SECURITY SAGES SAY "SO WHAT" TO NET TERROR

Computer security experts gathered in Hannover, Germany to say what Defense Tech has been reporting for months: that the threat of "cyber-terror" is a load of hooey.

"If (terrorists) want to attack they will do it with bombs like they always have," said security guru Bruce Schneier.

In December, Jim Lewis, with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, called cyber-strikes "weapons of mass annoyance."

Schneier added, "Breaking pager networks and stopping e-mail is not an act of terror."

Nevertheless, such attacks have generated a seemingly endless stream of media and government warnings. Schneier blames the Bush Administration for this.

"The hype is coming from the U.S. government and I don't know why," he said.

My house, aerial view

So, where are you?

How long does a worm live on the net?

1/5 Scale Sherman Tank

Just imagine the looks on your neighbors faces when you rumble into the midst of their barbecue in a Panzer, and paste the beer cooler with your 37mm potato cannon. That'll teach 'em to drink imported beer on the 4th of July.
[more]

Too few males driving antelope to extinction

Male saiga antelope have
been hunted to the point of
disrupting their breeding
Courtesy: Pavel SorokinLONDON - Selective poaching of male saiga antelope has pushed the endangered species closer to extinction, scientists say.

Saiga antelope are one-metre tall, weigh about 35 kilograms, have skinny legs and large eyes and noses. The nomadic herds live in the semi-arid rangelands from central Asia to Russia.

Males have long, ringed horns prized for traditional Chinese medicine. Hunting of males for their horns has led to a gender bias, where females outnumber males by a ratio of 100 to 1.
[more]

Pretoria inventor Nic van Zyl

Meet the 'gun with brains'

Say hello to the Intelligent Fire Arm, a unique and thoroughly South African device that could change the way we think about guns – and the people who wield them. Although still in prototype form, it will soon enter manufacture.

Inventor Nic van Zyl, 65, is an ardent believer in firearms with brains.

“Until now, firearms have been dumb. They lie in your safe at home, or in your holster, and tell no stories. Naturally, this opens the door for all sorts of abuse. The Intelligent Fire Arm, also known as the ‘smart gun’, changes all that.”

Van Zyl is managing director of Bansha Investments, the company that has produced the prototype of the IFA. Work began on the device in 1994, when the first of many patents was taken out. Now, eight years later, an international firearms company is poised to acquire the production rights to what may well be the world’s first foolproof firearm – at least in terms of criminal abuse.
[more]

Ex-CIA Officers Questioning Iraq Data

Former CIA Officers Appeal to Current Analysts to Make Public Any Anti-War Information on Iraq

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON March 14 — A small group composed mostly of retired CIA officers is appealing to colleagues still inside to go public with any evidence the Bush administration is slanting intelligence to support its case for war with Iraq.

Members of the group contend the Bush administration has released information on Iraq that meets only its ends while ignoring or withholding contrary reporting.

They also say the administration's public evidence about the immediacy of Iraq's threat to the United States and its alleged ties to al-Qaida is unconvincing, and accuse policy-makers of pushing out some information that does not meet an intelligence professional's standards of proof.

"It's been cooked to a recipe, and the recipe is high policy," said Ray McGovern, a 27-year CIA veteran who briefed top Reagan administration security officials before retiring in 1990. "That's why a lot of my former colleagues are holding their noses these days."
[more]

SECTION SIXTEEN: SECURITY SERVICES SOURCES

• Declassified Spy Satellite Imagery : From the friendly folks at the NRO.
• The NRO Declassified -- NSA
• SPOT Images main page : every 26 days the SPOT (Satellite Pour l'Observation de la Terre) satellite passes overhead and takes your picture.
• Radarsat Images
• CORONA Spy Satellite Images : spy satellite pictures from 1960 to 1972.
• TerraScope : overhead pictures from Chairman Gates. Coverage photos from various sources; they sell the images in finished form. Cast your eyes skyword and say cheese to Bill.
• BfV (Germany)Links Page
• National Security Agency : The ears have walls, US version.
• National Counterintelligence Center (USA)
• National Infrastructure Protection Center (USA)
• NSA Intrusion Detection Tools Inventory
• The GCHQ : the British version.
• UK Communications-Electronics Security Group : Note the papers on public key encryption available through "Non-Secret Encryption" bar.

