not what’s at issue here,” she told Jammie Thomas’ attorney during cross-examination.”

Straight from Fox News: “TEHRAN, Iran — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Wednesday that the U.S.-brokered Mideast peace conference was a “failure” and that Israel is doomed to “collapse,” lashing out at the Annapolis gathering that many saw as aimed at isolating Iran.

The comments were the first time in months that the hard-line Ahmadinejad has used such strong anti-Israeli rhetoric, highlighting Tehran’s bitterness towards Tuesday’s conference, which its closest Arab ally Syria attended.

“It is impossible that the Zionist regime will survive. Collapse is in the nature of this regime because it has been created on aggression, lying, oppression and crime,” Ahmadinejad said after a Cabinet meeting, according to state-run television.

“Soon, even the most politically doltish individuals will understand that this conference was a failure from the beginning,” he said, the official IRNA news agency reported.

Iran has repeatedly condemned the Annapolis conference, saying it would fail to bring any peace for the Palestinians and warning that it will discredit Arab countries who participated. Iran on Tuesday expresses surprise that Damascus participated in the gathering, though it has stopped short of directly criticizing its ally.

Ahmadinejad said the Palestinian “resistance” — such as Hamas, which is backed by Tehran — must have a say in any settlement.

“Many such meetings have been held but have failed,” he said. “If decision is made about Palestine, representatives of the elected Palestinian government and resistance should be there and the rights of the Palestinian people — self-determination, the right of voting and return of refugees — must be recognized,” he said.

Ahmadinejad has raised controversy in the West with past predictions of Israel’s eventual destruction, including a comment saying it should be “wiped off” or “disappear” from the map — and even critics at home said his inflammatory speeches were needlessly provoking the West against Iran.”

Was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the current President of Iran, one of the militant kidnappers that took over the U.S. diplomatic mission in Tehran on November 4, 1979 and held 63 U.S. diplomats and three other U.S. citizens hostage until January 20, 1981 (Of those captured, 52 were held hostage until the conclusion of the crisis 444 days later)? John Simpson of the BBC thinks so, and so do the hostages. The photo posted here shows one of the kidnappers in 1979 on the left, and Ahmadinejad on the right.

Wikipedia entry on the Iran hostage crisis

Straight from Fox News: “WASHINGTON — Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton would lose to every one of the top five Republican contenders in a head-to-head match-up — a complete reversal of fortune for the New York senator who has thus far led against all prospective GOP opponents — according to a new Zogby poll released late Monday.

Clinton’s top Democratic rivals, John Edwards and Barack Obama, however, still lead or tie Republicans in hypothetical match-ups ahead of the 2008 presidential election, the survey showed.

Clinton, who has recently witnessed sagging poll numbers since what many considered to be a poor performance at a nationally televised Democratic debate, trails Republican candidates Mike Huckabee, John McCain, Fred Thompson, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney by three to five percentage points in direct match-ups.

Click here to see detailed poll results

In July, Clinton led Arizona senator McCain by two-points, held a five-point lead over former New York Mayor Giuliani, a six-point lead over former Tennessee Sen. Thompson and a 10-point lead over former Massachusetts Gov. Romney.

While the November survey shows former Arkansas Governor Huckabee, who is surging in Iowa and national polls, beating Clinton by five-points, the July Zogby survey did not match the two.

The interactive poll of 9,150 likely voters nationwide was conducted Nov. 21-26 and had a margin of error of plus or minus one percentage point. The interactive poll surveys individuals who have registered to take part in online polls.”

Straight from Fox News: “A British primary school teacher arrested in Sudan faces up to 40 lashes for blasphemy after letting her class of 7-year-olds name a teddy bear Muhammad.

Gillian Gibbons, 54, from Liverpool, was arrested at at Khartoum’s Unity High School yesterday, and accused of insulting the Prophet of Islam.

Her colleagues said that they feared for her safety after reports that groups of young men had gathered outside the Khartoum police station where she was taken and were shouting death threats.

The Unity school is a Christian-run but multi-racial and co-educational private school that is popular with Sudanese professionals and expatriate workers.

