Category: News

The EFF alerts us to what appear to be rather draconian surveillance powers given to law enforcement in New Zealand to monitor all sorts of communications:

In preparation, technicians have been installing specialist spying devices and software inside all telephone exchanges, internet companies and even fibre-optic data networks between cities and towns, providing police and spy agencies with the capability to monitor almost all communications.

Police and SIS must still obtain an interception warrant naming a person or place they want to monitor but, compared to the phone taps of the past, a single warrant now covers phone, email and all internet activity.

It can even monitor a person’s location by detecting their mobile phone; all of this occurring almost instantaneously.

Apparently, New Zealand is looking to help boost the market for encryption technology. In the meantime, defenders of this law throw out all the clichés:

Police association vice-president Stuart Mills said the new capabilities are required because criminals were using new technologies to communicate, and that people who weren’t committing criminal offences had little to fear.

Of course, that statement makes no sense. Just because criminals are using a new technology to communicate it doesn’t mean you should have a built in backdoor to monitor all of it. I believe some criminals have used paper to write each other notes. Should we force all pads to have carbon paper for making a copy of every note taken? As for the “if you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear” statement, that’s been debunked so many times, it’s not even worth going there. Yet, if we must, would Police Association Vice President Stuart Mills object to a video camera being placed in every room in his house, recorded 24/7 and kept on file. We promise that no one will look at it without a warrant. He shouldn’t object, right, because he’s not doing anything wrong at home, so he has little to fear. Right?

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NASA’s new eye in the sky has spotted the first handful of what it hopes will be a flood of new exoplanets. The Kepler telescope, launched last year with the express purpose of planet-hunting, has found its first five new worlds, with the results forthcoming in the journal Science this week. Just don’t get any ideas about living on any of them.

“One of the planets is amazingly light – like Styrofoam,” said William J. Borucki, the astronomer from NASA’s Ames Research Center…. “And all five simply glow,” he said, “they’re like looking into a blast furnace – but that’s simply no place to look for life” [San Francisco Chronicle]. The scalding-hot planets measure in excess of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than molten lava. These planets all orbit their stars in a hurry, taking between three and five days to make a circuit. Ground measurements confirmed Kepler’s findings.

Four of the five exoplanets—including Styrofoam world—are mysteriously light; they’re far less dense than Jupiter despite being 40 percent larger, as you can see in the chart. “This is accumulating evidence that low density is a common feature” among exoplanets, says planetary physicist David Stevenson of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, who was not involved in the research. The problem is that no one has come up with a mechanism that could puff up an exoplanet that way [ScienceNOW Daily News].

Kepler’s first foray found more than just new planets. It also measured the light from 43,000 stars like our sun in its field of view and found two-thirds of them to be about as stable as the sun. That seemingly obscure observation suggests that the majority of stars potentially are as hospitable to life as Earth’s sun, assuming there was an Earth-like planet orbiting at the right distance from the star [Christian Science Monitor].

Related Content:
80beats: New Super-Earth: Hot, Watery, and Nearby
80beats: Meet the New Neighbors: Earth-Like Worlds Orbiting Nearby Stars
80beats: Don’t Pack Your Bags Yet—New Planet-Finder Hobbled By Electronic Glitch
80beats: Kepler Sends Postcards Home: It’s Beautiful Out Here
DISCOVER: How Long Until We Find a Second Earth?
Bad Astronomy: Kepler Works!

Image: NASA

In the good old days, Google made a big breakthrough with very simple yet effective text-only ads. These ads showing up for relevant searches made Google into the tech giant it is today. Over time, though, the company has started to diversify its offering while, thankfully, maintaining its clean approach to advertising. One small but important addition is the images which sometimes accompany the ads. Product ads all feature an image and, as Search Engine Land found out, they can some time get a little racy.

It turns out that Google is a bit less conservative than Apple for example and has a more flexible definition on what content is considered not suited for the younger users. This means that images of a more provocative nature are allowed in ads even when the Safe Search option is enabled. Google does review all the images advertisers provide and places them in three categories depending on their content. Even so, only images which are found to have “adult content” are labeled as non-family friendly.