[more]

Practical Cryptography

Niels Ferguson and Bruce Schneier

Publication date: April 2003.
Read the Preface and Table of contents online.
Order from Amazon: hardcover, paperback.
List of corrections and extensions (to appear).

This book is about cryptography as it is used in real-world systems, about cryptography as an engineering discipline rather than cryptography as a mathematical science.

Building real-world cryptographic systems is vastly different from the abstract world of most books on cryptography, which discuss a pure mathematical ideal that magically solves your security problems. Designers and implementors live in a very different world, where nothing is perfect and where experience shows that most cryptographic systems are broken due to problems that have nothing to do with mathematics. This book is about how to apply the cryptographic functions in a real-world setting in such a way that you actually get a secure system.

This is the book we wish we'd had more than a decade ago when we started our cryptographic careers. It collects our combined experiences on how to design cryptographic systems the right way. In some ways, this book is a sequel to Bruce's first book Applied Cryptography, but it focuses on very practical problems and on how to build a secure system rather than just design a cryptographic protocol.

I screwed up and lost the 11/3/3 entry...trying to recover it...help! I used the beautify option on my arachnophilic program and instantly regretted the ugly result, which inexplicably is 20k larger than the original hand-wrought mess. With any luck and far too many hours things should be back to normal tomorrow. A cosmically oxymoronic moment...beautify...HA! (update: Dearest Mousemusings saved the day!, yay)

Tommy, Can You See Me?

If ever there was a report to confuse you with regard to nature vs. nurture it is one: Genes Are Main Culprit In Development Of Myopia, Study Suggests. While genes appear to be the most important determinant (i.e. if both your parents are myopic, there is a 33% chance you will be), some of the other data is just weird. It begins to get difficult to tell what is cause and what is effect.

Myopic children tended to read and study 2 hours a week more than normally sighted children and participate in about 2 hours less physical activities. And they scored 10 percentile points higher on tests of reading and language skills. Even after the added time they spent studying was adjusted for.

This certainly fits the stereotype of the studious child with glasses but what does it really mean. Is there a link between intelligence (whatever that is) and short-sightedness? If it is not fully genetic (i.e. 67% of those with myopic parents have normal vision), what other factors are involved? Interesting data but we are a long way from knowing what it really means.

Think it's a parody of Raging Cow?

But the light of the stars disoriented him, and the Creator became confused. And out of the space between water and earth came a most unusual creature. For it did lay eggs like a hen but have fur like a dog. Its hind had the tail of a beaver, but its head had the bill of a duck. And the Creator flew into such a rage, cursed his creation, hid it under a rock, and hoped no one would notice.

And so was the Raging Platypus born.

HIGH STRANGENESS AT THE GERMAN BORDER

The Department of Special Effects drops a 21,000-lb. bomb in Florida, New Orleans prepares to rename its most famous neighborhood the Freedom Quarter...and what doe it take to get me to comment on current affairs?

Don Johnson.

Word has only recently (Wednesday) emerged that the former MIAMI VICE star, crossing into Germany from Switzerland in November, was found by German customs authorities to be accompanied by a cool $8 billion USD in credit notes, etc., contained in a black leather suitcase. (I think that if it had been a Louis Vuitton suitcase, they would have told us. Too nice a detail to pass up.)
[more]

Arf! Arf! Arf!

Right about now, the neighbors start to come home and walk their dogs.

Nardo is usually out hunting lizards and crickets and mice around now, too.

It's only a matter of time before he comes crashing over the fence with his tail completely fluffed up.

BARK! BARK! BARK! BARK!

Yup.

