Accountancy has a reputation for dullness but its history is the history of civilisation itself, from the evolution of government and taxation to trade and capitalism. It has also provided a paper trail through some of the darker periods of human history.

At first sight it looks like the income statement for any factory. It starts with the daily wage bill, and deals with the costs of uniform and other running expenses, all properly amortised.

But then comes an odd line: the projected income per worker is adjusted so that it covers not one year, but only nine months.

For this is no ordinary factory, but Buchenwald concentration camp. The workers, leased out by the SS, are expected to be dead from exhaustion in less than a year.

Further down in the accounts is a note: "revenue at death". This refers to the sum to be made from the body itself, from ashes, fat and hair.

BBC News - How men in grey suits changed the world

Scientists may have identified the first specks of interstellar dust in material collected by the US space agency's Stardust spacecraft.

A stream of this dust flows through space; the tiny particles are building blocks that go into making stars and planets.

The Nasa spacecraft was sent to catch material streaming from Comet Wild/2 and return it to Earth.

But it also carried a collector for interstellar dust.

The material was gathered by the Stardust probe in a seven-year, 4.8-billion-km (2.9 billion miles) interplanetary voyage.

BBC News - Probe may have found cosmic dust

What can lists tells us about the personality of the list-maker? An exhibition in Washington reveals the obsessive and controlling sides of some of the world's greatest artists.

BBC News - The art of list-making

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ShadyURL - Don't just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frightening

The open source community uses this argument to assert that open source software is more secure than proprietary software. Advocates of proprietary software attack this argument on a variety of grounds, but here’s a little secret: Raymond was right. One cannot deny the logic. In fact, it is a tautology. If you assume that all individuals have a non-zero probability of finding and fixing a bug, then all you need is “enough” individuals. A million monkeys banging on a million keyboards will eventually produce Twelfth Night. Mathematically, the many-eyeballs argument, and the million-monkeys argument are equivalent.

Thinking About Security : Microsoft’s Many Eyeballs and the Security Development Lifecycle

President Dmitri Medvedev has publicly stated that Russia needs to change course if it does not want to end up as a third-world country. Igor Shuvalov, the first deputy prime minister, recently told investors that although Russia had suffered its worse recession in a decade, it would be transformed into a “new country” by 2020 through innovation and investment in “human capital.” He said the investment climate would be significantly improved within a year through a reduction of red tape and a clean-up of the court system.

The problem is that we’ve heard this before. When Vladimir Putin moved into the Kremlin a decade ago he promised to ensure the rule of law and to tackle corruption. But under his watch there has been no progress toward an independent judiciary, and the corrupt bureaucracy has been allowed to expand.

Op-Ed Contributor - Dead-End Russia - NYTimes.com

Get ready for the optimized moviegoing experience, where every instant is calculated to tickle your neural G-spot — all thanks to functional magnetic resonance imaging, soon to be every director’s new best friend.

Scott Brown on How Movies Activate Your Neural G-Spot | Magazine

There is material covered in the talk that isn't covered in the paper, so it might make sense to start with the sides. I'm very interested in any thoughts, comments, or feedback that you might have.

My Blackhat DC paper, slides and videos are online

The IBM researcher, Tom Cross, notified Cisco of the issues back in December, and recommends revisions to the standard that will ensure that it is more secure by default. That might be helpful, but it still wouldn't deal with the problems posed by unpatched systems—Cross himself apparently recognizes that network administrators can be hesitant to risk the disruption of service that may come with updating major pieces of equipment.

Tom is on Ars Technica Today. Go Tom!

Cisco's wiretapping system open to exploit, says researcher

Activists have long grumbled about the privacy implications of the legal "backdoors" that networking companies like Cisco build into their equipment--functions that let law enforcement quietly track the Internet activities of criminal suspects. Now an IBM researcher has revealed a more serious problem with those backdoors: They don't have particularly strong locks, and consumers are at risk.

In a presentation at the Black Hat security conference Wednesday, IBM ( IBM - news - people ) Internet Security Systems researcher Tom Cross unveiled research on how easily the "lawful intercept" function in Cisco's ( CSCO - news - people ) IOS operating system can be exploited by cybercriminals or cyberspies to pull data out of the routers belonging to an Internet service provider (ISP) and watch innocent victims' online behavior.

Cisco's Backdoor For Hackers - Forbes.com