“AdWords specialists review all of the ads that appear on Google and the Google Network. Ads are categorized as ‘Family Safe,’ ‘Non-Family Safe,’ or ‘Adult,’ depending on the content of the ad and website. Google does not permit ads that are classified as ‘Non-Family Safe’ or ‘Adult’ to a… (read more)

Comedienne Kathy Griffin has reportedly been banned from CNN. Insiders say the network is so outraged over her second foul-mouthed New Year’s Eve appearance it refuses to work with her ever again.

The notoriously foul-mouthed comedian let a four-letter word loose as she co-hosted a live New Year’s Eve special with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, slipping the F-word into a discussion about “balloon boy” Falcon Heene as she fumbled his first name.

It was the second outburst on CNN for Griffin, who cursed out a heckler at the network’s 2009 NYE celebration. Her inability to control her loose lips have forced executives to sever ties with the Emmy winner.

“She was a total embarrassment to the network that calls themselves ‘The Most Trusted Name in News.’ Even Anderson (Cooper, her co-host) thinks it’s time to say goodbye to Kathy,” says a network spy.

I’m excited about the new Apple Tablet (which I probably won’t buy) the same way I was excited about the iPhone (which I don’t own). The latter combined a phone and an iPod, mixed in a hundred thousand apps and created something more than an iPod that makes calls. It created Swiss Army Knife for the 21st century, a do-it-all machine that find directions, name that tune and pick our next restaurant. Similarly, I think the Apple Tablet, which will be something like the child of e-reader and a small computer, could turn out to be more than the sum of its ancestors. It could be a revolutionary personal entertainment device; an techie artists’ easel; a super e-reader that allows magazines to evolve into multimedia heaven; a college students’ textbook and notebook; the perfect tablet computer and so on.

So I disagree slightly with Matthew Yglesias’ take that the Apple Tablet mania is just a bunch of hype:

But why do I want a tablet? Magazine publishers seem to want me to want
a tablet because after I have my tablet I’m allegedly supposed to want
to pay them for tablet versions of their magazines. But that can’t be
why I want a tablet. Is it supposed to replace my laptop? Is the idea
that conventional laptops are too easy to type on? Or does it replace
my kindle somehow? If you could make an iPhone-esque touch screen much
bigger and do it at an affordable price, that might be a cool feature
to ad to future MacBooks or iMacs–I’m sure programmers could devise
something interesting to do with a new user interface–but nothing
about typing on an iPhone has ever made me say if only I could replicate this experience in a device that doesn’tfit in my pocket!!!!

This is funny, but I don’t think it’s entirely fair. The one
rhetorical question that goes unanswered here is “or does it replace my
Kindle somehow?” Yes, that’s exactly what it replaces. Except instead
of merely replacing the Kindle, it reinvents what consumers are
supposed to expect from their e-readers by adding entertainment and
computer capabilities that carve out a new “smart-reader” category in
the market the same way smart phones have slowly taken over the cell
phone industry. I have no idea if this idea will catch like wildfire or blow up. But let’s all wait until we see the product before we proclaim it redundant.

Every month we start off with a few projects and recipes in mind, but we don’t always see them through. Starting this month, we’re going to ask you what your plans are for the month, then follow up at the end! So we’re curious: What recipes and kitchen projects would you like to try this month? Here are a few of mine.

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We mentioned yesterday that we’re slightly obsessed with Brussels sprouts at the moment. Here’s the latest product of that obssession: a quick, bright hash of chopped Brussels sprouts with quick and salty fried capers and the mellow nuttiness of hazelnuts.

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As economists begin to tweak their models and paradigm to account for the surprising virulence of the recent financial crisis, Harvard University’s Andrei Shleifer is offering an justification for what Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke calls “credit easing” — the Fed’s purchase of trillions of dollars worth of Treasury debt and mortgage-backed securities. It is, Shleifer argued at a presentation at the American Economic Association in Atlanta, the best way to get banks to resume lending.

In a crisis, the price of securities — mortgate-backed, Treasury debt, packages of loans, etc. — fall to fire sale prices, well below fundamental values, he says. Banks with the wherewithal to make new loans or buy securities that prefer to buy securities because the opportunity for profit is so tempting. (See Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase profits from securities trading in the recent quarter.) “Because asset prices are out of whack,” he said, “injecting capital into banks doesn’t restart lending.” Banks simply use the money “to buy underpriced securities… to speculate.”