Bush, Propaganda Minister O'Reilly, The P-Word and the Weiner Nation, by Al Martin

The only one that looked alert was Ari Fleischer and the problem is that although they powdered up Bush something fierce, they didn’t do anything to Ari’s head. They should have put more powder on the top of his head because every time he moved his head around it created a flash and glare off the top of his head. It even seemed to annoy Bush a little bit. He’d give him this look like “why don’t you turn your head down 50 watts?”
[more]

Something Else to Worry About
Monkeys in Pants

In December, Robert John Cusack, 45, was sentenced to 57 days in jail for a June smuggling caper on a flight to Los Angeles. He had four endangered songbirds and 50 illegal orchids in his luggage, and when one bird flew off down an airport corridor during an inspection, the agent asked if Cusack had anything else. "Yes," he said. "I've got monkeys in my pants" (actually, two endangered pygmy monkeys from Thailand, which Cusack dug down for and handed over). [Los Angeles Times, 12-19-02]

Top 10 words:

wife acceptance factor
leather spinster
google
post-mortem divorce
peeping-Tom TV
Adlai Stevenson moment
poo X
chewable liquor
Sprinkler City
jump-out squad

All newspaper editorial writers ever do is come down from the hills after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.

Comic Of The Day

Life in the elementary school classroom for delinquent pharmaceutical companies

The habitual wrongdoing of drug companies makes me feel like a teacher in charge of a class of naughty kids. Glaxo! How many times have I told you to stop interfering with the science experiments? And Pfizer where did you get those patents!? OK, give them back. Astrazeneca have you been copying other people’s work? This drug is exactly the same as the one you handed in for homework yesterday. You’ve been sitting next to Bayer again haven’t you? Come on, down to the front, where I can keep an eye on you …

And Novartis, stop bullying that little company and let them get on with developing a drug for peanut allergy.
[more]

John Gilmore: Sen. Wyden's CAPPS 2 amendment is bullshit

   (1) CIRCULATION OF PROPOSED PROGRAM- The Under Secretary shall--

       (A) propose a program under subsection (a) within 90 days after

       the date of enactment of this Act; and

       (B) distribute the proposed program, on a confidential basis,

       to those air carriers and other employers to which the program

       will apply.

     ...

   (4) SUSPENSION OF PROCEDURAL NORMS- Neither chapter 5 of title 5,

       United States Code, nor the Federal Advisory Committee Act (5

       U.S.C. App.) shall apply to the program required by this sectio n.

GeoURL and our neighbors

Both Komputor and Mass Spectrometry Blog are both my neighbors. Who would have thought GeoURL would be so cool? I just thought it was kinda neat and maybe a way to meet people, but I've found so many great sites that way.

Three Laws Of Thermodynamics, As A Poker Game

1. You can't win.


2. You can't break even.


3. You can't get out of the game.

Huxley and the absurd

"Huxley had, in fact, a well-developed sense of the absurd...that the universe is radically weird. Comments to this effect turn up again and again in Huxley's writing: "the astonishingness of the most obvious things," "the unutterably odd facts of human experience," etc. He was much tickled to find, when typing one day, that his left hand had slipped from "c" to "v," giving him the phrase: "the human vomedy.""

My focus today is on warnings, code red, that we have ignored in the decades since their first iteration. The odds, which for the bookie in us all I'll peg at six million to one, of being in personal danger due to terrorism from "others" is many orders of magnitude less than that of being terrorized by the domestic milieu.
[more]

Play 20 Questions

AP protests government seizure of package

Congress mulls P2P porn restrictions

Intel's new brand stirs up the message boards - FARK rejoices

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) - As much as Intel longs hope Centrino turns out to be more than meets the eye, it's not some new-fangled Transformer. And it's certainly not a teenage rebel from an alternate dimension a la the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles."

Centrino is Intel's new wireless brand, freshly launched with a $300 million party tab -- and it drew the kind of mixed reception that you'd only find in cyberspace.

The ruckus began on Fark.com where Bandman confused the issue with the low-riding Neutrinos of Dimension X at about the same time that MikeMir quipped: "What a coincidence, my coke dealer's name is Centrino."

Then there were others among the Web's irreverent peanut gallery, like TotallyFarkedDude, who went straight to the heart of the matter: "But can I download porn faster with it?"

Ah, but there's a serious side to those plucky little Fark'ers.
[more]

Teat-seeking robot to help cows milk themselves

Soft-touch technology could increase yields while farmers lie in.
12 March 2003
TOM CLARKE


Robot milker modeled
on an elephant's trunkDairy farmers of the future may sleep safe in the knowledge that an udder-friendly robot is doing the day's milking.