Bishop Ezekiel Kondo, chairman of the school council, told The Times that the school was in dispute with authorities over taxes, and suggested that Gibbons, who arrived in Khartoum in August, may have been caught up in that.

“The thing may be very simple but there are people who are trying to make it bigger. It’s a kind of blackmail,” he said.

Teachers at the school, in central Khartoum, a mile from the Nile River, said that Gibbons had made an innocent mistake by letting her pupils choose their favorite name for the toy as part of a school project.

Robert Boulos, the Unity director, said Gibbons was following a British National Curriculum course designed to teach young pupils about animals and their habitats. This year’s animal was the bear.

In September, she asked a girl to bring in her teddy bear to help the class focus and then asked the children to name the toy.

“They came up with eight names including Abdullah, Hassan and Muhammad. Then she explained what it meant to vote and asked them to choose the name,” Boulos said.

Twenty out of the 23 children chose Muhammad. Each child was allowed to take the bear home for weekends and asked to keep a diary about what they did with the toy. Each entry was collected in a book with a picture of the bear on the cover, next to the message “My name is Muhammad.”

Boulos said that the bear itself was not marked or labeled with the name in any way, adding that Sudanese police had now seized the book and asked to interview the 7-year-old girl who brought in the bear.”

Straight from Fox News: “TEHRAN, Iran — The head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization said Saturday that the country had produced its first nuclear fuel pellets for use in a heavy water reactor, which is still under construction.

The uranium oxide pellets are made using a process separate from the uranium enrichment at the heart of a standoff between Iran and the U.S., which accuses the clerical government of secretly pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

But the Arak reactor, which began construction in central Iran in 2004, is a concern to the West because the spent fuel from a heavy-water facility can be used to produce plutonium, which in turn can be used for a nuclear weapon. U.N. inspectors last visited the reactor in July, and Iran has said it hopes to have Arak up and running by 2009.

“Fuel pellets to be used in the 40-megawatt Arak research reactor have been produced,” Iranian Vice President Gholam Reza Aghazadeh said, according to the official IRNA news agency.

Iran is developing Arak parallel to its better-known light-water reactor program, like the one being built with Russian help at Bushehr. Such light-water reactors use enriched uranium that, at far higher levels of enrichment, can also be used to produce the fissile material for a nuclear weapon.

Iran insists its nuclear program is solely for peaceful purposes including generating electricity.

The U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, had no comment Saturday.”

Straight from Fox News: “Iran issued a warning to world powers Thursday that an attack on its nuclear facilities would trigger a “domino” effect across the Middle East.

“Playing with security of Iran is like dominos,” said Saeed Jalili, Iran’s new chief negotiator. “We believe the world powers are aware about Iran’s effective role in the global security. Our role in Afghanistan and Iraq is in direction with peace, stability and improving governments there.”

World leaders met to discuss Iran’s cooperation with United Nations resolutions aimed at ending Iran’s development of nuclear weapons.

Mohamed El Baradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, wants to give Iran more time, show in his agency’s latest report that the country has cooperated with negotiators.

The United States and Britain want a third round of sanctions against Iran while China and Russia appear to back El Baradei’s position to let negotiators have more time.

The UN Security Council adopted two rounds of sanctions resolutions against Iran.

“El Baradei wants to get across that Iran has shown real willingness to cooperate and we are making important progress, so let’s stick with it,” said a Vienna-based diplomat.”

Straight from Ars Technica: “AT&T announced earlier this year that was planning to introduce content filtering of some sort for all video passing across its network. Exactly what AT&T was thinking remained unclear: would the company truly attempt to reassemble the fragments of peer-to-peer transmissions, then extract video from all sorts of different codecs, then attempt to match it-in real time-to some database of copyrighted works? Would such a thing even be possible? It’s still not clear how AT&T plans to deploy its system, but the company is serious about it. Further evidence of that came today, when a brief Wall Street Journal writeup (subscription) pointed out that the company has just invested in Vobile.

Vobile’s core product is a screening technology that it calls “VideoDNA.” Like other systems of its kind, VideoDNA develops a unique signature from every frame of video. The signature is meant to be robust enough to survive various transformations and edits, and it can then be used to run matches against incoming content.