“Financing of new investment by banks [via lending to business] is always competing with speculation. If speculation is more attractive, it is going to draw the attention of banks,” he argued.

The solution: The Fed or the government should buy a lot of securities, so many of them that the price rises and the banks no longer find them attractive for speculation and lend instead. (Of course, those banks who hold securities before the Fed or government intervene will benefit from rising prices.) Shleifer said massive purchases of securities by the Fed isn’t targeted on an individual institution — a plus, he says — and he said the purchases work best if they are highly rated securities rather than removing toxic assets from the banks’ books, as the Bush Treasury initially proposed.

Gary Gorton, a Yale University economist, criticized the Shleifer argument, observing, among other things, that there are many reasons that banks, particularly big wholesale banks in the securitization business, would rather buy assets than make loans. He said it wasn’t plausible that banks would raise equity capital — including that provided by the government — for the purpose of buying more securities. Moreover, he said, the Fed and Treasury purchases, large as they were, probably weren’t large enough to get the banks to sell all the securities that they wanted to sell.

The Shleifer presentation drew on a paper he and the University of Chicago’s Robert W. Vishny wrote last year titled “Unstable Banking.”

Members of the 2010 U.S. Army All-American Marching Band (USAAAMB) are preparing to take to the field of the Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas on Saturday, January 9, 2010.

MENC partners with Drum Corps International, the U.S. Army, and SportsLink in presenting the U.S. Army All-American Marching Band. The band performs each year during the U.S. Army All-American Bowl.

Live Webcast of Halftime Show
On Saturday, January 9, MENC members, parents, family, and friends are invited to watch online as the marching all-stars take the field at halftime of the All-American Bowl, which begins at 12 noon CST.  View the live Webcast at allamericangames.tv. (MENC regrets that the previously-announced Webcast of the dress rehearsal has been canceled.)

Nola Jones, director of bands at the University of Tennessee at Martin, directs the USAAAMB in San Antonio this year. Prior to rehearsals for the big show, Jones answered a few questions about her preparations for the 2010 USAAAMB. 

• This will be third year for the band, but your first as director. Are you making any major changes this year and if so, what?

No real major changes. Bob Buckner, his staff, the US Army Field Band, Earl Hurrey of MENC, and SportsLink did a marvelous job of setting up a system for success. For next year we are working to hopefully streamline the audition process. The "catch 22" is managing how we accurately assess hundreds of auditions while making the application process "user friendly."  We want to be sure that the process selects the best "All American" marching musicians in the United States. 

The personal challenge for me is the responsibility of continuing the tradition of excellence achieved by the first two US Army Marching Bands. Bob Buckner has been a mentor to me and I have the utmost respect for what he accomplished with the band during the first two years. He left me with big shoes to fill!
 

• You normally work with college musicians in Tennessee. What is different or challenging about working with high school students?

Before I began teaching at the collegiate level, I was fortunate to teach band in public school grades 6-12. It has been my experience that while college students may be more musically and technically advanced, the desire to become better musicians is not exclusive to any age.

The USAAAMB members are clearly among the most talented and hard working high school students anywhere. Experiencing the chemistry the 2009 band and staff developed to achieve an outstanding performance in a matter of days was a highlight of my teaching career. The 2010 USAAAMB appears to be on a similar path to greatness.
 

• Tell readers something about the marching program this year, such as the theme.

When we began the creative process of planning this year’s show, Tim Pierce and I decided that utilizing a western flavor was appropriate for the US Army All America Bowl’s San Antonio venue. 

We also wanted to honor the US Army’s core values of loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage. We are opening with a brief portion of Cowboy Troy’s "Buffalo Stampede" transitioning into Tim Russ’s "Stand Up and Be Strong."  The second production will be a celebration of the freedom we enjoy as Americans. Jay Kennedy has done a terrific job of arranging readily recognizable melodies including Copland’s "Hoedown," various patriotic motifs and John Cougar Mellencamp’s "R.O.C.K. in the USA."  The outstanding all DCI color guard led by Tim Newbern and Ronnie Bynum will be particularly important to the visual excitement of band. 

