EFF Chairman Brad Templeton sez, "Since I kept getting cards in my luggage every time I checked a bag describing how the bags had been searched "for my protection" I designed some shipping tape that has the U.S. 4th amendment printed on it in an endless loop. You can put it on packages, or over the zipper of your luggage. Now, if they want to search your stuff, they have to literally slice the 4th amendment in half in order to do it. Ok, it may not stop them but it's a nice metaphorical statement of protest.

"Too bad we can't wrap it around our phone wires. The tape's available as a gift to EFF members who renew, or via the EFF store." Link (Thanks, Brad!)

Snip from an email sent by an anonymous US Marine to Wonkette:

Unfortunately anonomizers don't work out here (never have). Anyway, I had a few minutes today and thought I'd look and see what else was banned on the Marine web here. I think the results speak for themselves:

* Wonkette – “Forbidden, this page (http://www.wonkette.com/) is categorized as: Forum/Bulletin Boards, Politics/Opinion.”
* Bill O’Reilly (www.billoreilly.com) – OK
* Air America (www.airamericaradio.com) – “Forbidden, this page (http://www.airamericaradio.com/) is categorized as: Internet Radio/TV, Politics/Opinion.”
* Rush Limbaugh (www.rushlimbaugh.com) – OK
* ABC News “The Note” – OK
* Website of the Al Franken Show (www.alfrankenshow.com) – “Forbidden, this page (http://www.airamericaradio.com/) is categorized as: Internet Radio/TV, Politics/Opinion.”
* G. Gordon Liddy Show (www.liddyshow.us) – OK
* Don & Mike Show (www.donandmikewebsite.com) – “Forbidden, this page (http://www.donandmikewebsite.com/) is categorized as: Profanity, Entertainment/Recreation/Hobbies.”

Link

I didn't have time to warn eBay bidder "barclay147200" that he or she had placed a $51 bid on a list of computer equipment dealers, not a 20" flat screen display, as anyone might reasonably think after reading the item description. The item title is "NEW 20" FLAT SCREEN LCD COMPUTER MONITOR WHOLESALE LIST." Link

Stefan Jones says,

Today's (March 6, 2006) edition of Public Radio International's "The World" had a short segment about Boing-Boing's filter/censorship woes, including an interview with Mark Frauenfelder.

Link to radio segment by "The World" contributor Cyrus Farivar.

The "anti-griddle" is a super-chilled slab of metal in your kitchen that nearly instantaneously freezes anything you set down on it:

* Quickly freezes sauces and purees into solid, unique forms — or freezes just the outer surfaces while maintaining a creamy center.

* Minus 30°F ‘griddle' temperature ensures almost instantaneous results.

* Approximately 1 square foot high-endurance cooktop provides an ample, easy-to-clean work surface.

Link (via Cribcandy)

Nothing says "I love BANGBANGBANG you" like Rose Surprise, "a romantic table firework filled with fragrant rose petals." Link (Thanks, Bonnie)

Liz sez, "Next week, the San Francisco Bay chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery is having Seth Schoen from EFF give a presentation on current DRM controversies." Seth is one of the smartest people on DRM that I've ever met; his analyses of Trusted Computing, in particular, are lucid, readily comprehensible, and savage.

Date: Wednesday, 15 March 2006

Time: 6:30pm - refreshments, 7:00pm - talk

Location: Hewlett Packard (see directions), Pruneridge and Wolfe, Cupertino, Bldg. 48, Oak Room.

Cost: Free and open to all who wish to attend, but membership is only $10/year.

Link (Thanks, Liz!)

Toronto's hydroelectric authority is planning to offer citywide mesh WiFi service:

Brian Sharwood, a telecom analyst with the Seaboard Group in Toronto, said it makes sense for a utility to recoup the cost of supporting smart meters by also selling wireless broadband services. "In a way that's the excuse to do all of this," he said. "You're going to run it past a lot of people anyway."

He said Canada's largest municipal electrical utility, which last year purchased Toronto's street light system for $60 million, will likely install the necessary wireless transmitters and receivers atop every fourth or fifth lamp post as a way to blanket the city with coverage -- what the industry describes as "wireless mesh networking."

Kevin Kelly will be speaking about his forthcoming book, The Technium, this Friday. From Stewart Brand:

Science is notoriously unpredictable. The chronicle of recent important discoveries does not tell much about what will be discovered next, important as it may be.

