According to a post on Boing Boing, Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) has posted the US National Security Agency's guide to sanitizing Word and PDF documents.
With high-profile PDF censorship gaffes in the last few years due to misunderstandings about the technology, this PDF guide produced by the NSA cites common information leakages and includes a step-by-step guide on the censorship of Word documents and the subsequent conversion to PDF.

Ubiquitous PDF: Scrub documents the NSA way!

Google is rebuffing the Bush administration's demand for a peek at what millions of people have been looking up on the internet's leading search engine — a request that underscores the potential for online databases to become tools for government surveillance.

Google has refused to comply with a White House subpoena first issued last summer, prompting U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales this week to ask a federal judge in San Jose, California for an order to hand over the requested records.

The government wants a list of all requests entered into Google's search engine during an unspecified single week — a breakdown that could conceivably span tens of millions of queries. In addition, it seeks 1 million randomly selected web addresses from various Google databases.

In court papers that the San Jose Mercury News reported on after seeing them Wednesday, the Bush administration depicts the information as vital in its effort to restore online child protection laws that have been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Yahoo, which runs the internet's second-most used search engine, confirmed Thursday that it had complied with a similar government subpoena.

Google Won't Hand Over Files

We're hearing tales of two scenarios--one pessimistic, one optimistic--for the future of the Net. If the paranoids are right, the Net's toast. If they're not, it will be because we fought to save it, perhaps in a new way we haven't talked about before. Davids, meet your Goliaths.

This is a long essay. There is, however, no limit to how long I could have made it. The subjects covered here are no less enormous than the Net and its future. Even optimists agree that the Net's future as a free and open environment for business and culture is facing many threats. We can't begin to cover them all or cover all the ways we can fight them. I believe, however, that there is one sure way to fight all of these threats at once, and without doing it the bad guys will win. That's what this essay is about.

Here's a brief outline of the article. If you want to go straight to the solution, skip to the third section:

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Scenario I: The Carriers Win
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Scenario II: The Public Workaround
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Scenario III: Fight with Words and Not Just Deeds

Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes | Linux Journal

Imagine a large group of small unmanned autonomous aerial vehicles that can fly with the agility of a flock of starlings in a city square at dusk. Imagine linking their onboard computers together across a short-range, high-bandwidth wireless network and configuring them to form an enormous distributed parallel computer. Imagine using this huge computational resource to process the sensory data gathered by the swarm, and to direct its collective actions. You have now grasped the idea of a flying gridswarm. Here at Essex, we are working to bring this vision to reality.

Interesting factoid: a typical flock of starlings (about 2,000 birds) contains as much brain tissue as a single human.

As well as working on airborne gridswarms using UAVs, we are interested in heterogeneous swarms that employ a combination of airborne and terrestrial robots. This allows, for example, the UAVs to direct a ground vehicle to a particular location, or for sensed data from the ground vehicle to be processed on the airborne swarm and its results relayed to a central point for archival.

Gridswarms

Common sense dictates that submerging your high-end PC in cooking oil is not a good idea. But, of course, engineering feats and science breakthroughs were made possible by those who dared to explore the realms of the non-conventional. Members of the Munich-based THG lab are only too happy to confirm this fact. And not only did we find that our AMD Athlon FX-55 and GeForce 6800 Ultra equipped system didn't short out when we filled the sealed shut PC case with cooking oil--but the non-conductive properties of the liquid coupled created a totally cool and quiet high-end PC, devoid of the noise pollution of fans. The PC case - or should we say tank - also offered a new and novel way to display and show off your PC components.

Bad ass! Anyone want to try that?

Strip Out The Fans, Add 8 Gallons of Cooking Oil...

Asking folks in an Internet chat room to help crash his high school’s computer was a joke to one student.
School officials and Canton City Prosecutor Frank Forchione didn’t think it was funny.
On Wednesday morning, Forchione filed a felony criminal charge of disrupting public services against Michael W. Stone, 18, of 13634 Mogadore Ave. NW. Uniontown police arrested the Lake High School senior at the school.
“Michael said it was a joke,” Forchione said. “We showed him how we deal with this kind of joke.”
The incident occurred Dec. 2. Using a school computer, Stone created a blog on a Web site that encouraged others to use a link to another site. Once at the second site, Stone told users to “hold down F5 to help crash my school server,” according to police reports.
Forchione said school officials noticed that Lake High’s computer system was slowing down and called a technician who discovered the problem and its source.
School officials contacted Uniontown police, who investigated the case and turned over information to Forchione’s office.
Forchione said he filed charges because students need to know that officials will be aggressive when dealing with computer crime.

Lake senior faces felony charge OR When F5 Is A Crime...

DIY RFID human implants are on the rise. I have found over sixteen instances of midnight engineers implanting RFID tags in their hands. The general excuse is for automation purposes. Examples such as unlocking a computer screen saver or opening doors that have been outfitted with electric deadbolts. In my own case the idea of implanting technology that I have researched and spec'd out was very appealing. The fact that it can actually do something useful is quite secondary. The most rewarding part of this project was learning about RFID at a much deeper level.

Wow .. Will not find this in the pages of MAKE....

Man implants RFID in hand....

The first Galileo demonstrator is in orbit, marking the very first step to full operability of Europe’s new global navigation satellite system, under a partnership between ESA and the European Commission (EC).

Giove A, the first Galileo in-orbit validation element, was launched today from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, atop a Soyuz-Fregat vehicle operated by Starsem. Following a textbook lift-off at 05:19 UTC (06:19 CET), the Fregat upper stage performed a series of manoeuvres to reach a circular orbit at an altitude of 23 258 km, inclined at 56 degrees to the Equator, before safely deploying the satellite at 09:01:39 UTC (10:01:39 CET).
“Years of fruitful cooperation between ESA and the EC have now provided a new facility in space for improving the life of European citizens on Earth” said ESA Director General Jean Jacques Dordain congratulating ESA and industrial teams on the successful launch.

The US needs to for a union with the ESA/EC to better our old GPS systems, just proof that the USA lags/slacks and Europe best us to it.... Why not? We are 'Paranoid Nation' ... are we not?

ESA - Navigation - The future - Galileo - First Galileo satellite on orbit to demonstrate key technologies

For weeks, the blogosphere has been abuzz with tales of intrigue about Sony’s XCP copy protection system. Among the strangest revelations was that XCP itself infringes on the copyrights to several open source software projects. In one case, Sam Hocevar found conclusive evidence that part of XCP’s code was copied from a program called DRMS, which he co-authored with DVD Jon and released under the terms of the GPL open source license. What made this finding particularly curious is that the purpose of DRMS is to break the copy protection on songs sold in Apple’s iTunes Music Store. Why would XCP rip off code intended to defeat another vendor’s DRM?

Hidden Feature in Sony DRM Uses Open Source Code to Add Apple DRM

The National Association of Theater Owners wants the Federal Communications Commission to allow the blocking of cell phone signals in theaters.
John Fithian, the president of the trade organization, told the Los Angeles Times theater owners "have to block rude behavior" as the industry tries to come up with ways to bring people back to the cinemas.
Fithian said his group would petition the FCC for permission to block cell phone signals within movie theaters.
Some theaters already have no cell phone policies and ask moviegoers to check their phones at the door, Fithian said.
The Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association -- a Washington-based cell phone lobby that is also known as CTIA-the Wireless Association -- said it would fight any move to block cell phone signals.
"We're opposed to the use of any blocking technology, because it interferes with people's ability to use a wireless device in an emergency situation," CTIA spokesman Joseph Farren told the Times.

Theater owners want cell phones blocked