It's no secret that many members of Congress seem to not understand technology issues, but they sure don't seem to like it when their own technology malfunctions. The Raw Feed points us to the news that the Congressional computer that shows vote tallies in the House of Representatives went on the fritz Friday afternoon, leaving those poor Congressional Representatives with no large monitor to tell them how their colleagues were voting. Apparently, without having this information being prominently displayed, some were concerned that they wouldn't know if their votes were being accurately counted (they were), and therefore began debating whether voting should cease until the computer was fixed. Rep. Joe Barton pointed out that each side had their own computers with tallies, and if those tallies matched up, it seemed silly to delay the voting, but eventually the Representatives decided it was just too difficult and recessed while the machines were fixed. What ever did they do before computers?

johannacw writes "This story has in-depth info about managing Macs using Apple's Managed Preferences architecture. It covers how to use the 14 built-in systems-management areas, how preferences interact, how to secure workstations, and how to help users access resources including applications and printers. It's a must-read for any systems admin working in a Mac or mixed environment. Written by Ryan Faas, this is a follow-up to his popular Inside Apple's Workgroup Manager."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

narramissic writes "Mozilla has officially backpedaled from a pledge made at Black Hat by the company's director of ecosystem development, Mike Schaver, to fix any critical security bugs in the browser within 'Ten ****ing Days.' On Friday, Mozilla security chief Window Snyder wrote in a blog posting that the 10-day pledge is not Mozilla's policy, saying 'We do not think security is a game, nor do we issue challenges or ultimatums.' And today, the open source browser maker issued a statement retracting the pledge."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in February, a jury told Microsoft to pay Alcatel-Lucent $1.5 billion for supposedly violating some patents Alcatel-Lucent held on MP3 technology. The case helped highlight the patent thicket around MP3 technologies, as Microsoft had licensed the technology from the creator of the MP3 technology, Fraunhofer. Back in May, as the judge was considering what to do about the jury's award, Alcatel-Lucent actually claimed that $1.5 billion wasn't enough. It appears the judge not only didn't buy that story, but didn't buy the jury's reasoning either. Today he threw out the jury's ruling, noting that Microsoft doesn't even infringe on one of the patents in question, and the other one is jointly owned by Fraunhofer, and therefore Microsoft has a legitimate license to it already. As the judge said, "The jury's verdict was against the clear weight of the evidence." As you might imagine, Alcatel-Lucent is not happy about this, calling the ruling "shocking and disturbing." So, there is likely going to be a long appeals process. However, this is the second time in recent weeks that we're seeing courts take a more reasonable approach on patents. Hopefully, it's the start of a trend.

TopSpin writes "Flight International reports that scientists at the Marshall Space Flight Center have developed designs for an array of asteroid interceptors wielding 1.2-megaton B83 nuclear warheads. The hypothetical mission for these designs is based on an Apophis-sized Earth impactor 2 to 5 years out. According to NASA, 'Nuclear standoff explosions are assessed to be 10-100 times more effective [at deflection] than the non-nuclear alternatives analyzed in this study (PDF)." On April 13, 2029, Apophis will pass closer to earth than the orbits of geosynchronous satellites.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

narramissic writes "Following a series of complaints by privacy groups, the FTC has announced plans to host a two-day forum on targeted advertising at the beginning of November in Washington, DC. It's the first time since 2000 that the agency has looked at industry practices in this area. They hope to learn how Web advertising firms protect the personal data they collect, how they notify consumers about that data, and whether the data is sold to or used by other firms." The FTC page for the event ia here. Sign up by September 14 if you want to be a panelist or to recommend topics for discussion.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mark Frauenfelder:

For the last couple of months, Boing Boing readers have been emailing me about a two-hour documentary available on Google Video called Zeitgeist, the Movie. I finally got around to viewing it.

In three parts, Zeitgeist (which has no credits) attempts to show that 1) Christianity is rehashed pagan sun-worship and is used by the rich and powerful to control people, 2) the 9/11 tragedies were part of an elite conspiracy, and 3) ever since World War I, the ultra-rich have been secretly manufacturing wars and financial collapses to control the populace and to get richer and more powerful.