"The idea is to replace farmers' hands and allow cows to milk themselves whenever they fancy," says engineer Bruce Davies at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK.

Davies' company IceRobotics has just received a £98,000 (US$157,000) grant from Britain's National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts to develop its rubbery manipulator - the 'continuum activator' - into a flexible, teat-seeking robotic arm.

Frequent milking yields more than conventional morning and evening trips to the dairy. And cows produce more when they choose their own milking schedule - often at the times when calves naturally like to feed, between 11 pm and 3 am.
[more]

Jupiter's Great Red Spot

Jupiter's Great Dark Spot

The Great Dark Spot

March 12, 2003: For more than a century astronomers thought that the Great Red Spot was the biggest thing on Jupiter. Not anymore. Images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft have revealed something at least as large.

The Great Dark Spot.

"I was totally blown away when I saw it--a dark cloud twice as big as Earth swirling around Jupiter's north pole," says Bob West, a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
[more]

Airstrike! The Pentagon simplifies media relations

By John Lettice
Posted: 13/03/2003 at 17:10 GMT

Should war in the Gulf commence, the Pentagon proposes to take radical new steps in media relations - 'unauthorised' journalists will be shot at. Speaking on The Sunday Show on Ireland's RTE1 last sunday veteran war reporter Kate Adie said she had been warned by a senior Pentagon official that uplinks, i.e. TV broadcasts or satellite phones, that are detected by US aircraft are likely to be fired on.
[more]

U.S. Agency Seeks Bids for Rebuilding Iraq

(3/10/03)
By Sherie Winston, with Mary B. Powers and Tom Ichniowski

The U.S. Agency for International Development says that that it has asked a select group of U.S. engineering firms to bid on a contract that could be worth $900 million to rebuild a postwar Iraq.

The firms were sent a request for proposals about three weeks ago, says a USAID official. Special procurement laws allow for the select bidding, and also prohibit the government from discussing details, including which firms were asked to respond, the agency official says. Click here to view map

But the official says that all the firms that were asked to send proposals "have the unique capability to work under these urgent circumstances." President Bush has said that humanitarian relief, including rebuilding, should begin as soon as hostilities, if any, are over.

DOD ANNOUNCES NUMBER FOR OIL WELL FIRE CONTRACTORS

The Department of Defense announced last week that it has plans to prevent or mitigate destruction of Iraq's oil wells by Saddam Hussein's regime. Companies interested in providing specialized services related to firefighting or assessing damage to oil facilities in the event of military action in Iraq should call toll-free, 866-461-5171. A recorded message provides instructions on the information necessary for firms to be added to the bidders list.

Paypal knocked for seizing more sites' money

Scientists Find Extrasolar Planet With Atmosphere Much Like Jupiter

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

The Hubble Space Telescope has detected an extensive atmosphere of hydrogen enveloping and escaping from a newfound planet of a distant star, scientists reported yesterday.

The discovery comes as no surprise, astronomers say, but is important nonetheless as apparent confirmation that the extrasolar planets observed so far not only are much like the solar system's Jupiter in size but also are similarly huge gaseous bodies.

In an announcement by the European Space Agency and NASA, a French-led research team said three separate observations by the Hubble telescope in 2001 revealed a hot and puffed-up hydrogen atmosphere surrounding a planet orbiting the star HD 209458, in the constellation Pegasus 150 light-years from Earth. Details are described in today's issue of the journal Nature.

The most astonishing aspect, said the team leader, Dr. Alfred Vidal-Madjar of the Astrophysics Institute of Paris, is that the planet is so close to the searing heat of its parent star that the dense atmosphere reaches temperatures of about 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit and is boiling off and evaporating at a rate of perhaps 10,000 tons a second. The escaping hydrogen was detected extending across 125,000 miles, trailing the planet like a comet's tail.
[more]

RECENT NEWS
AFGHANISTAN GETS "DOT-AF" INTERNET DOMAIN
UNDP HELPS KARZAI GOVERNMENT SECURE AFGHAN NATIONAL PRESENCE ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB
March 10, Kabul--Afghanistan today officially planted its flag in cyberspace, gaining legal and technical control of the "dot-af" domain for Afghan websites and e-mail addresses.

