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walktalker · 18-09-01, 02:18 PM

Radio Sings Self-Censorship Tune
Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust." Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven." They are rock classics, heard on radio stations across the country for more than two decades. But now they're on a list of about 150 songs that a group of radio programmers deemed too offensive to play on the airwaves in the wake of last week's terrorist attacks. Executives within the radio division at Clear Channel Communications -- one of the nation's largest radio conglomerates -- denied any list had been developed. But sources familiar with the situation said an informal list of songs -- with lyrics and/or themes that might seem inappropriate to some -- had been delivered throughout the music industry.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,46925,00.html

What Future War Looks Like
President Bush has warned of a "different type of war" on terrorism. Wired News asked Stephen Sloan, a professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma, what a 21st century war might mean. Sloan's books include Simulating Terrorism and the Historical Dictionary of Terrorism. He has also served as a consultant to the U.S. military.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,46915,00.html

Robots Scour WTC Wreckage
Dozens of experimental search-and-rescue robots are scouring the wreckage of the World Trade Center's collapsed twin towers. At least two separate teams of roboticists are at Ground Zero operating up to two dozen experimental robots, which are being used to probe the rubble and locate bodies. This is the first time robots have been used in a search-and-rescue operation. Bristling with sensors, bright lights and video cameras, the robots are designed to find disaster survivors. Unfortunately, at this late stage, no one is likely to be found alive. The robots include marsupial machines that spit smaller robots out of their "stomachs" and shape-changing robots that can flatten themselves to crawl through tight spaces or rear up to climb and look over objects.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,46930,00.html

Creating New, Sky-High Power
Looking somewhat like a huge, upturned golf tee, it would be the highest man-made structure on earth. It would also provide electricity to as many as 200,000 homes. If built, a proposed 200-megawatt "solar chimney" for rural Australia would become the most daring application yet of a quirky form of generating alternative, renewable electricity. While the engineering would be biblical in scale, the concept itself is simple. A circular greenhouse with an upward sloping roof toward the center would draw heated air through electricity-generating turbines before allowing it to escape through a central "chimney." The hitch? The greenhouse would cover six square miles, and the chimney would stand more than a half-mile tall.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,46814,00.html

Controlling encryption will not stop terrorists
US government hopes of curtailing terrorist communications by controlling the use of cryptographic software have been criticised by computer scientists. Law enforcement groups have suggested that the terrorist groups associated with devastating attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon used encryption to communicate securely over the internet. Republican senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire has already called for the government to be given backdoors into all encryption products. In a speech just days after the strikes, Gregg said that software companies "should understand that as a matter of citizenship, they have an obligation" to include backdoors in their applications.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991309

Palm respond to terrorist tragedy
While millions turn to television, newspapers and the Internet for the latest on America's new war, many are looking to take info on the go with the latest Palm programs. In fact, a few swift Palm developers have already created and published free downloads related to last week's terrorist tragedy. The following are the first of what will likely be a cavalcade of programs to help those cope, communicate and keep informed, as the nation struggles to make sense of the recent attacks. Town Compass's "Disaster Relief Pocket Directory Database" is a free, downloadable database highlighting a number of relief agencies and organizations spread throughout the United States.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/ptech/0...ack/index.html

Increased security on oil, gas pipelines and nuclear power plants could have long-term costs
Increased security at nuclear power plants, refineries and along thousands of miles of pipelines is likely to have long-range impact on the nation's energy systems, industry officials say. The cost of the additional security measures -- from hiring more guards at power plants to more intense monitoring of nearly 400,000 miles of pipeline -- remains unclear. But federal regulators have advised they are ready to approve requests for electricity rate increases if energy producers request them. Meanwhile, the Bush administration expressed its hope Monday that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries would take steps to avert supply shortages and keep prices stable. The OPEC ministers are meet Sept. 26 in Vienna, Austria, to decide on production levels.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...330EDT0459.DTL

