Test PAC, the Reddit-based PAC founded to raise money to support opponents of Lamar Smith, the author of SOPA, has placed its first billboard and is set to run its first advertisements. The materials direct people to unseatlamar.com.

I donated to this.

I'm tired of hearing content industry executives say things like the following:

“Right doesn’t always prevail,” Attaway said of SOPA and PIPA. “This time, it didn’t, because our opponents were able to energize a grassroots response. In my view, and I think all of us would agree, [the protest against SOPA and PIPA was spread] primarily through disinformation and spinning their interest in a way that captured the attention of a number of consumers.”

The people who protested SOPA did not do so because everything is cool and there is no problem. Until content industry executives acknowledge that there is a problem and create policy proposals that respect the nature of the problem there will be no progress on these issues through dialog.

If we cannot make progress through dialog, we will make progress through other means.

Reddit-based PAC takes aim at SOPA-sponsor Lamar Smith - Boing Boing

A new law - which may be announced in the forthcoming Queen's Speech in May - would not allow GCHQ to access the content of emails, calls or messages without a warrant.

But it would enable intelligence officers to identify who an individual or group is in contact with, how often and for how long. They would also be able to see which websites someone had visited.

...

But Conservative MP and former shadow home secretary David Davis said it would make it easier for the government "to eavesdrop on vast numbers of people".

"What this is talking about doing is not focusing on terrorists or criminals, it's absolutely everybody's emails, phone calls, web access..." he told the BBC.

"All that's got to be recorded for two years and the government will be able to get at it with no by or leave from anybody."

...

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, added: "This is more ambitious than anything that has been done before. It is a pretty drastic step in a democracy."

Is this an April Fools Joke? Its impossible to tell anymore. :-/

BBC News - Email and web use 'to be monitored' under new laws

Do not miss this!

Google Maps 8-bit for NES - YouTube

Paul Vixie:

We still don't know the identities of any of the criminals who foisted Conficker on an unready world back in 2008. But we do know that the victim population has not dropped below six million (6,000,000). So we still collect the "sinkhole" data about these victims, we still report on it to network operators, and every year we buy another rack of disk drives to hold the next year or so worth of data. We're out of ideas for how to get people to care that their computers are infected with Conficker. These victims seem to feel that have more important things to worry about. My gut feeling is that they're wrong, but I can't seem to prove it. My other gut feeling about all this is that we, as a digital society, are doing this all wrong.

DNS Changer

In 2009, I posted that paleontologists found the fossilized remains of the world's largest snake, a 42-foot-long relative of the boa constrictor. Paleontologists from the University of Toronto dubbed the species Titanoboa cerrejonensis for the Cerrejón region of northern Colombia where they found the remains. The snake snacked on crocodiles. As part of a new Smithsonian documentary "Titanoboa: Monster Snake," sculptor Kevin Hockley built a life-size replica of the beast.

Finding a 42-foot-long snake (fossil) - Boing Boing

This is a very important ruling in the battle over the US Government's "anything goes" border search policies.

I think the court's analysis of the Fourth Amendment implications of border searches of electronics is incorrect. It attempts to draw a line in the sand that says strip searches require suspicion but searches of electronics do not. This conclusion is reached by arguing that if the search of the content of a brief case is not Unconstitutional than the search of the content of a laptop must also not be Unconstitutional, because they are both containers of potentially private information. Its probably the most reasonable and articulate finding on this that I've seen, but in some respects that makes it a bit more straightforward to challenge.

This analysis fails to consider that the scope of the information contained in a laptop is much wider than the maximum possible scope of the information that could be contained in a briefcase, and so the privacy impact is not just greater but rises to a level that is categorically different. This relates to the Mosaic theory of Fourth Amendment analysis which was raised recently in Jones. The fact that the police might see you driving down a particular street without having to get a warrant does not mean that its OK for the police to monitor every movement that you ever make with an electronic device. The fact that the police might look at a few documents that you happen to have in your briefcase while crossing the border does not mean that the they can spend months analyzing a complete archive of every email you've ever sent and every web page you've visited in the past couple of weeks.

The Mosaic theory is, mind you, controversial, but I think its necessary - its where we need to go in order to deal with issues like this.

Furthermore, the court quotes an older case in which it is observed that "Requiring Reasonable Suspicion for all computer searches may 'allow individuals to render graphic contraband... immune to [a] border search simply by scanning images onto a computer disk.'" While that is correct, it ignores the fact that individuals can already render graphic contraband immune to a border search by transferring that information across the border over an Internet file transfer instead of carrying it on a computer disk. Arguably the warrant requirements for wiretapping international telecommunications are a matter of Congressional policy rather than a Constitutional requirement, but applying ancient privacy principals to new technologies is a complicated interaction between all three branches of government and the court is remiss for not at least making note of this contradiction.

The analysis of the challenge to the duration that House's electronics were seized is kind of lame. Basically the court is saying that the government cannot hold onto your laptop longe... [ Read More (0.6k in body) ]

Politically Motivated Border Searches Could Be Unconstitutional, Judge Rules | Threat Level | Wired.com

This struck me as funny:

A housing recovery will probably begin within a year or so. In any event, it is certain to occur at some point.

"It is certain to rain at some point" is an interesting attitude to have in the middle of a drought.

Calculated Risk: Buffett's Views on Housing

This is the only lucid explanation I've read regarding the problem with the "Stand your Ground" law - most of the people analyzing the issue miss the point and talk about the idea that the law makes it hard to convict people who used deadly force of murder, but thats not the problem that is impacting the Zimmerman/Martin case - the problem is that Flordia's statute prohibits arresting and interrogating the shooter. This is essentially consistent with the argument going on between the police and the "Justice for Trayvon" movement, but the press hasn't zeroed in on the substantive legal issue.

So what is truly distinctive about Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law? It is this: while self-defense conventionally is just that -- a defense, to be raised at trial -- self-defense under the Florida law acts as an immunity from prosecution or even arrest. Section 776.032 of the Florida Statutes provides that a person who uses deadly force in self-defense "is immune from criminal prosecution." This odd provision means that a person who uses deadly force in self-defense cannot be tried, even though the highly fact-intensive question of whether the person acted in self-defense is usually hashed out at trial. The law thus creates a paradox: the State must make a highly complex factual determination before being permitted to avail itself of the forum necessary to make such a determination.

Not only that, Section 776.032 provides immunity from arrest unless the police have "probable cause that the force that was used was unlawful." Again, the law creates a Catch-22: police cannot arrest the suspect unless they have probable cause, not just to believe there was a killing, but also that the killing was not in self-defense; and where, as is often the case, the defendant is the only living witness to the alleged crime, the police likely will not be able to form probable cause without interrogating the suspect.

PrawfsBlawg: Trayvon Martin and Florida's 'Stand Your Ground' Law

Flying Robots Deliver Tacos To Your Location

Easy Ordering On Your Smartphone

Just tap and let the machines do the rest.

Tacocopter: One-click Taco Delivery in the SF Bay Area

While pixelated can be a dirty word in the field of photography, in design we welcome it. This collection is just a bit (ha!) of all the fun pixelated design out there. Here are over 15 of our favorite pixelated designs:null

Our Favorite Pixelated Designs | Design Milk