J.Tatar and a number of other readers alert us to the shooting death of an anti-government webmaster while in police custody in Ingushetiya, a volatile province in southern Russia. Police took Ingushetiya.ru owner Magomed Yevloyev off a plane that had just landed in Ingushetiya. "Yevloyev... was a prominent opponent of the pro-Kremlin president of Ingushetia, Murat Zyazikov [a close ally of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin]. Prosecutors have opened a preliminary manslaughter investigation after Yevloyev was shot in a police car in Narzan, the capital of volatile Ingushetia, a mostly Muslim region that borders Chechnya, Russian media reported. A spokesman for the prosecutor's office, Vladimir Markin, said 'an incident' took place after Yevloyev was taken into a police car 'resulting in a shooting injury to the head and he later died in hospital,' Interfax reported."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

billybob2 writes "VIA has released a 113,800 line open source graphics driver with full mode-setting support for CRT, LCD, and DVI devices along with 2D, X-Video, and cursor acceleration. Harald Welte, VIA's open source representative, states that the next step is to add 3D (see preview), TV-out, and hardware codec support while integrating this work with existing open source projects. VIA has pre-installed Linux on a significant portion of the company's latest products, including the EVEREX gPC2, 15.4" gBook, and CloudBook. It has also helped port the open source CoreBoot BIOS (previously LinuxBIOS) to several of its motherboards." VIA seems to be making good on the promise of its open source initiative announced last April.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This weekend on TokyoMango, I wrote about cool sci-fi self-portraits by Erina Matsui; a teddy bear that doubles as a cell phone; Japanese Internet bad-boy Hiroyuki Nishimura; rollerskating ninjas; and an electropop music video by Omodaka featuring 8-bit kimono-clad women.

( Lisa Katayama is a guest blogger.)

An anonymous reader notes that Microsoft has been granted a patent on "Page Up" and "Page Down" keystrokes. The article links an image of an IBM PC keyboard from 1981 with such keys in evidence. "The software giant applied for the patent in 2005, and was granted it on August 19, 2008. US patent number 7,415,666 describes 'a method and system in a document viewer for scrolling a substantially exact increment in a document, such as one page, regardless of whether the zoom is such that some, all or one page is currently being viewed.'... The company received its 5,000th patent from the US Patent and Trademark Office in March 2006, and is currently approaching the 10,000 mark."

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X0563511 alerts us to events in Minneapolis and St. Paul in advance of the Republican convention (which has been put on hold because of Hurricane Gustav). Local police backed by the FBI raided a number of homes and public buildings and confiscated computers and other material. From Salon.com: "Last night, members of the St. Paul police department and the Ramsey County sheriff's department handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than 'fire code violations,' and early this morning, the Sheriff's department sent teams of officers into at least four Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying. Jane Hamsher and I were at two of those homes this morning — one which had just been raided and one which was in the process of being raided." Here is local reporting from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: "Aided by informants planted in protest groups, authorities raided at least six buildings across St. Paul and Minneapolis to stop an 'anarchist' plan to disrupt this week's Republican National Convention. From Friday night through Saturday afternoon, officers surrounded houses, broke down doors, handcuffed scores of people and confiscated suspected tools of civil disobedience... A St. Paul City Council member described it as excessive, while activists, many of whom were detained and then released without charges, called it intimidation designed to quash free speech."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(1) Mercenary army outsourcers Controversial private security contractor firm Blackwater is gearing up for disaster in the Gulf, as Hurricane Gustav approaches. Snip from a "help wanted" ad on the firm's website:

Blackwater is compiling a list of qualified security personnel for possible deployment into areas affected by Hurricane Gustav. Applicants must meet all items listed under the respective Officer posting and be US citizens. Contract length is TBD.

Via Clayton Cubitt.

(2) Sean Bonner of metblogs writes:

This morning I've stumbled across a good number of online resources for Hurricane Gustav and New Orleans and thought it would be good to start a list here to keep track of them. Feel free to add any in the comments and I'll try to keep this list updated with any links posted.