I don't know enough about politics, history, or religion to have a valid opinion of Zeitgeist, but I was interested in getting a well-informed person's assessment of the documentary. I could think of no one better suited than Jay Kinney. He's the publisher of Gnosis magazine, the author of several books on Western esoteric and occult traditions, and the author of The Masonic Enigma, "a journey of discovery into the real facts (and mysteries) of Masonry's history and symbols." He's also an amazingly talented cartoonist, and contributed to The Whole Earth Review which is how I first learned about him. (His 1987 article, "If Software Companies Ran the Country," where he compares Al Capp's Shmoos to infinitely-copyable software, remains as fresh and powerful today as it did 20 years ago).

At my request, Jay watched the movie, and kindly wrote the following review for Boing Boing:

Zeiting the Geist

The latest bit of guerilla media to take the online universe by storm is “Zeitgeist, the Movie.” Clocking in at close to two hours’ length, and with over a million views on Google Video since its June 26th “official” release, Zeitgeist is a grabby, cranky, can’t-stop-watching-it documentary that purports to tell the real truth about Christianity, 9/11, and the International Bankers.

Exactly who is behind the video is unclear, although someone with the moniker of “Peter J.” has posted an online letter claiming credit and explaining Zeitgeist’s message to those who may have somehow failed to grasp the worldview that the video hammers home.

And what is that worldview, pray tell? Religions in general, and Christianity in particular, are primarily systems of social control. 9/11 was an inside job and the destruction of the WTC twin towers and building 7 were aided by controlled demolition. And finally, International Bankers, through the Federal Reserve and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), control our money and our future, leading to, ta da, the coming One World Government and the microchipping of everyone.

Exactly how all this fits together is left to the viewer’s imagination or, presumably, the film-maker’s hash pipe. Are those who manipulate Christianity for control purposes in cahoots with the Bankers, and were the Bankers in on the 9/11 caper? Zeitgeist sidesteps such logical questions through the use of the all-purpose term, “the elite,” a shadowy group of rich and powerful men who want nothing more than to enslave humanity and reap block-buster profits through the promotion of wars and financial crises.

For conspiracy buffs, this is all pretty standard fare, and, indeed, aficionados of the genre will find little new in “Zeitgeist.” The notions that most religions were originally a kind of solar worship, and that the Jesus Christ story recapitulated the mythos of numerous other “dying gods,” were floating around in the late 1700s. Fittingly, the video features a quote from Thomas Paine reducing Christianity to warmed-over sun worship, which was a daring bit of religion-baiting 200 years ago, albeit not so earth-shattering today.

The nefarious International Bankers meme has been propagating itself since at least the mid-1800s and has long been a mainstay of radical right-wing circles where it has often overlapped with mutterings about Jewish cabals.

The 9/11 truth segment of the video is, of course, of much more recent vintage, but, here too, it mostly repeats accusations that have gotten widespread play in the uber-skeptic milieu.

Breaking new factual ground is not what Zeitgeist is about, however. Rather, the video is a powerful and fast-acting dose of agitprop, hawking its conclusions as givens. Unfortunately, like most propaganda, it doesn’t play fair with its intended audience. At times, while watching it, I felt like I was getting Malcolm McDowell’s treatment in Clockwork Orange: eyes pried wide open while getting bombarded with quick-cut atrocity photos.

At other times, Zeitgeist engages in willful confusion by showing TV screen shots of network or cable news with voice-overs from unidentified people not associated with the news programs. If one weren’t paying close attention, the effect would be to confer the status and authority of TV news upon the words being spoken. Even when quotes or sound bites are attributed to a source, there’s no way to tell if they are quoted correctly or in context.

Late in the video, there’s a supposed quote from David Rockefeller, which, if genuine, would be an astounding confession of complicity in mass manipulation. But, of course, the quote is not sourced or dated, which renders it useless. (The video’s website does feature a Sources page, but a hodge-podge list of books, with no page numbers cited, is of little value for source verification.)

The over-all temper of the video is rather like the John Birch Society on acid, with interludes by Harry Smith. Incongruously, after spending nearly two hours trying to scare the bejeezis out of its viewers, Zeitgeist ends on an oddly upbeat note, telling us that Love — not Fear — is the answer, We are all One, and featuring sound-bites from Ram Dass and Carl Sagan.