Vobile pitches its products as being especially suitable for content tracking and management purposes. Video-sharing sites could deploy the technology to flag user-uploaded content for possible copyright violations. But, as Vobile’s site notes, VideoDNA is also quick enough to be deployed on video “when it’s transported over a network.”

AT&T has yet to publicly pick a winning technology (plenty of other companies are working on similar video identification technology), and it hasn’t even revealed the scope of its plans. But the interest in video filtering doesn’t appear to have faded after months of time in which executives could ponder the important questions of just how such a system would work and (perhaps more importantly) what customers would think of it.

Based on the complexity of the problem, we suspect that anything initially deployed by AT&T will fall far short of a robust P2P video filter. But should AT&T truly have its eyes on just such a prize, the company would be in a powerful position to impose its own policies on the entire US, since it owns major parts of the Internet backbone. It will also be in a plum position when it comes to dealing with the MPAA and with networks like NBC; both groups have been calling on ISPs to implement exactly this sort of filtering for months.”

Straight from Ars Technica: “The RIAA has responded to Jammie Thomas’ motion for a new trial or to have the amount of the jury award slashed. In their reply, the record labels argue that since Thomas agreed to the jury instructions and was aware of the possibility of a massive award, she has no basis to challenge the constitutionality of the statutory damages.

After a three-day trial last month, a Duluth, MN, jury found that Thomas willfully infringed on the record labels’ copyrights by downloading and distributing 24 copyrighted recordings. Under the provisions of the Copyright Act, they could have awarded the labels anywhere from $750 to $150,000 for each of the songs. They ultimately settled on $9,250 per song for a grand total of $222,000.

In her motion, Thomas argued that the award was unconstitutionally excessive, citing testimony in UMG v. Lindor (a case that the labels call “unrelated” in their response) that the labels only make about 70¢ per song sold online. Thomas instead would like to see damages limited to those that the labels can actually prove, arguing that any award above the labels’ actual damages is “purely punitive.” At most, statutory damages should be capped at 10 times actual damages.”

Straight from Ars Technica: “Customers aren’t the only ones frustrated with the high-definition format wars—Sony CEO Howard Stringer is reaching the end of his rope as well. Blu-ray, which is backed by Sony, was doing well up until recently and winning the war based on merits, Stringer said at an event in New York. That is, up until movie studio Paramount decided to “change sides” and go exclusively HD DVD in August. Things have apparently become more difficult since then, and the high-profile CEO is showing signs of wear.

“It’s a difficult fight,” Stringer was quoted saying by the Associated Press, going so far as to describe the situation as a “stalemate.” He candidly indicated that the war mostly came down to bragging rights over who was winning, and said that the two camps could have collaborated better in the past to develop one format. Stringer even said that he wished he could go back in time to make that possible—is that the smell of regret floating in the air?”

Straight from Ars Technica: “Macrovision, the DRM firm perhaps best known recently for creating security holes in Windows with its SafeDisc DRM, has purchased the intellectual property surrounding the BD+ DRM scheme used by Blu-ray to thwart attempts at copying. For $45 million, Macrovision will get ownership of the Self-Protecting Digital Content (SPDC) technology that forms the basis for BD+ as well as associated patents owned by Cryptography Research.

Both Blu-ray and HD DVD use AACS to thwart copying, but that was cracked last spring. Blu-ray is alone in using an additional layer of security, BD+, to keep users from copying Blu-ray discs. BD+ works via a small virtual machine that is launched each time a disc is inserted. The VM does some code transformation to correct deliberately-corrupted video streams, and checks to see if the disc is playing on a Blu-ray player known to have been hacked. If the player has been compromised in the past, playback can be disabled. When the disc is ejected, the VM disappears from memory, which, in theory, makes it more difficult to hack or reverse engineer.

One small problem: BD+ was hacked earlier this month by SlySoft, makers of AnyDVD. The crack made good the company’s boast that a crack would be available by year end and called into serious question the claims made by Blu-ray’s backers that BD+ was uncrackable.

With the crack, users of AnyDVD make copies of the movies for fair use purposes. Mandatory Managed Copy is part of the Blu-ray spec, but has yet to be implemented, meaning that there’s no way for Blu-ray disc owners to legally copy the discs.”