An anonymous reader writes "I work in a retirement/assisted living home. Many of the residents had never used the Internet but really find it fascinating once they are given a little training. However, I've stopped introducing it to them because of the drain it puts on me. There are a million and one things that a computer novice can screw up, and I don't have time to solve all of them. These folks don't need any sophistication. and they need only the most basic options. Adjustable text size would be nice, but otherwise — no email, no word processing or editing, no printing — just Internet browsing. This may not seem like a big market, but it's getting bigger every day! Is there an absolutely fool-proof device that can provide this without requiring virus scanners and constant attention?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

iFrated informs us of a successful penetration of US Defense Department computers by the Chinese military last June. From the article: "The Pentagon acknowledged shutting down part of a computer system serving the office of Robert Gates, defense secretary, but declined to say who it believed was behind the attack. Current and former officials have told the Financial Times an internal investigation has revealed that the incursion came from the [Chinese] People's Liberation Army. One senior US official said the Pentagon had pinpointed the exact origins of the attack. Another person familiar with the event said there was a 'very high level of confidence... trending towards total certainty' that the PLA was responsible." The PLA is also accused of breaking into German government computers, including a network in the office of the Chancellor.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

igny writes "British astronomers from the University of Cambridge and Caltech have developed a new camera that gives much more detailed pictures of stars and nebulae than even the Hubble Space Telescope, and does it from the ground. A new technique, called 'Lucky imaging' has been used to diminish atmospheric noise in the visible range, creating the most detailed pictures of sky in history."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Boing Boing reader Andy Carvin says,

"Now that the media circus has died down surrounding the controversial deposing and reinstatement of Sajani Shakya, the Kumari of Bhaktapur, Nepal, I just had the chance to conduct a brief interview with her. As befitting a living goddess - or perhaps a shy 10-year-old girl - her responses to my questions were short and sweet." Link.
Previously on Boing Boing:

Nepali "Living Goddess" is rather into gadgets

Gadget-loving Nepali "living goddess" fired

Nepali goddess, recently sacked, now reinstated

The second episode of season two of The IT Crowd just aired on the UK's Channel 4: "Return of the Golden Child," and it's keyboard-destroyingly funny. The IT Crowd is the nerd sitcom from Graham Linehan, who created the funniest TV show ever, Father Ted. In "The Golden Child," Denholm's death and Roy's obsession with his own mortality provide fodder for a series of very good inappropriate funeral jokes, mobile phone humor, and so on. It's vintage IT Crowd. Channel 4 has some kind of ridiculous, DRM-based streaming service in the UK, but I can't get it in China (I'm here for a meeting), so I just downloaded the torrent and laughed myself sick. Suprnova Torrent Link (Thanks, Dave and everyone else who suggested this!)

See also: The IT Crowd -- season two, episode one

(Disclosure: I was an unpaid consultant to the first season of The IT Crowd)

Glyn sez, "The BBC are reporting that ballot scanning machines used in the Scottish elections rejected tens of thousands of votes without any human adjudication. The Scotland Office ordered the machines to reject some kinds of the new style ballots automatically.

"The Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond described the development as 'astonishing' and deeply disturbing. 'I was under the impression - until this revelation - that the ballots that were rejected were actually seen by the election agents as part of the process,' he said. More than 140,000 ballots were spoilt on 3 May when votes were held for the Scottish Parliament.

"If you want to read in more detail about the e-voting trials in the UK check out the the Open Rights Group's election observers' report. It paints a grim picture of crashed computers and concerns about the systems' security and reliability." Link (Thanks, Glyn!)

US officials told the Financial Times today that China's military hacked into the Pentagon's computer network three months ago. The reported attack would amount to to the greatest pwnage yet of DoD computers:

The Pentagon acknowledged shutting down part of a computer system serving the office of Robert Gates, defence secretary, but declined to say who it believed was behind the attack.

Current and former officials have told the Financial Times an internal investigation has revealed that the incursion came from the People’s Liberation Army.

