Over the past 20 years, the number of Americans unsure about their stand on evolution has tripled from 7 per cent in 1985 to 21 per cent in 2005.

In other words, Americans are getting dumber.

"Republicans do it because it works.”

Yes, it does work. However, it is extremely irresponsible for the aformentioned reason. These people have damaged the strength of our country and its future for their own personal ends.

In evolution, Americans are big non-believers

Unbelievable. AOL released a file containing the search engine queries of over 500,000 users during a three month period. It's being mirrored all over.

Here is a screenshot of the download page before it was taken down, complete with a spelling error.. "ananomized"

This will probably be a watershed moment for Internet privacy.

Link to AOL data release

Or: How Acidus [*] learned how to port scan company intranets using JavaScript!

Imagine visiting a blog on a social site like MySpace.com or checking your email on a portal like Yahoo’s Webmail. While you are reading the Web page JavaScript code is downloaded and executed by your Web browser. It scans your entire home network, detects and determines your Linksys router model number, and then sends commands to the router to turn on wireless networking and turn off all encryption. Now imagine that this happens to 1 million people across the United States in less than 24 hours.

This scenario is no longer one of fiction.

You can visit the proof of concept page he created and test drive it now.

This is really, really, really scar^H^H^H^H cool!

Detecting, Analyzing, and Exploiting Intranet Applications using JavaScript

The owners of the privately held company have turned down a $750 million offer and hope to fetch as much as $2 billion in a sale, senior industry executives familiar with the matter say.

That may sound like a huge amount of money, especially when you consider that the company was launched just two years ago by a group of sophomores at Harvard University, led by Mark Zuckerberg (see BW Online, "Under 30, On the Cutting Edge"). But already, www.facebook.com has become the seventh-most heavily trafficked site on the Internet, according to market researcher comScore Media Metrix. It racked up 5.5 billion page views during the month of February, the latest month for which complete data are available. That's more page views than the Web sites of Amazon.com (AMZN), Ask.com, or Walt Disney (DIS).

I know several other Memestreamers are working on some cool web apps. Seems that there is a lot of interest in the area. How misguided it may be is a different story, but it looks like there's a crazy money pile at the end of the rainbow.

$750 Million not enough for Facebook

an. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Google Inc., the most-used Internet search engine, was sued by the Justice Department after it refused to turn over information that may help the government monitor sexually explicit material on the Web.

The Justice Department said it asked for all Google queries for a week and for 1 million Internet addresses in the company's database. According to the lawsuit, other search engines have complied with similar requests, ``and have not reported that they encountered any difficulty or burden in doing so.''

They did what now! How many of you want anything you have ever typed into Google to be in the government's hands? How many of you are pissed that other search engines just said "Here!"

DoJ sues Google for failing to turn over records!

The Bush administration on Wednesday asked a federal judge to order Google to turn over a broad range of material from its closely guarded databases.

The move is part of a government effort to revive an Internet child protection law struck down two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court. The law was meant to punish online pornography sites that make their content accessible to minors. The government contends it needs the Google data to determine how often pornography shows up in online searches.

In court papers filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Justice Department lawyers revealed that Google has refused to comply with a subpoena issued last year for the records, which include a request for 1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period.

I rest my case.

Bush wants Google search data

Within months of the government-run "Association of Kazakh IT Companies" getting control of Kazakhstan's internet domain, it shut down the website of British comic Sacha Baron Cohen (best known as Ali G). The site at www.borat.kz featured another of Cohen's comic creations, Borat Sagdiyev, a Kazakh journalist. It was removed from the Internet.

Why? The president of the organisation said it was so the comic "can't bad-mouth Kazakhstan under the .kz domain name". If you want an example of government-owned and run censorship on the internet, you'll be hard pushed to find a clearer example.

In principal I think governments should control their ccTLDs, but this is what happens. I think Kazakhstan is in the wrong, but its to be expected.

Linked in this story is another story about Iraq's ccTLD that is interesting. The previous owners of the domain were sent to prison for selling computer parts through a broker to Lybia and Syria. They really got nailed because one of their investors was Musa Marzuq, who is connected with Hamas. The U.S. alleges that this computer company was intended as a funding source for Hamas. Google provides a thick and interesting web here. The Council on American Islamic Relations called the convictions unfair, but there seems to be a number of direct links between them and the computer company. The people running the company also seem to have been connected to charities that were funnelling money to terrorist organizations.

Check this bio of one of the company's founders. A well educated technology guy who has been in the US for decades. Someone you could imagine doing business with... And apparently his business paid someone who planned terrorist attacks in Israel!

It is amazing and troubling to ponder how deeply integrated some of these people are into our society. Did this guy know about all of the activities of the charities he helped start? Did he realize his cousin and co-investor was married to someone who was planning terrorist attacks? Did he contemplate the fact that by generating money in his business he was helping fund her husband's activities? If this guy hired you to do consulting work would you have suspected this connection and turned him down? Why would someone who spent so much of his life developing communications tools that contribute to understanding get involved in business with someone who is killing innocent people?

ICANN and ccTDLs: For great justice?

TinyDisk is a program from saving and retrieving files from TinyURL and TinyURL-like services such as Nanourl. It overlays a write-once-read-many anonymous, persistent and globally shared filesystem. Once something is uploaded, only the database admin can delete it. Everyone can read it. No one can know who created it. Think of it as a magical CD-R that gets burned and placed on a network.

This is a file system I demoed at Phreaknic that runs on top of the link shortening service TinyURL. Its the perfect case study of how to write meaningful extensions on top of existing web applications, which was the topic of my presentation.

I've already uploaded some fun stuff into TinyURL, like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and even TinyDisk itself. Thats right, the program to read and write to TinyURL is stored inside TinyURL! It was also very cool to see other people starting to use it.

TinyDisk is a good hack.

TinyDisk - An anonymous shared file system on top of TinyURL.

Acidus says:

I've be doing quite a bit of work on anonymously and permanently publishing information on top of existing webservices (often without the service's knowledge/consent).

I thought I'd meme the grand daddy work on the subject Ross Anderson's Eternity Service paper. A must read about using the fragmented nature of USENET to overlay a hypertext-based layer where thing can never be unsaid.

One of the best computer security papers of all time...

The Eternity Service

Wikinews

Flickr pool

All you need.

London Bombing Attacks: Definitive Sources