It’s a shame, really, that Zeitgeist is, ultimately, such a mess. There are plenty of legitimate questions about what transpired on 9/11, just as there are plenty of shady doings in international finance or puzzling aspects of religious history, for that matter. And what is coming down in the name of National Security is truly unnerving. Yet, bundling them all together in disjointed fashion does justice to none of them. Time and again, Zeitgeist maximizes emotional impact at the expense of a more reasoned weighing of evidence. But, perhaps that’s the intention.

I’ve often pondered about what it might take to snap everyone out of the walking dream we collectively entered on 9/11/01. Just as the fall of the Berlin Wall provided the emotional pivot for the end of the Cold War, only a collective experience of an intensity equal to that of 9/11 might jolt us awake as to what is really happening in the corridors of power and certain undisclosed locations.

It’s my hunch that Zeitgeist is one attempt to provide such a jolt, and it does indeed pack a certain punch. Too bad it also runs off in three directions at once, and is so indiscriminate in its sources and overly certain of its conclusions. Zeitgeist may be powerful, but its power is tainted with some simplistic and pernicious memes that have already received more propagation than they deserve. The video’s producer does inform us that “It is my hope that people will not take what is said in the film as the truth . . .”

Indeed.

Link to Google Video page | Link to torrent files

It's almost surprising that it took this long, but someone has finally sued Apple for patent infringement related to the iPhone. Remember, back when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone he hyped up all the patents the company filed associated with the phone. It didn't make sense to us, because many of the technologies in the iPhone weren't new at all and had plenty of prior art. It was just the ability to put them all together in a compelling package that people would buy that was the key -- and no one could simply mimic Apple's ability to do that (though we can all watch others flounder around as they try). Still, with any new technologies these days, there's bound to be a patent thicket, meaning that there would inevitably be patent disputes. We had discussed a potential patent suit over the touchscreen interface, but it's not clear what became of that. In this latest case, the patent is for putting a keyboard on a touchscreen, which hardly seems like such a unique idea that it deserves a patent. Oddly, if you read the actual patent, it notes that "the input area... may not be minimized, maximized, or deleted." Since the iPhone keyboard can be minimized, you would think this patent doesn't apply. But, these days, why let little details prevent a patent lawsuit and potentially billions in payouts for doing nothing? Not surprisingly, the company is demanding a cut of every iPhone sold and wants an injunction against selling more iPhones with this technology included. Update: Turns out there's even more to this story. The guy who holds the patent was recently sentenced to 51 months in prison for fraud.

Morty writes "DNS rebinding attacks can be used by hostile websites to get browsers to attack behind firewalls, or to attack third parties. Browsers use "pinning" to prevent this, but a paper describes so-called multi-pin vulnerabilities that bypass the existing protections. Note that, from a DNS perspective, this is a "feature" rather than an implementation bug, although it's possible that DNS servers could be modified to prevent external sources from being able to point at internal resources."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thanks to the extensive use of ad networks and other middlemen, it's common for companies to not know each and every place online where their advertisements appear. For instance, a lot of big companies claimed ignorance when their ads showed up through adware products, saying that they had no idea they were supporting the practice. Last week, a number of British companies became alarmed with their ads on the Facebook social-networking site appeared on the profile pages of the British National Party, a far-right wing political party that's generally seen as racist and fascist. The companies yanked their ads from the site, and now the British government says it won't advertise on user-generated content sites for fear that its ads would run alongside contentious or undesirable content. This is a serious concern for many businesses, which don't want to be seen as supporting or associated with certain groups or types of content. But it's a potentially bigger problem for Facebook and other social-networking and user-generated content sites. These sites' major challenge is figuring out how to monetize the massive amounts of traffic they get, and their poor click-through rates are already one factor that holds down the rates they can charge. Couple those low rates with a dearth of quality advertisers scared off by the sites' content, and it sounds like a vicious cycle for social-networking and UGC sites.

Mark Frauenfelder: Based on this chart that shows the issue positions of 18 presidential candidates, I don't like any of them. My dream candidate would be Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich's love child. Link (Via Laughing Squid)

Reader comment:

Jay says:

I ran across this link today, which by choosing a stance and level of importance towards certain issues, your ideal candidate is automatically returned to you via a points-based system. I believe it was built off of the very same chart you posted earlier today. Who says voting requires personal involvement?