Religion's misguided missiles
A guided missile corrects its trajectory as it flies, homing in, say, on the heat of a jet plane's exhaust. A great improvement on a simple ballistic shell, it still cannot discriminate particular targets. It could not zero in on a designated New York skyscraper if launched from as far away as Boston. That is precisely what a modern "smart missile" can do. Computer miniaturisation has advanced to the point where one of today's smart missiles could be programmed with an image of the Manhattan skyline together with instructions to home in on the north tower of the World Trade Centre. Smart missiles of this sophistication are possessed by the United States, as we learned in the Gulf war, but they are economically beyond ordinary terrorists and scientifically beyond theocratic governments. Might there be a cheaper and easier alternative?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Ar...257777,00.html

Fujitsu opens up Linux-based humanoid robot
The electronics giant is releasing details of the internal architecture of the Hoap-1 to help programmers write their own code. Fujitsu is poised to release technical details on Tuesday of a humanoid robot that can walk on its own two legs. The company began selling the automaton, called Hoap-1, last week. The 48cm-tall robot is shaped like a humanoid, weighs 6kg and has been designed "for wide applications in research and development of robotic technologies", according to the Japanese manufacturer. Engineers from Fujitsu Laboratories will disclose the internal architecture of Hoap-1 at a meeting of the Robotics Society of Japan, which will be held at Tokyo University. By revealing some of the secrets of the robot, the scientists hope to encourage users to write original programs for it.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2095408,00.html

Teens Peer Ahead
Parents, a Moscow-based organization is enlisting your teens in a covert communications network that eludes most teachers and authority figures. Members download their instructions via the Web and pass messages among themselves using wireless handheld devices. Okay, Cybiko, Inc. isn't exactly the KGB. And its objective is to promote sociability, not socialism. Partially funded by AOL Time Warner, it makes Cybiko Inter-Tainment Computers that let teens meet, engage one another in multi-player games and blip instant messages back and forth over the 900-megahertz radio band.
http://www.techreview.com/web/hogan/hogan091801.asp

Internet Poses No Challenge To TV In Wake Of Attacks
During the terrorism crisis last week, probably the biggest single news story in more than a generation, the Internet did not pan out as a primary source of information, according to a new survey. Instead, a Pew Internet and American Life survey indicates, it was television that most Americans gravitated to while coming to grips with the terrorist strikes that destroyed the World Trade Center, severely damaged the Pentagon, Va., and appeared to unsuccessfully target the White House. However, the Pew survey said, while the Internet was not the first information or communication stop for most Americans during the first days of the crisis, e-mail and instant messaging proved a valuable supplement for many Americans, and the World Wide Web was also a valuable news source for many.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170194.html

Internet Now Part Of American Life
Usage patters suggest the Internet increasingly is becoming a part of everyday life for Americans, according to a new study. The study of the most popular Web destinations during the month of August, by Internet measurement company Jupiter Media Metrix, found Web surfers flocked to education sites and destinations related to the National Football League - largely due to the impending start of school and football season, respectively. Stephen Kim, senior vice president at Jupiter Media Metrix, said while it might seem intuitive that kids and parents would gravitate to education sites at this time of year to enroll in classes or do research on schools in preparation for filling out admissions applications, the most important thing is they are using the Internet, rather than other sources.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170192.html

German TV Hackers Crack Bank Server - Lawsuit Possible
HypoVereinsbank, one of Germany's largest banks, is considering legal action against a popular consumer high-tech TV show that hired hackers to break into the bank's online banking servers, according to a bank spokeswoman. Cornelia Klaila, a spokeswoman for HypoVereinsbank in Munich, told Newsbytes: "It is illegal what they did. It is very illegal." The "they" she is referring to is a TV show called Technical Adviser, which is produced by ARD, one of Germany's two public TV networks. Technical Adviser hired some young hackers in August to break into HypoVereinsbank's online banking servers and download information about customer accounts. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170191.html

Life will never be the same
| For what was already beyond words, we've begun running out of sentences. The more we parse and learn -- about a hijacker's apartment, about heroic sprints up smoky stairwells, about weeping calls to loved ones from the 105th floor -- the closer we get to closing our mouths for a very long time. In the interim, almost like a final, reflexive twitch, we've cobbled together a few mantras: How could this have happened? God bless America. Nothing will ever be the same again. It's that last one that resonates longest, rattling around even after the TV's off. Nothing will ever be the same again, we repeat, and yet we can't begin to say what will be different. For now, we linger in the practical and certain: There will be policy changes.
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/200...ter/index.html