Gustav resources online (hub.metblogs)

(3) You can follow Twitter chatter about #gustav here. Needless to say, the search string updates very frequently right now.

(4) Wikipedia says the Swedish name "Gustav" means "Staff of the Goths."

Previously on Boing Boing: New Orleans mayor: "We really don't have the resources to rescue you after this."

JagsLive tips the news that German customs agents have shown up in force to raid the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin. (The last time we discussed news like this was during CeBIT, in Hanover, last March.) 220 customs agents seized electronic gear from 69 different booths at IFA. The Register reports that this raid, like the one last spring, was touched off after complaints by patent firm Sisvel. "They seized equipment which will now be checked for evidence of patent breaches. A spokesman for German Customs told us: 'We've raided 69 companies today. We have seized equipment including flat-screen TVs, CD players, set-top boxes and MP3 players.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(via Arbroath)

The NYTimes has a cautionary tale of automated clearing house fraud. Parties unknown siphoned money from an individual's bank account. Nothing too unusual there, except that it was an elite private banking account at JPMorgan Chase, and the account holder is out $250K — the bank will only cover $50K of his loss. The $300K came out of the account in small transactions over 15 months. The bank offered no recourse except to open a new account, a large hassle given that the account is more than 20 years old and its holder writes a thousand checks a month. The article details how the spread of electronic settlements between banks has given rise to growing automated clearing house fraud — if anyone gets hold of the magic combination of account number and bank routing number, and once has permission to withdraw funds, all bets are off. Banks are unlikely to question future withdrawal orders. Moral of the story: go over your bank statements line-by-line every month, and question anything that looks funny.

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MojoKid writes "A recent study (PDF) by Richard Clayton at Cambridge University determined that the first letter of a someone's email address directly affects how much spam they receive. As shown in the graph at either link above, email addresses with numbers as their first characters receive even fewer spam emails. The corpus used in the study was 8 weeks' worth of email from the UK ISP Demon Internet, just over half a billion messages, of which 56% was deemed to be spam."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I snapped this photo of a passive millimeter wave scan machine set up in the main entrance hall at Denver International Airport on Friday evening. The machine was swiveling back and forth, searching people who didn't even know they were being scanned. I'm sure some of the people scanned weren't passengers; they were simply coming to pick up or drop off friends and relatives.

I wanted to see if they would scan my 11-year-old daughter as she walked by so I walked over to the desk with the computer monitor on it. I got a peek at the monitor for a second or two before one of the bald guys to the left of the TSA agent jumped in front of me and said I wasn't allowed to look. I couldn't tell which person was undressed on the monitor.

If federal agents set up this system at a shopping mall, would people care?

The TSA's blog states that the scanner's monitor be placed in a "remote location":

A couple of bloggers have advocated for the officer viewing the image to be out in the public area. We specifically require the remote location to protect the privacy of passengers using the machine. We just don’t think it’s appropriate for other passengers, airport, airline employees or just anybody walking by to see the images, much less snap a photo with a camera phone or anything else and post that image to TMZ.com or who knows where. That’s also why officers are not allowed to bring anything, including phones, bags or other items into the remote viewing location.

The USDA tests 1% of cattle of mad cow disease. Kansas-based Creekstone Farms Premium Beef exporters wants to test 100% of its cattle for mad cow disease. But the Bush administration took Creekstone to court, and a US federal appeals court ruled that the USDA has the authority to stop meatpackers from testing more than 1% of its cattle.

The dispute pits the Agriculture Department, which tests about 1 percent of cows for the potentially deadly disease, against a Kansas meat packer that wants to test all its animals.

Larger meat packers opposed such testing. If Creekstone Farms Premium Beef began advertising that its cows have all been tested, other companies fear they too will have to conduct the expensive tests.