But science may have a deeper arc than discoveries, an arc which is predictive. It emerges if you focus on the tools instead of the paradigms, the desires, or the funding. Early in the several years of study for his forthcoming book, THE TECHNIUM, Kevin Kelly observed, "In researching the trajectory of the scientific method I was shocked to discover how untold its story is."

So Kelly compiled a history of scientific methodology, with its future included. Starting with indexed libraries in 280 BC, through controlled experiments (1590), hypothesis/prediction, peer review, controlled placebo, meta-analysis; on through current breakthroughs like pattern mining, digital repositories (like GenBank), and exhaustive combinatorics; to a predictable future of combined negative results, triple blind experiments, evolutionary search, multiple hypothesis matrices, "zillionics," wiki-science, and defined benefit funding. (That's a sampler list.)

"The Next 100 Years of Science: Long-term Trends in Scientific Method," Kevin Kelly, Cowell Theater, Fort Mason, San Francisco, 7pm, Friday, March 10. The lecture starts promptly at 7:30pm. Admission is free ($10 donation certainly welcome, not required).

Um. OMFG.

John T. Draper --aka Captain Crunch, Crunch or Crunchman -- launched a hacking/security-themed video project called CRUNCHTV a few months ago. Link to the first edition, which just popped up on YouTube. (Thanks, Macki!)

Over at Virtual China, my IFTF colleague Lyn Jeffery posts about the inventiveness of some Chinese farmers. Lyn writes:

"Open up your perspective: the best of Chinese farmers' wisdom" (my loose translation) shows us some of the DIY projects taken on by those deemed "farmers" (农民) in the current Chinese social system. The car drives on land and in water; the submarine is one of a series of subs built by a 67 year old farmer from a village near Wuhan, China.

Link

An interesting article in the new issue of Smithsonian Magazine looks at why coyotes seem to be moving from the rural plains into Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and other big cities. From the article:

Until the 1990s, the farthest that coyotes had ventured into Chicago was to forested reserves near the city limits. But "something happened," says Stan Gehrt, a wildlife biologist at Ohio State University, "something we don't completely understand." Within ten years the coyote population exploded, growing by more than 3,000 percent, and infiltrated the entire Chicago area. Gehrt found territorial packs of five to six coyotes, as well as lone individuals, called floaters, living in downtown Chicago. They traveled at night, crossing sidewalks and bridges, trotting along roads and ducking into culverts and underpasses. One pair raised pups in a drainage area between a day care facility and a public pool; a lone female spent the day resting in a tiny marsh near a busy downtown post office. Perhaps most surprising to Gehrt, Chicago's urban coyotes tended to live as long as their parkland counterparts. No one knows why coyotes are moving into cities, but Gehrt theorizes that shrewder, more human-tolerant coyotes are teaching urban survival skills to new generations...

Should the urban coyote be viewed with trepidation? "Some people have fears that kids are going to be the next ones to be eaten," says (biologist John) Way. "I tell them coyotes have been at the edges of their neighborhoods for years." Way emphasizes coyotes can be an asset to urban ecosystems, keeping a check on deer, rodents, Canada geese and other animals that thrive on the suburbs' all-you-can-eat buffet.

Link

AdWeek's "AdFreak" blog just whipped up this spoof of Citibank's "Live richly" ads: "Who needs a working ATM card? It's not about the money, remember?"

Link

(Thanks, Tim Nudd from AdFreak.com!)

Related: Ben Popken at Consumerist is digging up more detail on the Citibank security breach by calling up and posing as a customer. The rep he spoke with just now claims the security issue was not a class break (definition here) -- this contradicts what another rep told Jake Appelbaum on Saturday, in the course of a call about Jake's affected Citibank account. Link to Consumerist post.

Update: Jake Appelbaum, who first alerted BoingBoing to the story, responds:

A month huh? That's two weeks up from the last time! This new explanation doesn't seem correct. The woman I spoke with on the phone said that the networks in these countries were compromised, she sent a new card to my US address as a result of using said networks. She also told me that if I used these networks again, Citibank might lock my card again. She could not assure me that it wouldn't happen the first time I used the Canadian ATM network with my new card. Her suggestion to withdraw large sums of money was cute, but perhaps not unwarranted given the stupid state of Citibank.

This sounds like an issue that's unrelated to cards just being rejected, doesn't it? If it was just the networks rejecting cards, why did I need to have a new card reissued? I've had fraud issues with my account cleared over the phone numerous times from my insane traveling schedule. Never have I had to have a card reissued because my card was "rejected by some banks." WTF?