Why can't Uncle Sam spy?
What's wrong with American intelligence? Not surprisingly, it's a question that is being asked everywhere in the wake of last Tuesday's horrific terrorist attacks. There is no simple answer, say former law enforcement officials and experts in intelligence. But they point to three things: excessive bureaucratic oversight, which ties intelligence agencies' hands and prevents them from responding quickly; an over-reliance on high-tech surveillance and a corresponding failure to develop on-the-ground operations; and poor coordination, both between the FBI and the CIA and between those agencies and their foreign counterparts. Efforts to address the first problem -- cutting through the bureaucracy that tangles intelligence operations -- have already begun.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...oks/index.html

New York's most disliked building?
They jeered when it went up. They cried when it crashed down. During its nearly 30-year residence at the southern tip of Manhattan, the World Trade Center's twin towers lived an unusual, contradictory city life. Built, according to its chief architect Minoru Yamasaki, "as a living symbol of man's dedication to world peace," the World Trade Center was destroyed by terrorists in a devastating act of war. The towers were acknowledged as a wonder of modern engineering, yet were riddled with quirks, like the way pencils rolled off desktops on the top floors when the wind began to gust. Real estate developers in the '60s and '70s derided the World Trade Center as government-sponsored folly. Yet this past summer the twin towers morphed into the most valuable piece of privately run real estate in New York.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/20...bit/index.html

Online military recruiting surges
A Web site run for U.S. military personnel and veterans has seen visitor traffic more than triple since last week’s attacks on New York and the Pentagon, with many looking to sign up for the U.S. armed forces and reserves, the site’s operators said. Recruiting is very big, both in terms of active duty and with veterans looking for reserve options,” said Anne Dwane, vice president of Military Advantage, the San Francisco company that operates Military.com. The commercial Web site links visitors to armed forces recruiters, provides news and information on veterans benefits and sells military paraphernalia.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/630539.asp?0dm=C14QT

More news... hum...