The AP reports that "The Bush administration says the low level of testing reflects the rareness of the disease." The Bush administration should apply the same logic to the TSA. Terrorists are extremely rare, so only 1% of passengers ought to be checked by airport security.
Link

An anonymous reader alerts us to an Orlando Sentinel report based on a leaked NASA email, indicating that NASA is looking at options to extend the Shuttle program. The fighting between Russia and Georgia has put a strain on plans to rely on Russian boosters until the Shuttle's replacement flies in 2015. Yet extending the Shuttle's life is no sure thing. According to a former NASA program manager, "We started shutting down the shuttle four years ago. That horse has left the barn." And NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has told Congress that if the Shuttle fleet were to fly two missions a year until 2015, "the risk would be about one in 12 that we would lose another crew. That's a high risk... [one] I would not choose to accept on behalf of our astronauts." And then there's the matter of finding the $4 billion a year it would take to keep the fleet operational. The Sentinel mentions that John McCain has called for additional Shuttle flights, but doesn't mention that Barack Obama has made the same point, as the BBC reports.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Akino Kondoh is a Japanese contemporary artist who makes neat black-and-white video art. This one is called Ladybirds' Requiem. She uses pencil, pastel, and acrylic for the original illustrations, combines them on Photoshop, and then adds motion using After Effects. The music was created just for this piece by Toshiaki Chiku, former member of a band called Tama. Kondoh started off doodling pencil drawings as a kid; during high school, she drew a comic book series called Memoirs of a High School Girl. "I've been drawing in black and white since childhood," she says.

I posted her other video, Maybe It's The Train, on TokyoMango a couple of weeks ago.

Akino Kondoh main page

( Lisa Katayama is a guest blogger.)

thebestsophist writes "A couple months ago, Scientists and Engineers for America, Science Debate 2008, and a bunch of other science organizations sent McCain, Obama, and all the Congressional candidates a bunch of questions on science and technology. Topics included biosecurity, genetics research, and national security, as well as the more common questions on research and education. Well, Senator Obama just answered." Senator McCain has not responded to the questionnaire at this point in time, but the site has a profile of his views and actions relating to science policy, which provides a good basis for comparing the candidates' stances. We've previously discussed the differences between the two candidates' technology platforms. According to a recent NPR story, both candidates intend to keep politics out of science.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Worth reading, Maureen Dowd's op-ed in today's Times.

Summary -- the McC choice of Palin is the plot of a low budget chick flick. Now, picking up the story where she left off...

The wrinkly white haired dude and the VP-chick win the election and just after he's inaugurated, the old guy dies suddenly and she's sworn in, over the objections of all the white males on the old dude's staff and the leading members of Congress including the fat white male Speaker of the House played by John Goodman (ignoring for a moment that the actual Speaker is a spry foxy grandma type). Donald Sutherland plays the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who does the swearing-in.

She gets a chance to redectorate the Oval Office in pink and throws a frat party at the White House for her friends from Alaska, who do funny farting and belching scenes in austere parts of the White House supervised by stuffy old maids and butlers and a corrupt Chief of Staff who the chick-Pres fires when she finds out he's been mean to one of her Alaskan friends.

Things are settling down to normal when the second Cuban Missle Crisis starts. It's looking pretty tough for our heroine when her husband, riding his snowmobile across the Bering Straight, throws a keg party for the guys manning the Russian missile silos in Kamchatka and convinces them to reprogram the computers to point their missiles back at Moscow. The Russians, who are fed up with white men too, and want to break their own glass ceiling, overthrow Putin and elect a hot Russian babe to be President, and the final scene is a summit meeting in a hot tub with the two Presidents comparing breast pumping techniques, drinking a beer and of course enjoying a moose bratwurst.

Turns out Russians and Alaskans have a lot more in common than you might think.

jonniee writes "Mike Riley over at Dr. Dobb's takes a look at 'The BUG,' from Bug labs. It's a Linux-based, Java-programmable electronic base with I/O ports for connecting BUGmodules — individual modules that supply additional functionality to the BUGbase. Four BUGmodules currently exist: a color LCD screen, a combined motion detector/accelerometer, GPS, and a 2-megapixel color camera. You can think of it as 'electronic LEGOs' that let you build different devices depending on how you plug the modules together."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.