Because Bob Buckner is a wonderful drill writer and possesses first hand knowledge of the band, I asked him to design our drill and he graciously agreed. The amazing staff we have managed to assemble includes Andy Cook, Martin Dickey, Wayne Dillon, Andre Feagin, Jon Henson, Joann Hood, Jeff Prosperie, Joe Roche, Mohamad Schuman and Susan Schuman. 
 

• Can you describe for other band directors what it is like to take these students from all over the country, with different marching and playing styles, and turn them into one unit?
  

As I mentioned earlier, we have put together a staff of incredibly talented and accomplished individuals to instruct this year’s band. We have individuals on staff that specialize on each instrument and possess many years of instructional experience.  When we combine this dream staff with a group of the most talented and dedicated students in the United States, the result should be gratifying for everyone.

We all owe the MENC, the US Army (especially Colonel Thomas Palmatier) and SportsLink a huge debt of gratitude for their collective commitment to providing this opportunity.  We think the audience at this year’s US Army All America Bowl is in for a real treat!

As a reminder, band directors can nominate current exemplary high school juniors for next year’s band. January 15 is the last chance to submit nominations for the 2011 band. Students of MENC members will receive a certificate from MENC in February.

 —Roz Fehr, January 5, 2010. © MENC: The National Association for Music Education

I want to spend two weeks working with the new fan-less, VIA EPIA-P820 pico-ITX board—with full 64-bit support—and matching VIA Amos-3001 chassis to create a full HD home theater in my car. Thankfully, I don’t have a car.

But it’s a perfect base for a custom home theater in any case. The board has a 1.2GHz U2500 VIA Nano processor with 2GB of DDR2 system memory, a VIA VX855 Media System Processor—which can decode any 1080p codec you can throw at it—and a VIA Chrome9™ HCM 3D integrated graphics core with full DirectX 9.0 support.

The best thing is that this 10 x 7.2-centimeter board fits perfectly in the aluminum VIA Amos-3001 chassis, alongside a I/O daughter board with HDMI, VGA, Gigabit LAN and two USB 2.0 ports. The whole packaged is capable of outputting DTS audio through S/PDIF, and connect to an additional four USB ports, IDE, and Serial ATA.

Did you hear about the two blondes who froze to death in a drive-in movie?  They had gone to see, “Closed for the Winter.”
I had my standard “beginning of the year” meeting with the family. My soon-to-be 18-yr old son reported that this time in his life is “unprecedented” for him, and that he is working on his “exit strategy” from high school. He then said that this would be an “historic opportunity” for me to provide him working capital. My 15-yr-old daughter (going on 25) said that although she is seeing “green shoots” in the economy, she will need to continue to spend in order to assist her Personal Consumption and that I shouldn’t let “uncertainty” keep that from happening. My wife thought that we should “circle back after the first quarter”, during which we can continue to “reach out” to our partners and vendors. Is this kind of talk the “new normal”?

OK, eventually the Fed will either end their $1.25 trillion mortgage-security purchase program, or extend it. Everyone, including the shoeshine boy, knows this – don’t pay any high priced consultants to tell you that. And rates will react accordingly. But heck, not only do we have several more months of the program, but we also have the possibility that either they will extend it, or that an investor-based market will re-develop – just like “the old days”. Let’s cheer for the private investors coming back in.

Do you have money in the bank? Probably. Do banks and money managers have lots of capital? Sure they do. Most recognize that the core of the problem is not a lack of capital, but rather a lack of willingness to deploy/invest it. If everyone is saving for a rainy day, they’re happy just to have the return of their capital rather than earn a good return on their capital. And a solid housing recovery relies on mortgage credit, decent rates, and a private mortgage market.

Where does warehouse lending stand these days?

more news on warehouse lending, Thornburg, Caliber, Chase, Wells wholesale, economy and yields, and joke of the day …  <<< CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE

Google will be holding a news conference today where the company is expected to unveil its new smartphone. Tech blogs have been buzzing for quite some time with speculation that such a phone existed. Today, we’ll get some details. Will the Google phone revolutionize the smartphones? I doubt it, but that doesn’t mean its presence in the market isn’t significant.