E++99 writes "Homeland Security has contracted with Intelligent Optical Systems, Inc. to develop an "LED Incapacitator," a nonlethal weapon consisting of a large flashlight with a cluster of LEDs capable of emitting "super-bright pulses of light at rapidly changing wavelengths." Sounds innocuous enough... until they they shine "the evil color" at you and you start puking! A working prototype has been completed, and they will soon be putting it through its paces. Homeland Security hopes to give it to Border Patrol agents and National Guardsmen by 2010."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Why is it so hard to find good programmers? And why should companies favor hiring fewer more senior developers rather than many junior ones? Frank Wiles discusses his thoughts in his article A Guide to Hiring Programmers: The High Cost of Low Quality"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nick Gonzalez from TechCrunch posted about a “great iPhone chat application” by a company called Mundu.

Then he slings this at his 500,000+ readers (many of which are calling bullshit in the comments):

“So why in the world will they eventually charge $11 for it? There are way better ways to monetize software. Offer a free version and drop an advertisement into the conversation every once in a while, for example. But if Mundu wants to get a lot of users fast before Apple adds their own apps, they can’t be screwing around with charging customers. The marginal production cost of software is zero. That’s what the price should be.”

This is typical of the sensational tech/media/business press: an obsession with all things free, all things inflated, and all things unsustainable. Sustainability doesn’t mean going back to your investors for another round because you don’t have enough to pay your employees because you don’t have any income because you don’t charge for your products.

They forget that not everyone has Google’s search subsidies, Yahoo’s traffic, or Apple’s hardware revenues making up for their “free” bundled software. The rest of the companies in the world have to put a price tag on their wares and sell them on the public markets. And surprise!... The public is happy to pay for great products. Advertising-subsidized product revenue is just a teeny tiny sliver of the overall economy. Most of the rest is buying and selling of goods.

“The can’t be screwing around with charging customers” and “Why in the world will they eventually charge $11 for it?” and “Offer a free version and drop an advertisement into the conversation every once in a while” are toxic suggestions. That is unless you want to go broke. And to suggest that software should be free because the marginal production cost is zero is about the most bizarre proclamation I’ve heard in a while.

With a few obvious bigco exceptions, I’d like to see a count of successful and sustainable software companies that are surviving and thriving giving everything away for free. I can point to hundreds of examples of small software companies running in the black by selling their products to their customers. The shareware industry, for example, puts much food on many tables for many families because the software builders price their products and put them on the market. People try it and people buy it. People are happy to pay for things they find valuable.

So don’t think for a second that you’re “screwing around” if you charge customers. What you’re doing is saying “This is our product, we believe it’s valuable, and we think you will too.”

There are few things more satisfying than having people find enough value in your ideas and products to trade their earned money for what you’ve produced. It’s primal and wonderful and every vendor should experience it. It’s great business and it makes your business great.

Tinkle writes "Sci-fi novelist William Gibson has given up trying to predict the future — because he says it's become far too difficult. In an interview with silicon.com, Gibson explains why his latest book is set in the recent past. 'We hit a point somewhere in the mid-18th century where we started doing what we think of technology today and it started changing things for us, changing society. Since World War II it's going literally exponential and what we are experiencing now is the real vertigo of that — we have no idea at all now where we are going." "Will global warming catch up with us? Is that irreparable? Will technological civilization collapse? There seems to be some possibility of that over the next 30 or 40 years or will we do some Verner Vinge singularity trick and suddenly become capable of everything and everything will be cool and the geek rapture will arrive? That's a possibility too.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Following the release of the various independent security reports last week on the e-voting machines used in Californa, the Secretary of State needed to decide by Friday night whether to keep the machines in use in the state. At 11:45pm, she decided to decertify the machines only to immediately recertify them if they made some security changes. Of course, it seems like the changes are simply patches, and as the original report noted, many of the security problems the machines have is because all of the security they've implemented was patched on as an afterthought. Until the machines are designed from the ground up with security in mind, it's not likely to really fix many of the vulnerabilities. But, in the meantime, there's an election coming up, and apparently a bunch of major security problems are no reason to get rid of the expensive e-voting machines the state has already purchased.