Chemists in Japan report development of the world's first DNA molecule made almost entirely of artificial parts. The finding could lead to improvements in gene therapy, futuristic nano-sized computers, and other high-tech advances, they say. Their study is scheduled for the July 23 issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

First DNA molecule made almost entirely of artificial parts

The team behind the popular torrent site The Pirate Bay has started to work on a new encryption technology that could potentially protect all Internet traffic from prying eyes. The project, which is still in its initial stages, goes by the name “Transparent end-to-end encryption for the Internets,” or IPETEE for short. It tackles encryption not on the application level, but on the network level, the aim being that all data exchanged on your PC would be encrypted, regardless of its nature — be it a web browser streaming video files or an instant messaging client. As Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij (a.k.a. Tiamo) told me, “Even applications that don’t supporting encryption will be encrypted where possible.”

The Pirate Bay Wants to Encrypt the Entire Internet « NewTeeVee

Instead of turning it into a jukebox, a jack-o-lantern, or worse, a web server hosting your text-only fan site, why not ship that old Mac of yours out to Melbourne, Australia where painter and street artist Satta van Daal will slap on some fanboy-approved Apple imagery as part of his iPaint myMac series. I'm actually a little surprised it's taken this long for me to see a Mac with Jobs and Woz's bearded mugs on it. Maybe I just wasn't looking hard enough. [Satta Van Daal via Team Teabag]

Meta: Artist Uses Old Macs as Canvases for Mac Fanboy Paintings

In addition to blocking traffic from websites they don’t like, it looks like the web-geniuses behind the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow site have a few other tricks up their sleeves, such as automatically replacing any use of the word “gay” with the word “homosexual” in any of the AP stories they run … leading to instances in which proper names are reformatted to meet their ridiculous standard, such as this article about sprinter Tyson Gay winning the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials in which he is renamed “Tyson Homosexual”:

lol

Right Wing Watch: The Dangers of Auto-Replace

Twenty-five years ago, when I was a junior reporter and stringer for the San Francisco bureau of Time magazine, I came across the greatest story I never wrote, which was actually a pretty smart decision at the time, given that the story had no ending, I didn’t know how to write such a story then, and even if I had written it, Time wouldn’t have run it. It wasn’t merely that the story was too bizarre. Time was a news magazine, and this wasn’t news. It was, rather, a glimpse into the darker corners of the human spirit, the kind of thing you naturally gravitate to late in the evening, when, tired of films and politics, you’d say to your friends, "Do you want to hear something really sick?" And there’d be a silent, collective "ahhh," like that of children snuggling in for a bedtime story, knowing they were about to hear what they’d been waiting for all night.

I first came across the name John Ronald Brown in the late fall of 1973 in the San Francisco Chronicle when I saw an item in Herb Caen’s column about a doctor down on Lombard Street who was "lopping" people’s penises off. As it was my (self-appointed) job for Time in those days to cover the more raggedy edges of the ongoing paradigm shift, I called up the clinic and found myself talking to Brown’s partner at the time, Dr. James Spence, who, despite some reservations, invited me to see him.

An old story, but still interesting. About the infamous "Table-Top" brown

LA Weekly - News - Why Did He Cut Off That Man's Leg? - Paul Ciotti - The Essential Online Resource for Los Angeles

Believe Me, It’s Torture
What more can be added to the debate over U.S. interrogation methods, and whether waterboarding is torture? Try firsthand experience. The author undergoes the controversial drowning technique, at the hands of men who once trained American soldiers to resist—not inflict—it.
by Christopher Hitchens August 2008

Believe Me, It's Torture: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com

Watermelon may be a natural Viagra, says a researcher. That's because the popular summer fruit is richer than experts believed in an amino acid called citrulline. (CBS/AP)

I have a feeling half of Japan just got a nose bleed.

Is Watermelon A Natural Viagra?, Researcher Says Popular Summer Fruit May Have Viagra-Like Effect On Blood Vessels - CBS News

Over the next few months my life became a series of break-ups, one after another, as I emptied my contact-list harem of 19 phony relationships. Sometimes I broke up with them, sometimes they broke up with me. The result was the same: freedom. But if the Internet had accelerated my entry into these relationships, it made getting out of them agonizingly time-consuming.

Modern Love - Instant Message, Instant Girlfriend - Series - NYTimes.com

WASHINGTON, June 30 (UPI) -- The U.S. military is looking for a contractor to patrol cyberspace, watching for warning signs of forthcoming terrorist attacks or other hostile activity on the Web.

...

"The purpose of the services will be to identify and assess stated and implied threat, antipathy, unrest and other contextual data relating to selected Internet domains," says the solicitation.

...

The solicitation says the successful contractor will "analyze various Web pages, chat rooms, blogs and other Internet domains to aggregate and assess data of interest," adding, "The contractor will prioritize foreign-language domains that relate to specific areas of concern … (and) will also identify new Internet domains" that might relate to "specific local requirements" of the command.

Officials were keen to stress the contract covered only information that could be found by anyone with a computer and Internet connection.

Analysis: U.S. military to patrol Internet - UPI.com

Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users' names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday.

Viacom wants the data to prove that infringing material is more popular than user-created videos, which could be used to increase Google's liability if it is found guilty of contributory infringement.

Although Google argued that turning over the data would invade its users' privacy, the judge's ruling (.pdf) described that argument as "speculative" and ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four tera-byte hard drives.

The judge also turned Google's own defense of its data retention policies -- that IP addresses of computers aren't personally revealing in and of themselves, against it to justify the log dump.

Judge Orders YouTube to Give All User Histories to Viacom | Threat Level from Wired.com