Oxblood Ruffin shares word that Cult of the Dead Cow just launched a large-scale scanner project, Goolag.org:

SECURITY ADVISORY: The following program may screw a large Internet search engine and make the Web a safer place.

LUBBOCK, TX, February 20th – Today CULT OF THE DEAD COW (cDc), the world’s most attractive hacker group, announced the release of Goolag Scanner, a Web auditing tool. Goolag Scanner enables everyone to audit his or her own Web site via Google. The scanner technology is based on “Google hacking”, a form of vulnerability research developed by Johnny I Hack Stuff. He’s a lovely fellow. Go buy him a drink.

“It’s no big secret that the Web is the platform”, said cDc spokesmodel, Oxblood Ruffin. “And this platform pretty much sucks from a security perspective. Goolag Scanner provides one more tool for Web site owners to patch up their online properties. We’ve seen some pretty scary holes through random tests with the scanner in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. If I were a government, a large corporation, or anyone with a big Web site, I’d be downloading this beast and aiming it at my site yesterday. The vulnerabilities are that serious.”

Goolag Scanner will be released open source under the GNU Affero General Public license. It is dedicated to the memory of Wau Holland, founder of the Chaos Computer Club, and a true champion of privacy rights and social justice.

GOOLAG SCANNER FUNCTIONS AND FEATURES

GoolagScan is a standalone windows GUI based application.

* Configuration. gS uses one xml-based configuration file for its settings.

* Data-House-holding. All dorks coming with the distribution of gS are kept inside one file.

An anonymous reader suggests we visit the home of the watchdog group Global Integrity for a breakdown of online censorship: "Using data from the Global Integrity Index, we put a US court's recent order to block access to anti-corruption site Wikileaks.org into context. In summary: This is unheard of in the West, and has only been seen in a handful of the most repressive regimes. Good thing it doesn't work very well... The whole event seems to encapsulate the constant criticism of governance in the United States: that the government has been captured by corporate interests, and that the world-leading rule of law and technocratic mechanisms in place can be hijacked to serve as tools for narrow, wealthy interests."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The second place winner in the "Greener Gadgets Competition" is Clay Moulton's LED lamp, which uses a gravity mechanism to generate electricity. To light the lamp, you lift the weight and let it slowly fall.

A Virginia Tech student has created an LED floor lamp that is powered by gravity, using a weight slide similar to the concept of a grandfather clock. The lamp puts out the equivalent of a 40-Watt bulb, and lasts four hours per cycle. The mechanism is expected to last 200 years.

To "turn on" the lamp, the user moves weights from the bottom to the top of the lamp. An hour-glass like mechanism is turned over and the weights are placed in the mass sled near the top of the lamp. The sled begins its gently glide back down and, within a few seconds, the LEDs come on and light the lamp, Moulton said. “It’s more complicated than flipping a switch but can be an acceptable, even enjoyable routine, like winding a beautiful clock or making good coffee,” he said.

Link (Thanks, Tom!)

You can buy a $50 kit to build this beautiful LED persistence of vision wristwatch. (Or pay $189 for the fully-assembled, ready-to wear watch.)

With two time display options (Binary and wave-it-in-the-air POV display) and a super-bright flashlight mode, this watch is sure to turn some heads. Buy as a chip only, a kit to assemble yourself, a preassembled board, or a complete watch.

Link (Via Make)

We've been down on Palm Inc. for some time now, as well as its tired OS. Just see any of the recent stories we've written here on the subject. Palm, its handheld computers and its OS were once the darlings of the IT world, and universally loved by almost all users. Palm devices performed a few tasks very well in an era where that was cutting edge. Unfortunately, as times moved forward, Palm's OS did not, and today it performs too few tasks, and performs them not that well. But despite our normal criticisms, this post is about how great the release of the Palm Centro in Europe and on AT&T is for the market. Given the still-tired OS don't expect cutting edge data applications: the main winning feature of this device is the $100 price tag. That's important because not every smartphone wannabe-user is ready to deal out the $400 for the entry-level iPhone, and the Centro addresses the millions of potential smartphone buyers that fall below Microsoft's, RIM's, Nokia N and E series' and Apple's price points. Some of these consumers still want a keyboard, a PIM, e-mail service, a browser, and such, but with a lower budget. Centro will offer that, and will be joined by other future cheap smartphones with Symbian, Android, and other Linux derivatives. By the end of 2008, anyone who wants a smartphone will be able to have one (whether or not it's from Palm), and that's a big deal.