later on

18-09-01, 02:18 PM	#3
walktalker The local newspaper man Join Date: Aug 2000 Location: Montreal Posts: 2,036	Radio Sings Self-Censorship Tune Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust." Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven." They are rock classics, heard on radio stations across the country for more than two decades. But now they're on a list of about 150 songs that a group of radio programmers deemed too offensive to play on the airwaves in the wake of last week's terrorist attacks. Executives within the radio division at Clear Channel Communications -- one of the nation's largest radio conglomerates -- denied any list had been developed. But sources familiar with the situation said an informal list of songs -- with lyrics and/or themes that might seem inappropriate to some -- had been delivered throughout the music industry. http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,46925,00.html What Future War Looks Like President Bush has warned of a "different type of war" on terrorism. Wired News asked Stephen Sloan, a professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma, what a 21st century war might mean. Sloan's books include Simulating Terrorism and the Historical Dictionary of Terrorism. He has also served as a consultant to the U.S. military. http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,46915,00.html Robots Scour WTC Wreckage Dozens of experimental search-and-rescue robots are scouring the wreckage of the World Trade Center's collapsed twin towers. At least two separate teams of roboticists are at Ground Zero operating up to two dozen experimental robots, which are being used to probe the rubble and locate bodies. This is the first time robots have been used in a search-and-rescue operation. Bristling with sensors, bright lights and video cameras, the robots are designed to find disaster survivors. Unfortunately, at this late stage, no one is likely to be found alive. The robots include marsupial machines that spit smaller robots out of their "stomachs" and shape-changing robots that can flatten themselves to crawl through tight spaces or rear up to climb and look over objects. http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,46930,00.html Creating New, Sky-High Power Looking somewhat like a huge, upturned golf tee, it would be the highest man-made structure on earth. It would also provide electricity to as many as 200,000 homes. If built, a proposed 200-megawatt "solar chimney" for rural Australia would become the most daring application yet of a quirky form of generating alternative, renewable electricity. While the engineering would be biblical in scale, the concept itself is simple. A circular greenhouse with an upward sloping roof toward the center would draw heated air through electricity-generating turbines before allowing it to escape through a central "chimney." The hitch? The greenhouse would cover six square miles, and the chimney would stand more than a half-mile tall. http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,46814,00.html Controlling encryption will not stop terrorists US government hopes of curtailing terrorist communications by controlling the use of cryptographic software have been criticised by computer scientists. Law enforcement groups have suggested that the terrorist groups associated with devastating attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon used encryption to communicate securely over the internet. Republican senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire has already called for the government to be given backdoors into all encryption products. In a speech just days after the strikes, Gregg said that software companies "should understand that as a matter of citizenship, they have an obligation" to include backdoors in their applications. http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991309 Palm respond to terrorist tragedy While millions turn to television, newspapers and the Internet for the latest on America's new war, many are looking to take info on the go with the latest Palm programs. In fact, a few swift Palm developers have already created and published free downloads related to last week's terrorist tragedy. The following are the first of what will likely be a cavalcade of programs to help those cope, communicate and keep informed, as the nation struggles to make sense of the recent attacks. Town Compass's "Disaster Relief Pocket Directory Database" is a free, downloadable database highlighting a number of relief agencies and organizations spread throughout the United States. http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/ptech/0...ack/index.html Increased security on oil, gas pipelines and nuclear power plants could have long-term costs Increased security at nuclear power plants, refineries and along thousands of miles of pipelines is likely to have long-range impact on the nation's energy systems, industry officials say. The cost of the additional security measures -- from hiring more guards at power plants to more intense monitoring of nearly 400,000 miles of pipeline -- remains unclear. But federal regulators have advised they are ready to approve requests for electricity rate increases if energy producers request them. Meanwhile, the Bush administration expressed its hope Monday that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries would take steps to avert supply shortages and keep prices stable. The OPEC ministers are meet Sept. 26 in Vienna, Austria, to decide on production levels. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...330EDT0459.DTL Religion's misguided missiles A guided missile corrects its trajectory as it flies, homing in, say, on the heat of a jet plane's exhaust. A great improvement on a simple ballistic shell, it still cannot discriminate particular targets. It could not zero in on a designated New York skyscraper if launched from as far away as Boston. That is precisely what a modern "smart missile" can do. Computer miniaturisation has advanced to the point where one of today's smart missiles could be programmed with an image of the Manhattan skyline together with instructions to home in on the north tower of the World Trade Centre. Smart missiles of this sophistication are possessed by the United States, as we learned in the Gulf war, but they are economically beyond ordinary terrorists and scientifically beyond theocratic governments. Might there be a cheaper and easier alternative? http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Ar...257777,00.html Fujitsu opens up Linux-based humanoid robot The electronics giant is releasing details of the internal architecture of the Hoap-1 to help programmers write their own code. Fujitsu is poised to release technical details on Tuesday of a humanoid robot that can walk on its own two legs. The company began selling the automaton, called Hoap-1, last week. The 48cm-tall robot is shaped like a humanoid, weighs 6kg and has been designed "for wide applications in research and development of robotic technologies", according to the Japanese manufacturer. Engineers from Fujitsu Laboratories will disclose the internal architecture of Hoap-1 at a meeting of the Robotics Society of Japan, which will be held at Tokyo University. By revealing some of the secrets of the robot, the scientists hope to encourage users to write original programs for it. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2095408,00.html Teens Peer Ahead Parents, a Moscow-based organization is enlisting your teens in a covert communications network that eludes most teachers and authority figures. Members download their instructions via the Web and pass messages among themselves using wireless handheld devices. Okay, Cybiko, Inc. isn't exactly the KGB. And its objective is to promote sociability, not socialism. Partially funded by AOL Time Warner, it makes Cybiko Inter-Tainment Computers that let teens meet, engage one another in multi-player games and blip instant messages back and forth over the 900-megahertz radio band. http://www.techreview.com/web/hogan/hogan091801.asp Internet Poses No Challenge To TV In Wake Of Attacks During the terrorism crisis last week, probably the biggest single news story in more than a generation, the Internet did not pan out as a primary source of information, according to a new survey. Instead, a Pew Internet and American Life survey indicates, it was television that most Americans gravitated to while coming to grips with the terrorist strikes that destroyed the World Trade Center, severely damaged the Pentagon, Va., and appeared to unsuccessfully target the White House. However, the Pew survey said, while the Internet was not the first information or communication stop for most Americans during the first days of the crisis, e-mail and instant messaging proved a valuable supplement for many Americans, and the World Wide Web was also a valuable news source for many. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170194.html Internet Now Part Of American Life Usage patters suggest the Internet increasingly is becoming a part of everyday life for Americans, according to a new study. The study of the most popular Web destinations during the month of August, by Internet measurement company Jupiter Media Metrix, found Web surfers flocked to education sites and destinations related to the National Football League - largely due to the impending start of school and football season, respectively. Stephen Kim, senior vice president at Jupiter Media Metrix, said while it might seem intuitive that kids and parents would gravitate to education sites at this time of year to enroll in classes or do research on schools in preparation for filling out admissions applications, the most important thing is they are using the Internet, rather than other sources. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170192.html German TV Hackers Crack Bank Server - Lawsuit Possible HypoVereinsbank, one of Germany's largest banks, is considering legal action against a popular consumer high-tech TV show that hired hackers to break into the bank's online banking servers, according to a bank spokeswoman. Cornelia Klaila, a spokeswoman for HypoVereinsbank in Munich, told Newsbytes: "It is illegal what they did. It is very illegal." The "they" she is referring to is a TV show called Technical Adviser, which is produced by ARD, one of Germany's two public TV networks. Technical Adviser hired some young hackers in August to break into HypoVereinsbank's online banking servers and download information about customer accounts. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170191.html Life will never be the same \| For what was already beyond words, we've begun running out of sentences. The more we parse and learn -- about a hijacker's apartment, about heroic sprints up smoky stairwells, about weeping calls to loved ones from the 105th floor -- the closer we get to closing our mouths for a very long time. In the interim, almost like a final, reflexive twitch, we've cobbled together a few mantras: How could this have happened? God bless America. Nothing will ever be the same again. It's that last one that resonates longest, rattling around even after the TV's off. Nothing will ever be the same again, we repeat, and yet we can't begin to say what will be different. For now, we linger in the practical and certain: There will be policy changes. http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/200...ter/index.html Why can't Uncle Sam spy? What's wrong with American intelligence? Not surprisingly, it's a question that is being asked everywhere in the wake of last Tuesday's horrific terrorist attacks. There is no simple answer, say former law enforcement officials and experts in intelligence. But they point to three things: excessive bureaucratic oversight, which ties intelligence agencies' hands and prevents them from responding quickly; an over-reliance on high-tech surveillance and a corresponding failure to develop on-the-ground operations; and poor coordination, both between the FBI and the CIA and between those agencies and their foreign counterparts. Efforts to address the first problem -- cutting through the bureaucracy that tangles intelligence operations -- have already begun. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...oks/index.html New York's most disliked building? They jeered when it went up. They cried when it crashed down. During its nearly 30-year residence at the southern tip of Manhattan, the World Trade Center's twin towers lived an unusual, contradictory city life. Built, according to its chief architect Minoru Yamasaki, "as a living symbol of man's dedication to world peace," the World Trade Center was destroyed by terrorists in a devastating act of war. The towers were acknowledged as a wonder of modern engineering, yet were riddled with quirks, like the way pencils rolled off desktops on the top floors when the wind began to gust. Real estate developers in the '60s and '70s derided the World Trade Center as government-sponsored folly. Yet this past summer the twin towers morphed into the most valuable piece of privately run real estate in New York. http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/20...bit/index.html Online military recruiting surges A Web site run for U.S. military personnel and veterans has seen visitor traffic more than triple since last week’s attacks on New York and the Pentagon, with many looking to sign up for the U.S. armed forces and reserves, the site’s operators said. Recruiting is very big, both in terms of active duty and with veterans looking for reserve options,” said Anne Dwane, vice president of Military Advantage, the San Francisco company that operates Military.com. The commercial Web site links visitors to armed forces recruiters, provides news and information on veterans benefits and sells military paraphernalia. http://www.msnbc.com/news/630539.asp?0dm=C14QT More news... hum... later on __________________ This post was sponsored by Netcoco, who wants cookies, cookies, cookies and, you guessed it, more cookies