Today's formal activation of Afghanistan's new Top Level Domain (ccTLD), as Internet country codes are known, marks the culmination of a complex international application process, and the parallel development of new telecommunications links enabling Afghanistan to put the the new .af domain to immediate use. MORE

Code Red returns

A Beautiful Friendship?

The fun part of being a generalist is that you get to have all these "Whoa" moments as you make connections. While looking up some material on Google for the earlier topic that had me talking to myself like Rick Blaine, I ran across some names that struck a big bell and led to some fun excursions.

A Beginning

It started with another report from the Biodefense meeting. Intranasal treatment of mice with interferon alpha and interferon gamma permitted 95% of the mice to survive a vaccinia infection that killed all of the control mice. This holds out significant hope that similar procedures activating innate immunity could be used in humans following a smallpox outbreak. Now, I went to Google to see if there was any more information on this at the company's site, Advanced Biosystems. That is when the "Whoa" moment hit.

A Middle

The company developing this treatment is run by Ken Alibek, one of the premier scientists, and possibly the main architect, from the Soviet Union's bioweapons program. He came to the US after the breakup of the Soviet Union and, after being debriefed by the CIA (a quicktime movie from NOVA), wrote a book called Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World--Told from Inside by the Man Who Ran It

An End?.

Could the man who devised bioweapons that were designed to kill millions be on the trail of a widely applicable therapy that could blunt the power of these very weapons? This makes a very interesting story, especially since the vice-president of this company is Charles Bailey, a colonel and former Commander at the U. S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. They first met as adversaries and are now colleagues. When will we see the movie? What should we call it?

Vaxgen and Its Numbers

The March 7 issue of Science has a summary of Vaxgen's presentation of their HIV vaccine results, under the discouraging headline of "Vaccine Results Lose Significance Under Scrutiny." The contents of the article will hold few surprises for readers of the posts here from the last week of February. The pitfalls of subgroup analysis are discussed, sometimes in exactly the same terms as my contributors and I used:

Cornell University's John Moor, a longtime critic of the vaccine and an expert on HIV antibodies, finds this reasoning absurd. "Lumping Blacks and Asians together is biological rubbish," says Moore. "They might as well do a subgroup analysis based on signs of the zodiac."

An interesting wrinkle occurred during that week after the criticism started. Many pointed out that the P values (used as a measure of statistical significance) really should have been corrected for how many subgroups were split out. A conservative way to do this, the Bonferroni correction, is to just multiply the P values by the number of subgroups. That way you have to have much more significance in the underlying data before you decide that you're seeing something real.
[more]

Getting vaccinated

Smallpox Update: Surgeon General Carmona, government bioterrorism consultant D.A. Henderson, and CDC head Julie Gerberding are getting vaccinated against smallpox to help persuade reluctant healthcare providers that this really is a necessary precaution. That's good. I've been worried about Dr. Gerberding since reading a statement in which she called obesity more of a threat than bioterrorism. Meanwhile, the anti-viral drug cidofovir is showing promise in mice for the treatment of cowpox, which could make it a useful tool in treating complications of the smallpox vaccine.

America the bunny!

America is the original no-tribe state. While today there are others, let’s not lose sight or forget just how rare a thing like America really is:

"We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right." (In the Beginning...)

America is like the original self-replicating molecule that started life as we know it. As Richard Dawkins says: that such a thing would spring into existence is extremely unlikely, but it had to happen only once.
[more]

Bloggers and Their Blogs

Fellow Bloggers! Thank you for considering participation in this survey! This survey will be used by the researcher to determine how we are using our blogs and how large our blogging community is. The survey should take about 10 minutes to complete and, of course, is voluntary. All responses are anonymous and cannot be traced to any individual participant. This survey is being conducted under the auspices of Georgetown University. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact me at crc8@georgetown.edu.

Kings meal a little too beastly

12 March 2003
By ANNABEL SCAIFE

A group of architects witnessed more than they bargained for in the lions' den at Auckland Zoo, on Thursday night. They saw whole horse heads thrown to the lions by their keepers, who did not realise members of the public were present.

