“For the first time, encryption is thwarting government surveillance efforts through court-approved wiretaps,” reports David Kravetz at Wired.com , citing a report by the U.S. agency that oversees federal courts. This report also shows that authorities armed with wiretap orders are encountering increasingly more encryption.
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Feds say encryption to foil wiretaps is on the rise
The Internal Revenue Service is planning to pay out about $70 million in employee bonuses, according to Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa , a senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over the IRS. That oughta go over real well.
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IRS to issue $70M in employee bonuses, says lawmaker
It’s been several months since Facebook introduced Graph Search , and if you have it, you may be wondering what it’s good for. The short answer: A lot of things! Here are some clever ways to make use of Graph Search if you already have it, and some reasons to sign up to get it if you don’t have it already. Read more…
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Clever Uses for Facebook Graph Search
phantomfive writes “Some countries are worried about the privacy implications of Google Maps, but Lithuania is using them to find tax cheats. ‘After Google’s car-borne cameras were driven through the Vilnius area last year, the tax men in this small Baltic nation got busy. They have spent months combing through footage looking for unreported taxable wealth. … Two recent cases netted $130,000 in taxes and penalties after investigators found houses photographed by Google that weren’t on official maps. … “We were very impressed,” said Modestas Kaseliauskas, head of the State Tax Authority. “We realized that we could do more with less and in shorter time.”‘ The people of Lithuania don’t seem to mind. ‘Authorities have been aided by the local populace. “We received even more support than we expected,” said Mr. Kaseliauskas.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Google Maps Used To Find Tax Cheats
Synthetic biology researchers at MIT are creating simple analog computers in living cells, complete with fluorescent “displays.” Rahul Sarpeshkar and Timothy K. Lu engineered genetic circuits in E. coli so that the bacteria glows with a brightness determined by the amount of certain chemicals surrounding it. From Science News: By making bacteria glow more or less brightly depending on the number of different chemicals around, the new circuit can compute answers to math problems, Lu’s team reports May 15 in Nature. To add 1 plus 1, for example, the circuit would detect two chemicals and crank up the bacteria’s glow to “2.” ” Analog circuits boost power in living computers ” (Science News) ” Cell-Based Computing Goes Analog ” (The Scientist) ” Synthetic analog computation in living cells ” (Nature)
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E. coli engineered into an analog computer
Britain’s largest ISP, British Telecom, has ragequit Yahoo! after learning that the internet giant had bought beloved microblogging site Tumblr. Just kidding! It’s actually sick of its customers’ Yahoo-provided email accounts getting hacked. [Telegraph]
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British Telecom quits Yahoo!
New submitter imlepid writes “The Oxford English Dictionary is currently undergoing a complete overhaul which includes a reexamination of the 300,000+ entries and citations for those entries. Understandably for a work which is over 150 years old, some of the sources have become hard to find. One such example is a book titled ‘Meanderings of Memory’ by Nightlark, which is cited 49 times in the OED, including for some rare words. The OED’s editorial team has appealed to the public, ‘Have you seen a copy of this book?'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Help the OED Find a Lost Book
German start-up Nanoscribe is commercialized a 3D “micro printer” that uses a near-infrared laser to print tiny structures with features as small as 30 nanometers. (A human hair is roughly 50,000 – 100,000 nanometers wide.) The device uses an infra-red laser beam moving in three dimensions to solidify a light-sensitive material into the desired shape. The additive manufacturing system, much faster than existing technology, could be used to “print” the components of medical devices, electromechanical systems, and, er, robot models that would fit on the head of a pin. ” Micro 3-D Printer Creates Tiny Structures in Seconds ” (Technology Review, thanks Anthony Townsend !)
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Microscale 3D printer
Artist Martin John Callanan and the Advanced Engineered Materials Group at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory used an infinite 3D optical microscope to capture 400 million pixel images of the lowest denomination coin from many currencies. ” The Fundamental Units ”
Yo ho yo ho, a pirate’s life for me. And for you! And for everyone! Because downloading BitTorrent files just got a lot easier. BitTorrent is finally pushing its torrenting browser plug-in, BitTorrent Surf, to beta for you to try. That means you don’t have to deal with pesky desktop clients, your browser (Chrome or Firefox) effectively becomes the only BitTorrent client you need. More »
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Download BitTorrent Files from Your Browser with BitTorrent Surf Beta