An interesting upshot of all this is that, as smartphones start becoming highly affordable, and anyone interested in owning one will do so, that group will also represent just about anybody interested in the mobile Internet and data services. If all these subscribers have devices that enable sideloading and direct installation of third party apps, the "walled garden" strategy will be increasingly futile. Carriers can still have the "carrier deck", and many customers will use it for convenience, but it will have to compete with off-deck solutions. It's about time.

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arktemplar suggests Technology Review for their annual list of 10 emerging technologies that the editors believe will be particularly important over the next few years. Quoting: "This is work ready to emerge from the lab, in a broad range of areas: energy, computer hardware and software, biological imaging, social interactions. Two of the technologies — cellulolytic enzymes and atomic magnetometers — are efforts by leading scientists to solve critical problems, while five — surprise modeling, connectomics, probabilistic CMOS, reality mining, and offline Web applications — represent whole new ways of looking at problems. And three — graphene transistors, nanoradio, and wireless power — are amazing feats of engineering that have created something entirely new."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Last week the Software Freedom Law Center published A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects. The primer, written for developers, has sections on copyrights, trademarks, patents, and organizational structure. Linux-Watch has reviewed the guide, saying 'I think any open-source developer or open-source group administrator must read this paper.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wired's Danger Room blog is running a contest to come up with a name for that weird military operation Mark blogged about last week -- in which the US government will attempt to shoot down a wayward satellite meandering around in the heavens. Poor li'l satellite. Link to the Wired contest. (thanks, Noah Shachtman)

from Ethan Persoff's COMICS WITH PROBLEMS, scans of a midcentury slaughterhouse graphic novelette advocating against animal mistreatment. I mean, well, advocating against inadvertently bruising cows and pigs before you kill 'em for sweet delicious bacon and steaks. I'm so confused.

Regarding the cell above: "Man, what an unfortunate and unintended history reference," says Ethan.

Previously on Boing Boing:
* About that ginormous beef recall

In a rather unfortunate ruling, the Supreme Court has decided to let an appeals court ruling stand, saying that the ACLU has no standing to bring a lawsuit over domestic wiretapping activities of the federal government. There's a bit of a catch-22 here. Neither the appeals court nor the Supremes are saying that the wiretapping is illegal. They're just saying that only those actually impacted by the wiretapping can bring suit -- which is tricky since the whole point is that there's no way for those being tapped to actually know they're being tapped. This would appear to be a rather ominous omission in the "checks and balances" our government is supposed to have.

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I just returned from New Zealand, where I spoke at Webstock. I am tired. I had a tremendous time. I was amazed at the quality of the organization of the conference. I loved the branding that was found on everything from the t-shirt to the speakers’ dinner menus. I saw many old friends and met new ones. I think my talk went over pretty well. I missed out on a lot of the talks due to being obsessive about my slides. I found out I’m not the only one that does that.

I took a lot of pictures. I rented a car and drove up through the center of the North Island and back. I was scared to drive on the opposite side of the road. I loved the espresso in Wellington, in particular People’s Coffee which was free throughout the conference. I’d like to attend more conferences that dispense free, high-quality espresso. I wish I could’ve visited the South Island. I really should’ve enabled mobile roaming before I left the country. I think kiwis are extremely friendly people. I found out that the term kiwi comes from the bird and not the fruit.

I never had a February 11, 2008. I missed my family terribly. I’m calling New Zealand “earth concentrate”, where a two-hour drive can take you through 10 different landscapes. I saw a few movie stars at the hotel in Wellington. I left my iPhone USB cable at a motel near Lake Taupo. I paid $39NZ for a new iPhone USB cable. I am thankful and honored for having to the opportunity to travel so far to talk about web design. I’ll be forever grateful to the hard-working Webstock organizers, in particular Natasha Hall and Mike Brown.