One senior US official said the Pentagon had pinpointed the exact origins of the attack. Another person familiar with the event said there was a “very high level of confidence...trending towards total certainty” that the PLA was responsible. The defence ministry in Beijing declined to comment on Monday.

Link (Thanks, Robbo)

caffeinemessiah writes "Rick Rubin, the legendary music producer, recently signed on as co-head of Columbia Records, which is owned by Sony BMG. In a recent New York Times interview (on pg. 4 of the online version), he discloses, possibly accidentally: 'It was the highest debut of Neil [Diamond]'s career, off to a great start. But Columbia — it was some kind of corporate thing — had put spyware on the CD. That kept people from copying it, but it also somehow recorded information about whoever bought the record...' Seems like the rootkit might have been a little more than your vanilla invade-your-rights-DRM scheme."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Blowing Out the Dust: Afternoon Edition

St?k: Coffee Shots in Creamer Tubs

Video: Cingular "Hanging on the Telephone" Commercial

Video: Motionless Helicopter Rotor Illusion

HUMP NF01, NF02 Reviewed (Verdict: Small USB Speakers That Don't Suck)

Bosch Pocket Saw

POWERbreathe: "Dumb-bells for Your Diaphragm"

Pacemaker: Handheld Mixing Unit

Credit Card-Sized Voice Recorder

Solar Bottle Uses Sun to Purify Water

Lonely MacGyver: Make a "Fleshlight" from a Potato Chips Tube

Cannondale On: Prototype Full-Size Folding Bicycle

Ditching MS Word for Text Editors

The Arcade Flyer Archive

Blade Runner "Final Cut" in the Works

Morning Tech Deals Highlights

In the Year 2000: '61 Life Magazine on Future Space

Would You Pay a Premium for Electronics Recycling?

Maasai Hands-Free Earpiece

WSJ on space elevators

Convert a cigarette lighter into a secret stash container

Wired News reporter and "Danger Room" blogger Noah Shachtman is liveblogging an ongoing reporting trip in Iraq (add a few days' delay, but same diff). Link.

"Kids with AK-47s, biometric gates, and a distressing lack of toilets all feature prominently," he explains. " Look out next week for what I believe is an exclusive look inside the CSI-style lab that's picking bombs apart to find the IED-makers."

Joanna says,

The collection of a doctor named Dean Edell -- who collected artwork related to anatomy -- is up for sale at Christie's in New York on October 5th.

The name of the auction: "Anatomy as Art: The Dean Edell Medical Collection." The collection for sale includes a bunch of really difficult to find big-wigs of the genre like Ruysch and Fritz Kahn; you can even buy 19th C anatomical waxes.

Some of the images on the Christie's website are really shocking, especially the full color close up painting (?) of hermaphroditic genitals. Some are just beautiful in a macabre kind of way.

morbidanatomy.blogspot.com has a bunch of the best images cherrypicked (Link 1, Link 2); more to be found on the Christie's site.

Andy Updegrove writes "Public announcements of how Participating members of ISO have voted on OOXML are now rolling in one at a time, and the trend thus far is meaningfully weighted towards 'No with comments.' By my count, there are now four announced Yes votes, with comments, two abstentions, and seven public No with comments votes for OOXML in ISO/IEC JT1. Korea has reportedly voted no as well, and I expect at least Canada, Japan and the United Kingdom to announce 'No with comments' today or tomorrow. There will be more no votes on the roster when the final results are announced in a day or two. But even if the 11 votes I know of now were the only votes, the vote would now have failed — but for the 11 countries that upgraded their status from Observer to Participating member status in the last few weeks. Without those extra 11 'P' countries, it would only require 10 votes to block OOXML from immediate approval. If most or all of those additional 'P' members vote 'yes' as expected, it will confirm suspicions that Microsoft has promoted extra votes in favor of OOXML not only within National Bodies, but within ISO itself."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Above: a nice collection of nerdy wedding cakes. Link, rounded up by ace scienceblogger Shelley Batts (that's not her in the photo, just so you know).

A chemical found in microwave popcorn, diacetyl, is killing food industry workers -- and may also pose a threat to consumers. The stuff is used to create a buttery taste in many popular brands. Link.

