In a move that critics have compared to the security clampdown in Baghdad, police are stopping motorists travelling through the main thoroughfare of Trinidad, a neighbourhood near the National Arboretum in the city's northeast section.

'Baghdad-style' checkpoints in US capital - Telegraph

Time Warner Cable said it will cease to offer customers access to any Usenet newsgroups, a decision that will affect customers nationwide. Sprint said it would no longer offer any of the tens of thousands of alt.* Usenet newsgroups. Verizon's plan is to eliminate some "fairly broad newsgroup areas."

This has to be the largest act of government coerced censorship in United States history. Granted, many of these newsgroups are still available via web interfaces like Google Groups, but the precedent set here is worse than the result. It is inevitable that if allowed to stand other content and protocols will be added to this regime. It is worth noting that the ISPs weren't required to block all of these newsgroups, just filter them with a government hash list. A hash list that would have inevitably expanded to include other verboten content that the government recommends that communications services "voluntarily" censor. Its likely that is not a business these ISPs wish to be in.

More here and here.

I have a feeling that June 10th, 2008 may replace February 8th, 1996 as the most infamous day in the history of the Internet.

N.Y. attorney general forces ISPs to curb Usenet access | The Iconoclast - politics, law, and technology - CNET News.com

The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has tapped Northrop Grumman to develop binoculars that will tap the subconscious mind. The Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System program, informally called "Luke's Binoculars," combines advanced optics with electro-encephalogram electrodes that can, DARPA believes, be used to alert the wearer to a threat before the conscious mind has processed the information.

Northrop To Develop Mind-Reading Binoculars | Danger Room from Wired.com

An internal British Telecom report on a secret trial of an ISP eavesdropping and advertising technology found that the system crashed some unsuspecting users' browsers, and a small percentage of the 18,000 broadband customers under surveillance believed they'd been infected with adware.
The January 2007 report (.pdf) -- published Thursday by the whistle blowing site Wikileaks -- demonstrates the� hazards broadband customers face when an ISP tampers with raw internet traffic for its own profit. The leak comes just weeks after U.S. broadband provider Charter Communications told users it would be testing a technology similar to what's described in the BT document.

Leaked Report: ISP Secretly Added Spy Code To Web Sessions, Crashing Browsers | Threat Level from Wired.com

Susan Blackmore studies memes: ideas that replicate themselves from brain to brain like a virus. She makes a bold new argument: Humanity has spawned a new kind of meme, the teme, which spreads itself via technology -- and invents ways to keep itself alive

awesome a fresh view of the tech singularity -- AI as the birth of third generation replicators -- R3 as T1 or piggy backing on humans and dawn of the post-human and climate change etc seen from new perspective -- I find it interesting that Susan Blackmore sees a choke point ahead --- I know I do and have done for some time but she weaves it into a larger narrative

Does this mean that women will someday choose a mate judging by the size of his robot?

TED | Talks | Susan Blackmore: Memes and "temes" (video)

While we are still far from a full understanding of the nature of memory, perception, and meaning, it is nonetheless because of the work of scientists such as Changeux, Edelman, and Rizzolatti that we have a better grasp of the complexity of subjective experiences. Perhaps in the future, questions about higher brain functions will be better understood because of new genetic and neurophysiological discoveries and brain imaging. An unexpected scientific discovery can give us a new insight into something we thought we had always known: mirror neurons, Rizzolatti tells us, "show how strong and deeply rooted is the bond that ties us to others, or in other words, how bizarre it would be to conceive of an I without an us."

How the Mind Works: Revelations

Paranoid Linux is an operating system that assumes that its operator is under assault from the government (it was intended for use by Chinese and Syrian dissidents), and it does everything it can to keep your communications and documents a secret. It even throws up a bunch of "chaff" communications that are supposed to disguise the fact that you're doing anything covert. So while you're receiving a political message one character at a time, ParanoidLinux is pretending to surf the Web and fill in questionnaires and flirt in chat-rooms. Meanwhile, one in every five hundred characters you receive is your real message, a needle buried in a huge haystack.
~Cory Doctorow (Little Brother, 2008)

When those words were written, ParanoidLinux was just a fiction. It is our goal to make this a reality. The project officially started on May 14th, and has been growing ever since. We welcome your ideas, contributions, designs, or code. You can find us on freenode's irc server in the #paranoidlinux channel. Hope to see you there!

--
ParanoidLinux Team

ParanoidLinux.org

Papa John’s Pizza has finally realized that mailing millions of pizza coupon leaflets to the American public is not the most effective marketing strategy. With the creative expertise of Quorum/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi, Papa John’s has taken an innovative approach to directing marketing with its deceiving faux delivery boy & pizza appearing at your doorstep. The optical illusion actually works by affixing a sticker right below the door’s peephole with the image. Already the winner of the Gold Lion for the best use of alternative media in direct marketing at the Cannes Advertising Festival, this marketing strategy is sure to stick with consumers.

Cruel Pizza Advertisement « THE FIRE WIRE

The bus stop, in front of the Benrath Senior Centre in the western city of Düsseldorf, is an exact replica of a standard stop, with one small difference: buses never stop there.

The idea emerged after the centre was forced to rely on police to retrieve patients who wanted to return to their homes and families but had forgotten that in many cases neither existed any longer.

"If we can’t find them then we have to alert the police,” said Benrath's director Richard Neureither. “It can be particularly dangerous if this happens in winter and they spend the night out in the cold.”

Wayward Alzheimer's patients foiled by fake bus stop - Telegraph

"What we've got to do right here is show you how robots get down."

Robot Love