In one of his first acts in office President Obama has ordered the U.S. government to suspend prosecutions of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay for 120 days, military officials said Tuesday.

Obama calls for halt to Gitmo prosecutions - CNN.com

Yesterday I accidentally conducted a denial of service attack on my iPhone, using VOIP call flooding.

I failed to turn off the 'call workers' on one instance of a Scalr server farm, and then proceeded to load test it with valid POSTs to queue calls in the database. 50 call workers processes then began to pull call information from the queue - which contained 39,000 records, to make 50 calls simultaneously - to my cell phone.

It began to ring. Each time I pushed end call another was there. AT&T managed to deliver 37 simultaneous voicemails. In a couple minutes I managed to shut down the call workers and the flood ceased.

Sort of. I kept getting voicemails in blocks of 90 at a time for the rest of the day. The voice was me as 'Vinnie' threatening my life. It was kinda creepy. For a while my service turned off. Checking the logs, it seems that out of 350 or so calls that were made, about 300 got through and were able to leave messages. I find this somewhat impressive, but part of me regrets not spawning 500 call workers instead of 50 to see what the network could really handle.

I don't know if this has security implications beyond being humorous, but it is worth noting that every major VoiceXML/VOIP software provider provides developer accounts without much in the way of credentials. These accounts provide free outbound calling minutes for development purposes. It is also trivial to buy minutes in blocks from these same providers. Probably you could use this as a real DOS attack on someone's phone, or on an entire company or government agency's telephone system, if you had enough accounts distributed across providers.

I DOS'd My Cell Phone

You are invited to join the Amazon SimpleDB team on Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 9am PST for the first session of our new Developers’ Brown Bag. During these once monthly webinar sessions, developers will hear from the technical experts behind SimpleDB, and have the opportunity to engage in live Q&A.

Interested developers may register by emailing simpledb-developer-brownbag@amazon.com. Please include name & AWS account ID. In addition, developers are encouraged to pre-submit any questions they may have, to allow for a more thorough response during the live webinar. For those struggling with the development of a new application, sample code and a description of the intended application may also be submitted for review and discussion.

The team is looking forward to speaking with developers on the 20th.

Amazon Web Services Blog: SimpleDB Developer's Brown Bag

The focus of this talk is concurrency-oriented
programming, as popularized recently by the
increasing prominence of the Functional
Programming Language, Erlang.

From POE to Erlang: YAPC::Asia 2008 - May 15-16th in Tokyo, JAPAN

About the trailer: the voices belong to Jonathan Ive, Andrew Blauvelt, Marc Newson, and Karim Rashid. The song is “I Like Van Halen Because My Sister Says They Are Cool” by our friends El Ten Eleven, from their new record These Promises Are Being Videotaped [get it on iTunes]. And the font used in the trailer is… Akzidenz Grotesk! [Shout out to Paula Scher!]

We’ll be releasing the preliminary screening schedule soon, so subscribe to our newsletter or our RSS feed and we’ll keep you posted.

Objectified: A Documentary Film by Gary Hustwit

Dear Pragmatic but Frustrated,

The image comes to mind of a beautiful woman carrying a bottle of nitroglycerin through the streets of Pamplona during the running of the bulls.

She likes being there. She likes how it feels. She finds it interesting and it excites her. But she does not want to participate. She just likes being there. She does not want to spill the nitroglycerin; she does not want to cause an explosion; yet she is on the streets of Pamplona during the running of the bulls. It may be her opinion that the running of the bulls is pointless and absurd. Yet she is carrying a bottle of nitroglycerin through the streets of Pamplona during the running of the bulls.

Here is something about young men. They will almost always be stronger than you. But each young man begins as a powerless child. The elder males lift him up and say, Look how strong he is! Make a fist! they say. Look! Throw a punch! they say. Flex those biceps! The young boy flexes his tiny biceps and poses. They applaud him, but he is not strong. He is just a boy. He has no power.

He would like to be strong. He reads about the Incredible Hulk and dreams of being able to roar in anger and transform himself into a giant muscled man that adults fear and run from. He dreams of this.

He reaches his teens. One day an elder grabs his wrist and holds it and he breaks the grip! He sees surprise and fear in the eyes of the elder. He realizes he has physical power.

This changes everything.

I want to be spanked but remain a virgin, a Since You Asked column by Cary Tennis | Salon Life

The overall improvement between the two scenarios is tenfold, and is proportional to the number of parallel threads of execution. Some existing Amazon SimpleDB customers have reported good results when using anywhere from 30 to 50 threads. This technique could be combined with the exponential backoff algorithm we describe later in this article to find the optimal throughput level for your application and data set.

Amazon Web Services Developer Community : Building for Performance and Reliability with Amazon SimpleDB

Swiss wealth manager UBS AG (UBSN.VX) (UBS.N) is closing all the offshore accounts of its U.S. clients, the bank said on Friday, as it comes under pressure from U.S. tax authorities.

The Swiss bank decided in July last year to stop offering offshore accounts to U.S. citizens after it was targeted by a U.S. tax investigation which challenges Switzerland's famous banking secrecy laws.

U.S. prosecutors have alleged UBS helped clients hide $18 billion of untaxed American money in undeclared accounts. This amounts to around $300 million of annual unpaid taxes, the newspaper said.nullnullnullnullnullnullnullnullnullnullnullnullnullnullnullnullnullnull

UBS closing U.S. clients' offshore accounts - Yahoo! News

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Frank Herbert, author of Dune, told ... how he had once been approached by a friend who claimed he (the friend) had a killer idea for a SF story, and offered to tell it to Herbert. In return, Herbert had to agree that if he used the idea in a story, he'd split the money from the story with this fellow. Herbert's response was that ideas were a dime a dozen; he had more story ideas than he could ever write in a lifetime. The hard part was the writing, not the ideas.

Herbert might as well have been talking about technology. Don't get me wrong. Ideas are important. Research is critical to advancing our society. But when it comes to commercialization, it is only a small part of the puzzle.

GT VentureLab: It's the Execution, not the Idea that Matters