I think I’ll post this, just as it is.

ethericalzen writes "A BBC article highlights a theory that the first stars may have been powered by dark matter. A group of US scientists published a paper in Physical Review Letters speculating that, unlike the stars of today, which are powered by nuclear fusion, early stars might have been powered by the abundant dark matter crowding the universe after the Big Bang. The theory suggests that these stars would have collided and destroyed one another before nuclear fusion had a chance take hold." The BBC perhaps overstates the certainty with which the dark-matter theory is held, and doesn't mention that the postulated properties of such particles are completely speculative.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This seems rather obvious at this point, but the National Consumer Council in the UK has released a report pointing out that software end-user license agreements (EULAs) are unfair. The problems with EULAs have been widely discussed before. They're generally dense and full of legal language, so that users have no idea what they're agreeing to. They're non-negotiable, so it's not like a standard contract either. Often people need to agree to them before they can even read all the terms ("by opening his package, you have agreed to..."). The end result, of course, is that no one reads them. If you did, you would probably never agree to what they said anyway. So, while this is nothing new, it's nice to see consumer protection groups shining a light on how EULAs are very often unfair.

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If you're using FlickrFan, you should have a copy of podcatcher.root in your Tool folder. If not now, at the top of the next hour (launch the OPML app so it can do the update).

I want to get started with a small group of people, develop features, and then figure out how to broaden it, if that turns out to be the right thing to do. For now, I just want a testbed to develop, and a group of interested users.

I've put together a brief cheat sheet for FlickrFan users.

http://codecasting.org/podcatcher/00001.html

If you have a question please post it there and we'll try to get you the answer.

Hope it works, and hope you like it.

An anonymous reader sends us to Wired for a piece about some declassified Pentagon research from 1998 that has been revealed in a freedom-of-information filing. Apparently the Pentagon has investigated lasers that put voices in your head, among other non-lethal technologies such as microwave heating. The report suggests the techniques could be useful for controlling crowds or in negotiations. There is no context for the research or any indication whether it has continued, although the microwave heating bit sounds rather like the Active Denial System we have discussed recently.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's no secret that people are fairly opinionated (one way or the other) about Fox News. I'm not going to weigh in on that debate, other than to note that there's a bizarre story making the rounds on FoxNews.com claiming that Google made a journalist "disappear" from Google due to his efforts to expose UN corruption. The problem is that this is simply untrue, and any basic fact checking by the Fox reporter would have made that clear. The guy in question wasn't removed from Google, but from Google News, which the search engine is quite clear is only a hand-chosen collection of publications, which the company reviews regularly. For better or for worse (and I actually tend to think for worse), Google has set some rules in terms of what types of sources can appear in Google News -- and this guy's site did not appear to qualify, hence the site getting bounced from the Google News index (not the wider Google). However, when people complained, and the guy provided proof that his organization might actually meet Google's standards, Google News agreed to put it back in the index. In other words, there's no story here. It has nothing to do with his reporting on UN corruption or Google's political views. It's certainly unlikely that the UN asked Google to remove him (as the guy implies). It's nice to cook up some conspiracy theory, but there's nothing to support the charges here. The Fox article does lay out some of these details at the end of the article, but the headline and opening certainly make you think that Google vindictively removed this guy from its index to punish him for exposing UN corruption.

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I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The US Supreme Court refused without comment the ACLU's appeal of a lower court ruling that prevented them from suing over the government's warrantless TSP program. The problem was a Catch-22: they lack legal 'standing' to sue over it because they can't prove that they were suspected terrorists, but neither can they find out who was actually suspected, because this is a matter of national security. So the warrantless wiretapping will continue, because no one knows or can know whether they were illegally spied upon."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russian artist Andrey Kuznetsov has created a series of Russian folk-art woodcuts inspired by science fiction films like The Matrix, Sta