Since the phone hasn’t been publicly released, details are still sketchy, but I actually happened to see the Google phone a few weeks ago. I was having drinks with a friend of mine who works for Google, and she was one of many employees beta testing the device. Although I didn’t get a full picture of the phone or its capabilities, from what I did observe, it appeared to be just another nice smartphone. When I asked her if she liked it, she said yes, but didn’t geek out on me about how great it was — like virtually every iPhone owner I’ve ever met.

I found that a little worrying for Google. If one of its own employees isn’t extremely impressed with the phone, what will a public with far less allegiance to Google think?

They will also like it, but also aren’t doing cartwheels. An ABC news clip included with an article about the device from Silicon Valley’s MercuryNews.com speaks to this point. In that clip, a few people who have no association to Google, but have used the phone, give their reactions. First, an editor from AllThingsD who has gotten to play with the phone reports that it’s a good smartphone. She likes the screen, camera, mapping and integration with Google services. But she still prefers her iPhone. Another technology columnist is also not that impressed. He expected a revolutionary device, but instead he thinks it’s “just a nice phone.”

What’s also troubling is the pricing. The article says:

Google is expected to offer consumers two options for buying the Nexus One, according to reports. They can pay $180 for it if they sign up for a two-year T-Mobile contract. Or they can pay $530 without a contract.

With a contract, that’s almost as much as the iPhone 3GS ($199). You can get the iPhone 3G for just $99. And without a contract, well, that’s just an awful lot of money for consumers to spend on a mobile device. Sure, they can use it with any service provider*, but I don’t believe many people will find that worth such an overwhelming price tag.

So is the Google phone doomed? Of course not. It’s a really good phone. There’s little doubt that a lot of people will buy one. But what I’m a little skeptical about is whether it has the chops to dethrone the iPhone as the premiere smartphone. I don’t see that happening.

But maybe Google doesn’t either. We should keep in mind that Google has some expectation for its smartphone, and that expectation is probably realistic. It’s a software company, so it would be ludicrous to think that its foray into hardware could be so incredibly triumphant to overtake the market and dwarf revolutionary devices like the iPhone, Blackberry and Droid. So I find it a little hard to believe that Google would have such outlandish expectations.

Instead, I suspect the company just wants to be a participant in the extremely important smartphone market. It probably wants a respectable market share, but isn’t looking to create any sort of earth-shaking paradigm change in mobile devices. Since the phone is a good device, it will appeal to some consumers, so that will be accomplished. And by providing access to all of its services, like Google Voice, other smartphone makers that aren’t as eager to allow integration of all-things-Google will feel more pressure to do so. So even if the Google phone doesn’t trump all others, it might not have to for the company to view the product as a success.

* As a few commenters have pointed out, this isn’t precisely true. What I mean by this is that an unlocked phone does provide more service provider flexibility than, say, the iPhone which is locked to AT&T.

Yesterday, I told you about a new Consumerist investigation into the huge ripoffy nature of Best Buy’s computer optimizations. But hoo boy, $40 to enter a username into a new Mac? That’s tough to justify.

Just what do you get when you give the Geek Squad $40 to optimize your new MacBook Pro?

As even a computer novice might expect, “Mac optimization” is useless. One supposed benefit is putting the user’s name on the computer, according to Best Buy representatives I spoke to. Presumably, anyone who is buying a computer knows how to type in his or her own name, or follow the prompts to do it. Another supposed benefit: checking the Mac’s network connection. This has no value because it is done in the store, while the buyer will use the Mac with a different network at home. Yet a third step involves loading the Geek Squad’s own proprietary software on the computer to scan drives-drives that have never been used and so don’t need to be scanned for trouble. An anti-virus program is also part of the mix, which is an insult to the virus resistance of Macs. “There’s nothing of that sort that any brand-new PC needs, and Macs less so,” Gottheil said. “Apple requires far less configuration.” Best Buy’s hard sell on “optimization” is like peddling mythic unicorns based on the value of their horsepower.

If there’s a more transparent retail scam aimed at vacuuming money out of the wallets of old and naive people, I’ve never heard of it. This is downright shameful. [The Big Money]

Apple has spent $275 million to jump into the world of mobile advertising by acquiring Quattro Wireless. It remains to be seen what changes Apple will make, and how they plan to compete with ad giants like Google. [BGR]