interesting things
Gary McKinnon, is a British man with Asperger’s Syndrome who has been fighting extradition to the US after he hacked a US military server “looking for evidence of UFOs.” He faced a 60-year sentence if convicted in the US. After a decade-long fight, the UK Home Secretary Theresa May has blocked his extradition, citing “public concern about the extradition regime,” in a turn that surprised many of us — I would have bet cash money against it.
Gary McKinnon extradition decision
You know you have an issue when someone brews up a Tumblr to mock you: theamazingios6maps.tumblr.com.
A peculiar rotten-egg smell covering the Los Angeles region has an explanation: it was brought in by winds blowing in from Salton Sea, a saline lake in Southern California, where a recent massive fish die-off occured. [Examiner]
In this Smithsonian Mag piece, some background on the “high-tech, high-stakes competition between Olympic athletes who use banned substances and drug testers out to catch them.” Helpful context for those seeking to understand the science behind today’s news on a doping scandal specific to a certain cycling hero and cancer advocate. (via @alicialane)
You may remember Paul Brigner, the geek who quit his job as CTO of the MPAA to work for its arch-rival net-freedom advocates at the Internet Society, who manage the .ORG top-level domain. He has just filed comments with the White House’s IP Czar rubbishing the techniques proposed in SOPA, which contemplated censoring the Internet by tinkering with the domain-name service in the hopes of reducing copyright infringement. At the time that Brigner left the MPAA for ISOC, a lot of us were worried that he’d officially endorsed SOPA and argued in favor of it at Congress. Brigner and ISOC both assured us that he’d had a genuine change of heart, and these comments are the proof in the pudding. As Mike Masnick notes, Brigner was a pretty half-hearted, ineffective SOPA advocate, but he’s a rip-snortin’, ass-kicking critic of it.
We are also of the opinion that any enforcement attempts – at both national and international levels – should ensure and not jeopardize the stability, interoperability and efficiency of the Internet, its technologies and underlying platforms. The Internet – a network of networks – is based on an open and distributed architecture. This model should be preserved and should surpass any enforcement efforts. For the Internet Society preserving the original nature of the Internet is particularly significant, especially when enforcement is targeting domain names and the Domain Name System (DNS) in general. There are significant concerns from using the DNS as a channel for intellectual property enforcement and various contributions have been made on this issue by both the Internet Society and the technical community. It needs to be highlighted that from a security perspective, in particular, DNS filtering is incompatible with an important security technology called Domain Name Security Extensions or DNSSEC. In fact, there is great potential for DNSSEC to be weakened by proposals that seek to filter domain names. This means that DNS filtering proposals could ultimately reduce global Internet security, introduce new vulnerabilities, and put individual users at risk.
Our second recommendation relates to the legal tools that should be in place in any enforcement design. ISOC would like to stress the absolute need for any enforcement provisions to be prescribed according to the rule of law and due process. We believe that combating online infringement of intellectual property is a significant objective. However, it is equally important that this objective is achieved through lawful and legal paths and in accordance with the notion of constitutional proportionality. In this regard, enforcement provisions – both within and outside the context of intellectual property – should respect the fundamental human rights and civil liberties of individuals and, subsequently, those of Internet users. They should not seek to impose unbearable constitutional constraints and should not prohibit users from exercising their constitutional rights of free speech, freedom of association and freedom of expression.
As a general recommendation, we would like to emphasize our belief that all discussions pertaining to the Internet, including those relating to intellectual property – both at a national and international level – should follow open and transparent processes.
Former MPAA CTO Tells The White House Why SOPA Is The Wrong Approach For IP Enforcement
No one knows what will become of the WELL, the venerable online community that erstwhile owners Salon.com have put on the auction block. One group of users is pledging cash for a co-op buyout. Now another group has incorporated a for-profit entity that says it will raise capital to make a cash offer to SALN.
Great piece over at Huffington Post in which LGBT employees of Chick-Fil-A are interviewed about what it’s like working there right now. They’re getting it from both sides: the icky customers who thank them for hating gays, and the entitled jerk protesters who assume the same. And, bonus: some of the fast food chain’s gay employees report “a lot of general homophobia” in their work environments.
Marketing guru and fab writer Seth Godin recommends Kickstarter for the similarly situated, having just raised over $120K on it in less than a day.
This amazing photo was taken by astronaut Don Pettit on board the International Space Stations—of which you can see a chunk at the top of the frame. It’s part of a whole series of absolutely stunning photos that you need to go check out as soon as you have a free 20 minutes to spend staring at your monitor and going, “Woah,” to yourself over and over.
Here’s what Pettit had to say about the process.
“My star trail images are made by taking a time exposure of about 10 to 15 minutes. However, with modern digital cameras, 30 seconds is about the longest exposure possible, due to electronic detector noise effectively snowing out the image. To achieve the longer exposures I do what many amateur astronomers do. I take multiple 30-second exposures, the ‘stack’ them using imaging software, thus producing the longer exposure.â€
Via Smithsonian, which is where you can find the rest of Don Pettit’s photos.
Domestic airlines in the United States are failing financially. Fine. Sure. We knew that. But here’s the kicker: They’ve been financially failing for 40 years, almost the entire time they’ve been popular. And that? Is fascinating. Back at the turn of the 20th century, a lot of the first electric utilities and long-distance railroad companies went bankrupt, because people couldn’t figure out how to make a profit in an industry with huge, fixed overhead costs. This is some evidence that the kinks haven’t totally been worked out on that, even today. (Via Matt Yglesias)