If you receive an invitation from a social networking site called Quechup, run screaming. Shava Nerad is among many who pointed us to their horrible spamming practices, and says, "The blogs are calling it 'the Q problem' and a 'trust virus.' Bad juju, in general, not to mention they are one of those sites that sends you your selected username and password in the clear." By the time you read this, there will probably be some news articles out about how evil they are. Until then, watch out.

A fascinating profile piece in this weekend's New York Times Magazine about Def Jam founder Rick Rubin's new job: save Columbia Records. But the bigger job he's taken on: save the entire music industry from its own slow, suicidal idiocy. Link. Here's a YouTube video Rubin totally flips out over in the course of that story -- an until-recently-unknown Welsh cellphone salesman named Paul Potts singing Nessun Dorma, from Puccini's Turandot: Video Link.

At left, several fat Flickr sets of pulp fiction cover scans: Link. My favorite are the cheezy pervy ones.

The Islamic religious council of Central Java has issued a fatwa on nuclear power, and declared plans for a nearby nuke plant "haraam," or "forbidden." Link.

Add this to the list of stuff promised, then denied to Katrina survivors: No WiFi for NoLa. "A free Internet wireless system in New Orleans likely will not be expanded to devastated areas of the city, following EarthLink Inc.'s decision to quit investing in such services." Link.

Artist Dan Funderburgh has created some neat Gangsta bling wallpaper, now available from a New Orleans-based shop that also offers fruit flavored scratch-'n'-sniff wallpapers. If the gangsta paper were scratch-'n'-sniff, would it smell like blood and gunpowder, new car, dolla dolla bills, or Chanel #5?

This news is a few days old, but you Burners and vacationers may have missed it: Torrentspy now blocks users with USA IP addresses: Link.

This one, too. Privacy rights in India suffer a new blow as police in Mumbai expand the use of keyloggers in public cybercafes, citing national security threats after recent bomb blasts in Hyderabad: Link.

MySpace launches a networking portal of sorts around fashion: Link.

50 years in a woman's life documented in photos, found by a stranger at a flea market: Link.

(Thanks, William Smith, Susannah Breslin, Kyle Marler, Aaron Rowe, Mike, Patrix, Andrew Tonkin)

knhasan writes to tell us that Google has just announced a new program in which they will host wire news stories directly on their site. This is widely believed to be the first concrete fallout from recent troubles with Agence France Presse (who sued Google for alleged copyright infringement) among other wire services. "The new feature unveiled Friday is called 'duplicate detection,' which lets Google News identify the original source of a story that may appear in tens or hundreds of news outlet Web sites. If the source story is from one of the four news service agencies that Google has licensing agreements with, Google will display the story on a page that it hosts."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Manybooks.net has formatted The Book of the Damned ("1,001 attested phenomena that science cannot answer and deliberately ignores) into a bunch of different ebook, formats, including the new iPhone books.app format (which I'm really digging). Link

InternetVoting writes "California has passed a bill banning companies from requiring employees to have RFID chips surgically implanted. Already one company has been licensed by the federal government, implanting more than 2000 people. At least one other company — CityWatcher.com, a Cincinnati video surveillance company — already required RFID implants in some employees. 'State Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) proposed the measure after at least one company began marketing radio frequency identification devices for use in humans. "RFID is a minor miracle, with all sorts of good uses," Simitian said. "But we shouldn't condone forced 'tagging' of humans. It's the ultimate invasion of privacy.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After seeing the photos of fortune cookies in a dumpster, Boing Boing reader "555" sent this photo of watermelons in a dumpster.

This reminds me of the photos we posted in March about a food bank dump in a California desert.

Here's a complete scan of a 1957 issue of Glamour Photography, with wonderfully weird front and back covers.

Glamour Photography is dedicated to that happy province of photography -- the creative interpretation of the girl beautiful. The magazine is designed to give the camera man a better understanding of the technical and philosophical aspects of photographing pretty girls.

Link (Via PCL Linkdump)