Though if anything, it's like there's more than one problem with Citibank and ATM networks in Canada. It seems like we've got a few issues: 1) Citibank cards are being rejected by some Canadian banks on the Canadian ATM network. This is being claimed the consumerist. It happened to me but perhaps this isn't the same case. My card was rejected but it wasn't only rejected by the bank I visited, it was locked by Citibank.

2) Citibank had/has a fraud issue with people generating card numbers and pins. This was disclosed when I called previously. It is unclear if my card was generated or if my pin was generated. I'm of the mindset that this could be the case but they're pretty tight lipped about it.

3) Citibank claims that using any of the Canadian ATM network will result in a card likely being flagged and locked. The only way to reset this flag is to get a new card issued. This does not prevent the issue though. They claim this is because the Canadian network itself is insecure. This is a pretty bold claim and the woman I spoke with on the phone repeated that this has been an issue for two weeks. This was also disclosed when I called.

4) Citibank says this is also happening in the UK and Russia. Again, they told me this over the telephone. The consumerist appears to have gotten the same response to the affected areas of the world.

I say they're doing damage control. Something doesn't sit right with me. How does "some banks reject citibank customers" translate into three nations worth of ATM networks being untrusted?

Previously on Boing Boing:
- Citibank security breach: undisclosed *internally*, let alone publicly?
- Citibank under fraud attack, customers locked out of accounts

Reader comment: Bill Hansley says,

I'm a US customer of Royal Bank of Canada / Centura, and they're having similar issues. The word from them was that Visa corp told them that several thousand (65,000 according to the service desk people at my grocery store, who knew about this as well) *cards* (not accounts) had been compromised and were cancelled Saturday and replacements mailed. My card was affected, my wife's, who's on the same account, was not. I wonder how many other banks were affected?

Update: Consumerist posts an official response from Citibank. It's generally short on facts, and fails to address some of the contested details. Link.

Update: Here's another presumably related personal account from a Citibank customer who found himself locked out of his account: Link.

Earlier today, Xeni linked to a New York Times piece about Secure Computing's censorware that blocks access to Boing Boing.

Here's the background: A US-based company, Secure Computing, sells a website censoring product called SmartFilter, which is used by many organizations worldwide to keep their employees/students/members from accessing certain sites that have been tagged (often incorrectly) as having objectionable content. For example, out of the 692 entries posted on Boing Boing last month, only two contained nudity. However, SmartFilter also labels the other 690 posts as "nudity" because Secure Computing can't afford to make a filter that is more than 0.5% accurate.

Another reason we don't like Secure Computing: It helps corrupt dictators oppress their people. In defiance of the US government's stated goal of promoting democracy around the world, Secure Computing has the gall to license its filtering products to totalitarian governments, such as the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. These countries, which have government-run ISPs, pass all their citizens' web requests through centralized filters. Can you imagine having a business model that includes selling tools of oppression to tyrants?

Also today, we learned another way in which Secure Computing is willing to make the Web worse for everyone in order to keep their inefficient filter from breaking: A Xerox employee told us that SmartFilter "now blocks any use of the Google 'Translate this page' function. Yay."

One reason SmartFilter might be interested in blocking Google's invaluable translation service is because it would stop people who had been using it to outsmart SmartFilter. (Here's Boing Boing's guide to defeating censorware, which includes the now useless Google translation proxy trick.)

If your company uses SmartFilter to block Boing Boing, we'd like you to test Google's translation service and see if it still works for you. Report your results here. It's hard to believe that Secure Computing would behave so irresponsibly as to actually block access to a translation service just to keep its censorware from collapsing.

Link to original Boing Boing story here.

Reader comment:

I work at a Fortune 500 company that runs SmartFilter. I recently experienced the sudden blocking of BoingBoing.

SmartFilter is also blocking Google Translation Services in my company and categorizing the URL as "Anonymizing Utilities."

Another website that kind of works is WorldLingo. You can translate to another language, then "back translate" to English.

It may not be the best translation, but it works.

Reader comment:

I'm currently working for Marconi in the UK and it looks like they are using SmartFilter to decide what their employees can look at whilst working.