The keepers did not know that Jasmax employees were enjoying a guided evening tour as part of a corporate function. The enthusiastic group got to the lions' den just in time to view the feed.
[more]

Cabbie's taxi nabbed on Bangor trip

By CHRIS LAMBIE
The Daily News

A Sackville cabbie wound up with a huge headache after a passenger he was driving all the way to Maine allegedly stole his Lincoln Continental when he stopped to buy her some Aspirin.

Brian Hill, 62, picked up Stephanie Williams near Harrietsfield on Sunday morning after a man he’d done business with before asked the taxi driver if he’d take the 18-year-old to Bangor for $880.
[more]

V.Jay LaRosa                           EMC Corporation

Information Security                  4400 Computer Dr.

(508)898-7433 office                  Westboro, MA 01580

(508)353-1348 cell                     www.emc.com

888-799-9750 pager                   larosa_vjay@emc.com

Why 91% > 91% (if you're US AIR)

Learn how percentages work if you're a bankrupt airline (also good for AMTRACK, apparently): http://www.usairways.com/promotions/specials/shuttle.htm.

Online Comics Directory

CSUC Underwater Basket Weaving Department

UBW 001: Introduction to Underwater Basket Weaving
UBW 101: Intermediate Underwater Basket Weaving
UBW 205: Advanced Underwater Basket Weaving
UBW 102: Current Trends in Underwater Basket Weaving
UBW 104: History of Underwater Basket Weaving
UBW 105: Extreme Weather Underwater Basket Weaving: Hurricanes
UBW 106: Extreme Weather Underwater Basket Weaving: Tsunami
UBW 201: Deap Sea Underwater Basket Weaving *prerequisite: scuba certification

Apple iMac - the PC you really want, says MSN
By John Lettice
Posted: 11/03/2003 at 13:41 GMT


Hats off to Apple Canada, which as far as we can make out appears to have pulled off a small but embarrassing heist at the expense of the local version of the Microsoft Network (MSN). The stunt would seem (naturally, we conjecture) to have taken advantage of the collision between MSN's thirst for ad revenue and what some might call the dubious presentation of advertising material undifferentiated from editorial.
>[more]

Francestinks.com sinks.com

By John Lettice
Posted: 12/03/2003 at 16:28 GMT

We considered sharing francestinks.com and germanystinks.com with you last week, but took the view that you could live without information on puerile exercises in xenophobia that seemed to have the (perhaps not entirely) subsidiary goal of selling related merchandise. We thought we'd leave off writing about it until vengeful hackers downed it, and although when we looked the French version had had a lot more visitors than the German, our money was on the Germans.

Correct. Post strike, the temporary home at www.bigboots.us tells visitors: "If you came here directly from a francestinks.com, germanystinks.com or bigboots.us link, it's because our main sites are down due to anti-US hackers in Germany." Presumably this is intended as a general-purpose announcement to be seen on whichever of the sites happen to be up at any given moment.
[more]

NSA Publishes Router Safety Guide

World's most stupid security measure contest this week

Code Red variants a tool for attackers?

MESSAGE TO ALL THE ANTIWAR PROTESTOR'S

I Vant to Be Alone

Just when you thought it couldn't get more Strangelovian, it does. The Bush bullies, having driven off all the other kids in the international schoolyard, are now resorting to imaginary friends.

Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, spoke to the Veterans of Foreign Wars here yesterday and reassured the group that America would have "a formidable coalition" to attack Iraq. "The number of countries involved will be in the substantial double digits," he boasted. Unfortunately, he could not actually name one of the supposed allies. "Some of them would prefer not to be named now," he said coyly, "but they will be known with pride in due time."

Perhaps the hawks' fixation on being the messiahs of the Middle East has unhinged them. I could just picture Wolfy sauntering down the road to Baghdad with our new ally Harvey, his very own pooka, a six-foot-tall invisible rabbit that the U.S. wants to put on the U.N. Security Council.
[more]

Glasnost on War's Looted Art

By SOPHIA KISHKOVSKY

OSCOW, March 11 — For more than 50 years the Soviet Union hid them in museum basements and secret repositories, one reportedly in a monastery wall. Now, reflecting increased glasnost, Russia's Ministry of Culture is posting images and descriptions of them on a new Web site.

