The filmmaker Laura Poitras profiles William Binney, a 32-year veteran of the National Security Agency who helped design a top-secret program he says is broadly collecting Americans’ personal data.

The National Security Agency’s Domestic Spying Program - NYTimes.com

"The goal of this guide is to provide leaders of authoritarian, autocratic, theocratic, totalitarian and other single-leader or single-party regimes with a basic set of guidelines on how to use the internet to ensure you retain the most power for the longest time. The best way to achieve this is to never have your authority contested. This guide will accompany you in the obliteration of political dissidence. By having everyone agree with you, or believe that everyone agrees with you, your stay at the head of state will be long and prosperous."

THE DICTATOR'S PRACTICAL INTERNET GUIDE TO POWER RETENTION

One of the longest-lived game development houses in all of Europe, Studio Liverpool, was abruptly closed by parent company Sony this morning. All games in development at the studio have been cancelled, affecting what an unnamed source told Eurogamer includes a Wipeout game that had been in development for 12 to 18 months and a "Splinter Cell-style game," both planned as PS4 launch titles.

:-/

Wipeout developer Studio Liverpool closed after 28-year run | Ars Technica

My name is Laura Graham and I live in Nashville, TN. I am a mom to a very handsome and ifriendly 2 year old who has inspired me to design lots of kid/family friendly iPad and iphone accessories. I have been working on the ikid case design for a year.

iKid a Shock Absorbing Foam ipad Case and Gaming Console by Laura Graham — Kickstarter

Todd Akin's comment about rape is possibly the most appalling rationalization that I have ever heard from a U.S. politician. It is really not OK for the halls of leadership in this country to be populated by people who are that detached from reality. Whats even more troubling is the idea that there may be many people involved in government who believe that nonsense.

What Akin said is likely a more common belief than most Americans realize. There are several examples of state lawmakers and even a federal judge nominee having expressed the same view (BuzzFeed has a rundown). And a quick Google search shows the view isn’t relegated to just a few rogue politicians; it’s one that some in the social conservative community believe — despite the medical community’s clear verdict that it’s nonsense.

The attached WAPO article takes the also somewhat creepy tact that its all strategy and politicians who rise from the ranks of the hard right need to be more careful about what they say when they move to a position where they are visible to the mainstream. How about this - how about we have politicians who aren't crazy. Thank you.

Todd Akin

“It was a big mistake,” said former British ambassador Oliver Miles. “It puts the British government in the position of asking for something illegitimate.”

Britain passed the law in 1987, after a deadly shooting in 1984 in which a Libyan diplomat opened fire on demonstrators from within his country’s London embassy, killing a British police officer.

Experts say British threat against Ecuadorean Embassy over Assange was a diplomatic blunder - The Washington Post

The government of Ecuador is prepared to allow Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, to remain in its embassy in London indefinitely under a type of humanitarian protection, a government official said in Quito on Wednesday night. Seeking asylum, Mr. Assange has been holed up for two months in the embassy, where police arrested some of his supporters on Thursday.

Its one of those situations where I'm disgusted with everybody.

Assange is most likely guilty of abetting Bradley Manning in violating his agreement to keep the information he had access to secret - cracking NTLM hashes is not "journalism" and if Assange did that he was not merely a conduit for information.

I'm tired of the masses who see him as an innocent victim in all of this, although I suspect that some don't care about his actual guilt or innocence because they support doxing "the man" for ideological reasons that can largely be characterized as the oversimplifications of youth. Whatever you think about the idealism of Manning and Assange, doxing "the man" is not and should not be legal. You incur certain risks when you do something like that, and the only way you should expect to be free afterwards is if it turns out to be so important that everyone thinks you're owed a Presidential pardon.

Everyone doesn't think that in this case.

Assange may also be guilty of some sort of sexual assault. I am just as sick of hearing people talk about the "most likely legit rape charges" as I am of people who claim the allegations are "obviously bogus." I hate how people prejudge criminal allegations based on their personal feelings about the nature of the allegation and the person accused. I really would like to see that matter resolved by the legal system in Sweden to shut people up about it one way or the other, but I suspect the partisans of that question to be just as unpersuaded by an actual court ruling as the partisans of the "journalism" question are about the testimony in the Manning hearing about NTLM hashes.

I don't understand why a state that does not really support press freedom is keeping this guy from facing justice in either case, but I presume it is a diplomatic bargaining chip. Both the UK and the US have shown absolutely no backbone in their zeal to tear apart both the Internet as well as fundamental norms of International Relations in an attempt to get this guy. As appalling as it is that Ecuador is allowing its embassy to be used to hide an accused criminal from justice, it is equally appalling that the UK has threatened to dissolve the Ecuadorean embassy over it. I'd line it up next to the preemptive invasion of Iraq on the thinnest of rationales, the indefinite detention of people without charges, and the illegal wiretapping program in the US as further examples of the disdain that the powers that be appear to have for the general structure of the rule of law that is the fabric upon which our entire civilization has been built.

If the UK makes good on its threats and marches into that embassy it will be a dark day, indeed. Assange will have done more harm through provoking that action then he ever did by encouraging Manning.

I'm personally tired of this Assange non-sense.

Marissa Mayer, the new chief executive at Yahoo, ordered that the stock ticker be removed from the company’s internal home page. “I want you thinking about users,” she told employees, according to The Wall Street Journal.

That’s progress.

Down With Shareholder Value - NYTimes.com

This handout photo, released Tuesday, shows a healthy adult pale grass blue butterfly (top) and a mutated variety (bottom). Severe mutations were found in butterflies collected near Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Study: Japan nuclear disaster caused mutated butterflies - World News

In an article from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne describing the research, Pinto explains that his team’s method could also be used for everything from identifying the source of a computer virus to determining the blogs most likely to make web content go viral to preventing the spread of an epidemic or chemical attack by learning how it’s spreading.

An algorithm for tracking viruses (and Twitter rumors) to their source — Data | GigaOM