Boing Boing has been banned/not banned several times over the past six months and now web translation services have been dumped in the sin-bin too. I tried both Google and Babel Fish with the same result:

Access denied because of its content categorisation: "Anonymizing Utilities"

Update: Kathryn Cramer has collected a great deal of financial information about Secure Computing, including the major shareholders and speaking engagement calendars of Secure Computing executives (so you can ask them why they sell censorware to tyrants). Great stuff. Link

According to a survey of 941 remote and mobile workers around the world, 10 percent of telecommuters work nude. Caveat: The survey was sponsored by SonicWALL, makers of remote network access technology. From the survey results:

All respondents were relaxed about their personal habits when working remotely. While about 39% of respondents of both sexes said they wear sweats while working from home, 12% of males and 7% of females wear nothing at all. In matters of cleanliness, the difference between the sexes was more pointed: 44% of women surveyed said they showered on work-at-home days, as opposed to men, who were slightly more likely to shave (33%) than wash (30%). 18% of men regularly break off to do household tasks such as laundry, dishwashing or dusting whereas many more women -- over 38% -- found their attention claimed by chores.

Respondents also said they took the opportunity to eat and drink outside standard times (about 35%); listen to music (45%) or watch TV (28%); and 21% of all respondents admitted to sneaking in an afternoon nap. A small percentage of those surveyed (9%) admitted to feelings of guilt about being away from the office. Taking a longer lunch than at the workplace was also relatively rare (12%).

Link

From the "Health In Plain English" page titled "Presidential Diseases:"

From George Washington's toothlessness (he has no teeth left by middle age), to Grover Cleveland's gout, to Franklin D. Roosevelt's polio, to Ronald Reagan's Alzheimer disease, and finally to George W. Bush's colon polyps, presidents throughout history suffer from the same diseases and ailments like the rest of us.

Find out what diseases you have in common with the leaders of the free world!

Link (via Neatorama)

A new study suggests that repeated test-taking may help students understand and retain information better than studying the material over and over. Henry L. Roediger III, a memory expert at Washington University in St. Louis, reports that tests not only can be used to assess what you know, but also helps you remember information longer. From a press release:

Perhaps equally important, this study demonstrates that students who rely on repeated study alone often come away with a false sense of confidence about their mastery of the material.

In an experiment in which students either took quizzes or were permitted to study material repeatedly, students in the study-only group professed an exaggerated confidence, sure that they knew the material well, even though important details already had begun slip-sliding away. The group that took tests on the material, rather than repeatedly reading it, actually did better on a delayed test of their knowledge...

Previous research, says Roediger, offers a number of theories on why this phenomenon takes place. One suggests we learn more efficiently when placed in difficult situations -- think of that sinking feeling in your stomach when a pop quiz is announced.

Others suggest that repeated testing improves long-term recall by forcing students to practice the very skills they will need to recollect this information at a later date, a memory quirk that might be called the "use-it or lose-it" effect.

Link

Are rail bikes safe? Are they legal? I don't know (and don't care) -- I love the idea.
Link

The Make blog has a couple of photos of this jet-powered VW Beetle.

The car has two engines: the production gasoline engine in the front driving the front wheels and the jet engine in the back. The idea is that you drive around legally on the gasoline engine and when you want to have some fun, you spin up the jet and get on the burner (you can start the jet while driving along on the gasoline engine).

Link

TechEBlog presents their list of the Top 10 Strangest Lego Creations, several of which are familiar to BB readers. Seen here, a functional Lego air conditioner, "complete with valves, compressor, and working fan." Link

Bill Scannell of Papers Please says: "The Identity Project (IDP) needs your help in an ongoing investigation into the right to fly without ID.

"The 9th Circuit stated in its Gilmore decision that when traveling by domestic commercial air, citizens had a choice: they could either show ID or submit to additional screening.

"Please try doing some or all of your air travel by declining to show ID and report back about what happens to you.

"Be a Freedom Flyer: the Constitutional rights you protect and defend are your own." Link

The winning entries of MIT's Student Origami Competition are now on display at the school and online. Seen here is freshman Jason Ku's model of a Nazgul from the Lord of the Rings.
Link (via MAKE: Blog)

Snip from a report in today's New York Times by Tom Zeller, Jr.:

"Access denied by SmartFilter content category," was the message a Halliburton engineer in Houston said he received last Wednesday when he tried to visit BoingBoing.net from his office computer. "The requested URL belongs to the following categories: Entertainment/Recreation/Hobbies, Nudity." Yep.