They are thousands of paintings, archives and rare books looted by Soviet forces in Germany and Eastern Europe during and after World War II and taken to Russia as so-called trophy art. (Now the preferred term in Russia is "displaced cultural treasures.") Hitler's forces had previously pillaged many of the works from Jewish owners and other Nazi victims.

The site is also being used to search for what the ministry estimates as two million works of art that disappeared from Russian museums during the Nazi occupation. An unknown number were destroyed in the war, but some have turned up in Russian antiques shops or at auctions abroad; a few have been returned by Germany.
[more]

National Do-Not-Call List Is Law

I Claim Stuff That's Good For What Ails You

The U. of Rochester patent defeat that I wrote about on Friday has some pretty interesting implications for Ariad's attempt to sew up the NF-kB transcriptional pathway. Much as I'd like for Rochester to have lost on general principles, the general principle that you can patent medical methods of treatment (and entire biological pathways) remains intact. It'll probably take statute law to change that. The reason Rochester lost was, basically, "lack of enablement."

That, translated from patent-speak, means that they didn't show how to do what they were claiming, and showed no evidence that they'd done it (or even knew how to.) It's one thing to claim the COX-2 enzyme; it's quite another to claim any compound that works by inhibiting it. Rochester had the enzyme in hand, and they'd done the background work to show what it could be used for. But they didn't have anything to accomplish those uses. As the judge's opinion said, they basically were expressing a wish, or outlining a plan - not carrying it out.

And you have to do that, or at least show enough work that you can claim that you know how to. Just saying that you think it would be a good idea isn't enough. Of course, the Rochester patent had already been issued in this form, which just goes to show you what the patent office is like these days. Now, if they'd shown some examples of compounds that inhibited COX-2, they'd have had a much stronger case - and the more compounds, and the more data they had on their effects, the better.

The people most likely to have plenty of data like that are, well, drug companies. It's much harder to invalidate big pharma patents, because they're generally backed up with more enablement. Not impossible, not at all - just harder. So will Ariad's hold up? Based on this decision, I'd be worried if I were them. They have no compounds in their patent at all, at least none that I recall seeing. So how can they say that all their claims of medical treatment are enabled? The whole patent looked to me like a gigantic shopping list.
[more]

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"Comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable"

Will faith-based groups discover limits on the traditional religious task, once described by Reinhold Niebuhr as "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable?"

French Fries Get New Name in Congress

The French Embassy in Washington had no immediate comment, except to say that french fries actually come from Belgium.
[more]

SETI@Home identifies 150 possible alien intelligences

The SETI@Home distcomp project has borne fruit: 150 signals that match SETI's criteria for probable alien intelligence have been identified, and the project is going back to the Arecibo radio-telescope-array to take a closer look at them.

"This is the culmination of more than three years of computing, the largest computation ever done," said UC Berkeley computer scientist David Anderson, director of SETI@home. "It's a milestone for the SETI@home project."

SETI@home users should find out the results of the re-observations - what The Planetary Society, the founding and principal sponsor of SETI@home, is billing as the "stellar countdown" - within two to three months.

Though excited at the opportunity to re-observe as many as 150 candidate signals, Anderson is cautious about raising people's expectations that they will discover a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization.
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Do you like your shape-shifting reptiles?

While I'm on the topic of mediated personae, something that came up during that CBC taping, last night (for me, anyway) was the idea that blogging (or even posting to fora) represents the democratization of the mediated persona. Literally anyone can have one, now, or several. I am an exception to this, because I have mine via the printed word, the oldest mass medium on the planet, and this website is maintained by a publishing company that belongs to an even larger corporation owned in turn by shapeshifting reptiles from Beta Reticuli, but the rest of you, today, are free to mass-mediate your own personae. Which was formerly, hugely, not the case. Choose a handle, post: you're mediating a persona.
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The chickens of war cluck towards Baghdad

But are the chickens made of the right stuff? Early indications are not encouraging. "The US Army calls the strategy Operation Kuwaiti Field Chicken - or KFC - but the plan has been put on hold after 41 of the 43 chickens deployed to the Gulf died within a week of arrival."
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Leaving for war...