"When it happened I was pretty put off," said the employee, who did not want to be named because the topic involved company filtering policies, "as I enjoyed the little distractions it provided me during the workday." It was a sentiment that, over the last two weeks, united oppressed employees — and citizens — all over the globe.

The culprit, SmartFilter, is a product of Secure Computing of San Jose, Calif. It is marketed in a few different flavors to corporations, schools, libraries and governments as a sort of nannyware — a way for system administrators to monitor and filter access to Web sites among users of their networks. This is accomplished with a central database of millions of Web sites organized into 73 categories — things like "General News" or "Dating/Social" or "Hate Speech."

At some point late last month, it seems, a site reviewer at Secure Computing spotted something fleshy at Boing Boing and tacked the Nudity category onto the blog's classification. The company's database was updated and, from that point on, any SmartFilter client that had its network set up to block sites with a Nudity designation would now automatically block Boing Boing.

The impact quickly rippled across the globe, which had the ancillary effect of outing corporate and government SmartFilter clients, as their employees and citizens, now deprived of their daily fix of tech-ephemera, blasted their overlords in anonymous e-mail messages to Boing Boing's editors, who then posted them to the blog. Halliburton is a customer. So, apparently, are Fidelity Investments and American Express. And in the space of a few days at the end of last month, reports came in that citizens in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia had also been blocked.

Reg-free Link. Above: what 'net surfers in Saudi Arabia see today when they try to access BoingBoing.

Previously on BoingBoing:

- Saudi Arabia joins league of BoingBoing-deprived nations
- BoingBoing banned in UAE, Qatar, elsewhere. Our response to net-censors: Get bent!
- ISPs in Iran, Tunisia also use SmartFilter (which blocks BoingBoing as "nudity"
- Stick Michelangelo's "David" on your blog to protest censorware
- BoingBoing now censored in the UAE (and elsewhere)
- Argonne National Laboratory is blocking Boing Boing

Following up on yesterday's Boing Boing post about an alleged class break affecting Citibank networks in the US, UK, and Russia, an anonymous Citibank employee says (via Consumerist):

Apparently [us] employees have no details either. A client came into the branch late last week, she was travelling in Canada, and her card stopped working for no reason. She called up Citiphone (the consumer help line - they’re terrible), and they gave her no reason as to why the card was blocked, and had a new card sent to our branch. Since she was in Canada, this really didn’t help her out one bit.

Your article was the first that I heard of this. When she came into the branch to pick up her new card, there were no notes on her account stating why her card was blocked in the first place. There was no internal memo or email sent out regarding this fraud issue.

Link. What is a "class break?" In network security jargon, that's what happens when one breach leads to a whole new "class" of attacks on various systems, using similar methods. When it happens on a global banking network, it's also known as "really bad news." Update: Ben Popken at Consumerist reports that Citibank is now claiming that the breach was not a class break -- but acknowledges they've known about it for a month. Link.

Previously on Boing Boing:
Citibank under fraud attack, customers locked out of accounts

BigDog is a strange robotic pack mule that Boston Dynamics developed for the military. The .7 meters tall mechanical beast-of-burden is powered by a gasoline engine and, so far, has trotted at 3.3 mph and lugged around 120 lbs. The video is a hoot. From the Boston Dynamics site:

BigDog has an on-board computer that controls locomotion, servos the legs and handles a wide variety of sensors. BigDog’s control system manages the dynamics of its behavior to keep it balanced, steer, navigate, and regulate energetics as conditions vary. Sensors for locomotion include joint position, joint force, ground contact, ground load, a laser gyroscope, and a stereo vision system. Other sensors focus on the internal state of BigDog, monitoring the hydraulic pressure, oil temperature, engine temperature, rpm, battery charge and others.

Link to Boston Dynamics, Link to New Scientist article (Thanks, Sean Ness!)

Convicted murdered Shaun Tuley, incarcerated in HMP Frankland prison in Durham, England, has been denied access to books about magic. From the BBC News:

Tuley, who murdered a 20-year-old prostitute in September 2000, said he had been "refused permission on grounds of 'operational security problems' to purchase a selection of books on the subject of magic, sought in order to be able to pursue my hobby whilst serving a life sentence"...

Magic Circle spokesman David Beckley said: "I can't understand the Prison Service's attitude - unless this man has asked for books on escapology.

"Magicians do have skills which enable them to deceive but this is only in an environment which is controlled by the magician himself."

Link